The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation has lent for this exhibition presented until 8 June 2025 at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda, in Martigny, Switzerland, a series of rare photographs of Francis Bacon including two unique portraits of the British painter, taken by Helmar Lerski and Francis Julian Gutmann.
Featuring around 30 paintings by Bacon, as well as various photographs of the artist, this exhibition will explore Francis Bacon’s deep connection to portraiture and how he challenged traditional definitions of the genre. From the mid-1950s, Bacon starts painting from life (sitters) and makes portraits of his patrons or his friends, like the artist Lucian Freud. He admires Rembrandt and is notably inspired by his Autoportrait au Béret (1659), that is lent for this occasion by the Musée Granet, in Aix-en-Provence.
The hang is thematically and chronologicaly presented and includes five sections: ‘The Portrait Emerges’, ‘Beyond Appearance’, ‘Paintings from the Masters’, ‘Self-Portraits’ and ‘Friends & Lovers’.
Majid Boustany, Founder of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, has launched a new scholarship for graduate students coming to the University of Oxford to study for a Master’s degree in History of Art and Visual Culture.
Awarded in partnership with Christ Church, Oxford, the Majid Boustany Oxford Graduate Scholarships will cover the cost of the course fees for home students ordinarily resident in the UK who are pursuing research in drawing and/or painting from 1900 to the present day. The first scholarship will be available in the 2025/26 academic year and the second will be awarded for the 2027/28 academic year.
Professor Geraldine Johnson, Head of the History of Art Department and Tutor at Christ Church, said: ‘We are immensely grateful to Majid Boustany for his visionary support of graduate studies in History of Art. I am looking forward to welcoming the scholarship recipients to our vibrant community of art historians at Oxford.’
Majid Boustany added: ‘I am delighted to be partnering with the University of Oxford to support talented graduate students researching modern and contemporary art. This is an area of History of Art that is particularly close to my heart and is central to the mission of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation.’
The founder of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation donated to the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford a significant number of publications on Francis Bacon, providing students, scholars and art historians with an essential tool for studying and understanding the painter’s monumental oeuvre.
As the first winners are announced, the Musée du Louvre extends its thanks to the Majid Boustany Fund, established in 2020 within the Musée du Louvre’s Endowment Fund. The Fund finances annually the Majid Boustany Research Scholarship of €10,000 supporting doctoral or postdoctoral research, and the Denon Prize of €12,000 assisting the publication of a doctoral thesis under the supervision of the staff of Éditions du Louvre. The research scholarship and the prize are awarded for research in art history, archaeology or museum studies on a theme relevant to the Musée du Louvre, from any period or geographical area.
Léa Tichit has been selected for the Majid Boustany Research Scholarship to help her pursue her postdoctoral research project, ‘Collecting and Exhibiting Architecture at the Musée du Louvre (1793–1989)’. She also teaches at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne and Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, as well as the Institut Supérieur des Arts Appliqués, Toulouse.
Sarah Piram, winner of the Denon Prize, has been awarded funding to publish her doctoral thesis, ‘Heritage Awareness and Architectural Creation in Iran: Around the Figure of André Godard (1881–1965)’, produced under the supervision of Rémi Labrusse at the Université Paris Nanterre.
This book, edited by the founder of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, Majid Boustany, offers a new perspective on Francis Bacon, by focusing on his unique ties with France and Monaco.
This publication presents a set of enlightening texts by art historians and various testimonies from people close to the artist. Elsa Boustany, Majid Boustany, Dr Margarita Cappock, Dr Rebecca Daniels, Milan Garcin, Michel Giniès, Martin Harrison, Yves Peyré, Sophie Pretorius and Jacques Saraben have contributed to this project.
The book also recounts the history of the Foundation and the encounter of its founder with the oeuvre of Francis Bacon, in an unpublished interview between Majid Boustany and Yves Peyré, a writer, poet and friend of Francis Bacon.
A French edition was also published under the title Francis Bacon sous un nouveau jour.
The Foundation is pleased to announce the release of the book Revisions: Francis Bacon in the Act of Painting, edited by Martin Harrison and Sophie Pretorius, and published by The Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing, in association with Thames & Hudson, and supported by the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation.
Bacon’s works often lost and gained a great deal after leaving his studio, as he frequently found ways to alter, improve or destroy his paintings, even as they hung on the walls of gallerists and collectors. From the sudden absence of a cigarette in Study of a Portrait of a Man, 1967, to the removal of Richard Chopping’s central figure in the centre panel of Triptych 1974-77, Bacon’s revisions vary dramatically in scale and intention. Diptychs become triptychs, seemingly important details disappear without ceremony, and figures travel between works like ghosts.
Many artists make changes to their paintings while they are in progress, but in few instances do photographic records exist. Francis Bacon’s oeuvre provides a rare exception. With first and final versions presented side by side for the first time, Revisions: Francis Bacon in the Act of Painting provides detailed, never-before-seen insights into Bacon the creator: his process, his intentions, and what does and doesn’t make a ‘Bacon’, according to the artist himself.
Over the years, through extensive research, publications, exhibitions, lectures and documentaries, and thanks to an active acquisition policy, the Foundation has positioned itself as an international research and study centre on Francis Bacon and an essential working resource for art historians, scholars and curators.
From the outset, we committed ourselves to forging lasting relationships with great European cultural institutions, contributing to the majority of solo or group exhibitions devoted to Bacon, through consenting to loans, giving financial support and providing our expertise. The Grimaldi Forum Monaco, the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Royal Academy and the National Portrait Gallery in London are among the institutions with which the Foundation has collaborated.
The Foundation has also consolidated its authority over the years by becoming the most important publisher, co-publisher and publication sponsor of books and documentaries on Francis Bacon.
It actively supports research and artists, by providing a research scholarship to a PhD student from the École du Louvre (Paris) whose work is about or related to Francis Bacon, and by providing a support grant to an emerging artist, graduating from the Villa Arson (Nice).
Lastly, as it has done since 2014, the Foundation presents exhibitions on its premises with the objective of showing the public the Founder’s collection (MB Art Collection), through a free weekly guided tour, by appointment only.
Majid Boustany, Founder and President of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, wished to associate the Foundation with the Musée du Louvre and the École du Louvre by becoming a leading patron of these prestigious institutions. He has also supported projects with the association AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions).
Around this anniversary, a variety of events will be reflecting ten years of commitment to the influence and legacy of Francis Bacon’s monumental oeuvre.
> The exhibition ‘Francis Bacon: Graphic Works’ presented until early 2026 at the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation in Monaco.
> The exhibition ‘Francis Bacon and The Golden Age of Design’ at the eac. Donation Albers-Honegger in Mouans-Sartoux, presented until 5 January 2025, co-curated and supported by the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation.
> The important loan of rare photographs of Francis Bacon to the National Portrait Gallery in London, for their ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ exhibition, presented until 19 January 2025.
> ‘The Anointing’ at the Villa Arson, Nice, an exhibition dedicated to Lukas Meir, the recipient of the 2023 Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation artist scholarship, presented until 2 February 2025.
> And especially conceived for this occasion, the publication of Francis Bacon in a New Light, a bookwhich offers a new perspective on the artist by focusing on his unique ties with the French Riviera, France and Monaco, with enlightening texts by art historians and testimonies from people close to Bacon, as well as a rare interview with Majid Boustany, by Yves Peyré.
Expanding the influence of his work is and will remain among my highest priorities. I cherish the hope that the research to come and the support provided for future projects related to Bacon will reveal yet unknown aspects of this unparalleled artist.
The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation is a major lender of photography for this Francis Bacon exhibition, currently presented at the National Portrait Gallery, in London, until 19 January 2025. On that occasion, our institution lent a series of rare photographs of Francis Bacon including two unique portraits of the British painter, taken by Helmar Lerski and Francis Julian Gutmann.
Featuring more than 55 works from the 1950s onwards, this exhibition will explore Francis Bacon’s deep connection to portraiture and how he challenged traditional definitions of the genre.
From his responses to portraiture by earlier artists, to large-scale paintings memorialising lost lovers, works from private and public collections will showcase Bacon’s life story. Accompanied by the artist’s self-portraits, sitters include Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne and lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer.
In September 2023, Lukas Meir received the fourth scholarship awarded by the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation to a young artist who has graduated from the Villa Arson with a National University Diploma in Artistic Expression, obtained by virtue of practice and production in the field of painting or drawing. As both a painter and a sculptor, Lukas Meir’s work depicts scenes from everyday life, using a visual language that evokes Renaissance religious painting.
His exhibition ‘The Anointing’ is on show at the Villa Arson until 2 February 2025. What has become of holidays in the age of late capitalism? This is the question that drives Lukas Meir’s pictorial and sculptural work, as he observes beaches crowded with bodies, veritable temples in which this strange, profane, yet, in the artist’s words, ‘almost religious’ ritual seems to take place. A ritual that ‘promises redemption from earthly suffering’, notably manifested in the joyous acceptance of an injury: sunburn. Lukas Meir sees it as an act of faith, the self-punishment of a martyred society ‘ready to die for its belief in eternal growth’. In the ironic and deliberately exaggerated use of this metaphor, a fundamental role is played by sunscreen: an attempt at protection and healing, an ‘anointing of SPF 50’. This sunscreen appears on the damaged skin of the bathers in a grotesque and disturbing way: sometimes applied like a clown’s make-up, at other times smeared on until it completely covers their faces, the coarseness of the white patches stands in stark contrast to the artist’s otherwise realist and highly refined brushwork, capable of referencing some of the great masters of the past while simultaneously desacralising them.
We are pleased to announce the release of Michael Peppiatt’s last book, entitled Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait in Words, which includes the most comprehensive collection of Bacon’s interviews and letters to date. This meticulously collated anthology offers a deep dive into Bacon’s life and thoughts, featuring interviews with Julian Jebb and Pierre Koralnik discussing Bacon’s struggles with alcoholism, as well as letters from various archives that reveal everything from mundane financial matters to profound insights into his psyche.
The founder of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation allowed the publisher to reproduce a selection of Francis Bacon’s correspondence from his collection. The Foundation archives encompass one of the most extensive collections of letters and postcards between the painter and a wide range of friends, companions, family, acquaintances, and also with writers, gallery directors and curators. They are a valuable tool for art historians and scholars.
The Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux has just published the eponymous catalogue for the exhibition ‘Francis Bacon and The Golden Age of Design’, on show until 5 January 2025, with the essential support of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation.
This bilingual French-English catalogue, featuring texts by Elsa Boustany, Fabienne Grasser-Fulchéri and Dr Rebecca Daniels, invites us to discover a little-known aspect of Francis Bacon’s practice: his creation of furniture in the early 1930s, as well as the British artist’s sources of inspiration for his creations and the influence of this period on his pictorial works. Bacon said that he was greatly influenced by French design, and also specified that post-cubism, as well as the Bauhaus, had a profound effect on him.
