Art Gallery of Alex Alien

signed, titled and dated 1966 on the reverse of the left canvas
oil on board each: 81 by 66 cm.; 32 by 26 in.

Hanover Gallery, London
Wright S. Ludington, California
Galerie Beyler, Basel
Sir Edward & Lady Hulton, London (acquired from the above in 1976)
Private Collection, Europe
Thomas Gibson Fine Art, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1997

London, Hanover Gallery, Francis Bacon Paintings. Robert Ironiside Drawings, 1949, no. 7
California, Palm Beach, Society of Four Arts, Contemporary British Painting, 1956
Toronto, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Francis Bacon, 1979
London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1985, p. 42, no. 8, illustrated in colour
Lugano, Museo d'Arte Moderna della Città di Lugano Villa Malpensata, Francis Bacon, 1993, p. 29, illustrated in colour, and p. 138, no. 9, illustrated
Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou; Munich, Haus der Kunst, Francis Bacon, 1996 -97, p. 291, illustrated
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Hamburg, Hamburg Kunsthalle, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, 2005-06, no. 3, illustrated in colour
Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts; Wisconsin, Milwaukee Art Museum; Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, 2006-07, no. 5, illustrated in colour

Penguin New Writing, London 1949, no. 38, p. 64
Horizon, no. XX, December 1949 - January 1950, pp. 418-19
World Review, New Series, no. 23, January 1951, p. 64
Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, no. 22, illustrated
Hugh M. Davies, Francis Bacon, New York 1986, p. 19, no. 13, illustrated
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Paris 1987, no. 8, illustrated in colour
Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Ed., Francis Bacon, New York 1998, p. 18, illustrated in colour
Martin Harrison, Ed., Francis Bacon: New Studies, Göttingen 2009, p. 177, no. 119, illustrated in colour

1949 was a seminal year for Francis Bacon: it marked the full inauguration of an artistic vision that drew back the veil on the human condition with a rawness and violence never before witnessed. This was the year of Bacon’s very first one-man exhibition in which the extraordinary and historically important group of six Heads powerfully proclaimed his critical arrival. Designated as third in this crucial series, Head III was conceived as part of the most ferocious corpus of Bacon’s early career; a sequence of paint encrusted, starkly monochromatic pictures that navigates an evolution from the innate animalism of Heads I and II (housed in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Ulster Museum, Belfast respectively) to culminate in Head VI (Southbank Centre, London) as the very first in Bacon’s groundbreaking and iconoclastic pantheon of screaming Popes. Viewed as part of a metamorphic sequence, Head III is an extraordinary vision of abject and ‘all too human’ man arrested at an evolutionary stage between base animal instinct and howling patriarch. In context of this seminal revelatory moment, Head III is itself of great precedential significance. Preempting the gaping mouthed shriek of Head VI, this painting denotes the first explicit occasion in which the obsessively quoted broken glasses, or pince-nez, fully appear; Bacon famously lifted both glasses and scream from Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece of silent cinema, Battleship Potemkin. This work also significantly embodies the first irrefutable human likeness of Bacon’s professional career. Though not a portrait, the painting bears a resemblance to Bacon’s first significant benefactor and long-term companion, Eric Hall, and thus anticipates the way in which Bacon would later look to his social circle for principal inspiration. Having been exhibited in some of the most important museum shows of Bacon’s career, including the seminal 1985 Tate retrospective held during Bacon’s lifetime, alongside countless others at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Hamburg Kunsthalle; Haus der Kunst, Munich to name but a few, the historical importance and museum pedigree of Head III is utterly beyond reproach. Further beyond doubt is the power and technical brilliance of this early work. Extensively commented upon in contemporary reviews and admired in influential critiques of the Hanover exhibition, Head III was the first painting sold by the Hanover Gallery in advance of the private view in November 1949. The notable Californian collector Wright S. Ludington (1900-1992), who shared a mutual friend with Bacon in Graham Sutherland and is notable today for his crucial involvement in the foundation of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, was the first to own this painting: he bought it on 28 October 1949 for £150. Possessing rich provenance, a profound history and a deeply evocative subject, Head III certainly holds a place of utmost importance within the arc of Bacon scholarship.

Following the intermittent early success of the first two masterworks, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 (Tate Collection, London), and Painting 1946 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), of which the latter was acquired for The Museum of Modern Art only two years later, the emergence of the Heads in 1949 indefatigably announced the arrival of Bacon’s genius and primary subject – the human-animal as unadorned, despairing, godless and alone. Though comprising only ten works in total, the Hanover Gallery’s now legendary 1949 exhibition reads as a roll call of Bacon’s early masterpieces. Alongside the series of Heads, the aforementioned Three Studies and the Tate owned Figure in a Landscape, 1945 (works both donated to the Tate in the 1950s by Eric Hall), were displayed alongside two larger scaled new paintings, Study from the Human Body and Study for Portrait housed in the collections of The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Apart from Heads IV and V, the inventory from this crucial exhibition rightfully resides across the world’s most prestigious museum collections; together these works embody a significant historical turning point in the development of perhaps the most important artistic career of the late Twentieth Century.

Pared down to a grisaille execution and stripped bare of the theatrical trappings witnessed in the first masterworks, Painting 1946 and Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Bacon concentrated his depiction of humanity on visceral animalistic drives: “no sides of meat, no bandages, no umbrellas or other props; simply a glimpse of mankind reduced to basic instinct, the mouth gibbering in fear or bared in attack, with the rest of the senses (and often, literally the rest of the head) obliterated” (Michael Peppiatt, Anatomy of an Enigma, London 2008, p. 153). The technical brilliance of Bacon’s ability to elucidate the instantaneous flicker of film noir or the granular blur of newsprint in the Grand Manner of oil on canvas mark these works as extraordinary feats of artistic creation. In this regard, Head III powerfully delivers great technical resolve, forcefully encapsulating Bacon’s professed desire from this early moment: “to paint like Velázquez with the texture of hippopotamus skin” (the artist cited in: ‘Survivors’, Time, 21 November 1949, p. 44). Unlike any works previously and in contrast to the extant works in the series, Head III delivers an extraordinarily unsettling depiction of man: out of a thickly painted pock-marked complexion a haunting and disarmingly human stare pierces the downwards drag of a diaphanous curtain. Dimly lit and dissolving into darkness, this turning bald-headed figure meets our gaze through shattered glasses - the notorious Baconian motif obsessively quoted from the screaming nurse of the Odessa steps sequence in Eisenstein’s Potemkin. Though dispossessed of the nurse’s ensuing scream that would come to define Bacon’s iconic corpus of Popes after Velazquez’s 1650 Pope Innocent X, Head III depicts a terrible moment of silence in which this anonymous man’s disturbing countenance and penetrating glare projects directly out of the black abyss to meet with our own. Not only does Head III possess the first fully formed pair of eyes in Bacon’s work since the 1930s, it also represents the first recognisably human facial study in Bacon’s mature expression. At once evoking the frail physicality of a cleric or hunchbacked civil servant, Head III foreshadows the nameless businessmen of the landmark Man in Blue paintings whilst inaugurating the defining subject of Bacon’s career - the unadorned translation of human presence. In this regard such was the arresting power of Head III in 1949 that esteemed critic Robert Melville was impelled to comment in his influential review of the Hanover exhibition: “how did this man come to get a skin of such a disquieting texture? I cannot divorce the facture from what it forms. I am prevented from going through my usual routine of art appreciation. Modern painting has suddenly been humanized” (Robert Melville, ‘Francis Bacon’, Horizon, December 1949, p. 423).

Situated off Hanover Square at 32a St George Street, the Hanover Gallery was established by the visionary gallerist Erica Brausen in 1947. Having escaped the rise of Nazism in her native Germany during the early 1930s, Brausen developed a prominent profile in Paris among the elite of the contemporary artistic milieu. Arriving in London penniless after fleeing Fascist occupation of Mallorca, Brausen began working as a dealer at the Redfern Gallery before setting up her own enterprise with financial backer Arthur Jeffress in 1947. During this very year Brausen became Francis Bacon’s first dealer. Introduced by their mutual friend, Graham Sutherland, at Bacon’s 7 Cromwell Place studio in South Kensington, artist and dealer formalised a relationship that would prove instrumental for Bacon’s career. Possessing an unimpeachable artistic eye, Brausen advised many of the world’s most influential curators and important collectors; after acquiring Painting 1946 during her first studio visit, Brausen wasted no time in securing this painting within the equally progressive and prestigious permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The significance of Brausen’s promotion and support during the first formative decade of Bacon’s career cannot be overstated and it was the prestige of obtaining this significant museum acquisition so early that cemented Bacon’s ascent to international renown. Following their first meeting Bacon agreed to produce for Brausen a body of new work in preparation for his first one-man exhibition to be held at the Hanover Gallery. With the £200 received from the sale of Painting 1946, a substantial amount for a little known and unrepresented artist, Bacon left almost immediately for Monte Carlo where he predominantly spent the next four years. Extravagantly languishing in the Mediterranean climate and indulging at the glamorous casinos - Bacon famously loved to gamble - very little work was produced until he returned to Cromwell Place in 1949. Nonetheless, that Bacon had conceived the premise for, and even started work on his next body of paintings is revealed in a letter to Arthur Jeffress sent from Monaco in 1948: “The pictures seem to be going well. I am at the moment working on some heads which I like better than any I have done before, I hope you and Erica will like them. I shall come back in November or December” (Francis Bacon, letter to Arthur Jeffress, 1948, Tate Archive, London, 863.6.2.1). Back in London in late 1948, the ensuing months of furious creativity leading up to the exhibition not only produced Bacon’s most formative and powerful early images, but also crucially established the serial working method that drove his mature practice.

Two years following the sale of Painting 1946, Bacon’s first solo show finally opened on 8 November 1949. This decisive exhibition (which he shared with a small installation of watercolours by Robert Ironside in the upstairs gallery) courted widespread controversy in the press, a considerable degree of attention that in turn precipitated the artist’s first significant critical appraisal. The reviews responded directly to the frightening nature of Bacon’s subjects, commenting on the disquieting evocation of “cruelty being committed out of sight”, and describing his pictures as “so repellent” they “leave in the mind precisely the same long-continued feeling of disquiet as a thoroughly bad dream” (Anonymous, ‘Art Exhibitions: Mr Francis Bacon’, The Times, 22 November 1949). In recounting “dismemberment by bomb splinters” these early critical appraisals identified Bacon’s work as a sensationalism of war’s horror, denoting “the high watermark of contemporary morbidity” (Neville Wallis, ‘At the Galleries: Nightmare’, The Observer, 20 November 1949, and, Maurice Collins, ‘Art’, Time and Tide, 26 November 1949). Nonetheless, positive criticism was substantial and Bacon’s technical mastery was universally acknowledged. The superb handling of grisaille punctuated with flashes of pink, blue or green was considered a painterly achievement likened to that of the Old Masters. In sum, the 1949 Hanover show was a triumphant critical debut bolstered by the successful sale of all but three of the pictures on offer. According to the Hanover Gallery’s ledgers and daybooks presently held in the Tate Archives, Head III is notable as the very first work from the exhibition sold by Brausen. Bought for £150, Head III was originally acquired by the California-based collector Wright S. Ludington. Before the war Ludington cultivated an exceptional collection of Modern art including works by André Derain, Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Miró, and Dalí to name a few; however it was military service in London that first exposed Ludington to the cutting edge of British art and sparked a friendship with Graham Sutherland. A staunch early supporter instrumental in Brausen’s introduction to Bacon, that Sutherland directed Ludington towards Bacon’s gallery debut here seems likely. Ludington’s acquisition of Head III shortly before the opening of the exhibition reflects the powerful intrigue cast by this very painting, a work of profoundly compelling nature contemporaneously verified in two of the most influential critical reviews of Bacon’s first exhibition.

Renowned critic Robert Melville wrote at length on the artistic success of the 1949 exhibition in Horizon, in which he poetically described the Heads as possessing “the colour of wet, black snakes lightly powdered with dust” (Robert Melville, Op. cit., p. 421). Directly in response to these works, Melville cited Bacon as “the only important painter of our time who is exclusively preoccupied with man”, concluding his article by recognising in Bacon a new hope for painting (Ibid., p. 423). This influential review devoted particular attention to an analysis of Head III: “A man turns his head and stares out of a picture through pince-nez; I am more conscious of the stare than of the eyes; the play of intervals between the eyes, the rims of the glasses and the shadows of the rims is further information about the stare – the man is ‘holding something back’; I do not think about spatial concepts when examining the relationship between head and curtain – I am too subdued by the fact that the curtain is sucking away the substance of the head; the subtle pinking beige paint that dabbles and creates the face is an exquisite foil to the greys” (Ibid., pp. 422-23). Similarly attuned to Melville, celebrated writer and painter Wyndham Lewis published his review in The Listener on 17 November 1949, praising the Hanover show for its “exceptional importance” (Wyndham Lewis, ‘Round the London Art Galleries’, The Listener, November 17 1949, p. 860). Describing an artist “perfectly in tune with his time”, Lewis prophetically assigned Bacon the status of “one of the most powerful artists in Europe today” (Ibid.). In this article, Head III was once again singled out. Recounting the “baleful regard from the mask of a decayed clubman or business executive - so decayed that usually part of the head is rotting away into space” Wyndham Lewis continued, “… these faces come out of the blackness to glare or shout. I must not attempt to describe these amazing pictures” (Ibid.).

In May 1949, some months prior to the exhibition, Wyndham Lewis enthusiastically published a preview of the show which announced the presence of Head III at the gallery some months ahead of the extant works in the series. Describing “a man with no top to his head”, Lewis noted the distinctive “cold-crumbling grey of the face” and “glittering white mess of the lips” particular to this remarkable painting (Wyndham Lewis, The Listener, 12 May 1949, p. 811). The early arrival of Head III perhaps hints at Bacon’s rare satisfaction with a finished work. Indeed, during these formative early years before the routine of frequent exhibitions motivated a prolific work ethic, Bacon was destructively self-critical. Though he maintained a deeply self-effacing stance throughout his lifetime, the ruthlessness with which Bacon liberally destroyed finished works during the late 1940s and early 1950s marks the survival and early exhibition of any work from this period as remarkable in itself. The Times review sensationally reported that over seven-hundred canvases were maimed in preparation of the Hanover exhibition; though undoubtedly an embellishment, during the seven years between 1944 and 1950 only fifteen works survived Bacon’s scrupulous working practice. In light of such critical reception and the artist's ruthless early practice, the significance of the works included in Bacon’s very first exhibition is truly seminal.

“The History of Europe in my lifetime”

John Russell described this series as conveying “what it feels like to be alone in a room… we may feel at such times that the accepted hierarchy of our features is collapsing, and that we are by turns all teeth, all eye, all ear, all nose… our person is suddenly adrift, fragmented, and subject to strange mutation” (John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 2001, p. 38). These extraordinary variants of human drives and animalistic embodiment form a catalogue of fear, anguish and internal suffering - a “zone of indiscernibility” that Giles Deleuze defined as the “becoming-animal” in Bacon’s work (Giles Delueze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London 2002, pp. 15-19). As Bacon outlined in Time magazine in November 1949, “They are just an attempt to make a certain type of feeling visual… painting is the pattern of one's own nervous system being projected on canvas” (the artist cited in: ‘Survivors’, Time, 21 November 1949, p. 44). From the existential disintegration of bestial drives and impulses redolent in Heads I and II, through to the pallid frailty and troubling human spectacle of Head III, and ending in the harrowing papal scream of Head VI, this series established a mythology for the contemporary moment. With these works and the magnum opus of Popes that shortly followed, Bacon inaugurated a modern-day revivification of the Tragic genre. Highly receptive to language, particularly the Greek tragedy of Aeschylus and the fusion of mythology with contemporaneity of T.S. Eliot, Bacon imbued his work with an elevated grandiosity absorbed from the realm of literature. In synthesising quotations from film, duplicating the out-of focus immediacy of news imagery, and loading a wealth of associations drawn from both contemporary visual culture and his most admired art historical Masters, Bacon thought of himself as a “pulverizing machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed” (Francis Bacon cited in: John Russell, Ibid., p. 71).

Head III and the series at large command an immediacy of sensation derived very much from a visual parity with film - a burgeoning artform in the 1920s of crucial import during the artist's impressionable years as a young man. Executed in series like a chain of film stills, these paintings are infused with the palette, striking composition and flickering light effects of early cinema. Though Bacon obsessively mined the emotive potential of the iconic screaming nurse in Eisenstein’s Potemkin, it was the pioneering filmmaker’s high-impact deployment of montage that strongly informed Bacon’s practice. As outlined by Martin Hammer, Bacon, akin to Eisenstein’s approach to film, was committed “to painting as a vehicle of expression that operates in terms of immediate sensation rather than narrative” (Martin Hammer, Francis Bacon and Nazi Propaganda, London 2012, p. 31). Bacon’s serious interest in silent-film melodrama insinuates the transposition of film techniques, such as superimposition, double exposures and dissolves, into paint. David Alan Mellor explains that the series of Heads in particular owe much to the innovation of Fritz Lang, the forefather of film noir and director of the groundbreaking Metropolis (1927): “Bacon’s 1949 depictions of semi-transparent portrait heads and later, in 1955, his reworkings of James S. Delville’s cast of William Blake recall a similar motif in Lang’s Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922), in which a murderous patriarchal head is superimposed on the floor of the Stock Exchange in the vast room’s perspectivised space” (David Alan Mellor, ‘Film, Fantasy, History in Francis Bacon’, in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Britain, Francis Bacon, 2009, p. 52). The way Head III appears to hover and disintegrate as though superimposed or projected onto a curtain parallels the sinister floating head of Lang’s Dr. Mabuse. Echoing these dramatic techniques Bacon employed the visceral charge of such filmic effects and motifs, not for their narrative suggestions, but for their strength and immediacy of expression.

Behind this absorptive association-led process, Bacon’s overarching impetus to capture in a single image “the History of Europe in my lifetime” illuminates a will to visually distil the self-destructivity of the Twentieth Century; an impulse at once symptomatic of the dismal post-war climate in which these early images came to light and accountable for the repetitive, serial inference of particular historical events (the artist cited in: Hugh M. Davies, ‘The Screaming Pope: Past Art and Present Reality’, in: Exhibition Catalogue, Lugano, Museo d’Arte Moderna, Francis Bacon, 1993, p. 60). Sam Hunter’s photographs of the visual compost found in Bacon’s studio at 7 Cromwell Place affirms the prominence of Nazi imagery in Bacon’s early work. The frequency with which figures appear behind microphone banks, mouths agape, in front of or disappearing behind heavily pleated curtains invokes the totalitarian imagery of Hitler, Goebbels and Goering in full oratory swing. However, alongside the open-mouthed scream and Eisenstein’s pince-nez stare, it is the isolating and confining presence of the vertically striated curtain or disintegrating veil that unite these early pictures. Drapery and the diaphanous effect of veiling denote a prominent early obsession for Bacon: the powerful downward brushstrokes that permeate Bacon’s fresh works for the 1949 exhibition continue with heightened vigour into the subsequent Pope paintings and beyond. Undeniably evocative of Titian’s half-veiled Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Achinto (1558), in Head III Bacon seems to combine this cutaneous dissolution with the enshrouding effect of shadow as apparent in Rembrandt’s early self-portrait from 1629. Not only are these effects evocative of dimly-lit and curtained interiors, the likes of which could also be found in Bacon’s own Cromwell Place studio (heavy curtains originally installed for blackouts during the war), these backdrops echo photographs of Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light, the spectacular expanse of vertical light-architecture devised for the Nuremburg Rallies. Such allusions to troubling historical spectacles do not dictate meaning in Bacon’s work, but instead act as vehicles through which these paintings draw their gravitas and pictorial power. Employed as a formal trope, the powerful erosive potential of the curtain disintegrates the top of the figure’s skull in Head III under which piercing melancholic blue eyes glare through Eisenstein’s broken glasses, a precursor to the series’ screaming climactic conclusion and the realisation of Bacon’s subject par excellence.

Where Bacon’s portrayal of the tyrannical father and ultimate patriarch found its finest incarnation in the 1953 Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, an alternate expression of this concern is very much at stake within a reading of Head III, particularly in relation to Bacon’s biography. Where this figure possesses the appearance of a bewildered clerk or aged politician, the austere suggestion of dress also implies the religious uniform of monastic robes. Here, Bacon’s portrayal of an aged father figure delivers an expression of waning power and weakness, a manifestation perhaps of the artist’s growing impatience and outgrowth of his long-standing partner of fifteen years, Eric Hall - a figure to whom Head III purportedly bears a likeness. As shown in a portrait by Roy de Maistre, this plump, balding and immaculately dressed man radiates a benevolence that bespeaks paternity, leaving in no doubt the father and son relationship shared between both men. Where Bacon’s brief upbringing had been far from nurturing (his father, Edward Bacon, was a retired Army Captain and horse-trainer with a weakness for military discipline) by the early 1940s Bacon had found a secure emotional and domestic foundation with Eric Hall and his devoted childhood Nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. A respected and prosperous businessman significantly older than Bacon, Hall scandalously left his wife and children to live in an openly homosexual relationship with the artist at 7 Cromwell Place. During these happy domestic years, Hall had an enormous impact on the young artist: not only an ardent early supporter and patron of his work, as a mentor Hall cultivated Bacon’s taste for fine dining, travel and the arts. He was the supportive father figure Bacon never had, and together with Nan Lightfoot, the trio lived happily together for some years as an unorthodox and peculiar family unit. By the late 1940s however, Hall was becoming an impeding presence for an artist gaining in stature and professional renown. Bacon became increasingly careless and a string of affairs undoubtedly eroded their relationship. Following the death of Nan Lightfoot in 1951, the last familial bond was severed and Bacon’s innate independence had finally, after fifteen years, outgrown this gentle father figure. Significantly it was around this time that he first met Peter Lacy, the violent, tortured lover whom Bacon purportedly loved most because he made him suffer the most. Intriguingly, Lacy’s bold features can be distinguished upon the obsessively painted pantheon of Papal figures executed following the 1949 show. Interpreted in this regard, if indeed this painting bears a likeness to Hall, Head III represents the disintegration of paternal authority, gentility crumbling in the wake of terrible cruelty.

Into the present work Bacon poured his fixation with corporeal mutilation and glistening mouths, his obsession with Eisenstein, his rapture with film-noir, his indistinguishable preoccupation with terrible patriarchy and the history of Twentieth Century conflict. Mediated by the vicissitudes of biography, Head III is an incredibly pioneering and unique work that marks the very formation of Bacon’s painterly genius. Signalling the terrible and silent metamorphosis from inchoate bestiality towards the realisation of nightmarish patriarchy, with these works Bacon made the transformation from mythological creatures and theatrical ornament to psychologically charged humanity: the Heads erected the pictorial scaffold by which Bacon took command of his greater artistic vision. Melding bravura command of tonality with the granular monochromacity of black and white news reportage, the remarkably powerful yet tragic Head III captures the instantaneous impact of film through a masterful manipulation of oil paint. Against a contemporaneously prevalent post-war milieu of conceptual abstraction following the horrors of two World Wars, Bacon’s astounding series of Heads bravely restored the relevance of figuration for a confrontation of our “contemporary nightmare” (Kenneth Clark in response to Bacon’s work, cited in: Michael Peppiatt, Op. cit., p. 135)

signed, titled and dated 1966 on the reverse of the left canvas
oil on canvas each: 35.5 by 30.5cm.; 14 by 12in.

Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris
Private Collection, France (acquired from the above in 1971)
Sale: Christie's, London, Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale, 4 June 2004, Lot 26
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Hamburg, Hamburg Kunsthalle, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, 2005-06, no. 50, illustrated in colour
Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts; Wisconsin, Milwaukee Art Museum; Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, 2006-07, no. 54, illustrated in colour
New York, Gagosian Gallery, Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers, 2008, pp. 38-9, illustrated in colour

John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1971, no. 82, illustrated
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon: full face and in profile, Barcelona 1983, no. 36, illustrated in colour
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Paris 1987, no. 34, illustrated in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, Milan, Palazzo Reale, Bacon, 2008, p. 60, illustrated in colour
Rina Arya, Francis Bacon. Painting in a Godless World, Farnham 2012, pp. 122-3, illustrated in colour

Isabel Rawsthorne occupies a position unlike any other within Francis Bacon’s art. Of all his female subjects and many friends, she was the woman to whom he felt closest: the extraordinary number of portraits after her likeness command a rare heroic dimension at once testament to Bacon’s affection and reflective of Isabel’s remarkable magnetism as a person. Muse, mistress and friend of the Parisian avant-garde during the 1930s, Isabel was a compelling personality and alluring subject for André Derain, Pablo Picasso and most significantly, Alberto Giacometti, with whom she shared a drawn-out love affair. Undoubtedly enamoured by her sophisticated Parisian connections and impressed by her imposing presence, she was an irresistible source of inspiration for Bacon during the 1960s. Indeed, though indisputably homosexual, Bacon was far from impervious to her charms. After she died in 1992, he famously divulged to Paris Match: "You know I also made love to Isabel Rawsthorne, a very beautiful woman who was Derain's model and Georges Bataille's girlfriend" (Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, London 1994, p. 167). Executed seventeen years after they first met, Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne utterly encapsulates this defining relationship, gracefully transmuting strong, handsome features with the fractured assault of Bacon’s dramatic painterly shorthand. Embodying the penultimate example from a series of five triptych studies of Isabel painted between 1965 and 1968 in the artist's iconic 14 by 12 inch canvases, the present work echoes with remarkable proximity the very first small-scale triptych in sharing a similar colour palette of dark ground and contrasting crimson red. Bought from Marlborough Fine Art by Sir Robert and Lisa Sainsbury almost immediately after its completion, this work now resides in the public collection of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia. Following this first triptych, the cumulative experience of a year spent intently studying and translating her form is evident in the masterfully swift and spontaneous yet controlled facture of the present work. According to a diary recovered from Francis Bacon’s studio after his death, the present work was executed in just under two weeks between 21 October and 4 November 1966 (Ewbanks Auctioneers, Surrey, 2007, Lot 2004). Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne therefore stands at the very epicentre of intense focus on her likeness, a period between 1966 and 1967 during which Bacon would produce some of the most incredible portrayals of his career. Alongside the present work from 1966, the magisterial Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne in the collection of the Tate, London, and the powerfully animalistic Study of Isabel Rawsthorne, of the Pompidou Centre, Paris, would preface two of the most heroic and inventive of Bacon’s portraits, works both painted in 1967 and housed in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin: Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho and Three Studies for Isabel Rawsthorne. Simultaneously demonstrative of her profound power as one of the most significant muses of the Twentieth Century and Bacon’s inimitable powers as a portraitist, Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne crystallises a remarkable symbiosis between painter and subject.

Isabel Rawsthorne cited in: Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, London 1994, p. 166.

The daughter of a master mariner, Isabel Nicholas was born in East London in 1912. As a child, her father’s work moved the family to Liverpool where she started her education at Liverpool School of Art. By the time she turned eighteen however, her father’s unexpected death at sea and mother’s subsequent emigration to Canada left Isabel to make her own way. After winning a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy she secured her return to London, where, to subsidise her own artistic training, she began modelling. Possessing striking, exotic features and a tall slender frame, a string of dalliances and affairs naturally ensued. When Isabel became assistant and model for Jacob Epstein she also became his lover, and by the age of twenty-two had given birth to his child. The Epstein family adopted the child and Isabel was encouraged to continue her studies in Paris. By 1934 after taking life classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse Isabel began socialising at Le Dôme Café and Le Café Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés where she was to meet the most prominent figures of the avant-garde, including the immediately enthralled André Derain for whom she modelled: “I adored Derain – he was the most French person you could ever meet. That’s how I learned the language” (Isabel Rawsthorne cited in: Daniel Farson, Op. cit., p. 165). However it was a relationship with Alberto Giacometti that would prove the most significant of these years in Paris. Following their first encounter at Le Dôme one evening, Giacometti and Isabel met daily. In her memoirs she recalled, “I already knew he had changed my life forever” (Isabel Rawsthorne cited in: Véronique Wiesinger, ‘Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Gagosian Gallery, Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers, 2008, p. 217). In return, she was to have an enormous impact on the trajectory of Giacometti’s practice. The countless portraits in two-dimensions and in the round after Isabel traverse a great transformation in Giacometti’s interpretation of the human form, indeed, it was a vision of Isabel standing in the distance on the Boulevard St Michel that inspired the corpus of small naked women planted on cubic bases, a precursor to his iconic mature style. Via Giacometti, she was received into the inner circle of the French intelligentsia: alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Bataille, and Simone de Beauvoir, Isabel forged particularly close friendships with the painter Balthus and the eminent man of letters Michel Leiris and his wife Louise – all figures, it must be noted, that Bacon held in the greatest esteem. Though she had married Sefton Delmer in 1936, a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express, Isabel and Giacometti sustained an agonizing and protracted love affair that was to last over ten years; the intensity of their relationship only diminished with Isabel’s return to England following the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940.

By the end of the Second World War Isabel had divorced Delmer and following a number of sojourns in Paris with Giacometti married for the second time - in 1947 she wedded the composer and conductor Constant Lambert. Working alongside her husband, Isabel designed sets for many of the Sadler’s Wells ballet and opera productions. Indeed, these years during the late 1940s were devoted to developing her own art practice away from the indulgence of Paris’ cafés. Having established representation by Erica Brausen, she held her first solo exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in 1949, the very same year of Bacon’s seminal one-man show. First introduced by Brausen, it was during the months of preparation running up to their respective exhibitions that Bacon and Isabel became friends. Having returned from Monaco in late 1948 to complete the group of paintings that would secure his critical arrival, Bacon, undoubtedly in awe of Isabel’s Parisian connections, struck up one of the most important relationships of his life. For Bacon, Paris would always represent the very epicentre of the art world; though this seat of power was displaced to New York during the 1950s, Bacon’s love affair with the city never diminished and he considered the honour of exhibiting at the Grand Palais in 1971 his very highest achievement. This undiluted respect was anchored to the artist’s intense admiration for the pioneers of modern art who emerged from Paris during the early Twentieth Century: where Picasso was the catalyst for Bacon’s very first paintings of the 1920s, he attributed Giacometti with effecting the most profound influence upon his work. Giacometti’s dissolution of human appearance down to its very essence was for Bacon the closest parallel to his own ambitions, while the grandiosity of the older artist’s austere diffidence towards the comforts of success undoubtedly impressed Bacon’s generation - the chaos of 7 Reece Mews takes on emulatory significance in homage to Giacometti’s cave-like Montparnasse studio. Not only seduced by these Parisian links however, like his heroes before him, Bacon was captivated by Isabel’s magnetic charisma, disarming personality, and commanding presence. With feline grace and striking features, she was an attractive subject for an artist. Isabel’s appearance naturally leant itself to intense scrutiny and sustained intrigue: her high forehead, long cheekbones and arched eyebrows are as prominent in Giacometti’s busts as they are translated almost thirty years later in Bacon’s highly distorted yet astonishingly accurate portrait heads.

Constant Lambert died in 1951 and shortly after Isabel remarried, settling with Lambert’s close friend and fellow composer, Alan Rawsthorne. During this decade and into the next, Bacon and Isabel became close. Her friendships with eminent figures from the Parisian art world strengthened Bacon’s own ties to Paris; the dinner parties hosted by Isabel helped cement Bacon’s relationships, particularly with Giacometti and Michel Leiris, whom Bacon would later portray in paint with Leiris returning the compliment in one of the finest word-portraits of the artist ever penned. Bacon and Isabel spent the 1960s socialising in the same circle, lunching at Bernard Walsh’s seafood restaurant, Wheeler’s, spending days and long evenings drinking at the George, The French Pub or at the renowned Colony Room run by Soho legend and fellow portrait subject, Muriel Belcher. As central protagonists within this ‘gilded gutter life’, Isabel, Muriel and the gregarious Henrietta Moraes would collectively come to define Bacon’s treatment of the female form - casting a break from the male dominated paintings of the 1940s and ‘50s. Their presence would usher in a period retrospectively perceived as Bacon’s second great artistic peak: where the first belongs to the moment initiated by his series of 1949 Heads, the second coincides with Bacon’s portrayal of his Soho clique and the initiation of the small scale portraits from 1962 onwards. Where Henrietta, sprawled naked on a bed, occupies the tradition of the female nude, and Muriel, with her high hairline and sharp wit, is portrayed as sphinx-like in her wizened demeanour, Isabel embodies the heroic in Bacon’s art like no other individual: the sheer exuberance and almost mythical character of her life and Bacon’s profound respect for her radiates unreservedly from these remarkable portraits.

All the Pulsations of a Person

Across Bacon’s oeuvre, Isabel Rawsthorne is depicted as indefatigably enigmatic, exuding dignity and stature to match the artist’s high regard and deep affection. One of the finest paintings of Bacon’s career is the arrestingly bright blue full-figure portrait Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho, 1967, in the Nationalgalerlie Berlin. Standing vigilant and exuding assurance testament to a life’s worth of experience, Rawsthorne is imbued with a distinctly masculine heroism. In the words of John Russell: “that proud, watchful, experienced figure could be a captain on leave: a lifelong single handed adventurer stepping out from a blue-awning after an assuredly good luncheon, with a rakish open roadster of antique design drawn up at the kerb and a searching unembarrassed glance at the people who have stopped to watch him/her get in and drive off” (John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 2001, p. 125). Unusually attuned to the moods of a woman, Bacon felt a particular affection for Isabel, and even portrayed her facing George Dyer, the artist's most profound love interest and model, in a small portrait diptych from 1967. Bacon revealed this warmth in 1973 when speaking to Hugh M. Davies about the Sainsbury Collection triptych: “Because the others were too torn apart, in the third one I wanted to give the impression of her real physical beauty - with drink and age it’s gone but she was very beautiful” (the artist cited in: Hugh M. Davies, ‘Interviewing Bacon, 1973’ in: Martin Harrison, Ed., Francis Bacon: Centenary Essays, Göttingen 2009, p. 101). A similarity of effect is apparent in the present triptych: where the first two canvases possess an almost animal aggression, the third canvas delivers a graceful and flowing articulation of flattering forms undeniably characteristic of the many photographs of Rawsthorne taken by John Deakin. As outlined by Michael Peppiatt, “If a magnificent sense of dignity emanates from these studies [of Isabel], it is because the artist’s affection is greater, but only just, than the destructive fury with which he dislocated and twisted every feature” (Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London 2009, p. 257). As Peppiatt goes on to illustrate, Bacon’s portraits are an enactment of his own thoughts on the nature of real friendship; the artist is famously quoted saying: "I’ve always thought of friendship as where two people really tear each other apart", indeed, in his portraits Bacon mercilessly pulls, rips and cleaves the intricacies of his friends’ likenesses until their flayed countenances distil some essential physical and pictorial truth (Ibid). In the present work the quick-fire sequence of three alternating views from left to right each deliver a fury of contradicting examinations nonetheless unified by an overarching faithfulness to Isabel’s essential character.

Exploiting familiarity to his advantage, Bacon freely manipulated and wrestled with the physiognomy of those closest to him to engender an elemental painterly distillation in which facture and expression are resolutely interlocked. Representation is deconstructed to the point where features become indiscernable and physical states are superimposed. Nevertheless, the end result is unmistakable in subject. As outlined by John Russell: “although the features as we know them in everyday life may disappear from time to time in a chromatic swirl of paint or be blotted from view by an imperious wipe with a towel, individual aspects of the sitter are shown to us, by way of compensation, with an intensity not often encountered in life” (John Russell, Op. cit., p. 124). As prevalent within Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, the particular arch of her brow, the high cheekbones and handsome profile are compellingly portrayed. Dramatic blows of white are balanced against striking contrasts of red, orange and pink, accented with blue and thickly stippled with the smear of a cashmere sweater. The delicate treatment of the eyes and fluid accent of silhouette are set in dialogue with an almost porcine and mask-like aggression to deliver unbridled vitality of presence. They form a visual parity to Peppiatt’s impression of the fascinating variance of her character and expression as a person: “Her face would assume a look of extreme indignation, followed by one of raucous good humour, and then a glance of seduction, all dropped like masks and as rapidly replaced” (Michael Peppiatt, Op. cit., p. 251).

Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne illustrates a seismic shift in Bacon’s career at the beginning of the 1960s: moving away from emblematic forms - such as those extrapolated from Velazquez’s Pope, Muybridge’s figures in motion, Van Gogh, and Eisenstein - the impetus to harness abstract forces and emanations beyond the realm of appearance began to consume Bacon’s practice. Realising the need for a physical armature upon which to hang this ‘energy’ and ‘living quality’, Bacon turned to his inner social circle. Alongside Isabel Rawsthorne, the ensuing deluge of likenesses after Lucian Freud, Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes and George Dyer acted as the predominant physical catalysts for Bacon’s translation of an inner bodily reality. With some reflection in 1983, Bacon gave clear expression to this inquiry: “The living quality is what you have to get. In painting a portrait the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person… The sitter is someone of flesh and blood and what has to be caught is their emanation… I don’t know whether it would be possible to do a portrait of somebody just by making a gesture of them. So far it seems that if you are doing a portrait you have to record the face. But with the face you have to try and trap the energy that emanates from them” (the artist cited in: David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London 2000, p. 98). During the 1960s Bacon commissioned his drinking partner, friend and Vogue photographer John Deakin to photograph Rawsthorne and the other protagonists of his Soho enclave to be used as shorthand visual cue cards. By the mid-‘60s, Bacon’s established practice of reconstituting and melding photographic source imagery with his own memory and powers of invention had long disposed of the need to paint from life. As he told David Sylvester, "I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs... It's true to say I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I don't know. But, if I both know them and have photographs of them, I find it easier to work than actually having their presence in the room" (David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p. 40). Alongside Rawsthorne, Bacon’s portrait subjects were people he knew exceptionally well; by wielding extraordinary powers of imagination concurrent with his own ‘memory traces’ in tandem with the catalogue of photographs taken by John Deakin, Bacon produced some of the most arresting portraits of the Twentieth Century, and of these, the small portrait heads constitute among the most remarkable portrayals of human appearance ever translated in oil on canvas.

Very much related to Picasso’s reworkings of the human head initiated in 1907, these works combine a translation of successive movement inspired by Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion, as well as Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Emulating mug-shot proportions of a photobooth portrait, the unadorned immediacy of Bacon’s small portraits radiate endurance, nervousness, and involuntary mannerisms: these heads truly embody Bacon’s desire to paint as close to the ‘nervous system’ as possible. To quote William Feaver: “‘Studies’ or exercises though they are, these small paintings are central to Bacon’s art. The scale of a bathroom mirror-image makes them one-to-one, and when they are paired, or grouped in threes, the differences animate them. No rooms, no thrones, no perfunctory landscape settings are needed. Without context or posture, the heads have nothing to do but look, sometimes at one another, and wait” (William Feaver, ‘That’s It’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Francis Bacon 1909 - 1992 Small Portrait Studies, 1993, p. 6). A series and format first settled upon in 1961 and maintained until the very end, these intimately scaled works form the very staple of Bacon’s mature practice, acting as the primary locus for the ‘brutality of fact’ and most immediate site for loosening the ‘valves of feeling’ so frequently referred to by the artist. Unaccompanied and isolated within a dark emerald green ground, with Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne our sight is rapt by the visceral and psychological charge of Bacon’s distorted yet searingly honest vision of humanity.

Delivering a masterful essay on the analysis of facial landscape, Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne is a deeply personal portrayal of one of Francis Bacon's closest friends. Of the handful of female confidants painted by Bacon, portaying only those he knew intimately, Isabel Rawsthorne provided unique focus for the artist: her astounding connections with the Paris art world strengthened Bacon’s own and his profound admiration for her inspired a greater number of small portrait canvases than any of his other friends. Painted over two decades after they first met, this spectacular portrayal illuminates a friendship that lasted until the very end of their lives - in 1992 they died within months of each other. Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne consummately illuminates Bacon’s breathtaking ability to navigate the very threshold of abstraction and figuration: remarkable portraits as unrestrained and exuberant as Isabel Rawsthorne’s uninhibited and extraordinary life.

Sotheby’s London will offer a selection of works which articulate key moments in the careers of many artists such as Francis Bacon on June 26.

Alongside a strong selection of Post-War European Masters, the sale has a particularly strong showing of major British artists. At its heart are two key paintings by Francis Bacon; one a work from his legendary first commercial show at the Hanover Gallery in 1949, the other an outstanding triptych portrait of his closest female friend, muse and lover, the artist Isabel Rawsthorne. Other highlights include David Hockney’s paean to his home country, Double East Yorkshire and Bridget Riley’s powerful op art masterpiece of 1964, Stretch.

The cover lot of the auction is the most important collection of Andreas Gursky “Stock Exchange” photographs in private or public hands. Created over 20 years, these monumental and dynamic images of trading floors, distil the socio-economic topography of our age. Many fresh to the market and with distinguished exhibition histories, the sale comprises 69 works with a combined estimate in excess of £66 million.

“Contemporary collectors in search of prize works, should find a great deal to excite them in our Evening Sale. It is very much an auction of historic ‘firsts’,” said Alex Branczik, Head of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Department. Noting that they were offering the first work that Francis Bacon ever sold, from his first show at a commercial gallery, in which for the first time he depicts the human form, Branczik added, “We have the first David Hockney landscape to appear at auction since the hugely successful 2012 Royal Academy show; a 1964 Bridget Riley shown in the first ever exhibition of “Op Art” in New York in 1965 and Andreas Gursky’s first Stock Exchange photograph of 1990, part of an unparalleled collection of his iconic series of trading floor studies.”

« Il y a dans l’acte d’amour une grande ressemblance avec la torture ou avec une opération chirurgicale, »

Tony Bond, curator of the Francis Bacon, Five Decades show at the NSW Art Gallery

FRANCIS Bacon was once called the greatest living painter of the 20th century, but his reputation has not translated into summer attendances for the Art Gallery of NSW.

This Sunday the gallery will close the door on Francis Bacon, Five Decades with disappointing visitor numbers for the nation's first major survey of the Anglo-Irish artist. As of yesterday, 86,000 visitors had stumped up $20 to see the 53 works.

Total attendances, when tallied, will be considerably down from the record-setting 366,286 who saw the gallery's Picasso survey last year and fewer than the 305,611 who saw The First Emperor: China's Entombed Warriors the previous summer.

Picasso broke an almost 30-year-old attendance record at the gallery, largely because it ran for 130 days. The entombed warriors show ran 101 days, about the same duration as Bacon.

Francis Bacon, Five Decades is the third instalment of the Sydney International Art Series staged by the Art Gallery of NSW in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Art with funding support from Destination NSW.

The MCA's summer show is a survey of work by British contemporary artist Anish Kapoor. There has been good word of mouth for that show, and while the gallery will not say how many people have visited, The Australian understands that visitor numbers have been low.

The Bacon exhibition at the AGNSW is the first big show under the watch of its new director, Michael Brand. However, it had been planned before his arrival in Sydney last year following the departure of veteran director Edmund Capon. The Bacon show has, along with Kapoor, been critically acclaimed.

Curator Tony Bond said: "The gallery had very low (attendance) expectations, which is probably what we're seeing . . . It's not bad.

"I thought it deserved many more but that was just me being optimistic," he said.

Bond, who retires next month, said not all exhibitions could be blockbusters.

The Irish-born artist Francis Bacon once more goes to auction as a 'British icon', writes MICHAEL PARSONS

‘No, he is not an Irishman. He was born in Ireland; but being born in a stable does not make a man a horse.” Daniel O’Connell’s alleged quip certainly put the boot into the the Duke of Wellington, the Irish-born general who led the British to a famous victory to a famous victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. The Duke was, indeed, born in Ireland but like many children of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy was sent off to school in England – Eton, of course – and later pursued a career in the British army.

The “nationality” of a more recent Anglo-Irish figure, the 20th-century painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is also open to question.

He was born in Dublin and spent his childhood in Kildare but left Ireland as a teenager and spent the rest of his life in London where he became one of the most acclaimed, and now most expensive, artists of the modern era. But there’s no hint of Irish influence in his paintings and, in the international art market, Francis Bacon is classified as a British artist. This week, some more of his fiercely expensive paintings were sold at auction in London.

At Sotheby’s on Tuesday evening, his oil-on-canvas triptych – three-panel painting – titled Three Studies For A Self-Portrait sold, within estimate, for £13.7 million (€15.9 million). The painting dates from 1980, when the artist was aged 71, and is one of many self-portraits he made.

Asked why, he replied, according to a catalogue note: “People have been dying around me like flies and I’ve had nobody else to paint but myself. I loathe my own face and I’ve done self-portraits because I’ve had nothing else to do”.

Sotheby’s said the triptych was “acquired by a German collector, Jürgen Hall, who will generously loan the work to a major international institution”.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Hall is “a tobacco tycoon who lives near Cologne”.

On Wednesday evening in London, Francis Bacon – billed as a “British icon” was back on the menu – this time at Christie’s – where his Man in Blue VI, catalogued as “a stirring and profoundly perceptive portrait of existential, postwar Europe”, sold for £4.9 million (€5.7 million).

The auction, featuring “some of the most celebrated British masters of the 20th century”, also included an “early masterpiece” by British artist Damien Hirst (born 1965) – a sheep suspended in a formaldehyde-filled tank – titled Away From The Flock (Divided), which sold for £1.9 million (€2.2 million).

An auction assistant placing Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Self-Portrait on display during the Sotheby’s London Evening Sale of Contemporary Art.

A Francis Bacon self-portrait triptych has sold for over £13 million (€15 million) at auction.

The work, Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, dates from 1980, when the artist was 71.

It was painted nine years after the suicide of Bacon’s partner, George Dyer, and demonstrates the artist’s self-analysis.

An anonymous telephone buyer fought off competition from two other bidders to buy the artwork for £13,761,250 (€15,983,169) at Sotheby’s contemporary art auction.

The oil on canvas piece belongs to a set of 11 triptych self-portraits in Bacon’s particular format of 14 by 12 inches. Cheyenne Westphal, chairman of European contemporary art at Sotheby’s, said: “We are extremely pleased with the price achieved tonight for this sublime self-portrait triptych by Francis Bacon.

“Works of this quality and wall power continue to attract a truly global spread of bidders.

"Three Studies for a Self-Portrait is a quintessential example of how Bacon distilled the great depths of his emotion in a very particular small format triptych, which are so sought after by discerning collectors.”

Francis Bacon's masterwork Three Studies For A Self-Portrait is highest sale as Sotheby's auction brings in £74million.

An anonymous telephone buyer fought off competition from two other bidders to buy a Francis Bacon painting for £13.7million.

t was a "healthy" night of sales at Sotheby's as a contemporary art auction brought in more than £74m - the auction house's second-highest total for a February sale of contemporary art in London. A grand total of £74,364,200 was brought in after the sale of paintings by the likes of Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and Bacon.

The top lot of the evening's sale was Bacon's oil on canvas triptych masterwork Three Studies For A Self-Portrait, which sold for £13,761,250 against an estimate of £10-15 million.

The work dates from 1980, when the artist was 71. It was painted nine years after the suicide of Bacon's partner, George Dyer, and demonstrates the artist's self-analysis.

An anonymous telephone buyer fought off competition from two other bidders to buy the artwork. The oil on canvas piece belongs to a set of 11 triptych self-portraits in Bacon's particular format of 14 by 12 inches.

Cheyenne Westphal, chairman of European contemporary art at Sotheby's, said: "We witnessed healthy buying activity from across the globe, including from Europe, Asia, the US, the CIS and the rest of the world.

"This, combined with the depth of bidding on many lots resulted in a total comfortably within estimate and representing Sotheby's second-highest for a February sale of contemporary art in London.

"This market is demonstrably buoyant, both at the top end for blue-chip classics - such as Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter and Jean-Michel Basquiat - as well as the lower end for well selected works by desirable young artists, including Hurvin Anderson and Andrian Ghenie.

"We are also delighted to announce that the Bacon Triptych was acquired by a German collector, Jurgen Hall who will generously loan the masterwork to a major international institution."

Buyers from 14 countries participated in the auction, which also saw 14 works sell for over £1 million.

Andy Warhol's Lenin sold for £2,169,250, while Mark Rothko's Untitled sold for £2,561,250.

Francis Bacon's 1980 Three Studies for a Self-Portrait (1980) is estimated at £10 million - to £15 million

Forget about looking for trends in this week's London auctions of contemporary art. Copying the tastes of the next guy is not the way the market is going, as collectors become more sophisticated and international.

"Buyers are increasingly creative so that we must cater to various views and global tastes. There is not one area, but lots of enclaves," says Francis Outred, Christie's European head of postwar and contemporary art.

Sotheby's opens the 2013 contemporary season on Tuesday and Wednesday, followed by Christie's Wednesday and Thursday and Phillips on Thursday and Friday. Major offerings will cover figurative, abstract, conceptual and photo art from established stars and emerging artists from Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East. Pieces will be dramatic, powerful, lyrical, delicate or just plain fun.

The work carrying the highest estimate will be Francis Bacon's 1980 Three Studies for a Self-Portrait. The triptych is expected to fetch £10 million-£15 million at Sotheby's. Bacon's intense, implacable and haunting self-portraits are an enormously important part of the British artist's oeuvre. Christie's will have his Man in Blue VI (1954), one of his famous series of paintings of businessmen, isolated and trapped in a sea of blue. Bacon is quoted in the catalogue as saying, "I am excited about the new series I am doing - it is about dreams and life in hotel bedrooms." (Estimate: £4 million-£6 million).

First exhibition to explore dialogue and connections with Francis Bacon and August Rodin

A gallery employee poses between a painting by British artist Francis Bacon entitled Three Studies from the Human Body and a sculpture by French artist Auguste Rodin entitled Iris, etude avec tete at Ordovas gallery in central London on February 7, 2013. Forming part of an exhibition titled 'Movement and Gravity Bacon and Rodin in dialogue' they are to be displayed from February 8 - April 6 2013. Three Studies from the Human Body, 1967, went on public display for the first time in the UK.

LONDON.- At the beginning of September 1959, Francis Bacon travelled to Cornwall, seeking to escape the distractions of London, and took out a six-month rental on a studio in St Ives from the artists William Redgrave and Peter Lanyon. One evening at a party in St Ives, Redgrave noticed Bacon talking with Brian Wall; Bacon asked Wall what he did. ‘I’m a sculptor’, replied Wall; ‘How interesting’, Bacon retorted, before continuing, ‘actually there are only three: Michelangelo, Rodin and Brancusi.’ This provocative response not only confirms Bacon’s high estimation of Rodin, but also coincides exactly with the period in which Rodin’s sculpture was paradigmatic in his paintings. Movement and Gravity: Bacon and Rodin in dialogue is the first exhibition that has ever been dedicated to exploring the dialogue and connections between Francis Bacon and Auguste Rodin, and it is being staged at Ordovas from 8 February to 6 April 2013.

Three bronzes by Rodin are being shown alongside three paintings by Bacon, including Three Studies from the Human Body, 1967, which was last exhibited 40 years ago and has never before been publicly displayed in the UK. For Bacon, Rodin’s dialogue with the human body, exaggerated limbs, fractured forms and the articulation of movement was of vital importance to his work in the 1950s and 1960s, but this is a topic that has attracted little comment, until now. Movement and Gravity: Bacon and Rodin in dialogue examines the profound effect of Rodin on Bacon’s work, in particular, the modulation of the figure and the portrayal of movement and the body in space.

Bacon’s interest in Rodin was documented as early as 1950; a reproduction of Le Penseur, 1880, was included among a selection of Bacon’s pictorial sources at his Cromwell Place studio by photographer Sam Hunter. In 1953, Roland, Browse & Delbanco Gallery in Cork Street staged its first exhibition of Rodin’s work in London and it is very probable that Bacon would have viewed drawings and bronzes there throughout the 1950s, especially as the gallery was a stone’s throw from Marlborough Fine Art who represented Bacon. However, Bacon would have been familiar with the work of Rodin since the mid-1920s when he moved to London; he seldom lived more than a few minutes’ walk from the Victoria and Albert Museum, where his uncle, Sir Cecil Harcourt Smith, had been Director. The Victoria and Albert Museum held Rodin’s most extensive collection of works in England: eighteen sculptures gifted to the museum by Rodin in 1914, to which Bacon is said to have been a frequent visitor. In the 1960s Bacon became closely acquainted with several sculptures that his friend Lucian Freud had borrowed, including the three versions of Iris shown in this exhibition.

Many of Bacon’s paintings attest that he was in a kind of dialogue with sculpture, evidenced either in the plasticity of his forms or in the way his figures occupy space. With Lying Figure, 1959, and the group of five paintings of reclining, lying and sleeping figures to which it belongs, the splayed limbs and exposed genitals are redolent of two of Rodin’s sculptures in particular, both dating from 1890–91: Figure volante and Iris, messagère des dieux, and there is rare recorded evidence to support that Bacon specifically referenced these works as direct source material when painting these lying figures. Miss Muriel Belcher, 1959, arguably the greatest of the early portraits that Bacon made, was, like Lying Figure, also painted during the artist’s sojourn in St Ives. Bacon began to paint head and shoulder portraits, at approximately life size, in 1958 and the vitality of brushstrokes and expressive handling of the materials in this painting are distinctly Rodin-esque.

Three Studies from the Human Body, 1967 is arguably the only painting by Bacon that can be described as depicting weightlessness. In this intriguing picture, unique in Bacon’s oeuvre, three gyrating, choreographed figures defy gravity, suspended in a saturated black void. Apart from the lessons that Bacon had absorbed through his study of Rodin’s works, there are numerous speculations as to his influences in making this work, as well as the identities and reading of the three figures he has depicted. The foetal position of one of the figures suggests that Bacon was depicting the three ages of man, and that this painting was his attempt at coming to terms with growing old. The head of the youthful, acrobatic figure, inspired by a photograph in Paris Match from 1959, hanging sloth-like on the horizontal bar, is also, paradoxically, that of an elderly man. The third figure, depicted in a splint, is thought to be a reference to a close friend who had been in a severe accident. Among contemporary events that may have triggered elements of this painting are the three American astronauts who died during a launch-pad test of their Apollo spacecraft in January 1967.

Precious ... Francis Bacon's private studio at Reece Mews, South Kensington, before it was moved and reassembled at Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery.

FOR six years after artist Francis Bacon's death, the dim, cluttered six-by-four metre London studio where he had painted for three decades sat idle.

Despite his wealth and fame, Bacon had lived frugally in Reece Mews, two houses once used as stables, in London's South Kensington. His abode included a bath in the kitchen, and in winter he would turn the stove on for warmth.

But Bacon, who died in Madrid in 1992, had enjoyed his riches in other ways, particularly with food, says Barbara Dawson, the director of Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery, which houses Bacon's recreated studio.

He loved Mediterranean food in particular; his taste for food and wine had developed as a young man in the company of rich older men, and Bacon was a good, though simple, cook.

There was, however, a deeper point to the slabs of meat in paintings by Bacon, best known as one of the 20th-century's great figurative painters, and lesser known as a foodie.

''They were inferences of man as animal, man as flesh; that we're all living organisms. And there is an empathy between the man and the meat: who's slaughtered, and who lives.''

Destruction and contradiction were both Bacon's artistic bedfellows: after a few drinks, Bacon and Cockney bar manager John Edwards, his muse and closest companion for 16 years, would slash Bacon's own paintings with a Stanley knife and dance gleefully on the canvases.

It was Dawson who convinced Edwards, to whom the artist had left his entire estate but who died in 2003, that Bacon's studio and its 7000 items should be photographed, tagged and catalogued, then moved and delicately reassembled at her gallery, precisely recreating the studio in Bacon's birthplace of Dublin.

The items moved included paint-splattered doors and walls, canvases, images of anatomy, crumpled photographs and previously unknown Bacon works such as an unfinished self-portrait, amid shelves piled high with paint tins and tubes.

But was opening Bacon's private world for public consumption what the painter would have wanted? According to his executor, artist Brian Clarke, Bacon would have ''preferred the studio just be bundled off into a skip and burned''.

Clarke, whom Bacon had enlisted to administer the estate because John Edwards could neither read nor write, has said it was all right for Bacon to say the studio should be destroyed, ''but it was certainly not right for me as his executor to carry out that wish'', because although the ''curious topography of detritus'' covering the studio floor looked like garbage, ''it was essentially precious''.

Dawson, visiting Australia to speak at the Art Gallery of NSW, which is showing Francis Bacon: Five Decades, agrees, and says she was in the right place at the right time when Edwards expressed his wish the studio not be destroyed.

The studio is itself a work of art, but its value is in its items, which have ''proven hugely valuable'' in understanding Bacon and his work, says Dawson.

But does she think they went against Bacon's wishes? ''John Edwards said [Bacon] would have roared with laughter when he saw it,'' she says.

''He probably wouldn't have given a care. It probably also wasn't against his wishes, either: he had this contradictory nature. He said he was a 'desperate optimist'; a trait he shared with the Irish. He said he couldn't care less about his studio; he didn't mind his reputation in that way.

Barbara Dawson joins a panel symposium, Bacon's Bodies, on February 9, and discusses Bacon's studio on February 13, Art Gallery of NSW.

An exhibition featuring selected works of Francis Bacon and Auguste Rodin displayed side-by-side is to open at London's Ordovas Gallery on Friday.

Movement and Gravity: Bacon and Rodin in dialogue, will examine the influence the sculptor had on the British artist.

The artist's works include Three Studies from the Human Body, which has never before been publicly displayed in the UK.

The 1967 painting, which was last shown at exhibitions in New York and Paris in 1971, depicts three gyrating, apparently weightless, figures and is said to represent the three ages of man, as Bacon came to terms with growing old.

Movement and Gravity, which runs until 6 April, looks at the profound effect that Rodin's interpretation of the human body, with its emphasis on exaggerated limbs, fractured forms and the articulation of movement, had on Bacon.

The painter's other works on display at the Ordovas are 1959's Lying Figure and Miss Muriel Belcher from the same year, while French artist Rodin is represented by three sculptures of Iris - messenger of the gods, study with head, and large head, all dating from 1890-91.

There is said to be recorded evidence from Bacon that his two paintings were influenced by Rodin's Iris sculptures - modelled on the Greek goddess said to be the personification of the rainbow.

Rodin is considered by many to be the father of modern sculpture, whose work Le Penseur, or The Thinker, is one of the world's most famous works of art.

Bacon is known for his nightmarish figures and preoccupation with the subject of death and last year, his nude portrait of the Soho model Henrietta Moraes, sold for £21m at Christie's in London.

Art handlers cover works of art in the Hugh Lane Gallery by Francis Bacon including 'untitled' self portrait, thought to be of his former lover George Dyer

OVER €6m worth of Francis Bacon artwork are being prepared to travel to Brussels this month as part of a special exhibition to celebrate Ireland’s Presidency of the European Union.

The four paintings, dating as far back as 1970s, will be displayed at the BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts from February 28 to May 19, alongside dozens of contemporary pieces.

The Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane have collaborated for the ‘Changing States’ exhibition, which also features Dorothy Cross, Orla Barry, Gerard Byrne and Garrett Phelan among the 20 chosen artists to highlight the diversity of Ireland’s creators.

The operation is being overseen by Dr Margarita Cappock, Head of Collections at The Hugh lane.

The gallery, based on Parnell Square in Dublin, was gifted Bacon’s studio in 1998 and houses hundreds of his pieces.

A total of 80 items created by the famous artist will make the journey to Brussels later this month, including the final painting he worked on before his death in 1992.

ArtLyst – London Art Network – Art News – 4 February, 2013

At the beginning of September 1959, Francis Bacon travelled to Cornwall, seeking to escape the distractions of London, and took out a six-month rental on a studio in St Ives from the artists William Redgrave and Peter Lanyon. One evening at a party in St Ives, Redgrave noticed Bacon talking with Brian Wall; Bacon asked Wall what he did. ‘I’m a sculptor’, replied Wall; ‘How interesting’, Bacon retorted, before continuing, ‘actually there are only three: Michelangelo, Rodin and Brancusi.’ This provocative response not only confirms Bacon’s high estimation of Rodin, but also coincides exactly with the period in which Rodin’s sculpture was paradigmatic in his paintings. Movement and Gravity: Bacon and Rodin in dialogue is the first exhibition that has ever been dedicated to exploring the dialogue and connections between Francis Bacon and Auguste Rodin, and will be staged at Ordovas from 8 February to 6 April 2013.

Three bronzes by Rodin will be shown alongside three paintings by Bacon, including Three Studies from the Human Body, 1967, which was last exhibited 40 years ago and has never before been publicly displayed in the UK. For Bacon, Rodin’s dialogue with the human body, exaggerated limbs, fractured forms and the articulation of movement was of vital importance to his work in the 1950s and 1960s, but this is a topic that has attracted little comment, until now. Movement and Gravity: Bacon and Rodin in dialogue will examine the profound effect of Rodin on Bacon’s work, in particular, the modulation of the figure and the portrayal of movement and the body in space.

Bacon’s interest in Rodin was documented as early as 1950; a reproduction of Le Penseur, 1880, was included among a selection of Bacon’s pictorial sources at his Cromwell Place studio by photographer Sam Hunter. In 1953, Roland, Browse & Delbanco Gallery in Cork Street staged its first exhibition of Rodin’s work in London and it is very probable that Bacon would have viewed drawings and bronzes there throughout the 1950s, especially as the gallery was a stone’s throw from Marlborough Fine Art who represented Bacon. However, Bacon would have been familiar with the work of Rodin since the mid-1920s when he moved to London; he seldom lived more than a few minutes’ walk from the Victoria and Albert Museum, where his uncle, Sir Cecil Harcourt-Smith, had been Director. The Victoria and Albert Museum held Rodin’s most extensive collection of works in England: eighteen sculptures gifted to the museum by Rodin in 1914, to which Bacon is said to have been a frequent visitor. In the 1960s Bacon became closely acquainted with several sculptures that his friend Lucian Freud had borrowed, including the three versions of Iris shown in this exhibition.

Bacon and Rodin in dialogue: Ordovas from 8 February to 6 April 2013.

The first leg of the exhibition will be in Tokyo from 8th March to 26th May 2013 and will travel to Toyota from 4th June to 1st September 2013.

Timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of his death, this exhibition will introduce audiences to Bacon’s “world” by presenting around 50 works including 10 triptychs, the format that came to symbolize his art practice.

The format of this Japanese exhibition is entirely original. More than simply a retrospective, it will also take the form of a themed exhibition focusing on the “body,” which was extremely important to Bacon, and comprising three “chapters” that attempt to trace the changes in his expressive style. A part that attempts to identity the influences Bacon had on “contemporaneous” artists will also be included in the form of an epilogue. In this way, this exhibition, the first to be held not only in Japan but in Asia since Bacon’s death, could be described as epoch-making in a variety of ways. As if to back this up, in addition to the five works known to be held in collections in Japan, works from major collections from around the world – including the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington), the Estate of Francis Bacon, and the Yageo Foundation (Taiwan) – will make the journey to Japan.

Despite the fact that various museums around the world have managed to stage Bacon exhibitions, for the last 30 years Japan has not witnessed a solo exhibition of his work. Even today Bacon continues to stimulate a great many artists across all manner of genres.

'Bacon's genius was to have found a single image through which he could express the whole range of his most extreme emotions: fear, disdain, hate, lust, and even a fierce kind of love' (M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, exh. cat., Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, 2006, p. 26).

'Man in Blue I (1954), and the 6 extant variations on the themes, continued this sustained monochrome phase. The figures, painted from a man Bacon met at Henley-on-Thames, are isolated in the deep space of his internal framings, like museum specimens displayed in vitrines. They were Bacon's most sardonic comments on the phenomenon of the tycoon in a sharp suit, white collar and tie, anticipating both the incipient Kennedy era in the USA, in which men in blue suits who played tennis wrested power from the men in grey who played golf, and the 'Executive' satirized in John Betjeman's poem' (M. Harrison, In Camera Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, London 2005, p. 106).

'In these claustrophobic curtained settings, there loom up before us beings whose shadowy, ambiguous, unexpected presence takes command of any setting they survey, making real beings seem like shadows. They are as appalling as they are compelling, for these are creatures faced with their tragic destiny' (D. Sylvester, 'Francis Bacon', The British Pavilion: Exhibition of Works by Nicholson, Bacon, Freud, Venice XXVII Biennale, Venice 1954).

'What [Bacon] communicates, he conveys in the paint. The last image in the triptych of three heads whose sequence might depict a politician's rise and fall portrays a 'shattered' man: but we are left in doubt whether the wrecked features of the face are a terrible wound or have only been obscured by a hand lifted in grief: it does not matter, the disintegration of the form acts directly upon our nerves, suffices without explanation to realise the tragedy. And, whether there is this ambiguity or not, this avoidance of the descriptive is sustained consistently, if less spectacularly, in all the more recent paintings Bacon has mastered the problem, which is the essential problem of painting, of trapping a reality without naming it' (D. Sylvester, quoted inThe British Pavilion: Exhibition of Works by Nicholson, Bacon, Freud, XXVII Venice Biennale, Venice 1954).

'Most of those pictures were done of somebody who was always in a state of unease, and whether that has been conveyed through these pictures I don't know. But I suppose, in attempting to trap this image, that, as this man was very neurotic and almost hysterical, this may possibly have come across in the painting' (M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, exh. cat., Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, 2006, p. 48).

MAN IN BLUE: A TRIUMPH OF FIGURATIVE PAINTING

The penultimate painting in Francis Bacon's seminal suite of Man in Blue paintings (1954), Man in Blue VI is a stirring and profoundly perceptive portrait of existential, Post-War Europe. Enveloped in a deep sea of saturated, Prussian blue, the small figure of a man is seen cast into darkness, isolated, trapped in obscurity. The twilight of the painting is broken up by highlights of pink and alabaster white, the man's anguished, grimacing face, white starched collar and clenched fist, piercing the darkness. Bacon's moment of profound genius lies in the man's face, the painstakingly perfected features violated with an impulsive sweep of his paint brush. Allowing chance and contingency to enter the fate of his composition, Bacon achieved the perfect expression, the paint conveying what the artist once described as the 'brutality of fact'. The series was executed between March-June 1954 in the build up to Bacon's exhibition at the Hanover gallery in June-July of that year which included I-VI of the Man in Blue series, Sphinx III (1954), (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.) and Study for a Running Dog (1954) (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.), and rounded off a key moment in Bacon's development on the international scene. That summer the artist also represented Britain at the Venice Biennale XXVII, with a celebrated show that was in essence a miniretrospective of his work of the previous ten years and included many of the paintings that have come to define Bacon as an artist.

The Man in Blue series presents the triumphant continuation of the artist's themes that were so powerfully conveyed in his now iconic first series of Popes (Study for a Portrait I-VIII) from the previous year, 1953. In the same way that he took these powerful figures of religion, isolated them from society, encaged them and depicted them dwarfed within a sea of deeply mysterious blue, here Bacon was taking these burgeoning symbols of Post-War capitalism, the businessmen, and giving them a similar treatment. Here, the gilded robes are swapped for perfectly starched white shirts and meticulous tailoring, but in neither series can the clothing hide the bodily and facial expression as it yearns to break free. Three of this landmark series are now housed in museums including Man in Blue I, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Man in Blue IV, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna and Man in Blue V, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Dusseldorf. According to Ronald Alley, Man in Blue VI is one of very few paintings undertaken from life, painted of some anonymous businessman met at the Imperial Hotel in Henley-on-Thames, where Bacon was hauled up close to his caustic lover Peter Lacy. Ronald Alley once poignantly described these paintings as both Bacon and his lover, stranger and friend: 'it is symptomatic of the ambiguity of much of his work that the man has been interpreted both as a victim (one of the pictures was exhibited in New York under the title 'Trapped Man' [Man in Blue II]) and as a kind of ruthless interrogator' (R. Alley, F. Bacon, London 1964, p. 86).

All seven of the works in the series hold the same compositional frame, the curtain pulled in behind a carefully lined geometry. The same outline and configuration of walled space gives form to each of the seven paintings, while two types of desk or barman's counter pen the men in, preventing their escape. Three of the series: Man in Blue I and IV and the present work, see the figure leaning up against a bar, visibly straining in one to release himself from his confines. The cast of each man differentiates the works in the series. Just as the mood of the eight popes alternates from haughty, to malevolent, to despairing, the Man in Blue figures revolve from calm confidence, to quiet distraction, to wild desperation recalling Bacon's Three Studies for the Human Head (1953), the artist's first portrait triptych. This triptych was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and was later united with the present work and Man in Blue IV, especially selected for Bacon's first major retrospective at the Tate, London in 1962.

The disconsolate expression read on Man in Blue VI, is one of the most feverish of the suite. The penultimate of the series, the man has been wound up from Bacon's first painting to the point of hysteria, silently shrieking in the last. It is a picture of modern anguish hidden behind a mask of dominance and respectability, evocative of the existential zeitgeist. Immediately following the Man in Blue suite, Bacon undertook another masterpiece, Sphinx III, which carries the same compositional conceit. Here the curtain and desk enclose a sphinx, mysticised as treacherous and merciless, carrying the haunches of a lion, the wings of a great bird and the face of a human. The myth suggests that those unable to answer a riddle are killed and devoured by this ravenous monster. Bacon articulates the evolution from Pope, to Businessman, to Sphinx as a seething commentary on society in the immediate Post-War period, recalling the oeuvre of his other great contemporary, Alberto Giacometti.

These were concepts being heavily pursued by contemporary leaders of European Existentialism, with the impact of Jean-Paul Sartre's influential text, L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme (1946) resounding widely. Sartre defined the state of angst and despair that meets a person when they accept their sole responsibility for their own destinies. He elaborated the story with the description of a waiter in a café, dressing himself in the trappings of his uniform and going about his work like an automaton. That costume and job had become his identity, although it was entirely of his own choosing. In short, for the waiter as with every person, there can be nothing beyond what one chooses to make of oneself. This doleful meditation, with its chilling atheism is perfectly expressed in Man in Blue VI, where the suited capitalist is confronted with his own destiny, unable to seek redemption, and artfully revealing the 'lonely pathos of the powerful' (C. Stephens, quoted in 'Apprehension', M. Gale and C. Stephens (eds.), Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London, 2008, p. 124).

FRANCIS BACON'S MASTERY OF PAINT

During the early 1950s, Bacon inhabited a unique moment, where his raw intensity and novel approach were to result in works of perhaps improbable brilliance. As Michael Peppiatt has suggested, 'Bacon's masterpieces of the late 1940s and early 1950s were produced: through constant trial and error, elation and destruction, technical awkwardness absorbed and made suddenly effective by sheer force of invention' (M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, exh. cat. Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, 2006, p. 33). In Man in Blue VI, Bacon has established a brimming, vital figure, teeming with life and emotion. Established on the canvas with pure, intuitive brushstrokes, Bacon has animated pink, flushed skin, expressive hands and a face filled with agony, ecstasy, violence and fear. Unlike the laden paintwork of the 1940s, Bacon has in Man in Blue VI and its associated series of paintings, created an identity of flesh through suggestion rather than through application, the veiled surfaces of the canvas amounting to a triumph of figurative painting. As Bacon was to explain, this was part of a new process of 'opening up areas of feeling rather than merely an illustration of an object' (F. Bacon, quoted in 'On the Margins of the Impossible', M. Gale & C. Stephens (eds.), Francis Bacon, exh. cat., London, 2008, p. 18).

Using opaque, lead white paint, Bacon has painted the stiff starch of a white businessman's collar, interrupted by the tight knot of a corporate tie. Atop this flash of white, is the man's head with its squared-jaw, wide brow and angular physiognomy reminiscent of William Blake's Life Mask (1823) in the National Portrait Gallery, London. The moment of Bacon's real genius lies here in the face. Carefully painted with texture built up across the cheekbones and forehead, Bacon has created the curves of an ear, the dark hollows of two eyes, an open mouthed grimace surrounded by pink fleshy lips that Martin Harrison suggests might be redolent of Diego Velázquez's Philip IV of Spain (1656), or indeed the young visage of friend David Sylvester, who Bacon lived with at 19 Cromwell Road for a short time at the beginning of 1954. Crowning the head is a smooth coif of black hair, indicated with an economy of brushstrokes. These points of light in the darkness: the face, shirt collar and the pink fist resting on a counter create a triangle which anchors the composition. Along the broad shoulders of the man's blazer, royal purple illuminates the figure, Bacon's neat oil paint shimmering under light.

Teeth bared, the man's mouth is itself spectacular, projecting a real sense of the character's emotional life. Emitting a silent cry, the perfected, expressive mouth recalls Bacon's oft-favoured film still of the screaming nurse on the Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin. At the same time, the mouth appears reminiscent of images reproduced of proselytising fascist leaders speaking out at party rallies, copies of which Bacon had strewn amongst his belongings. In an impulsive, violent act, Bacon has defiled these features, swiping vertically down the face with a dry paint brush, as if intimating movement of the head. Having built up the wealth of dark blue for the ground, painstakingly articulated each of the narrow vertical bars of his protagonist's cell, and expertly rendered the physiognomy of the face, Bacon was taking a calculated risk. Acting with characteristic impulsion, Bacon was ready to despoil the perfected features of his figure's face in order to bring over a certain 'brutality', as if it were 'his own nervous system projected onto canvas' (F. Bacon, quoted in L. Gowing, 'The Irrefutable Image', Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, exh. cat., Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, 1968, p. 13).

Much of the atmosphere imbued in Man in Blue VI derives from its Prussian blue-black canvas ground, the isolated figure at its centre surrounded by darkness. This deep, saturated blue arose from Bacon's unique practice of priming the reverse of his canvases, allowing the oil and turpentine to penetrate deep into its woven fabric. On top of this dense pigment, Bacon then created the diagonals of furniture using straight geometric lines lightly indicated in pale gold. Roughly unloading the pigment on his trouser leg, Bacon dragged his dry brush along the surface of the canvas, the coarse hog's hair bristles resulting in a wealth of shadowy bars. These bars confine the solitary man to his solitude, while the pane of glass in front of the composition, Bacon's prescription for all his paintings, acts to emphasise his vulnerability and desperate seclusion.

The confluence of these effects provides the painting with a 'clinical yet theatrical presentation' which Martin Harrison has likened to the 'long exposure torture to which sitters in early photographic portrait studios submitted, clamped into their chairs' (M. Harrison, In Camera Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, London, 2005, p. 106). Recalling the account of writer Maria Edgeworth, sitting for daguerreotypes at the turn of the twentieth century, Harrison draws a perfect parallel: 'It is a wonderful mysterious operation. You are taken from one room into another up stairs and down and you see various people whispering and hear them in neighbouring passages and rooms unseen and the whole apparatus and stool on high platform under a glass dome casting a snapdragon blue light making all look like spectres and the men in black gliding about' (M. Edgeworth, quoted in M. Harrison, In Camera Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, London, 2005, p. 106).

Sitting within his isolated chamber, Man in Blue VI also bears a striking resemblance to Alberto Giacometti's own dark cages. Although the two figurative modernists were only to meet in 1965 through their mutual friend Isabel Rawsthorne, Bacon had long-admired his continental colleague's work. Giacometti's gaunt, Spartan figures contained within strict geometries are often posited as a source for the British painter's spaceframes. Indeed with their limited palette, direct frontality, shoulders firmly squared to the viewer, there is much to commend the comparison between the two artists, the present work bearing real affinities with Giacometti's Portrait of Peter Watson (1953), housed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

AN EXISTENTIAL ERA

In Man in Blue VI, Bacon imports a sense of the era's European Post- War Existentialism, cutting through the veneer of civilised society to distil the raw and visceral qualities of the human character on canvas. As Michael Peppiatt has suggested, 'Bacon's genius was to have found a single image through which he could express the whole range of his most extreme emotions: fear, disdain, hate, lust, and even a fierce kind of love' (M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, exh. cat., Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, 2006, p. 26). This was a period of personal and public turmoil in Britain, marred by the legacy of the Second World War and stunned by the rising spectre of the Cold War, soon to meet its confluence in the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the Suez crisis.

In Bacon's Study of a Nude (1952-53), now part of the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, University of East Anglia, Norwich, we see a heroic figure teetering on the edge of the abyss, preparing to take the existential dive into the black-blue deep below. This spectral image of a deathly pallid, solitary man poised to leap, importantly prefigures Man in Blue VI, as well as providing a chilling symbol of contemporary society. Peppiatt perfectly captures the essence of the times: 'London still in thrall to its memories of wartime fears and privations, was an almost unbearable fluency in new modes of suffering and humiliation. In that unwelcome, macabre revelation, not only the human figure but pigment itself had never before looked so naked and vulnerable - as if the skin of the paint had been peeled back to reveal the potential for pain beneath' (M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, exh. cat., Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, 2006, p. 33).

A FIERCE KIND OF LOVE

Bacon himself was in the depths of a combustive, ill-fated relationship with former RAF pilot Peter Lacy, living between the spare room of a friend's house in Beaufort Gardens and Lacy's home in Hurst. The pair had met at the bar of Soho emporium the Colony Club, known as Muriel's after the eponymous and formidable owner Muriel Belcher, and entered into a relationship that would prove passionate yet deprave, violent yet addictive. While Bacon was known to have various indiscretions, Lacy was the great love of his life. 'Being in love that way, being absolutely physically obsessed by someone, is like an illness', Bacon was later to recount. 'It's like a disease, a disease so ghastly I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy' (F. Bacon, quoted in M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, exh. cat., Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, 2006, p. 40).

At times, the horror of the violent rows with Lacy drove Bacon to flee Hurst and stay at the Imperial Hotel in nearby Henley-on-Thames. It was here at the hotel that Bacon met any number of passing, unnamed, well-suited businessmen, becoming engaged in a series of illicit affairs that were to become translated into the Man in Blue paintings. As the artist confirmed in a letter to David Sylvester, delivered from Ostia in November 1954, 'I am excited about the new series I am doing - it is about dreams and life in hotel bedrooms' (F. Bacon, quoted in 'On the Margins of the Impossible', M. Gale & C. Stephens (eds.), Francis Bacon, exh. cat., London, 2008, p. 122). The claustrophobic settings of these darkened hotel rooms were first detailed in a number of works created in 1953 including Study for a Portrait, previously owned by David Sylvester and now housed in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, as well as Three Studies for the Human Head (1953). As Sylvester so eloquently described on the occasion of the Biennale: 'what [Bacon] communicates he conveys in the paint. The last image in the triptych of three heads whose sequence might depict a politician's rise and fall portrays a 'shattered' man: but we are left in doubt whether the wrecked features of the face are a terrible wound or have only been obscured by a hand lifted in grief: it does not matter, the disintegration of the form acts directly upon our nerves, suffices without explanation to realise the tragedy. And, whether there is this ambiguity or not, this avoidance of the descriptive is sustained consistently, if less spectacularly, in all the more recent paintings Bacon has mastered the problem, which is the essential problem of painting, of trapping a reality without naming it (D. Sylvester, The British Pavilion: Exhibition of Works by Nicholson, Bacon, Freud, exh. cat., XXVII Venice Biennale, Venice, 1954).

The series of Man in Blue paintings certainly offer an autobiographical quality, Bacon himself being very partial to a well cut, navy blue suit. Spending some time holding seminars at the Slade School of Art in 1953, Andrew Forge recalled Bacon the elegant aesthete: '[Francis] came in...wearing a tremendously elegant dark blue chalk striped suit, absolutely beautifully cut, very minimal, his hair streaming out of his head like petals out of a flower...and a tartan shirt open at the neck...and somehow that combination of formality and complete informality and the quality of his voice and his whole presence in the room was just utterly glamorous' (A. Forge, quoted in M. Gale and C. Stephens (eds.), Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London, 2008, p. 124). Both impressed by power and irreverent to it, Bacon's paintings of the period are loaded with their own irony. Indeed as Martin Harrison has suggested, in Man in Blue we see the artist take a sardonic shot at the 'phenomenon of the tycoon in a sharp suit, white collar and tie, anticipating both the incipient Kennedy era in the USA, in which men in blue suits who played tennis wrested power from the men in grey who played golf, and the 'Executive' satirized in John Betjeman's poem' (M. Harrison, In Camera Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, London 2005, p. 106).

Despite the apparent anonymity of the figures painted at this time, the abiding influence of Lacy is still clear in Man in Blue VI. As Bacon confessed, 'most of those pictures were done of somebody who was always in a state of unease, and whether that has been conveyed through these pictures I don't know. But I suppose, in attempting to trap this image, that, as this man was very neurotic and almost hysterical, this may possibly have come across in the painting' (M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, exh. cat. Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, 2006, p. 48). Indeed, all of the ferocious fights with Lacy, and a sense of the peripatetic, subversive existence of the artist at this time, find their way onto the canvas. As he explained, his oeuvre was 'concerned with my kind of psyche, it's concerned with my kind of - I'm putting it in a very pleasant way - exhilarated despair' (F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York, 1990, p. 83). Bacon relished the extremes of sensation, his 'nervous tension' allowing him to test the boundaries of painting. As he himself suggested, 'you have to go too far to go far enough - only then can you hope to break the mold and make something new' (F. Bacon, quoted in M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, exh. cat., Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, 2006, p. 22).

This work will be included in the forthcoming Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, being prepared by The Estate of Francis Bacon and edited by Martin Harrison.

Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist in 1982)
Sale: Christie's, London, Contemporary Art, 22 June 2006, Lot 37
Private Collection, Europe

Milan, Palazzo Reale, Bacon, 2008, no. 53, illustrated in colour
New York, Gagosian Gallery, Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers. Portraits by Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon, 2008, pp. 110-11, illustrated in colour
Rome, Galleria Borghese, Caravaggio Bacon, 2009-10, p. 210, illustrated in colour

Self-portraiture has played a role of unparalleled importance in the work of Francis Bacon. More so than any artist since Rembrandt, Bacon’s implacable self-portrayals weave an autobiographic thread through the exigent vicissitudes of an extraordinarily dramatic life. Lived with the deepest commitment to brutally seizing the vulnerable, vital and violent conditions of human existence in both his work and day-to-day being, Francis Bacon was an artist for whom the searing reality of life itself was the purpose. Nowhere is this more forcefully evident than in the haunting opus of Self-Portraiture. Executed in the artist’s eighth decade at the age of 71, Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, richly surmises a life’s worth of retrospect locked within an emphatically urgent scrutiny of Bacon’s iconic features. Belonging to a corpus of eleven triptych self-portrayals in Bacon’s standard 14 by 12inch format, the present triptych counts among the ten executed following the death of Bacon’s closest companion, George Dyer. The profound trauma of this event would precipitate an onslaught of searing self-analyses executed across the extant years of Bacon’s life. Painted in 1980, nine years following Dyer’s suicide, these three portraits collectively embody among the most elegiac in this intimate and somewhat commemorative triptych format. The sequence of effervescent works exude muted melancholia accented with the violent facture of Bacon’s inimitably physical painterly assault. Herein, these works utterly encapsulate the strength of burning sensation and direct emotion telescoped in Bacon’s astounding corpus of portrait heads. A series and format first settled upon in 1961 and sustained in practice until the very end, these extraordinary portraits form the very staple of Bacon’s mature practice, acting as the primary locus for the “brutality of fact” and most immediate site for loosening the “valves of sensation” so frequently spoken of by the artist. Professing profound reflection accompanying the artist’s entry into old age, Three Studies for a Self-Portrait significantly preserves one of the very final depictions of Bacon's likeness in this unflinching, intimate and crucial format. Following the 1979 Three Studies for a Self-Portrait residing in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and directly preceding the very last small Self-Portrait sequence from 1984 belonging to the Honolulu Museum of Art, this work hauntingly eulogizes the penultimate occasion of Bacon's searing and intimate self-analysis in his favourite format: the triptych. These human-scaled portrait heads are translucent, air-like apparitions of an ephemeral spirit dissolving into the black ether of the void. Enshrouded in shadow and ethereally effervescent, de-formulation and re-formulation of likeness moves from one image to the next; in series as though caught in the flash of a photo booth, these fully frontal and in profile depictions glow like votive icons of an artist who himself is an icon of his age.

Suited in a white collar like an echo of the anguished early portraits of anonymous male sitters from the 1950s, this ethereal triptych represents one of the most quintessential translations of Bacon’s legendary likeness. Resembling a distorted and existential mirror image of the artist’s own psyche, the three portraits compound the immediacy and unsurpassed power of the small studies. As William Fever has explained: “‘Studies’ or exercises though they are, these small paintings are central to Bacon’s art. The scale of a bathroom mirror-image makes them one-to-one, and when they are paired, or grouped in threes, the differences animate them. No rooms, no thrones, no perfunctory landscape settings are needed. Without context or posture, the heads have nothing to do but look, sometimes at one another, and wait” (William Feaver, ‘That’s It’, Exhibition Catalogue, London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Francis Bacon 1909 – 1992 Small Portrait Studies, 1993, p. 6). These works exude the nervousness of existence so cherished a part of Bacon’s artistic vision. Exuding endurance, suffering and involuntary mannerisms, the artist’s likeness emerges from underneath the surface of the paint. In Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, we witness Bacon pushing the boundaries of representation to their limits, deriving a new vocabulary of amorphous, inscrutable forms that, despite their ostensible abstraction, render with unequivocal certainty the instantly legible physiognomy of the artist with outstanding and somewhat surprising tranquillity. Charged with unparalleled melancholic beauty and framed within abyssal black grounds, these portraits combine masterfully scumbled, scraped and diffused handling of paint with arresting intensity and consummate psychological depth.

Powerfully evincing Bacon’s essential artistic aim, the present triptych fulfils a compelling visual counterpart to the artist’s own desire for his work: “I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime” (the artist, cited in: David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London 2000, p. 33). Vaporous, ghost-like, yet dramatic physiognomies emerge out of an abyssal black ground; amorphous forms trail a presence through each image, leaving the viewer as vividly witness to some lingering apparition. In full consciousness of the waning years Bacon here paints himself in the dim-light of inexorable transience. Four years after the creation of this work Bacon mentioned to David Sylvester: “Life is all we have. I mean we are here for a moment” (the artist, cited in: Ibid., p. 231). Where the small portrait heads translate this eschatological communion most powerfully, it is Bacon’s own self-portraiture that punctuates the most exceptional moments of his oeuvre. With particular reference to the present work, Michael Peppiatt explicates: “…he was never more brilliant, more incisive or more ferocious when it came to depicting himself. In this he helped revive a genre, and Bacon’s Self-Portraits can now be seen as among the most pictorially inventive and psychologically revealing portraits of the Twentieth Century” (Michael Peppiatt in: Exhibition Catalogue, Rome, Galleria Borghese, Caravaggio Bacon, 2009-10, p. 210).

In his authoritative monograph on the artist, John Russell pointedly outlines the central importance of Bacon’s small portrait format: "The single head, fourteen inches by twelve, was from 1961 onwards the scene of some of Bacon's most ferocious investigations. Just as a gunshot sometimes leaves an after-echo or parallel report, so these small concentrated heads carry their ghosts within them" (John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1993, p. 99). Russell’s descriptive conjuring of spirits and ghosts here pinpoints the powerfully enduring impact of the small portrait heads. Initiated in 1961, the very first triptych in this format was painted directly in response to the death of Pater Lacy, the object of Bacon’s first major love affair. A former RAF pilot with a self-destructive nature prone to furious outbursts, Lacy embodied a magnetic force for Bacon whose finely-tuned and receptive proclivity for the violence of existence drove all aspects of his life. By the mid-1950s Lacy had ended the tempestuous relationship and moved to Tangier, where he began to slowly and surely drink himself into oblivion. Upon hearing of his death the grief-stricken Bacon painted Lacy’s emanation as a commemorative act of resuscitation and atonement. Three Studies for a Portrait (1961) powerfully lays bare the harrowing introspective quality intrinsic to the intimately scaled triptychs: struggling to the surface of the outer panels, Bacon’s phantasmal memory of Lacy is here comingled and conjoined with the artist’s own self-portrait, present in the central canvas. As noted by Peppiatt: “For Bacon, Lacy himself had become part of the artist’s own myth of guilt and retribution. He could recapture him at his most vital by foreseeing the death that would dissolve his appearance” (Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: An Anatomy of an Enigma, London 2008, p. 236). Significantly, it was this event in Bacon’s life that precipitated the production of his first acknowledged Self-Portraits. That tragedy forcefully induced a mode of self-reflection in Bacon’s work was made emphatically clear following the second and most profound tragedy to beset Bacon’s life: the death of George Dyer. Ten years following Lacy’s demise and on the eve of Bacon’s Retrospective opening at the Grand Palais in Paris 1971, George Dyer - Bacon’s companion, lover and principle artistic subject since 1964 - was found dead. Marred by progressive alcoholism, suicidal desperation and a waning sense of purpose in the Bacon’s shadow, Dyer’s eight-year relationship with the artist was as fractured as it was passionate. A compelling force in life, in death Dyer’s absent-presence took on the weight of Bacon’s loss and melancholic regret; a profound grief that resonates throughout Bacon’s post-1971 opus and specifically the elegiac last paintings of himself. Echoing the posthumous depictions of Peter Lacy, where the late paintings of Dyer represent ruminations on his lost companion, they simultaneously represent deeply introverted self-reflections. What’s more, the constancy and significance of Dyer’s appearance in Bacon’s late oeuvre is surpassed only by the wealth of Self-Portraits, which from 1971 onwards, greatly increased in number. Bacon’s searching and intensely haunting self-images at once exorcise accusatory demons whilst offering deeply mournful inquiries in the face of profound bereavement: today the suite of heart-rending self-images executed during the last two decades of Bacon’s life stand among his very best works. These harrowing epic eulogies powerfully speak of the intense loss and guilt that remained with Bacon until his death.

When asked by Sylvester in 1979 why there are so many self-portraits, Bacon explained: “People have been dying around me like flies and I’ve had nobody else to paint but myself… I loathe my own face and I’ve done self-portraits because I’ve had nothing else to do” (the artist, cited in: David Sylvester, Op. cit., p. 129). Anathema to such a postulation, Bacon's purported reluctance to paint his own image is largely trivialising. The artist very rarely painted from life and did not require the presence of sitters to translate a likeness in paint, instead relying upon memory and the detritus of photographs and books famously strewn across his South Kensington studio as aesthetic triggers. Alongside the countless photographs of his friends Bacon commissioned from John Deakin, hundreds of photos of himself taken over the years, comprised a core visual compost for his pictorial imagination. While the intensity of Bacon’s Self-Portrait practice undoubtedly deepened following the death of George Dyer, throughout his life Bacon maintained an abiding fascination with his own appearance. A wearer of make-up and keen subject of the photographers lens Bacon had learned the nuances of re-invention and self-presentation from a young age, spending hours scrutinising and tracing the particularities of his own appearance in the mirror. Such a reading of the mirror image is extraordinarily present in the almost 1 to 1 scale of Three Studies for a Self-Portrait. “This is how we see what we feel like in the morning”, describes William Feaver, “examining the image in the mirror that corresponds so remotely with the sense we have of ourselves. This is the face that gets worse (more ‘lived in’) over the years, the face that betrays. These heads are what we are stuck with: unsentimentally ours. Bacon dealt with his… knowing that the best he could do was to effect a phantom, a rasping whoosh of characteristics” (William Feaver, Op. cit., p. 6). Though evoking in effigy a residual and unrelenting guilt over George Dyer’s death, Bacon's self-reference and proliferation of self-portraiture during this period somewhat confirms a statement made to Sylvester in 1975: "One always has greater involvement with oneself than with anybody else. No matter how much you may believe that you're in love with somebody else, your love of somebody else is your love of yourself" (the artist, cited in: David Sylvester, Op. cit., p. 241). Where for Bacon the act of painting is tantamount to a divulging of the self into the physical matter of paint, the presence of the artist’s own features within many paintings based on Dyer, Lacy or other members of his social circle simultaneously represents a form of psychological transference and an act theatrical artistic licence. That Bacon would translate his own features into portrayals of Dyer amongst others in his close circle of friends, both male and female, is not only testament to his pluralistic technique of working from visual ephemera and memory, but also to a compulsion that can be traced back to the seventeenth-century masterpieces of Caravaggio.

For an illumination of the present work, it is the theatrical way in which Caravaggio pioneered the contemporaneously non-existent genre of Self-Portraiture by gratuitously transfiguring into his work autobiographical narrative that chimes with Bacon. Self-Portrait as Bacchus (1593) and David with the Head of Goliath (1610) both purport such an autobiographical reading; whether it be an expression of illness, poverty and existential distress in the artist as Bacchus, or as persecutor and persecuted for which Caravaggio is both David and Goliath, scholars have identified the artist’s own physiognomy as surreptitiously present throughout his oeuvre. That Caravaggio would cast himself as the grotesque beheaded Goliath and as the youthful victor David speaks very much to the fugitive lifestyle undertaken after killing a man in Rome in 1606. Though far from casting himself in biblical character or mythological role, Bacon’s own beheaded likeness in Three Studies for a Self-Portrait conflates young with old, life and death in much the same self-analytical way as Caravaggio. This juxtaposition was explicitly brought to the fore when the present work was shown as part of the 2009 exhibition, Caravaggio Bacon, held within the theatrical Baroque environs of the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Alongside other major paintings from Bacon’s canon, Three Studies for a Self-Portrait was set in visual dialogue with Caravaggio’s most iconic works. Taken down from the chapels of Rome’s churches and borrowed from the most prestigious of collections, the bold and dramatic conflation of Caravaggio with Bacon revealed a parity of violent tension and relishing of bloody corporeality between artists separated by over 300 years.

Plunged into penetrating blackness, both Caravaggio and Bacon share the theatricality of vision that stages human tragedy and violence as temporally dislocated, dissolving into and emerging from, the shadow-light. Though he never openly cited Caravaggio as an influence, instead privileging his Caravaggisti predecessor Velazquez, Bacon’s erudition and pluralistic absorption of Art History’s vicissitudes far from discounts a comparison. Claudio Strinati outlines the pivotal confluence between the two artists: “Bacon and Caravaggio are artists who conceived of and used painting to possess the image, as if they both thought of figurative art as a parallel, perfect world, unable to be touched by the risk of change or decay, both of which distinctive of the real world” (Claudio Strinati, ‘Bacon and Caravaggio: The Occasion for an Encounter’, Exhibition Catalogue, Rome, Galleria Borghese, Caravaggio Bacon, 2009-10, p. 48). Where Caravaggio’s theatrical lighting and penchant for dramatic mise-en-scene prefigures the filmic aesthetic of modern day cinema, Bacon’s own cinematic inclination for distributing images in threes voices simultaneity of effect. As Bacon commented in interview with Sylvester, it was this filmic deployment of images that he felt worked best: “I know the things I really like doing are the triptychs. They are the things I like doing most, and I think this may be related to the thought I’ve sometimes had of making a film. I like the juxtaposition of the images separated on three different canvases. So far as my work has any quality, I often feel perhaps it is the triptychs that have the best quality” (the artist, cited in: David Sylvester, Op. cit., p. 232). As uniquely brought to the fore in Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, that Bacon and Caravaggio shared a theatrical temperament and a lifetime fraught with pathos and tragedy is reflected in a confluence of violent immediacy between two entirely singular artistic voices utterly without parallel.

By 1980, the cumulative impact of Bacon’s changing visage clearly seemed to have compounded an assertion of mortality and a desire to indelibly inscribe his own likeness within the eternal grand arc of Art History. Ancestor to Caravaggio’s pioneering of the genre perfected by revered masters from Rembrandt to Picasso, Bacon was driven by an incessant compulsion to forge an artistic legacy for the experience of his time. As a genre, Self-Portraiture purportedly reveals the private side of a public profession; nowhere can this be understood with such forthright candour than in Bacon’s oeuvre as viewed in the light of Rembrandt’s influence. Rembrandt was the very touchstone of Bacon’s inventiveness in these small scale canvases; the endless variety and successive permutations of his own visage, which meld into almost abstract dissolving matter towards the end of his life cast Rembrandt’s late Self-Portraits as a striking parallel to, and even art historical blue-print for, the present work. Bacon believed Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits to be “formally the most extraordinary paintings. He altered painting in a way by the method by which he dealt with himself and perhaps he felt freer to deal with himself in this totally liberal way” (Ibid., p. 241). When viewed close up the Rembrandt’s heads seemingly disband into a mass of non-representational marks that were doubtless an inspiration to Bacon’s own savage expressivity. In Bacon’s description of the Aix-en-Provence Self-Portrait with Beret (1659), it is almost as though he is describing the very nuances, subtleties and techniques employed in the execution of Three Studies for a Self-Portrait: “… if you think of the great Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en-Provence, for instance, and if you analyse it, you will see that there are hardly any sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational. I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks… what can happen sometimes, as it happened in this Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en-Provence, is that there is a coagulation of non-representational marks which have led to making up this very great image. Well, of course, only part of this is accidental. Behind all that is Rembrandt’s profound sensibility, which was able to hold onto one irrational mark rather than onto another” (the artist, cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Marlborough Gallery, Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, 1967, p. 28). Plunged into Caravaggesque tenebrism and built from one irrational mark scraped, daubed and smeared on top of the other, the diffused brilliance and shadow-like delicacy of Bacon’s Three Studies appear nervously held together by a masterful translation of pure sensation in paint. Like Rembrandt tallying his aged, lined and weary features with a congruent painterly treatment of disbanded corporeality, in the present work the vaporous dissolution of Bacon’s likeness tempers exigent facture with an intense yet reposed response to the concrete fact of mortality.

A portrayal so quintessentially synonymous with Bacon’s own distinctive character yet far beyond mere caricature, Three Studies for a Self-Portrait truly counts as a masterpiece of Bacon’s intimately scaled triptychs. As though witness to the artist’s mirror image reflected back at us, in these incredible works we are hauntingly reminded of Bacon’s emphatic quotation of Jean Cocteau: “every day in the mirror I watch death at work”. Startlingly powerful in execution and psychological affect, these works resemble a remarkably lyrical antecedent to Michel Leiris’ magnificent word-portrait of Bacon. Three years following the execution of this triptych the preeminent man of letters and close friend to Bacon poetically penned: “… Bacon’s canvases, at once so effervescent and so controlled, provide, for the spectator who looks at them as a whole and grasps them in their diversity, a striking image of this unique contemporary artist in all his complexity” (Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, New York 1983, p. 43).

This work will be included in the forthcoming Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, being prepared by The Estate of Francis Bacon and edited by Martin Harrison.

Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1977

"The single head, fourteen inches by twelve, was from 1961 onwards the scene of some of Bacon's most ferocious investigations. Just as a gunshot sometimes leaves an after-echo or parallel report, so these small concentrated heads carry their ghosts within them"

Among the many remarkable aspects of Francis Bacon’s extraordinary oeuvre, his capacity to capture so exactly the unmistakable likenesses of his human subjects is legendary. As his career progressed through the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, he developed his prodigious and uncanny skill to manipulate the many guises of a now-famous cast of characters into single physiognomies: images formally rooted in memory and photographic record, yet expanded through imagination to become psychosomatic x-rays that attest the entire human drama. Bacon enlisted a specific coterie of friends and acquaintances, encountered in the pubs, nightclubs and casinos of London’s Soho and the West End, as a template to evidence enduring themes of the human condition. Today this line up of personalities may consist of strangers, yet the lasting universality of their powerful expressions still stand as metaphors for the circumstances of existence. Indeed, Bacon’s revered paintings of portrait heads belong to the great exemplars of art history in which a face depicted becomes both portal and mirror for profound contemplation and are no less than timeless in their phenomenal impact.

The present work, Study for Portrait of 1976 is an archetype of these intimate portrait heads, conflating several of Bacon’s most important subjects, critically including himself, in one vital visage. Readily discernible traits of two of Bacon’s most important muses, Henrietta Moraes and Isabelle Rawsthorne are characterized with almost preternatural ease by Bacon’s brush, from the unmistakable angle of the profile, to the curve of the neck, to the cascading wave of hair. Ultimately the composition is focused to a point with the inscribed black circle to the centre-right, fashioned after one of the array of paint lids or other round objects that Bacon utilized as stencils and which cluttered the various surfaces of his South Kensington studio. Within this ring resides the immediately-recognizable profile of Bacon’s own self portrait, as it appears in so many of his most famous paintings and large scale triptychs of the decade. Thus the present work is loaded with a spectacular amalgamation of the preeminent actors of Francis Bacon’s output, and stands as a mnemonic touchstone for both his life and art. To approximate the words of John Russell, it is a scene of ferocious investigation that carries its ghosts within like the after-echo of a gunshot (John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1993, p. 99).

The painting schematizes physiognomy in diagrammatic swathes, whose edges carve through the layers of accumulated paint material among patterns of pigment applied with cashmere sweaters and corduroy impressed and smeared on the surface. The head looms like a sculpture in paint and is virtually superimposed onto the stark flatness of the pale backdrop, whose tonal polarity emphasizes the prominent silhouette of morphing profiles. Throughout the work there is this tension between graphic dexterity and the raw power of colour, as is so typical of Bacon's most enthralling masterworks. Within the scribed lines of the head its idiosyncratic features - high forehead, long cheek-bones and arched eyebrows - are confidently incised in flecked streaks and variegated smears of densely worked paint. Variance of expression is revealed through the veiled layers of shuttered hatching, so that as the artist described "sensation doesn't come straight out at you; it slides slowly and gently through the gaps" (Francis Bacon cited in: David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 1990, p. 243).

As delineated by the eminent art historian and Bacon authority David Sylvester, this painting stands squarely within the extraordinary corpus of poignant canvases produced during the years 1971-1976, following the suicide of the artist’s long term partner and lover George Dyer on the eve of Bacon's prestigious retrospective opening at the Grand Palais, Paris in January 1971. Five years after Dyer's death, Bacon returned to Paris in January 1977 with an exhibition of extraordinary new works at the Galerie Claude Bernard. This seminal and now legendary exhibition became the single most important commercial gallery show of Bacon's career. Of the intimate group of twenty works exhibited, including the present work, a significant number of these now reside in prestigious museum collections: while two belong in the Tate Collection, examples also belong to the Fondation Beyler, Basel, and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caracas. Furthermore, the sale of Triptych, 1976, the centerpiece of the Claude Bernard show, at Sotheby's New York made auction house history when it achieved the then highest price for any Contemporary work of art ever offered at auction, and the exhibition also included the spectacular Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror.

This pivotal exhibition in 1977 bore witness to an unprecedented amount of publicity and eager anticipation; as Michael Peppiat, friend to Bacon and author of the biography Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, describes: "with the mixture of intellectuals and collectors, art groupies and sensation seekers, aesthetes and layabouts, the gallery quickly became half sideshow, half shrine... Bacon was on hand in the middle of the throng, pink-cheeked and immaculately dressed, greeting friends, signing posters and catalogues, laughing appreciatively and generally behaving as if nothing could have been more normal than the single-minded mobbing of which he and his pictures had suddenly become the object." (Michael Peppiat, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London, 2008, pp. 344-45). The police notoriously cordoned off the Rue des Beaux-Arts to limit the immense crowds coursing towards the gallery from the Boulevard Saint-Germain; an incredible 8,000 people squeezed and pushed their way down the narrow street and into the restricted gallery space. In an interview with Richard Cork in 1991, Bacon fondly remembered the heightened intensity given to his paintings by the claustrophobic conditions and affirmed that the installation at Claude Bernard stood as his favourite among the many museum retrospectives prestigiously afforded him (Richard Cork in: David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 214).

That the present work prominently includes the simulacra of Bacon’s own likeness introduces the powerful presence-through-absence of the memory of Dyer that saturates many of the artist’s most impactful masterpieces of the 1970s, and this would have been extremely evident in the context of the 1977 Claude Bernard exhibition, where Dyer’s shadow was seemingly all-pervasive. The constancy and significance of Dyer's appearance in Bacon's oeuvre is rivalled only by the self-portraits, with which Bacon became increasingly preoccupied from 1971 onwards. Somewhat disingenuously, Bacon once explained: "People have been dying around me like flies and I've had nobody else to paint but myself... I loathe my own face and I've done self-portraits because I've had nothing else to do." (the artist quoted in David Sylvester, Francis Bacon, London, 1975, p. 129). Anathema to Bacon's trivialising postulation, the suite of self-portraits executed during this period offer deeply mournful meditations on transience and death, and it is difficult to view a self-portrait after this time without being reminded of Dyer. In the present work, a masterpiece of Bacon’s intimate portrayals of the human animal, this enduring source of reflection resonates within the inky black circle, itself symbolic through its unending linear infinity.

What a good job I never found my way to The Colony Room Club. My life expectancy would be shorter than it already is. A small, bright green chamber decorated with bamboo, mottled mirrors, leopardskin barstools and plastic tropical plants, the Members Only establishment, situated up a flight of dingy stairs in Dean Street, Soho, was where you went ‘to have fun and to have jokes when the rest of the world was working’. The Colony was an afternoon drinking den, opening at 3 pm in the days when the strict licensing laws closed the pubs straight after lunch.

To the older clientele, the club was known as ‘Muriel’s’ – after the proprietor, Muriel Belcher, a ‘theatrical Portuguese Jewish lesbian’ of Welsh extraction, who was born in Edgbaston in 1908. Foul-mouthed and camper than Christmas, Muriel is remembered in this lavish book for ‘her courage, her instinctive assessment of people ... She was for honesty, for generosity, for the vulnerable, against the self-righteous, the smug and the pretentious’.

Francis Bacon adored her, and painted her portrait three times. When the club was inaugurated in 1948, Muriel paid him £10 a week to ‘bring in the people you like’. In no time, The Colony became a home from home for Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, Charles Laughton, E.M. Forster, Tallulah Bankhead, even Mary Kenny. ‘Mary Kenny used to go there and was quite a naughty girl, but that was before she discovered religion.’ Another regular was John Hurt. ‘The actor John Hurt was most often seen at The Colony falling down its staircase.’

But you didn’t need to be famous to join. Bacon also recruited eccentric furniture designers, decorated war heroes (‘She was a brave gal on the Somme’), Russian spies, a man who was married to Enid Blyton’s daughter, and a man who avoided conscription ‘by escaping to Ireland dressed as a Mother Superior’.

The Colony also gave refuge to unsuccessful cat burglars. One pair robbed a house in Hampstead, but passed out drunk on the Heath, right next to their sack of booty. Another boasted about having burgled Mrs Thatcher’s house and ‘was flabbergasted at the reported insurance claim.

The club was an escape or an oasis away from ‘clocking into work, making do and mending, trying to lead respectable lives’. According to Francis Bacon, Muriel had ‘a tremendous ability to create an atmosphere of ease. After all, that’s what we all want, isn’t it? A place to go where one feels free and easy?’

Not everyone was enamoured, however. Peregrine Worsthorne remembers The Colony as ‘bloody ghastly! I loathed it and I hated Muriel ... It was such a squalid room. I shudder with the thought of it – the dirt, both physically and metaphorically’. The gays kept trying to pinch his bottom, ‘but then I was always a pretty boy,’ sighed Worsthorne, now aged 89.

Brian Patten also had his doubts. The Colony was like ‘a small urinal full of fractious old geezers bitching about each other’. Sophie Parkin, author of this magnificent history, calls it ‘a fish tank whose water needed changing’. But to Sophie’s mother, the indomitable Molly Parkin, the club was ‘a character-building glorious hell-hole. Everyone left their careers at the roadside before clambering the stairs and plunging into questionable behaviour’.

As Frank Auerbach confesses, ‘I drank too much, talked drivel, had some stimulating conversation, often with Francis Bacon, a few arguments, always with Francis Bacon ...’ The Colony was, as George Melly explained, ‘an enchanting antidote to the empty studio’ – which will be why Maggie Hambling stopped going: ‘I could see it becoming an addiction.’

Many others were not so fortunate or as sensible. Membership of The Colony could be a death-sentence. Sophie Parkin’s book is a roll-call of suicides and alcoholics among its members. Nina Hamnett threw herself out of a window and was impaled on the railings below. Peter Langan set fire to his bed. Isabella Blow drank weed killer. Sebastian Horsley took an overdose, as did John Minton. One member died ‘drunk in charge of a bicycle’, another was ‘singing and dancing down the road when a car hit him’. Having identified photographer John Deakin’s body, Francis Bacon, adopting Muriel’s affectation of calling a he a she, announced, ‘Her trap was shut for the first time in her life’.

Jeffrey Bernard was an habitué, despite being repeatedly barred. Even though he’d lost his legs to diabetes, he still tried to get in, hopping up a ladder. Ian (‘Ida’) Board, Muriel’s successor, met him at the top with a boiling kettle. When the play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell opened, starring Peter O’Toole in the title role, Francis Bacon, who’d only ever been to the theatre once in his life before (to see Cats), was outraged at the way he was represented. ‘I don’t paint in a beret!’ he shouted at the stage. ‘I paint in a Savile Row suit!’.

With Muriel’s death in 1979, The Colony went slowly downhill. ‘Ida’ Board, with his brandy-induced red cabbage of a nose, was generally deemed ‘insufferable’, and the membership solidified into ‘an army of alcoholic aging queens’, like Dan Farson, who did a Jekyll and Hyde flip after a few tinctures. Though at opening time he’d beam: ‘My dear boy, how lovely to see you!,’ this was soon replaced with snarling and threats of violence: ‘You’re the most revolting fifth-rate cunt I’ve ever met. I don’t know why you don’t die.’

The third and final proprietor was Michael Wojas, a drug addict who was most often found slumped on the toilet. (It seems that the fate of everyone was to turn into likenesses of Francis Bacon paintings.) Wojas allowed the club to become a ‘private space you could be bad in’ for Young British Artists Damien and Tracey and the rest, who were ‘celebrity chasing’ and ‘attention-seeking’ and better suited to the ethos of the Groucho Club, which as luck would have it was right next door – and where they all soon decamped.

There were problems with the Colony lease, legal disputes about ownership of the paintings and sculptures around the place, now worth a mint, and the club closed for ever in 2008. I wish the National Trust or English Heritage had preserved it.

Michael Wojas, Tom Baker, Francis Bacon, Ian Board, John Edwards in The Colony Club