Artworks and Archives
The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation is home to its founder’s collection, entitled the MB Art Collection, which now comprises over 3,500 items. Majid Boustany has an active policy of enhancing his collection through regular acquisitions with the aim of giving art historians and other scholars, exhibition curators and visitors access to this invaluable resource.
Majid Boustany
Founder and President of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation
At the core of the MB Art Collection is a selection of paintings by Francis Bacon, dating chiefly from the beginning of his career. Indeed, the artist’s three first pictures – historic pieces produced in 1929 and 1930, which are fundamental to understanding the origin of his art – are in the collection. Majid Boustany has also assembled a corpus of works by artists who influenced Bacon. More >
In 1930 and 1931, Francis Bacon lived at 17 Queensberry Mews West, in the South Kensington area of London, where he set himself up as a designer of furniture and rugs. His designs were influenced by Bauhaus, mainly as a result of a brief stay in Berlin in 1927, and by his discovery at the end of the 1920s of the work of modernists such as Charlotte Perriand, André Lurçat, Eileen Gray, Marcel Breuer, Pierre Chareau, Robert Mallet-Stevens and Le Corbusier. More >
The MB Art Collection’s photographic archive has been added to over the years. It now comprises more than 800 photographs of Francis Bacon and his studios taken by over ninety different photographers, including unique unpublished images, paint-spattered images from Bacon’s various studios, and contact sheets. More >
Francis Bacon’s first lithographs were published by the Galerie Maeght, in Paris, in an issue of the magazine Derrière le miroir, in 1966, when the gallery held an exhibition of his work. In 1971, the first of Bacon’s lithographs to be produced in a signed and numbered limited edition was printed, under his constant supervision, to coincide with his now legendary retrospective at the Grand Palais. More >
The MB Art Collection archives contain the largest and most varied collection of Francis Bacon-related correspondence and official documents in existence. It includes letters, postcards, telegrams and brief handwritten notes between the painter and his circle of friends, his partners, his family and his various connections as well as writers, gallery managers and exhibition curators. More >
After the success of his now legendary exhibition at the Grand Palais in 1971, Francis Bacon began to stay in Paris more often. In 1974, he took a studio that doubled as a flat at 14, rue de Birague, in the Marais district. He set up home there in 1975 and lived there until 1987, producing a group of artworks that included a series of portraits and self-portraits. More >
Francis Bacon was inspired by a staggering variety of source images. He drew on a visual reservoir fed by a torrent of pages torn from books, fragments of illustrations, newspapers and magazines, folded, creased and paint-spattered photographs of friends and lovers, artist’s supplies, brief handwritten notes, scraps of garments and other objects. More >
