Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez
09.30.2016 - 01.08.2017
Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez an exhibition of almost 80 works including some of the most important and yet least exhibited paintings by this British artist born in Ireland, alongside the works of the classic mas ters from French and Spanish culture who played a huge role in his career.
While a fervent Francophile, Francis Bacon was also well-versed in the work of Spanish masters such as Diego Velázquez, and the exhibition explores the influence of both cultures on his art. Bacon, who became a painter after seeing the exhibition Cent dessins par Picasso at Paul Rosenberg’s gallery in Paris, was a great connoisseur of French literature and painting. He avidly read the writings of Jean Racine, Honoré Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, and Marcel Proust and admired the art of Édouard Manet, Edgard Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.
Aside from the initial contact with Picasso’s Parisian output of the 1920s and 1930s, the clearest evidence of Bacon’s connection with Spanish culture is undoubtedly his obsession with Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent x painted in 1650. Although Bacon had the chance to see the work at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj during a trip to Rome in 1954, he preferred, however, to have reproductions of the work rather than a memory of the original while producing his more than 50 variations on the motif. In addition to Velázquez, Bacon was fascinated by Francisco Goya, El Greco, and Francisco de Zurbarán, whose works he viewed at the Prado Museum, Madrid.
Exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in collaboration with Grimaldi Forum Monaco
Francis Bacon
Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962
Oil on canvas, three panels
198.1 x 144.8 cm, each panel
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 64.1700
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved
DACS/VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016
The Exhibition
Francis Bacon
Composition (Figure), 1933
Pastel, pen, and ink on paper, mounted on card
53.5 x 40 cm
Colección Abelló, Madrid
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS/VEGAP. Bilbao, 2016
Francis Bacon
Study for Portrait of Van Gogh I, 1956
Oil and sand on canvas
152.5 x 117 cm
The Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, University of East Anglia
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS/VEGAP. Bilbao, 2016
Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
Francis Bacon
Study after Velazquez,1950
Oil on canvas
198 x 137 cm
Private collection
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS/VEGAP. Bilbao, 2016
Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
Francis Bacon
Study for Self-Portrait, 1976
Oil and pastel on canvas
198 x 147.5 cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Purchased 1978
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS/VEGAP. Bilbao, 2016
Photo: Jenni Carter, Viscopy
Francis Bacon
Three Studies of Figures on Beds, 1972
Oil and tempera on canvas
Three panels,198 x 147.5 cm
Esther Grether Familly Collection
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved.
DACS/VEGAP. Bilbao, 2016
Photo: Bildpunkt AG, Münchenstein
Alberto Giacometti
Buste of a Man in a Frame (Buste d’homme dans un cadre), ca. 1946
Oil on canvas
28,1 x 22,4 cm
Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris
© Alberto Giacometti Estate/ Vegap, 2016
Francisco de Goya
Tauromachy (Tauromaquia) series (detail), 1816
Aquatint, etching, burin, and dry point
40 etchings, 31.5 x 47.7 cm (paper)
Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao
Artist
Bacon, Francis
Did you
know that...?
A self-taught artist
Francis Bacon approached the creative process of painting somewhat unconventionally: only rarely did he make preparatory drawings, and he always painted directly onto the bare canvas. He never received any formal training, and his studios were practically the only places where he worked.
Human Figures
Bacon’s painting style is halfway between abstraction and representation. Surrealism was an important springboard for and influence on his earliest works. Later, when Bacon began to capture the movement of the figures on canvas, Eadweard Muybridge’s late 19th–century photographs of the human body in motion became an essential point of reference.Sexuality
Bacon said that his parents had banished him from his home in 1926 when they found him wearing his mother’s clothing. After this episode, he moved to other cities where he was able to express himself more freely, thanks to the money his mother forwarded to him.Life and Death
One of the first subjects that Bacon painted was the pieces of meat that the artist saw displayed in butcher shops, which ended up becoming a recurring image in his oeuvre [see Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962) in gallery 205]. To Bacon, meat represented the cycle of life and death.