Francis Bacon News

                                                                                                                                                            October 28, 1909, Dublin - April 28, 1992, Madrid

Bettina Boyens, Gießener Allgemeine, 13 May 2012 

In die erwartungsvolle Anfangsstille hinein beginnt der Wasserkocher zu sprudeln. Zwei Schauspieler gießen sich entspannt in knatschbunten Plastikbechern Tee auf. Dann kommen sie langsam aus der Tiefe des Raums nach vorne und verwandeln sich Schritt für Schritt in den exzentrischen Maler Francis Bacon. Das Besondere: Wir sitzen nicht im Schauspiel Frankfurt, sondern 500 Meter weiter südwestlich. Nur ein kleiner Fußweg über den Holbeinsteg ans gegenüberliegende Mainufer ist nötig, um direkt zur Uraufführung ins Frankfurter Städel zu gelangen. Intendant, Regisseur und Textcollageur Oliver Reese hat pünktlich zum 20-jährigen Todestag die berühmten Interviews des Kunstkritikers David Sylvester mit dem irischen Maler in Szene gesetzt. Dass daraus keine langweilige Teatime geworden ist, liegt an der grandiosen Spielfreude von Viktor Tremmel und Martin Rentzsch. In 90 Minuten loten sie die unterschiedlichsten Facetten seiner Persönlichkeit aus, die von quälenden Selbstzweifeln ebenso geprägt war wie von berserkerhaften Wutattacken und die auf unnachahmliche Weise seine Offenheit in der Wahrheitssuche mit Selbsthass konterkarierte.

Angenehm fällt sofort auf, dass sich Oliver Reese nicht in den oft kolportagehaft zitierten Exzessen Bacons suhlt: Seine sadistischen Liebhaber interessieren ihn ebenso wenig wie seine rabiaten Sauftouren, seine Drogenprobleme oder seine Spielleidenschaft. Er spürt einem Mann nach, der so sachlich und so ehrlich wie möglich über Malerei und die Einsamkeit des Lebens an sich Auskunft geben will. Die Genauigkeit, mit der er versucht, das Unsagbare zu beschreiben, faszinieren vom ersten Satz an: »Meine ganze Malerei ist Zufall, ich weiß selbst nicht, worum es dabei geht.«

Viktor Tremmel spielt Bacons abgründige Seite lustvoll aus. Unvermittelt zerquetscht er Orangen, zertrümmert Stühle in unstillbarer Lebensgier und genießt das Auftragen von Lippenstift mit ganzer Handfläche. Er sagt Sätze wie: »Das Leben ist so viel brutaler als meine Bilder« und tanzt danach eckig durch den Raum. Martin Rentzsch dagegen ringt mit jeder Silbe, berichtet gequält davon, was ihm »nicht gelungen ist« und genießt das vorsichtige Beleuchten von Kunsttheorien und Arbeitsprozessen. Selten sprechen die beiden miteinander, vielmehr belauern und umkreisen sie sich, während sie langsam den großen, lichtdurchfluteten Raum im Städel-Untergeschoß erobern.

An der Rückwand steht ein echter Bacon aus dem Bestand des Museums. In den typischen Abmessungen 198 mal 142 Zentimeter schreit vor dunkelgrünem Hintergrund die Krankenschwester aus dem Film »Panzerkreuzer Potemkin« um ihr Leben. Ihr linkes Auge ist zerschossen, der zerstörte Körper leidet auf einer Schaukel Märtyrerqualen, der Mund klafft auf wie eine einzige offene Wunde. Da wirkt es schon sonderbar, wenn Martin Rentzsch zum Schluss den erstaunlichsten Satz spricht, den Francis Bacon je gesagt hat: »Ich wollte immer das Lächeln malen, aber es ist mir nie gelungen.«

Statt irischem Single Malt trinken die Darsteller Tee. Dennoch steigt die Stimmung stetig an bis zum Finale, äquivalent zum siedenden Wasser im Kocher. Viel Applaus am Ende für Bacon mal zwei, für die kunstübergreifende Idee und für Oliver Reese und sein Ausstattungsteam.

Reese zeigt "Bacon Talks" im Städel-Museum

Nach Kinder- und Massenmördern hat sich Oliver Reese für seine neueste Aufführung den monströsen Maler Francis Bacon ausgesucht.

Birgit Hupfeld, Welt, 13 May 2012

    Bacon painting sells for $44.8m at auction

       MICHAEL PARSONS, Irish Times, Friday, May 11, 2012

          Francis Bacon's 1976 Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror exceeded its estimate of $30 million to $40 million at a Sotheby's auction

A MALE nude painting by Dublin-born artist Francis Bacon has sold for $44.8 million (€34.5 million) at a Sotheby’s art auction in New York.

Described as a “powerful and sophisticated” painting, Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror exceeded its estimate of $30 million to $40 million at the auction on Wednesday night. Five bidders competed to buy the painting. The successful buyer was listed as “anonymous”. The 1976 oil painting was sold by an unnamed European collector.

A second, smaller painting by Bacon, Study for a Portrait, sold later in the evening for $4.2 million. The New York Times reported that it had been bought by Donald L Bryant, an American art collector who told the paper he was “happy to get it at that price”.

Speaking afterwards, Tobias Meyer, worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, said the company was thrilled by the results and that “the top end of the market performed beautifully . . . due to a global demand for masterpieces that is almost unparalleled”.

     The Francis Bacon Opera

         Martin Stevenson, Whats On Stage, 10 May 2012

         
Date: 10 May 2012

Composer/director Stephen Crowe is taking his seventh chamber opera to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year to run the gauntlet of road-weary reviewers and faintly jaded audiences. The opera is a direct transcription of an (apparently famous) interview first aired on The South Bank Show in 1986, with Melvyn Bragg and the controversial painter Francis Bacon, in which alcohol is a constant source of lubrication.

Months of negotiation were required to secure the rights to the text, but now that the Estate of Francis Bacon and Lord Melvyn Bragg have officially approved the opera, the Crowe Ensemble are free to perform the work.

Meeting in a cramped coffee shop in Soho, Crowe’s manner was a mixture of arrogant intelligence and barely disguised impatience. He feverishly fingered his fashionable beard and checked the time on his phone every few seconds. I was hoping that the meeting wouldn’t go so well as to be converted into an opera itself, but true to the model of The Francis Bacon Opera I thought it would be apposite to present this interview in its raw form. No alcohol was consumed during the course of the interview.

Why did you want to set the original television programme to music?

“Have you seen it?”

No.

“Oh, God. Because I absolutely love that particular interview. There’s something fantastically irrepressible about Francis Bacon in it. He’s completely open and childlike. And he’s damning, and dismissive, but cuddly with it. But the interview is more than just a man saying interesting things, it’s an entity in its own right. Normally an interviewer just lets the interviewee tell a few anecdotes, but not Melvyn Bragg. He’s far too interesting, and far too interested in Bacon to let that happen. And definitely far too drunk.”

Isn’t it enough that the original programme exists in its original form? Why does it have to be an opera, necessarily?

“That’s such a pompous question, if you don’t mind me saying so. Why did Rembrandt have to paint his own craggy, old face? Why not leave that in its original form?

But he was… (interrupted)

“It was Bacon’s spiky, free-wheeling monologues that put me in mind of opera straight away. He has these passionate outpourings, which contrast perfectly with Melvyn's more measured, more restrained approach. The whole scenario just perfectly suits the ‘recitative, followed by aria’ format. It was gagging for a musical skewering, you could say.”

Using a famous BBC presenter and a well-loved painter as your subject could be seen as another example of abusing the cult of celebrity to build an audience for opera. As with Turnage’s Anna-Nicole Smith opera as well as Damon Albarn and Rufus Wainwright’s recent operatic offerings.

“No it bloody couldn’t! There is definitely a bit of that going on in opera, though. I don’t have a problem with Anna-Nicole (Smith’s life) as a subject for (an) opera- the stories should always be relevant. I think it’s sometimes easier to lean on the crutch of Ancient Greece, say, than it is to set something contemporary, because the old classics have already been approved by the ‘culture police’.

Who are the ‘culture poli..?’ (interrupted)

It’s been pre-digested by the audience and the composer is just regurgitating it. Honestly the easiest thing in the world would have been to set a Shakespeare play to music, but I’d like to think that his plays are already finished.”

Does this mean that you are opposed to Shakespearian operas by Verdi, or Bellini, or Thomas Adès?

“It depends what you value in Shakespeare. If it’s just the plot then (those operas are) great, but if you love Shakespeare for the subtle poetry of the language then (those operas are) not so great. Verdi, for example, cuts some of the most amazing lines from Lady Macbeth and from Macbeth himself, so what’s the point?

Are you going to cut any of the words of the original South Bank Show?

“No. I’m contractually obliged to keep everything in. I honestly wouldn’t want it any other way. The imperfections of speech (in the opera) are fascinating. I bet that to make sense out of what I’m saying in this interview you’ll have to do a bit of word-juggling, but I haven’t done any of that in Francis Bacon. There’s one point where Bacon is talking about how he rejects ‘fantasy’, or the idea of ‘fantasy’ on his work, and, since he’s merrily pissed, he slurs his words and starts to say ‘philosophy’ instead. That’s more than just a slip of the tongue, because he was obviously thinking about what he rejects and he obviously marries philosophy with fantasy in his subconscious. And it’s also funny to keep in the little quirks of speech. The audience respond to it.”

Are there any contractual constraints about how to represent the men physically? I imagine Lord Bragg would be rather particular about how he appears on stage.

“Thankfully not. I always think of that man who said he thought Melvyn Bragg was always wearing two wigs at the same time, (laughs) because Melvyn’s hair is an institution in itself. Miraculous. It would have been terrible to be retrained in how we present that famous mop. Originally the production was going to mirror the physical set-up of the original show - they’re at the Tate, then in Bacon’s studio and finally in a restaurant. But when I saw the design by Candida (Powell-Williams) I decided that it would be more interesting to present Bacon’s arias as if he is delivering a sermon from inside one of his own paintings.”

So, if Lord Bragg will be wearing two wigs at once, does that mean that the opera has a funny side?

“Of course. Yes. It’s a comedy. It’s hilarious.”

The Francis Bacon Opera, starring Christopher Killerby as Francis Bacon and Oliver Brignall as Melvyn Bragg, is playing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival from the 18th to the 27th of August at C Venues, Main House.

Francis Bacon painting estimated to fetch $40million

Francis Bacon's extraordinary 1976 Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror painting will be auctioned at Sotheby's in New York today.

The Telegraph, 9 May, 2012

Earlier this year, Bacon's Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, which features a naked female model sprawled on a bed, sold for £21.3 million at a Christie’s auction in London.

Beauty and the Bacon: two portraits to be auctioned

MICHAEL PARSONS, Irish Times, Wednesday, May 9, 2012

TWO RADICALLY different views of the human figure by Irish artists – a male nude by Francis Bacon and a portrait of a Co Meath aristocrat’s wife by Sir William Orpen – are being auctioned in New York and London.

After last week’s sale of the painting The Scream for $120 million (€91 million), the mere $30 million expected for a male nude by Bacon tonight is unlikely to raise an eyebrow. Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror will go under the hammer at a Sotheby’s auction in New York with an estimate of $30 million- $40 million. The 1976 oil painting, which measures approximately 6.5ft by 5ft, is being sold by an unnamed European collector.

According to an explanatory note in the auction catalogue, the subject of the painting “represents both Bacon’s partner George Dyer and the artist himself”, and the figure combines “Dyer’s distinctive profile” and the artist’s “own distinctive sweep of hair”.

Bacon, who lived in London, met Dyer – an East End criminal – in 1964 when Dyer broke into his studio.

The pair had a stormy relationship that ended when Dyer died from a drink and drugs overdose in a Paris hotel in 1971. Bacon painted numerous portraits of him before and after his death.

The work of Dublin-born Bacon, who died in 1992, is now among the most expensive in the world. Earlier this year, one of his female nudes, Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, sold for £21.3 million (€25.4 million) at a Christie’s auction in London.

Meanwhile, in London tomorrow, Sotheby’s will auction Portrait of Rose, Fourth Marchioness of Headfort by Orpen, which is expected to sell for up to £500,000. The painting, which was on view in Dublin and Belfast last month, is among the Irish lots in a British and Irish art sale in Sotheby’s on New Bond Street.

Rose Boote, an Edwardian London music-hall star and “society beauty”, married the Co Meath aristocrat Geoffrey, fourth marquess of Headfort, in 1901.

Orpen, who was born in Stillorgan, Co Dublin, painted the portrait in 1914. According to Sotheby’s, the “absolutely stunning” sitter “deftly managed the dwindling finances of the estate at Kells in Co Meath, proved a brilliant hostess at numerous house parties, and was attentive to the concerns of the Headfort tenants and the local community”.

She and her husband’s alleged “popularity as progressive landlords ensured that Headfort survived the struggle for Irish independence largely unscathed”.

The earrings seen in the portrait were sold by Sotheby’s at a jewellery auction in Geneva last year for €35,000.

The auction also features work by Roderic O’Conor, Jack B Yeats, Louis le Brocquy and Mildred Anne Butler, as well as four paintings by Paul Henry, including A Connaught Fishing Village, which has an estimate of £120,000-£180,000.

   Sotheby's

    Contemporary Art Evening Auction

      New York | 09 May 2012, 07:00 PM | N08853

LOT 19
PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED EUROPEAN COLLECTION
FRANCIS BACON
1909 - 1992

FIGURE WRITING REFLECTED IN MIRROR
signed, titled and dated 1976 on the reverse
oil on canvas
78 x 57 7/8 in. 198 x 147 cm.

ESTIMATE 30,000,000-40,000,000 USD

SOLD 44,882.500 USD
 

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

EXHIBITED

Paris, Galerie Claude Bernard, Francis Bacon: Recent Works, January - March 1977, p. 15, illustrated in color
London, Tate Gallery; Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie; Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Francis Bacon, May 1985 - April 1986, cat. no.
99, n.p., illustrated in colour (London only)
Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; Los Angeles County Museum of
Art; New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Francis Bacon, October 1989 - August 1990, cat. no. 45, illustrated in
colour
Lugano, Museo d'arte moderna, Francis Bacon, March - May 1993, cat. no. 49, p. 109, illustrated in colour
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, Bacon-Freud Expressions, July - October 1995, cat. no. 21, p. 73, illustrated
in colour
Paris, Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, Passions privées: Collections particulières d'art moderne et
contemporain en France, December 1995 - March 1996, cat. no. A41:1, p. 367, illustrated
Paris, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou; Munich, Haus der Kunst, Francis Bacon, June 1996 -
January 1997, cat. no. 72, p. 197, illustrated in colour

LITERATURE

John Russell, Francis Bacon, New York, 1979, pl. 106, illustrated
Michel Leiris, Full Face and in Profile, New York, 1983, fig. 110, illustrated in colo9r
Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon, New York, 1986, pl. 80, p. 81, illustrated
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Barcelona, 1987, fig. 100, illustrated in colour
Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, Cambridge, 1993, fig. 30, p. 58, illustrated
Cercle d'Art, ed., Découvrons l'art du XXe siècle, Paris, 1994, no. 23, illustrated
Christophe Domino, Bacon Monstre de Peinture, Paris, 1996, p. 80, illustrated in colour
Christophe Domino, Francis Bacon 'Taking Reality by Surprise', London, 1997, p. 80, illustrated in colour
Exh. Cat., The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Francis Bacon, 2001, p. 144, illustrated (as exhibited at Galerie Claude
Bernard, 1977)
David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York, 2007, fig. 131, p. 173, illustrated
Martin Harrison, ed., Francis Bacon: New Studies: Centenary Essays, Göttingen, 2009, pl. 140, p. 201, illustrated in
colour

CATALOGUE NOTE

"Bacon's mirrors can be anything you like - except a reflecting surface... Bacon does not experience the mirror in the same way as Lewis Carroll. The body enters the mirror and lodges itself inside it, itself and its shadow. Hence the fascination: nothing is behind the mirror, everything is inside it."  Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London and New York, 2005, p. 13

"Each day in the mirror I watch death at work" Francis Bacon quoting Jean Cocteau in, Hugh M. Davies, 'Interviewing Bacon, 1973' in, Martin Harrison, ed., Francis Bacon: New Studies, Göttingen, 2009, p. 96

"The paintings, I venture, begin in words, not in pictures. He was really a poet... When Bacon said he didn't draw, he really meant it. The graphic works are not Bacon's 'sketches.' The real sketches are his notes."  Brian Clarke in David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 208

Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror ranks among the most painterly, thematically and emotively outstanding works of Francis Bacon's extraordinary oeuvre. Via a stunning dissemination of color and line, in tandem with magnificent force of physical and imaginative execution, Bacon's principle subjects and most significant leitmotifs are readily present. At once, the iconic nude effigy of Bacon's ill-fated muse and lover George Dyer is conflated with a self-portrait of the artist, whilst the pivotal conceit of reflection and the act of writing incites a stimulating dichotomy between vision and language. As delineated by the eminent art historian and Bacon authority David Sylvester, this painting stands as testament to the extraordinary corpus of poignant canvases produced during the years 1971-1976, following George Dyer's tragic suicide on the eve of Bacon's prestigious retrospective opening at the Grand Palais 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. Prestigiously chosen as the poster for this seminal and now legendary exhibition - the single most important commercial gallery show of Bacon's career - this painting belongs to the very highest tier of the outstanding works specifically selected by the artist. Of the intimate group of twenty works exhibited in 1977, 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 highest price for any Contemporary work of art ever offered at auction. Created during the very same year as Bacon's record-breaking triptych, Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror triumphantly echoes Bacon's operation at the very zenith of his creative powers.

As the headline work for Bacon's pivotal exhibition in 1977, this painting 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).

Exuding unrivalled intellectual and painterly command, Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror represents a stunning summation of the intensely introspective years that preceded its creation and the prevailing triumph that shortly followed with Bacon's legendary exhibition at Claude Bernard. As a feat of imaginative sophistication, this painting embodies one of the finest single canvases by the artist ever to be presented for public sale - a superlative testament and outstanding tribute to the irreproachable eminence of Francis Bacon within Art History.

With his muscular back turned and deeply immersed in the act of writing, Francis Bacon's nude figure radiates melancholic absorption. Exuding the refinement in line, coolness in palette and haunting grandeur inimitable to Bacon's post-Dyer opus, the second peak of the artist's career according to David Sylvester, this highly psychological and thematically complex painting radiates an atmosphere of elegiac contemplation. In Paris 1971, on the eve of Bacon's Retrospective opening at the Grand Palais - an honour only previously awarded to Picasso among living painters - George Dyer died from an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol. Found slumped on the toilet in their hotel room at the Hôtel des Saints-Péres, this tragic event, to which Bacon initially reacted with an outwardly stoic callousness, affected the artist profoundly. The degree to which Bacon was consumed with guilt over Dyer's death would find equal measure only in the posthumous paintings of Dyer and the event of his suicide. Collectively known as the 'Black Triptychs', these harrowing epic eulogies powerfully speak of the intense loss and guilt that remained with Bacon until his death: "Time does not heal. There isn't an hour of the day that I don't think about him." (Artist quoted in Exh. Cat., Lugano Museo d'Arte Moderna, Francis Bacon, 1993, sv. 44). Bearing the irrevocable trace of a sombre mind set following such a tragedy, the present work offers a remarkably quiet deliberation on the voluptuous male back - a prominent fascination indissolubly coupled with Bacon's almost obsessive portrayal of Dyer.

Having first met the previous autumn, by 1964 Dyer was established as Bacon's companion, lover and principal artistic subject; for the eight years leading up to his death, Dyer and Bacon shared a fractured relationship marred by Dyer's progressive alcoholism and waning sense of purpose in Bacon's shadow. A petty-thief from London's East End possessing insalubrious criminal connections and a muscular build, Dyer embodied a physical ideal and refreshingintellectual counterpart for Bacon. In the present work, the heroic muscularity of the male nude's voluptuous back is strongly reminiscent of a triptych painted a year prior to Dyer's death. Described as "that hymn to George Dyer's virility" by David Sylvester, Three Studies of the Male Back features the well-defined silhouette and round shouldered posture synonymous with John Deakin's famous photographs that had been commissioned by Bacon and record Dyer sitting in his underpants among the detritus of the artist's studio (David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 134). What's more, in their depiction of the masculine form, both of these paintings elucidate a hybrid of correlative source imagery inexplicably related in Bacon's mind to Dyer's physicality. To be found strewn, crumpled and heaped on the floor of Bacon's chaotic studio, evidence of his fascination with how the spine in Degas's Nude After the Bath "almost comes out of the skin altogether" is comingled with Michelangelo's hyper-masculine and heroic backs and Eadweard Muybridge's motion-photographs of male wrestlers. (Artist quoted in Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon, New York,1986, p. 79). What's more, inimitable to Dyer's likeness, the physiognomy of the writing figure suggests the same iconic profile that proliferated in Bacon's creation from 1964. Compounded with the suggestion of a suit collar - Dyer was always immaculately turned out - and the underpants ubiquitous to Deakin's photographs, the congruency of signifiers indeed affirms that the present work is a posthumous portrait of George Dyer. He is here depicted writing indecipherable words on a blank sheet, perhaps also recalling one of Dyer's previous suicide attempts during a holiday they had taken together in Greece, when Dyer left a short suicide letter which read: "We all have to go, it's not so bad." (Michael Peppiat, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London, 2008, p. 295). While on that occasion he had arrived in time to stymy Dyer's half-hearted suicide attempt, Bacon heartrendingly lamented Dyer's passing in the summer of 1972: "I feel profoundly guilty about his death. If I hadn't gone out that morning, if I'd simply stayed in and made sure he was alright, he might be alive now." (Artist quoted in Ibid., p. 303).

Embodying a powerful force in life, in death Dyer's absent-presence took on the weight of Bacon's loss and melancholic regret. As much as these last paintings of Dyer represent ruminations on his lost companion, they
simultaneously encompass deeply introverted self-reflections. Indeed, the constancy and significance of Dyer's appearance in Bacon's oeuvre is rivalled only by the self-portraits, which from 1971 onwards, greatly increased in
number. Somewhat disingenuous, 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 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. As magnificently exemplified in Self-Portrait, 1973, Bacon's adoption of the archetypical pose of melancholia, made iconic by Dürer's eponymous woodcut, in combination with the wristwatch and the mirror as vanitas symbols, together confer a cognitive fixation on grief and mortality. Thus, to once more return to the identity of the Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror, the manner in which the hair is depicted falling across the forehead bears a striking affinity with Bacon's characteristic fringe or "forelock," which, according to the eminent French intellectual and friend to Bacon, Michel Leiris, "is well in evidence in all his self-portraits" (Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, New York, 1983, p. 12). In this sense, whilst evoking the effigy of George Dyer, Bacon's self-reference confirms his statement to Sylvester recorded one year prior to this painting's execution: "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." (Artist quoted in David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, Op. Cit., p. 241).

Bacon's statement on love and the self here evinces a certain envelopment and effacement of identity that resonates throughout his oeuvre. In Bacon's violent portrayal of copulation, animalistic aggression invokes a conflation of self and other, engenders a loss of bodily boundaries. This was repeatedly given verbal expression by Bacon in countless interviews: "The frustration is that people can never be close enough to one another. If you're in love you can't break down the barriers of the skin." (Artist quoted in Hugh M. Davies Op. Cit., p. 107); whilst on another occasion Bacon also referred to this more explicitly as being unable to "cut the flesh open and join it with another" (Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, London, 1992, p. 125). Such a jubilant and violent surrender of hermetically sealed corporeality is evident in the second triptych Bacon painted after Dyer's death. Following the deeply elegiac In Memory of George Dyer of 1971, Three Studies of Figures on Beds, painted in 1972, represents a veritable celebration of his life (David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, Op. Cit., p. 136). In the present image, where identity is ambiguous the boundary of the body is also extended and blurred via a mysterious wound or umbilical cord across to the figure's incongruous reflection. However, this offers none of the paroxysm or violence present in other physical pairings in Bacon's oeuvre. Rather, with their backs turned against each other, this work speaks of the withdrawal and loss which continued to haunt Bacon throughout the 1970s. Herein the role of the mirror in Bacon's work takes on an important metaphoric function: connected to the myth of Narcissus in Ovid's metamorphoses, mirrors are traditional symbols of vanitas and death. Described by the artist as an "infinite thing", in Bacon's work they represent existentialist empty spaces, serving the same function as the deathly black voids which permeate and give name to Bacon's 'Black Triptychs'. Thus, at once a reflection of the self and George Dyer, this painting gives unique visual expression to Bacon's melancholic citation of Jean Cocteau: "Each day in the mirror I watch death at work." (Artist quoted in Hugh M. Davies, 'Interviewing Bacon, 1973,' Op. Cit., p. 96).

Conspicuously present in his work as well as his studio, mirrors and the premise of reflection signify a dominant theme and powerful engagement throughout Bacon's career. As apparent within Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror, the depiction of a tall mirror converging with a large table in the corner of a stark anonymous room, shares significant visual affinities with the large wall-mirror and pine table located in Bacon's bedsitting room in his Reece Mews studio in South Kensington. The congruency of wall fixings and positioning in both this painting and documentary photographs of Bacon's flat, underlines the imaginative importance of Bacon's studio: "I am very influenced by places - by the atmosphere of a room, you know. And I just knew from the very moment that I came here that I would be able to work here." (Artist quoted in John Edwards, 7 Reece Mews Francis Bacon's Studio, London, 2001, p. 112). In the same way Bacon endeavoured to harness chaos and accident in the execution of his work, he also liked to preserve unforeseen phenomena in his working environment. The very same mirror in Bacon's bedsitting room possesses a spectacular star-like fracture, the pitted impact of a heavy glass ashtray reputedly thrown at the artist during a row - perhaps the vestiges of one of George Dyer's drunken rampages. Indeed, very much aligned to the shattered and distortive reflection borne of Bacon's smashed mirror, the mirror image depicted in Bacon's painting is not a true reflection of reality.

In the present work, although an ostensibly mimetic image is relayed, close scrutiny reveals a dislocation of the viewer's seat of focus. The angle of reflection is incongruous with the figure before the mirror; as explicated by Ernst
Van Alphen, "a phenomenon has occurred that is at odds with the act of looking" (Ernst van Alphen, Op. Cit., p. 61). Rather than mirroring the figure's profile in line with traditional laws of pictorial perspective, Bacon disrupts, confuses and dismantles the logic of sight. By acting as a means of distortive intensification, the mirror compounds a blurring of corporeal and spatial boundaries. The employment of a curving arabesque and precise yellow outline of an ellipse draws our attention to the locus of this transgression: the conceit of 'reflection' forges a kind of magnetic field that violates verisimilitude. Bacon wields the mirror as a weapon against an illustration, or indeed reflection, of reality. Instead, the mirror is employed as a tool to call forth "images which are a concentration of reality and a shorthand of sensation" (the artist in an interview with Melvyn Bragg, Francis Bacon: The Southbank Show, Dir. Michael Hinton, Illuminations Media, 1985). As established in Gilles Deleuze's pivotal text, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation: "Bacon's mirrors can be anything you like - except a reflecting surface... The body enters the mirror and lodges itself inside it, itself and its shadow. Hence the fascination: nothing is behind the mirror, everything is inside it." (Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London, 2005, p. 13).

Bacon was greatly fascinated in how others can look directly at you through the mirror, as France Borel propounds, "does Bacon not insist on placing his canvases behind glass precisely in order to create a certain mirror effect?" (France Borel, 'Francis Bacon: The Face Flayed' in: Milan Kundera and France Borel, Francis Bacon Self Portraits, London, 1996, p. 193). Such optical effects and tricks of illusion, present throughout Bacon's oeuvre, form an intriguing tribute and dialectic with the significant role of mirrors in the history of Western art. In acknowledging and revering a dialogue that stretches back to Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Marriage (1434), Velázquez's paradigmatic Las Meninas (1656-1657), through to Manet's uncanny meditation on the gaze in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881-82) and René Magritte's surreal disjuncture of the mirror in Reproduction Prohibited (1937), Bacon critiques and augments the canon of reflection in art history. Through conflating the theme of sight with bodily sensation and perception, Bacon invites corporal fragmentation and a dislocation of the viewer's gaze. Within Bacon's remarkable oeuvre and as masterfully prescient within the present work, sight, at once a powerfully metaphoric and physical device, "is no longer to be conflated with the 'mind's eye', but with the 'body's spasm." (Ernst van Alphen, Op. Cit., p. 81).

In a further contravention of tradition, rather than being preoccupied with the act of looking, the figure reflected does not look in the mirror nor meet our gaze: his lack of interest or incapacity to regard his own likeness is usurped by the act of writing. As confirmed by the performance of writing itself, arguably the only instance Bacon ever depicted this action, alongside the prominent use of Letraset towards the bottom edge of the composition, the theme of language is as important as vision. Indeed contemplation of the present work led van Alphen to postulate: "Is this specific unexpected occupation in front of a mirror a hint at a polemic between language and vision, between narrative and perception?" (Ibid., p. 59). Herein, Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror offers a powerful rumination on the dichotomy between vision and language, and the profound significance of the written word for Bacon's extraordinarily evocative painterly invention.

In an interview with Sylvester in 1975, shortly predating the execution of the present work, Bacon articulated his feeling for the restrictive tension of writing in comparison to painting: "Painting is really a very unique thing in the sense that writing is not, because writing and common speech are very near to one another, whereas painting is something totally removed. It's the most artificial of the arts." (the artist in David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, Op. Cit., p. 248). Highly articulate and meticulous in his choice of phrase and expression, Bacon paid careful attention to the literal scrutiny and criticism of his work. He would frequently revise interview transcripts and edit exhibition texts to maintain an enigmatic and elusive interpretation removed from any sense of narrative or illustration. Indeed, very much in thrall to the emotive capacity of language, Bacon was an immensely erudite and literary individual who set great store by the power of the written word. He read widely and boasted a host of literary notaries within his circle of friends. Among these was the acclaimed French belletrist, or Man of Letters, Michel Leiris. Where Bacon painted his portrait in 1976 - one of the most remarkable likenesses of Bacon's oeuvre - Leiris reciprocated in 1983 with the finest 'word-portrait' of the artist perhaps ever to have been penned: "His forelock, which is well in evidence in all his self-portraits, like a reckless comma staunchly inscribed across his brow, appears to be there as an emblem showing that, inside his head, nothing proceeds according to the lazy norms of some already accepted pattern, but that everything is liable to be called into question, cut short or left in suspense." (Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, New York 1983, p. 12).

Inherent to Bacon's rejection of, to use Leiris' phrase, an 'accepted pattern', was the compost of crumpled photographs, paint-splattered reproductions, and torn magazines that constituted his principle resource of visual stimuli. However, in equal measure, fragments of poetry and evocative cantos would also "bring up images" and "open up valves of sensation" in exactly the same aleatory, associative and chaotic way (the artist interviewed by David Sylvester in 1984, David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, Op. Cit., p. 236). Very much inspired by the grand melodrama and pathos of Aeschylus, Greek tragedy and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Bacon's figures are imbued with an intense Dionysian abandon countered by the Apollonian calm interiors and isolated stages upon which his tragic dramas unfold. This can be traced back to the three Eumenides depicted in his seminal 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, through to the mythical grandeur of Triptych 1976 centered on a complex musing and conflation of the Promethean and Oresteian myths. For Bacon, ancient myth represented the imaginative 'armature' upon which all kinds of sensations and feelings attuned to the violence of contemporary existence could be hung. Moreover, T. S. Eliot's modern-day poetic recapitulation of classical mythology greatly affected and inspired Bacon's work. The fragmentary and intensely concentrated emotive sensibility manifest in Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes and The Waste Land - literary works that would provide titles for two of Bacon's paintings in 1967 and 1982 respectively - find visual echoes throughout the artist's oeuvre. Indeed, according to Michael Peppiat, when Bacon repeatedly claimed not to know where his images originated, he spoke of them as materialising semi-consciously from the vast "memory traces" that had remained in his "grinding machine" – an analogy that Eliot had directly employed to define the "poet's mind" as a "receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite form a new compound are present together." (the artist and T. S. Eliot in Michael Peppiat, Op. Cit., p. 282). Bacon was also good friends with the American Beat poet and author of the cult novel Naked Lunch, William Burroughs, whose pioneering fragmentary and highly evocative 'cut-up' technique offers a great literary parallel to Bacon's harnessing of controlled accident: the indecipherable use of Letraset here in Bacon's painting offers the most immediate visual elicitation of Burroughs' enigmatic literary juxtapositions. For Bacon, poetry and words powerfully provided a direct link to sensation, breeding images and unlocking the valves of feeling in equal measure to the gamut of photographs and visual ephemera at his disposal. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that words furnished Bacon's incubatory imaginative process.

As is notoriously documented in numerous interviews, Bacon maintained a steadfast dismissal and denial of any necessity for, or practice of, preparatory drawing. Instead, he repeatedly cited chance or accident as the principal motor driving and directing his imagery. Nonetheless, contrary to such postulations and denials, following the artist's death a not insignificant number of preparatory drawings were uncovered alongside abundant lists of memoranda and written notes. In discussing these in a letter to Sylvester, the artist Brian Clarke insightfully proposed: "These notes are always precisely worded, to the point, and provocative of visual ideas. Bacon I think, was essentially a literary man for whom textural narrative, words and phrases triggered powerful visual images. Never a draughtsman, deeply vulnerable to the power of words, his most articulate and helpful 'sketches' took the form of the written word... the paintings, I venture, begin in words, not in pictures. He was really a poet... When Bacon said he didn't draw, he really meant it. The graphic works are not Bacon's 'sketches.' The real sketches are his notes." (Brian Clarke in David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, Op. Cit., p. 208). Thus, rather than the economically delineated compositional drawings which Bacon made a practise of destroying throughout his career, it is the notes that constitute the germinative foundations of Bacon's enigmatic, and intensely poetic, painterly invention.

Interviews with Artists 1966 - 2012 by Michael Peppiatt - review

Over 46 years, Michael Peppiatt met the world's great artists, from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Francis Bacon, on their home turf.

The collected interviews are enthralling…

   Talitha Stevenson, The Observer, Sunday 1 April 2012

      'Fertile': Francis Bacon in his studio, 1980. Jane Bown for the Observer

The art of the critic-interviewer is, like that of the psychoanalyst, to draw poignant attention to what it is that the interviewee cannot express. The limitations imposed on Peppiatt are those of language itself, and they serve him well, causing him to nudge each of his subjects to the point where words fail them, to where the picture, the sculpture, the building or the photograph becomes the only means of expression.

These 28 interviews and 13 studio tours illuminate many abstractions, and many particulars – of workspace, childhood and technique. We visit the "Aladdin's cave" in which Peter Blake painted, the "bookish" haven of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the "supernatural neatness" of architect Richard Meier. Each emphasises for Peppiatt a facet of the artist's work, as if the surroundings were a visible extension of personality.

In the service of his large-scale composition, none of Peppiatt's lines of inquiry – material, cultural, gossipy, psychoanalytic – is allowed to predominate. Instead, each interview refracts the multiple concerns of artists and critic. "I'm just a salad of comings and goings," says Miguel Condé. "Chance and accident are the most fertile things at any artist's disposal," says Francis Bacon.

When required, Peppiatt's grounded intelligence tugs his interviewee's most nebulous thoughts back to earth. Talking about paint, he asks Hughie O'Donoghue: "Is it a voluptuous thing?", to which the artist replies: "Absolutely."

When Peppiatt does sanction a flight, it is always an endearing flight of fancy. Dado tells him: "When I've done a drawing, the person I've brought to life will then walk past the window." "So it's life imitating art," says a giddy Peppiatt.

We come to know the critic through the wit, the characteristic forward dash of his questions. Examining with Auerbach the painter's friendship with Bacon and Freud, Peppiatt wonders politely if "the rivalry came through admiration"? And he cuts a consistently lovable fanatic, ready to wade through "waist-high waters in Venice to talk to Ida Barbarigo" or to be slapped so hard on the back by a jovial Hans Hartung that he "fell to the floor". He is equally unfazed by Zoran Mušic's silences or the fact that "Condé speaks almost too well". Gradually we arrive at an impression both of the psychic riot of each artist and, along with it, of that unifying critical sensibility which led Peppiatt to define "the London School" of painters in the late 80s.

If the book risks anything so confining as a perspective, it is one of existential robustness. On that belvedere above Rome, in the presence of Balthus's majestic despair, Peppiatt notes, in contrast, the sudden "thunderous arrival of Balthus's two dogs, still possessed by some adventure in the garden's undergrowth". After RB Kitaj explains: "I even revise the intentions I had when I did [the paintings]," Peppiatt agrees that this "can be a bit alarming", which leads Kitaj to quote from the Kabbalah: "The book changes its meaning every year,'' he says. "Everything is in flux."

Francis Bacon painting, Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror, in Sotheby’s sale

Estimate up to £25m on painting representing lover George Dyer and the artist which has been in private collection since 1977

           Francis Bacon's Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror, to be sold at Sotheby's New York in May.

A powerful and important Francis Bacon  painting showing a contemplative figure writing, which has remained in the same private collection since it was bought in 1977, is to be sold at auction in May.

"It is a very, very serious painting that we've chased for years," Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's worldwide head of contemporary art, told the Guardian ahead of the sale announcement.

The auction house believes Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror is as important as two works by Bacon which set auction records for post-war art in 2007 and 2008. First Study from Innocent X briefly held the record when it sold for $52.6m but was later pipped by a Mark Rothko. Triptych 1976 now holds the record after Roman Abramovich bought it for $86.3m, an astonishing sum that had jaws dropping – not least because it was a time when many were predicting an end to crazy auction prices.

Both the triptych and the new-to-market Bacon were part of a small and now famous 1977 show of his work at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris.

Meyer recalled seeing the Bacon up close. "It was quite something," he said. "But great Bacons do that you, hit you over the head a little bit and the body of work that was shown in 1977 does that with great vigour and energy.

"Apart from being important paintings and very convincing, they are also incredibly beautiful because it is probably Bacon at the height of his skills as a painter."

Another painting in the show included Three Figures and Portrait, now owned by Tate and on display in Liverpool.

Figure Writing Reflected in a Mirror shows a male figure in white underwear who bears a distinct resemblance to the artist's lover George Dyer, who, with breathtaking timing, killed himself on the eve of Bacon's important retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris, in October 1971. The black sweep of hair resembles Bacon, so it can be interpreted as representing both artist and lover.

Dublin-born Bacon was hugely inspired by literature, whether the Oresteia or TS Eliot, and the figure writing, with crumpled paper on the floor, would seem to be a direct manifestation of the artist's obsession with the written word. No other Bacon canvas has someone writing.

The painting remains something of a mystery, as it is difficult to fathom exactly what was going on in Bacon's mind. Unlike other works there are no classical references. "There are no birds swooping down to eat the liver of Prometheus," said Meyer.

Sotheby's has estimated the painting at $30m-$40m (up to £25m) and Meyer said it might be easier to sell because it is a single panel and not as violent as the Triptych.

Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror was clearly considered a star at the 1977 exhibition because it was used as the catalogue cover and the anonymous collector who bought it had been given first choice of the works by Claude Bernard.

Bacon who died in 1992, aged 82, was one of the greatest and most influential 20th century artists. The critic Robert Hughes, writing in The Guardian in 2008, described him as "England's most celebrated recently dead painter. He is probably the best-known one, and possibly the most popular, since JMW Turner." His distorted paintings of tormented figures were not to everyone's tastes. Margaret Thatcher once called him "that awful artist who paints those horrible pictures."

   Francis Bacon's Studio: Dublin City Gallery - Review

      Harriet Rowlinson, Staff Writer

      The University Newspaper, Trinity College's Student Newspaper, April 2nd, 2012

The first thing I notice is the dust that covers nearly all the contents of the studio, like a thin film marking those objects that have long been forgotten. Would Francis Bacon only use a paintbrush once before it was swallowed by the chaos? Later on I discover that this is no ordinary dust, it was actually collected and transported with the rest of the studio so that the artist’s work place could be fully recreated to the nearest particle.

The reconstruction of his studio at the Dublin City Gallery Hugh Lane is beyond comprehension.  In terms of mere numbers the small unique space holds 570 books and catalogues, 1,500 photographs, 100 slashed canvases, 1,300 leaves torn from books, 2,000 artist’s materials and 70 drawings. Over 7000 of these items were carefully shipped from his studio in Reece Mews in London to Dublin where the artist himself was born. The project took three years to complete with a team of archaeologists, conservers and curators working to make sure everything was mapped out on the grid system, labeled and put onto the database. The end result is a huge privilege, to see what was only ever known to a close circle of Bacon’s friends.

In 1926 Bacon left Ireland when he was only 16 years old following a heated row with his father, who had found his son dressed in his mother’s underwear. After travelling to many cities including Berlin and Paris, Bacon finally chose London as his adopted home. It was in Mayfair where he gambled, Soho where he drank, the East End where he met the gangsters and South Kensington where he decided to paint. The studio that dissolved into disorder now stands before me, but what beauty this disorder inspired! Despite the Monets and Constables hanging in next-door rooms, visitors from around the world flock to Dublin City Gallery for this studio alone

When you first walk in you are met with a giant screen on which an interview from 1985 with Bacon is being played on a loop. You are also surrounded by quotes from the artist talking about the infamous Reece Mews studio: “For some reason the moment I saw this place I knew that I could work here. I am influenced by places, by the atmosphere of a room.”

You are then led to the back of the room where the studio lies. A long window at the entrance of the studio immediately brings you closer to the artist, as though Bacon himself has invited you in. Despite the chaos, certain objects jump out at you such as photographs of the late Lucien Freud with whom he conducted a tumultuous friendship, his trousers, shoes, a book on Velasquez and at least ten empty boxes of Krug champagne alluding to Bacon’s hard partying days.

The room is littered with the props used in his paintings. There’s a chair featured in the Triptych of Lucien Freud 1969, the circular mirror which resides on the back wall of the studio, and the hanging light bulbs and switches both of which feature in an untitled and unfinished painting c.1980-82 of a back view of kneeling figures, one of which was George Dyer – Bacon’s lover which is hung at this very gallery.

One of the reasons why I enjoy Bacon’s paintings is his use of colour, especially the use of fleshy pink tones that have become synonymous with his work. The walls and door of his studio were effectively how he decided on his palette and as he smilingly said in one interview they were “his only abstract works.” The surfaces are covered in a range of tones and textures. You can almost see his thought process right before your eyes. Materials like corduroy and towelling used for creating texture and depth to his paintings are strewn across the floor or under piles of boxes. In the video that still plays overhead I hear him bragging that he “never went to art school, thank god.”

Bacon’s relief is clear. He wanted to learn new techniques and not copy those who had come before him. He knew only too well that what to us looks like a pile of rubbish was to him useful and inspirational “This mess here around me is rather like my mind; it may be a good image of what goes on inside me, that’s what it’s like, my life is like that.” It’s hard to think that the 1976 Triptych that was allegedly sold to Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich in New York  for $86.3million in 2008 could have been created from this mess, let alone how canvases of that size fitted in there.

Although we may not have Abramovich’s budget, the Dublin City Gallery has allowed us our very own piece of Francis Bacon, who, before he died in 1992, was the most expensive living British artist. I feel his studio gives a real insight into the world and mind of this complex genius, whose torment can be seen on the paintings that now reach such astronomical prices. Part of Bacon has come home, and we should feel lucky that somehow it chose us.

   Bacon's Indian born muse

     Sarju Kaul, The Asian Age, Feb 22, 2012

                              Henrietta Moraes by John Deakin

Indian-born muse of British contemporary artists, Henrietta Moraes, was in the news again as her portrait by Francis Bacon was auctioned by Sotheby’s for £21.3 million.

Henrietta, who was born in 1937 in Simla in British India, was known for her beauty and famous for being a model and the muse of renowned contemporary British artists, Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, and Maggi Hambling.

Henrietta, described as a notorious bonne-vivant, was known for her love affairs with both sexes and a series of marriages. She was even briefly married to Indian poet Dom Moraes in the 1960s and kept the last name of the poet after their separation.
Famous for her bohemian life, which led her to alcohol dependence and a career as a cat burglar that ended with a stint in Holloway prison, according to her autobiography, Henriettta, published by Hamish Hamilton in 1994.

Henrietta, who was born was born Audrey Wendy Abbott, had a tough childhood growing up in England where she was sent as a child after her father deserted his family. Known as “the Queen of Soho,” she was given the name Henrietta by her first husband Michael Law, a filmmaker.

She then married actor Norman Bowler and that marriage broke up in 1956 as she took up with 18-year-old Dom Moraes, at the time a student at Jesus College in Oxford University. Henrietta took Moraes’ last name after they got married in 1961, but the marriage, like her first two marriages, did not survive and ended in a few years.

Henrietta haunted the infamous drinking dens, the Colony Room Club, and the French House, in Soho, and became friends with post-war contemporary artists Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud and the Soho set, which included Vogue photographer John Deakin, in the 1950s.

“Two people I was determined to make friends with because I felt so drawn to them were Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. They were both young, not particularly well-known painters, but Lucian’s hypnotic eyes and Francis’ ebullience and charming habit of buying bottles of champagne proved irresistible,” she wrote in her memoirs of the bohemian era.

Bacon, who was gay, was very close to Henrietta who he painted more than 16 times in his painting career.
Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, painted in 1963 from a series of photographs by Deakin, is “quite simply one of the most beautiful, seductive and sexy portraits of a female figure by Bacon,” says Frances Outred, the head of post-war and contemporary art, Europe, at Sotheby’s.

“Henrietta Moraes was a larger than life figure in 1950s Soho and she really captivated the life of Francis. She became one of his key muses,” he adds.

Bacon had asked his friend Deakin to take some nude photographs of Henrietta, as he only painted from photos and not directly from figure. Describing Henrietta as Bacon’s close friend, Leonie Grainger, associate specialist in post-war & contemporary art at Sotheby’s, says, “Bacon only ever depicted friends and never painted the subject from life, preferring to use photographs instead.”

Henrietta was also painted by Lucien Freud, who was her one-time lover, and appeared in his Girl in a Blanket in 1952, which she later used as the cover of her autobiography.

A combination of her hedonistic lifestyle, full of drinking liquor and sampling a variety of drugs, led Henrietta to die at 67 and she was buried in the Brampton Cemetery in west London.
Henrietta also had same sex relationships, including with singer-actress Marianne Faithfull, and the last one was with artist Maggi Hambling, who described as her most powerful muse.

Portrait of a tragic muse: As this picture sells for £21m, we reveal the extraordinary story of the sexually voracious but deeply troubled woman who inspired it

By GLENYS ROBERTS, The Daily Mail, 16th February 2012

                 Francis Bacon's 1963 portrait of Henrietta Moraes was described as 'sexually charged'

She lies, legs spread wide and one breast exposed, in a pose that — for all the accomplishment of the artist — fails to convey what is so utterly fascinating about the beguiling model Henrietta Moraes. She was the legendary Fifties beauty who sat, or more properly reclined, for the Francis Bacon portrait — described as 'sexually charged' by Christie's — which sold to an unknown buyer for a staggering £21 million in London this week, far exceeding its guide price.

That makes it one of the most valuable of the painter's works, tripling as it does the price achieved by another Bacon portrait of Moraes, entitled Lying Figure With Hypodermic Syringe, that was sold a couple of years ago. This featured the model in the grip of a heroin trip, and Henrietta Moraes's extraordinary story only adds to the picture's notoriety.

The model, a half-Indian beauty, was one of the stars of the demi-monde that drank in London's Soho and bedded each other in the Fifties. She was passed around among the louchest men of the time, including, as was revealed only just before his death last year, the incorrigible Lord Glenconner — most famous for turning the tropical island of Mustique into a celebrity playground.

Princess Margaret's favourite peer could not wait to boast in his final days that the irresistible Henrietta was the mother of his illegitimate son Joshua, born, unbeknown to him at the time, after a week-long fling in 1955. He and Joshua, then 54, eventually agreed to DNA tests in 2009 in order to prove what they had long suspected — that they were father and son.

But the most telling comment was the one Glenconner made to me shortly afterwards when he said that the artist Lucian Freud 'was furious Joshua was mine, not his son'. Those few triumphalist words lifted the lid on that decadent era when Freud and the Irish-born Bacon mingled with hard-living aristocrats, East-End villains and classless beauties. Both of them painted Henrietta Moraes, who at the time was known by her birth name Audrey Abbott. Born in India in 1931, she was brought to England as a small girl by her mother, after her father, who was in the Indian Air Force, walked out of the family home in the foothills of the Himalayas after a marital row.

             After a long battle with alcohol and drugs, Henrietta Moraes died from cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 67, in 1999

Sotheby's Contemporary Sale Soars to $80 in London, Driven by Gerhard Richter Fever

By Judd Tully, ART INFO February 15, 2012

Although Sotheby’s had no true blockbuster to match the luscious Francis Bacon nude that sold for $33.4 million at Christie’s Tuesday evening — the most expensive trophy so far this season — it did offer an early and quirky example. Bacon's Figure with Monkey (1951), a small-scaled work by the artist's standards at 26 by 22 inches, featuring a man seemingly trying to feed a rather ferocious monkey through the grill of a zoo fence, sold to a sole telephone bidder for £1.8 million ($2.9 million) (est. £1.8-2.5 million. Though the Bacon was more curiosity than masterpiece, it still did better than a small group of Lucian Freud drawings from a single, anonymous owner.

   'Sexually charged' portrait by Francis Bacon sells for £21 at auction

       By NAZIA PARVEEN, Daily Mail, 15 February 2012

                                         Auctioned off: The portrait of Henrietta Moraes sold for £21m
 

One of the most ‘seductive’ female portraits ever produced by Francis Bacon sold at auction for £19million yesterday.

Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, one of his favourite models, beat its estimate by £1million, making a total sale price including fees and taxes of £21,321,250.

Bidding began at £13million shortly before 7.25pm at Christie’s in London, but leapt to the final figure in just five minutes.

It was snapped up by an anonymous telephone buyer, who saw off competition from two other phone bidders and a saleroom bid as the price was raised at £500,000 a time.

Produced in 1963, it is one of the most valuable pieces to be sold at a post-War and contemporary art sale at the auction house, a spokesman said.

The highest selling work in this category was another piece by Bacon, Triptych, which went for £26.3million in February 2008.

Portrait of Henrietta Moraes is an oil on canvas, raw with colour and texture, which measures 65in (165cm) by 56in (142cm) and shows the model sprawled across a bed.

The painting, which has not been seen in public for 15 years, is described as one of Bacon’s ‘most seductive and sexually charged’ paintings.

Since the day it was created the work has only had two owners.

The the present owner who offered the item for sale was not disclosed by Christie’s, who said it came from a ‘distinguished’ New York collection which acquired it in 1983.

Francis Outred, Christie’s head of post-war and contemporary art, said: ‘The carefully constructed mood through colour is forcefully invaded by the extraordinary swipes of the loaded brush, which create the woman’s voluptuous figure. This juxtaposition of the sheer beauty of colour with the brutal physicality of paint is what makes Bacon’s art so remarkable.’

Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents and moved to London in 1926.

Although he had no formal training as an artist, he started to exhibit his work in the 1930s and a decade later he was causing a sensation among the artistic community with his angst-ridden paintings of twisted and mutated forms.

He died of a heart attack in Madrid in 1992. Today his work is among the most popular of 20th century art at auction.

Francis Bacon's 'sexually charged' portrait fetches £21m

A portrait of a female nude by Francis Bacon sold for £21.3 million at Christie's on Tuesday, helping bring the total for the post-war and contemporary evening sale in London to £80.6 million.

By Telegraph staff, The Telegraph, Wednesday 15 February 2012.

Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, which features a naked model sprawled on a bed, beat its estimate by £1 million, making a total sale price including fees and taxes of £21,321,250.

It was bought by an anonymous telephone buyer, who saw off competition from two other phone bidders and a saleroom bid as the price was raised at £500,000 a time.

Produced in 1963, Portrait of Henrietta Moraes is one Bacon's "most seductive and sexually charged paintings", according to Francis Outred, Christie's head of post-war and contemporary art, Europe.

Overall, the auction, which had been expected to raise £56.7-84 million after a Mark Rothko painting was withdrawn to be sold privately, made £80.6m.

There were three artist auction records, including for Christopher Wool, whose untitled work went under the hammer for £4.9 million, surpassing expectations of £2.5-3.5 million

The solid results follow bumper sales at Christie's in London last week, when it was offering impressionist and modern works. Those auctions fetched a combined £179.1 million.

The top end of the art market has survived the euro crisis and slowing economic growth relatively unscathed so far, with prices rising sharply in 2010 and 2011 after the financial crisis took its toll in 2009.

Sotheby's holds its main London post-war and contemporary auction on Wednesday.

Bacon's Nude Model Sells $33.3 Million at Christie's London

Scott Rayburn, SF Gate, San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday, February 14, 2012.

Feb. 14 (Bloomberg)  - A painting of a female nude by Francis Bacon sold tonight in London for 21.3 million pounds ($33.3 million).

Bacon's sexually charged 1963 canvas Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, showing one of his favourite models sprawled across a bed, had been valued at about 18 million pounds in a 65-lot auction of contemporary art at Christie's International.

The buyer was Sumiko Roberts, a London-based member of Christie's client services, acting for a customer on the telephone, outbidding at least one other telephone bidder.

The painting had been entered from an unidentified "distinguished New York collection," according to Christie's catalogue.

The seller was Sheldon Solow, a prominent Manhattan real estate developer and art collector, who had bought the work from Galerie Beyeler, Switzerland, in 1983, dealers said. Christies refused to comment on ownership.

Picasso and Modern British Art 

Richard Dorment wavers between exultance and despair at the Tate Britain's exhibition about Picasso’s influence on British art.

Richard Dormant, Review, The Telegraph, Monday 13 February 2012

                                The source: Picasso's Three Dancers (1925) presages Bacon’s Crucifixion (1933)

When Tate Britain announced plans for an exhibition about Picasso’s influence on British artists such as Duncan Grant and Graham Sutherland, my snorts of disbelief could be heard in Sidcup. Recent exhibitions have pitted him against Titian, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Goya, Delacroix, and Matisse. To hang important works by him in a show full of his British imitators would be an act of cruelty.

I wasn’t wrong, but neither is the show the disaster I imagined. The perverse brilliance of Picasso And Modern British Art is to take a non-subject (Picasso’s impact here was limited to a handful of artists) and turn it into a gripping indictment of British culture in the first half of the 20th century.

It is in this context that Picasso And Modern British Art looks at how his art was understood and absorbed by British artists who saw it either on visits to Paris or in shows at the Grafton, Mayor and Leicester Galleries in London. What they took from him inevitably depended on the style Picasso was working in when they discovered him, so that Duncan Grant’s Picasso is a Cubist while Francis Bacon’s was a Surrealist.

For me Francis Bacon is the artist who suffers most in the show from comparison with Picasso, but also the one I learned the most about. The grossly distorted limbless torsos and gaping mouths are close to the similarly distorted figures in Guernica. The difference is that Bacon moves into the realms of abstraction to express horror and disgust, whereas Picasso never strays from the here, the now, and the specific.

From Wednesday until July 15

Home-grown talent brings home the Bacon

Ben Luke, London Evening Standard, 13 Feb 2012

Francis Bacon, Henry Moore and the other British artists in this exhibition would have been the first to say that they could not hold a candle to Pablo Picasso. The Spaniard is among the all time great painters, for me, up there with Titian and Velázquez.

The curators make no attempt to claim that Bacon, Moore et al match Picasso's greatness and judiciously avoid pairing his masterpieces with his followers' work too often, instead gathering the Picasso works that appeared in the UK in clusters, followed by works showing the effects of his work on a succession of Britons.

More often than not, the British artists' works are less strident: Picasso's visual drama is adapted to a more becalmed, distinctly British kind of lyricism, particularly in the works of Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.

Francis Bacon, meanwhile, takes the Spaniard's visceral power onto an infinitely more disquieting terrain, while David Hockney's response is self-conscious hero worship.

Of course, the Spaniard is the main event here, and a central room with about 30 Picassos from 1901 to the Thirties is magnificent.

British artists were simply in awe of him. See this show, and so will you be.

Art In Liverpool – Francis Bacon’s Three Figures And Portrait, Tate Liverpool.

Liverpool Student Media, Mon, Feb 6, 2012

                                        Three Figures and Portrait  1975  Francis Bacon

Liverpool is currently one of best cities in the U.K. outside of London to see important, beautiful and mind-blowing pieces of art.  Thanks in part to the 2008 Capital of Culture, the year of culture itself has left a wonderful legacy and a demand for art in Liverpool that has been growing for years even before the festival had started.  With this in mind then, this is the start of a new look at artwork currently on show in the city as well as Merseyside in general and what better place to start than at the haven of contemporary art; Tate Liverpool.

Their collection is huge and though it has many brilliant works that deserve credit (and probably will get it later on in the year), the piece recommended to take a look at this week is Francis Bacon’s dark but oddly beautiful painting, Three Figures and Portrait.  The painting itself is currently housed on the second floor and is a massive canvas of twisted proportions so is not hard to miss.

Though one becomes aware of a strong divide between people that either love or loath Bacon’s work when discussing it, Three Figures and Portrait is an obvious staggering achievement even if some viewer’s personal taste dictates a wary form of disgust.  The pictures shows two figures that appear to be in the process of physical change, morphing furiously as if trying to escape their redundant form of a person.  This could also be seen a literal re-working of personal identity which is in constant flux for everyone but at the same time is here depicted as something one must try at all lengths to escape both physically and emotionally.

The two figures themselves have, like many of Bacon’s portraits and people, been identified as his deceased lover George Dyer.  Though on no account does this account for the visual darkness on show in the rest of Bacon’s work, it is clear that the death of Dyer caused the artist to go even deeper into his own psyche in creating his work whether he admits it or not.

A third creature inhabits the very front of the painting though describing it as a bird would be highly unkind to ornithology.  Its bird like appearance is juxtaposed to its horribly human mouth which grins its white teeth as it relaxes on top of its cube as the people agonise over their painful metamorphosis.

The work itself is also one of the first self-referencing pieces with all the figures in the painting being watched over by another painting clearly by Bacon.  Perhaps this is turning the idea of what visual art is on its head by making the painting itself watch the artist twist and turn in torment as he tries to gain some sense of being as opposed to the artist torturing the paint with his brush until the painting fits with his ideas of what existence should be about.

Three Figures and Portrait is currently on show at Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock.  The painting is on show as part of the DLA Piper Series: Conversation Pieces, and it’s on show till the 27th of August.  

Adam Scovell

  Sotheby's

   Contemporary Art Evening Auction
   London | 15 Feb 2012, 07:00 PM | L1202

                                  Figure with Monkey 1951 Francis Bacon

LOT 42

FRANCIS BACON
1909 - 1992

FIGURE WITH MONKEY

oil on canvas
66 by 56cm.
26 by 22in.
Executed in 1951.

ESTIMATE  1,800,000 - 2,500,000 GBP

LOT SOLD  1,833,250  GBP

PROVENANCE

Hanover Gallery, London
F. J. Anscombe, Cambridge
Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London
Private Collection, Belgium
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in the 1980

EXHIBITED

London, Hanover Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1951-52
London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Francis Bacon, 1955, no. 4
Porto, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Francis Bacon: Caged Uncaged, p. 119, illustrated in colour
Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia; Milwaukee, Art Museum; Buffalo, Albright-Knox
Art Gallery, Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, 2006-7, no. 10, illustrated in colour

LITERATURE

Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, no. 30, illustrated
Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Francis Bacon, 1996, p. 244,
illustrated

CATALOGUE NOTE

"This key notion in Bacon's art, that man is an animal, was explored in numerous paintings throughout the 1950s in which humans and monkeys are depicted as interchangeable, if not almost indistinguishable: both imprisoned in dark cages with their mouths opened in screams" (Michael Peppiat in: Exhibition Catalogue, Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, and travelling, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, 2006, p. 24)   Throughout the extraordinary oeuvre of Francis Bacon, the human figure is incessantly undone and brutally laid bare: reformed and transposed into primeval animalism, man and beast habitually appear as indistinguishable, if not entirely interchangeable. This impetus to confront the bestial reality of the human form lies at the very centre of the remarkable early painting, Figure with Monkey. Executed in 1951, this work heralds an incipient moment in Bacon's career. Following a stay in Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, during 1951 alongside numerous visits to South Africa throughout the 1950s, Bacon produced a cycle of wildlife landscapes and animal paintings, including a small series of encaged screaming monkeys.

Comprising four remarkable paintings in total, three of which prestigiously reside in the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Figure with Monkey stands as the very first from this extraordinary corpus. The sheer force of Bacon's painterly invention here commands a magnificent coalition of the artist's unbridled fascination with wild animals with his inimitable impulse to expose the primal nature of man. Dramatically fixed around the open mouthed bestial scream – the quintessential Baconian leitmotif – Figure with Monkey represents a unique and pioneering articulation of the dialectical "zone of indiscernibility" between man and animal vitally intrinsic to Bacon's astounding artistic legacy (Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London 2003, p. 16). Scarcely reproduced and rarely exhibited since its creation, the re-emergence of this significant early work marks a moment of art historical importance for Francis Bacon scholarship.

Despite fiercely avoiding contact with domestic pets owing to severe asthma, Bacon remained strongly captivated by wild animals. Littering the floor of his infamously chaotic studio, a vast and disparate matrix of visual and photographic resources provided an instant well-spring of creative inspiration. Among the various books, magazines and photographs at his disposal, Eadweard Muybridge's paradigmatic Animal Locomotion and Marius Maxwell's Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa published in 1925 have been cited as distinctly influential, while smudged, paint smeared and oil stained depictions of monkeys on torn pages from Life History of  Orang-Outan and Hutchinson's Animals of All Countries contribute to the broad array of visual stimuli called forth and transmogrified into Bacon's inimitable canon. Nonetheless the desire to see for himself and photograph such wildlife in situ, most notably at Kruger National Park, was a major driving force behind the several trips Bacon made to see his mother in her new South African surroundings throughout the 1950s. Upon his return Bacon declared: "I felt mesmerized by the excitement of seeing animals move through the long grass"; an enthusiasm that translated to a memorable body of work including the magnificent Elephant Fording a River from 1952 (Michael Peppiat in: Exhibition Catalogue, Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, and travelling, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, 2006, p. 26). For Bacon, it was the thrill of witnessing and perceiving the instinctual impulses shared with human beings that held the most fascination. Undisguised by "the veneers of civilisation" untamed animals embodied an emotive vehicle for transmitting the elemental and unalterable facts of existence (Ibid.). Very much aligned with this experiential enthusiasm and no doubt inspired by his stays in Africa, Bacon's series of monkey paintings are however starkly differentiated from the safari styled telephoto-reportage of Elephant Fording a River. Snarling, writhing and contorted, these encaged beasts bear a more immediate affinity with Bacon's treatment of the human subject.

Bacon outlined his interested in monkeys as stemming "from the fact that like humans they are fascinated with their own image, and that their interest in themselves is displayed with an abandon and relish rarely equalled by men" (the artist cited in: Martin Harrison, In Camera Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, London 2005, p. 200). This 'abandon' is expertly deployed in Figure with Monkey via the focal lure of the monkey's glinting-jawed shriek. Bacon depicts a moment of volatile release; frightening, spontaneous and primal, the scream is the epicentre of drama and the point at which both animal and man converge. Barely discernable as ape or monkey, the hulking and formidable dark silhouette of the encaged screaming beast is tentatively reached for by a faceless suited man. Here, Bacon imparts a projection of the elemental nature residing behind Man's veil of appearance. Nominally segregated by the field of criss-cross fencing, the visual connection between man and monkey nonetheless incites a reading of Bacon's assertion that "we nearly always live through screens – a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, and travelling, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, 2006, p. 26).

In this regard, Figure with Monkey bestows an illuminating and apposite visual expression to Gilles Deleuze's crucially groundbreaking philosophical elaboration on Francis Bacon. As propounded by Deleuze, "Sometimes an animal" in Bacon's work "is treated as the shadow of its master, or conversely, the man's shadow itself assumes an autonomous and indeterminate animal existence. The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we have been sheltering. In place of formal correspondences, what Bacon's painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility or undecideability between man and animal" (Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London 2003, p. 16). Distended and intimidating, the incomprehensible monkey appears as pure shadow out of which the dramatic locus of the painting emerges: the monkey's terrifying scream. Articulated in a conflation of energetic brushstrokes, the spontaneous flurry of paint betrays the influence of Muybridge's photography for Bacon's obsession with depicting motion. Simultaneously shrinking away, the figure of the suited man tentatively extends his grasp towards the unnaturally contorted gape of looming razor-sharp teeth; here the monkey gives violent expression to the faceless and mute primal shadow of Man. In other works in the later 1950s rather than depict the bipartite relationship between man and monkey, ape-like forms are carried over to many of the hulking male nudes, choosing to favour the prehensile crouch of the primate for an evocation of primordial physicality.

The aggressive and contained animality of Figure with Monkey formatively underlines an obsessive preoccupation with the mouth as bestial centre and agent of the primal scream – a motif that would later find its ultimate manifestation in the career defining series of Popes after Velazquez's 1650 masterpiece Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Belonging to the very earliest paintings centred on the locus of the animalistic existential scream, Figure with Monkey marks the inauguration of Bacon's major subject matter. Immediately presaging the very first Pope paintings produced that same year, this work emerged at the outset of a pivotal period which was to define Bacon as a major artist. In leading the viewer's eye to the shrieking animal by means of an outstretched human arm, this work explicitly draws a relationship between archetypal man and beast, a disturbing parity that would later characterise his work from this period: to quote Michael Peppiat, "by focussing on what was most animal in man – the primal scream – Bacon had found the single image which was to define his vision" (Michael Peppiat, Op. Cit., p.24). Indeed, the 1950s denote a period of developmental experimentation in Bacon's career through which thematic aspects would later filter into Bacon's masterpieces from the Men in Blue series articulated within foreshortened spatial interiors and contained within a delineated scaffold. Figure with Monkey represents an innovative disclosure of Bacon's interest in such framing devices: engulfed by an encompassing field of criss-cross fencing, this work delivers an early intimation of Bacon's employment of 'space-frames' – the term coined by David Sylvester to denote the  structural and psychological framing device compellingly used to convey the haunting spectacle of man's alienation and defamation.

Bacon first came to prominence in the late 1940s against the austerity of post-World War II Britain, and it was in this climate that the artist unleashed his acute sense for the violence, suffering and existential isolation at the core of postwar humanity. The first unequivocal expression of this brutal aesthetic can be traced to the seminal 1944 painting, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. First exhibited at the very end of the war in 1945, the menacing, tooth-baring and sightless mythological creatures of Bacon's triptych shocked contemporary audiences. Imbued with the same nightmarish shriek of the Eumenides in Bacon's seminal work, the animal screams of Bacon's 1950s production illustrates a shift away from mythological beasts to distinctly earth-bound ones. Pioneeringly indicating this transferal, Figure with Monkey exists today as one the earliest and most remarkable examples of Bacon's explicit and nightmarish articulation of the interchangability of man and primate, as means to de-evolve and apprehend the human race as inherently savage. At once, the artist's pronounced engagement with primates is presciently brought to the fore, whilst a lifelong dialogue with scaffold-like enclosures and screaming subjectivity coalesces to powerfully communicate that which Deleuze imperatively recognised in Bacon's painting: "Man becomes animal" (Gilles Deleuze, op. cit., p. 16)

    Christie's

       Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction

          Sale 8052 / Lot 12  Estimate of request  

          14 February 2012 London, King Street

          Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992)

          Portrait of Henrietta Moraes

Lot Description

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) 

Portrait of Henrietta Moraes 

titled, inscribed and dated 'Portrait of HENRIETTA MORAES From Photograph by JOHN DEAKIN 1963' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas 

65 x 56in. (165 x 142cm.) 

Painted in 1963. 

Price Realized

£21,321,250  ($33,666,256)

Special Notice

Artist's Resale Right ("droit de Suite"). If the Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer also agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 20% on the buyer's premium.

Provenance

Marlborough Fine Art, London. 

Willy & Fänn Schniewind, Neviges.

Galerie Beyeler, Basel.

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1983.

Pre-Lot Text

PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED NEW YORK COLLECTION

Literature

D. Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, Oxford 1975, no. 26, p. 126 (illustrated, p. 29).
J. Russell, Francis Bacon, London and New York 1985, no. 31, p. 186 (illustrated, p. 79).
J. Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1993, no. 31 (illustrated, p. 79).
R. Chiappini (ed.), Bacon, exh. cat., Milan, Palazzo Reale, 2008, fig. 5 (illustrated in colour, p. 73).

Exhibited

London, Tate Gallery, Painting and Sculpture of a Decade: 54-64, 1964, no. 144, p. 132 (illustrated, p. 133).
Siegen, Oberes Schloss, Francis Bacon, 1967, no. 7 (illustrated, p. 31).
Recklinghausen, Städtische Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Zeitgenossen: das Gesicht unserer Gesellschaft in Spiegel der heutigen Kunst, 1970, no. 9 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).
Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Francis Bacon, 1971-1972, no. 49, p. 48 (illustrated in colour, p. 122). This exhibition later travelled to Dusseldorf, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.
Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Francis Bacon: Retrospektive, 1987, no. 17, (illustrated in colour, unpaged).
Munich, Haus der Kunst, Francis Bacon 1909-1992 Retrospektive, 1996-1997, no. 40 (illustrated in colour, p. 137 and installation view illustrated, p. 305).

Lot Notes

'Bacon's lack of personal erotic interest in naked females did nothing to prevent these paintings from being as passionate as those of the male bodies that obsessed him' (D. Sylvester, Francis Bacon: The Human Body, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1998, p. 36.

INTRODUCTION

Painted towards the end of 1963, Portrait of Henrietta Moraes is perhaps the most seductive painting of a female figure ever realised by Francis Bacon. Created the year after his breakthrough retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London in 1962, and the same year as his first major American exhibition at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the painting depicts the artist's close friend and model Henrietta Moraes. For many years, the work formed part of the Schniewind collection of important post-War paintings, the present owner acquiring it from the family in 1983, almost thirty years ago. Portrait of Henrietta Moraes represents part of the pantheon of great paintings by Bacon executed in 1963, the majority of which are now housed in major international museum collections. The turning point came with the artist's powerful and deeply affective Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962) housed in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Over the preceding four years, Bacon had devoted himself to investigating the properties of paint, technique and undertaking studies of the human nude; a subject that he had rarely dared consider in his early career. In Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, Bacon has perfected the subject's body, carrying it out with a prodigious use of rapid, impulsive brush marks. Having painstakingly established the stippled, coloured background of his painting, Bacon was taking a calculated risk, confidently establishing the figure 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., New York, 1968, p. 13). Standing out proudly from a vivid lilac ground, Henrietta lies undressed in all her voluptuous glory on a simple ticking mattress. Her body undulates in a serpentine from the hilt of her ample bosom, past the narrow cinch of her waist to the sensuous curve of her outstretched leg, just like the sumptuous females of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingress Le Bain Turc (1862). Unflinching and brazenly exposed like an odalisque, Moraes exudes a raw sexuality, her naked body dangerously open to the prying eye. For Bacon, this visceral quality and the sheer physicality of his model's body was a source of constant rapture. Indeed he returned to Moraes as a subject for more than sixteen paintings over the course of his career including Three Studies for the Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1963) held in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
 

HENRIETTA MORAES

In Portrait of Henrietta Moraes Bacon imbues the painting with a striking passion, as if carried over from the intensity of his own personal life. This was the year that Bacon embarked upon his all-consuming love affair with George Dyer, immortalising his partner in his first painting. Whilst Bacon had often considered the figure of the male nude, his depictions of Moraes were the first to seriously consider the architecture of the female form. The same ardent splendour is present. As David Sylvester once observed: 'Bacon's lack of personal erotic interest in naked females did nothing to prevent these paintings from being as passionate as those of the male bodies that obsessed him' (D. Sylvester, Francis Bacon: The Human Body, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1998, p. 36). Moraes herself was a notorious bonne vivante, denizen of the artist's favourite haunt, the Colony Room, Soho. The muse to a number of contemporary British artists, she was one-time lover to Lucian Freud and appeared as the sitter in his Girl in a Blanket (1952). During the 1960s she met the young Indian poet Dominic Moraes and married him, adopting his surname as her own. A combination of her hedonistic lifestyle and an unsuccessful attempt at being a cat burglar led to her spending a short stint inside Holloway Prison. With the help of her friend and writer Wyndham Lewis she later penned her memoirs of this frenetic period, coloured with the eccentric characters in her life such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. As she recounted, 'two people I was determined to make friends with because I felt so drawn to them were Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. They were both young, not particularly well-known painters, but Lucian's hypnotic eyes and Franciss ebullience and charming habit of buying bottles of champagne proved irresistible' (H. Moraes, Henrietta, London 1994, p. 30).

JOHN DEAKIN'S PHOTO SHOOT

Bacon only ever depicted friends and never painted his subjects from life, preferring to use photographs instead. As he once explained to David Sylvester, 'even in the case of friends who will come and pose, I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from them... I think that, if I have the presence of the image there, I am not able to drift so freely as I am able to through the photographic image... what I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance' (F. Bacon interview with D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York 1990, pp. 39-40). For Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, Bacon commissioned John Deakin, his friend and feted photographer to take a now renowned series of images that he would translate into his paintings. The project did not go smoothly at first, as Moraes was later to recount in her memoirs. The photographs were taken at 9 Apollo Place, Chelsea; the house Moraes had inherited from the artist John Minton, where Bacon himself had once lived for a short time in 1955. Deakin had already used Moraes as a model for a nine-foot blow-up image displayed in Archer's poetry shop in Greek Street, Soho, but had never taken a picture of her or indeed any woman in the nude before. Bacon had devised his own rigid criteria for each pose, carefully instructing Deakin of how to capture Henrietta on film. 'He wants them naked and you lying on the bed' Deakin said to Henrietta, 'and he's told me the exact positions you must get into' (J. Deakin quoted in H. Moraes, Henrietta, London 1994, p. 71). The shoot was a disappointment, Bacon exclaiming, 'Well, look here, Henrietta - this blithering nitwit has reversed every single shot of you I wanted' (F. Bacon quoted in H. Moraes, Henrietta, London 1994, p. 71). Bacon demanded that it be restaged, and it was through this subsequent shoot that Deakin produced the well-known contact sheet used as the source image for the present painting.

COLOUR AS MOOD

The resulting work with all its heady sexuality was created on a papal red ground, as if derived from Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X. On top of this smooth, monochrome surface, the artist conjured up the walls of the bedroom with a stippled, lilac layer of paint just as he had done in his Man and Child (1963) held in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk. Together the serene chromatic balance of lilac, white and saturated red recall the bold and emotive fields of colour created by contemporary artists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. As David Sylvester has pointed out, in Bacon's other notorious painting of Moraes from the same year, Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1963), he employed stacked layers of purple, brown and black colour like those of his American colleagues. Yet Bacon was consistently scathing about Abstract Expressionism. For him, abstraction was to be restricted to the backgrounds of paintings, as complements to his figurative images. Notwithstanding, the Tate Gallery's 1959 exhibition, 'The New American Painting' did leave a profound impression on the artist, with certain similarities emerging in his later body of work. As David Sylvester concluded: Bacon, who was famous for enjoying and engendering huge hilarity in his social life, created an art that was always resoundingly solemn. But he was not quite alone in his solemnity; he was in the company of Newman and Rothko and Still and Pollock. Those four contemporaries of his are grouped by Robert Rosenblum as the exponents of 'The Abstract Sublime'. And Bacon's role in painting has been that of the one great exponent in our time of the Figurative Sublime' (D. Sylvester, Francis Bacon: The Human Body, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1998, p. 21).

THE PAINTER OF HUMAN FLESH

In Portrait of Henrietta Moraes a flurry of white brushstrokes combine to suggest a bedspread and pillows, using a technique strikingly similar to Bacon's salacious and at the time, deeply provocative masterpiece Two Figures (1953), depicting a couple, ostensibly Bacon and Peter Lacy, writhing around on a bed. In the present work, Henrietta's ripe body lies majestically at the centre of the bedroom. Her figure is remarkable, the swirling contours created with impulsive, cascading marks of the artist's brush. The muscles in her limbs almost convulse through the effects of Bacon's confident gestures. As André Breton once famously asserted, 'beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all' (A. Breton, Nadja, New York 1960, p. 160) and in Portrait of Henrietta Moraes these words appear to have found their ultimate fulfillment. The figure itself has a carnal quality to it, recalling Bacon's Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962), which marked a turning point in his practice. From the late 1940s through to the mid-1950s, Bacon's treatment of flesh had been largely monochromatic. From 1962 onwards however, his technique and use of vibrant colour offered the body a more visceral and graphic effect than ever before. In Three Studies for a Crucifixion, Bacon coupled the human body with a splayed carcass in the right hand panel, recalling the work of Chaim Soutine and Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox (1655), Bacon drew an explicit connection between meat, flesh and sex. In Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, the same link can be made, her body depicted as though the flesh had been turned mysteriously inside-out. As Bryson has suggested, 'Bacon changes the current entirely, by joining the torsion of muscle, with its erotic charge, to the spasms where the boundaries of the body break open to the outside, where inside and outside flow into each other and the body is opened up (like meat)' (N. Bryson, 'Bacon's Dialogues with the Past', W. Seipel et al. (eds.), Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna, 2004, p. 54).

THE FIGURE IN THREE DIMENSIONS

Henrietta's figure is surrounded by a halo of red, radiating like the latent heat from her skin. It is an almost spectral shadow, one of Bacon's well-known hallmarks. The artist first began engendering this effect in the 1950s in paintings such as Two Figures in a Room (1959) held in the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury collection, University of East Anglia. He had been looking at fragments from books such as J.E. Burns's, Adventures in Wildest Africa published in 1949 documenting big game hunting with three-dimensional printing. The book shortly predates the public frenzy for 3-D images of the mid 1950s, which clearly informed Bacon's practice (an interesting parallel given the current, contemporary vogue for 3-D optics). For the artist however, the silhouette was not merely a function of light or optical illusion, but rather a metaphorical tool representing the model's emotional and physical 'emanation'. As Gamper has elaborated, 'Bacon's shadow figures are a projection of a past, undamaged condition, a relic of a time when the body was still intact. The figure always carries within it its archetype, marked by unity and entirety, underlining its own precarious corporeality' (V. Gamper, 'The Ambivalent Function of a Shadow', W. Seipel et al. (eds.), Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna, 2004, p. 301).

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE

Through the centre of Henrietta's figure, Bacon has also added dark black, curving brush strokes, intimating a sense of movement or rotation of the torso. It is as if he has conflated a series of movements into one image, like an Eadweard Muybridge photograph, so that we simultaneously see Henrietta lying exposed, supine, as well as gently rolling onto her side. Her facial features appear distorted, like an African mask or the angular physiognomy of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso who Bacon greatly admired. She nevertheless offers a potent sense of Henrietta's character, shining up from the paint surface. As Bacon once explained, 'I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime' (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London 2000, p. 56).

THE WOMEN WHO SHAPED BACONS LIFE

Throughout his career Bacon painted intimate and deeply revealing portraits of men, but it was only in the 1960s that he seriously turned to the figures of women. As Martin Harrison has illuminated, these works are equally insightful of Bacon's character, revealing the depths of his search for self-identity and sexual orientation. Following the death of Peter Lacy in Tangiers in 1962, the same day as Bacon's major Tate Gallery opening, the artist turned to strong and independent female characters for support and friendship. He forged close relationships with characters such as Muriel Belcher, Isabel Rawsthorne and Henrietta Moraes whom he painted, as well as other women including Joan Leigh Fermor, Nadine Haim, Janetta Parladé, and Sonia Orwell who he credited as being 'the person most responsible for my success' (F. Bacon quoted in M. Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, London 2005, p. 224). In paint, he was expressing neither the absentee mother, nor the 'melting' submissive woman but, as Harrison has explained, 'the women with whom he identified-the recipients of male sex. He was as extreme in his sexual proclivities-he wore make-up and women's underwear and 'suffered' physical beatings-as in all aspects of his life and art. He conveyed his inner life without compromise, but in code, in his paintings' (M. Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, London 2005, p. 230). In this respect, Bacon's Portrait of Henrietta Moraes dismisses the supposed duality between the two sexes, presenting the dynamics of desire and delving into the recesses of Bacon's own restless mind.

    Christie's

       Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction

          Sale 8052 / Lot 33  Estimate £1,800,000 - £2,500,000

          14 February 2012 London, King Street

Lot Description

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) 
Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne 
each: signed and titled 'Francis Bacon Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas, in two parts 
each: 14 x 12in. (35.5 x 30.5cm.) 
Painted in 1983 

Special Notice 

Artist's Resale Right ("droit de Suite"). If the Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer also agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 20% on the buyer's premium.

Provenance

Dr. Paul and Mrs. Ruth Brass (a gift from the artist in 1983).
Anon. sale, Sotheby's London, 12 October 2007, lot 31. 

London, Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., Francis Bacon 1909-1992, Small Portrait Studies, 1993, no. 14 (illustrated in colour, unpaged). 

Lot Notes

'[Rawsthorne had an] animal exuberance a magnetism and a mobility of expression that captivated Bacon...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' (M. Peppiatt quoted in F. Laukötter & M. Müller, 'Paintings 1945-1991', A. Zweite & M. Müller (eds.), Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real, London 2006, p. 148).

Created in 1983, Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne is the last portrait that Francis Bacon ever painted of his lifelong friend, confidante and artistic muse Isabel Rawsthorne. Given as a gift to Bacon's personal physician, Dr. Paul Brass, along with a number of other paintings including Figure in Movement (1985), it commemorates two of the artist's most intimate relationships. An enduring character in Bacon's life, he first met Rawsthorne in 1947. She was already by this stage a deeply desired and sought after model, living and working in Paris with artists including André Derain, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. It was this dynamic young woman, with her outspoken charisma and strident zeal who was to introduce Bacon to Giacometti in 1965. In Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, a sense of her tenacious spirit appears distilled as if into the very fabric of the painting. Two profiles are depicted in opposite panels, like two aspects in a cabinet mirror, presenting the viewer with an almost 'stereoscopic' view of the subject's visage. Rendered against a backdrop of brilliant orange, the face appears proud, the arched brow and noble contours expertly captured by Bacon's brushwork.

Just as the artist elaborated in his Reclining Man with Sculpture (1960) currently held in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, the present painting has an almost tangible, sculptural quality, the handsome physiognomy almost carved out from the luminescent, flat ground. As the artist once told David Sylvester, 'I would like now - and I suppose it's through thinking about sculpture - I would like, quite apart from the attempt to do sculpture, to make sculpture, to make the painting itself very much more sculptural' (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p. 114). Vibrant, fuchsia hatchings partially obscure Rawsthorne's eyes, cheeks and lips adding a powerful geometry to the composition. At the same time, these veils of paint reveal a sympathy rarely witnessed in Bacon's oeuvre. Rawsthorne was already seventy by the time of this painting, yet Bacon opted to suspend the passage of time for his friend, softening the lines of her face and the failing eyes in a mark of deep affection.

Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne was derived from a black and white photograph taken by John Deakin in and around Soho in the 1960s. As Bacon once explained, 'I have, even in the case of friends who will come and pose, I've had photographs taken for portraits because I much prefer working from the photographs than from them. It's true to say I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn'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' (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p. 38). In the painting, her profile clearly matches that of the photo, yet it is invested with a unique essence of the character. Distorted and depicted against a shrieking orange palette, the painting goes far beyond the physical appearance to 'record' a sense of Rawsthorne's own physical atmosphere and gravity. As the artist once concluded, the portrait must capture the 'pulsations' of the person and in Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne with its bold, unabashed and statuesque composition, this is carried out prodigiously.

Throughout the course of his career Bacon depicted those from his close inner circle of friends. Amongst these, very few were women. Isabel Rawsthorne was perhaps the most significant in his life, appearing in three magnificent large-scale paintings between 1964-1967 and at least fifteen small portraits and five triptychs up until 1983. Rawsthorne was a talented young artist and emigrée living between London and Paris. Studying at the Royal College of Art, she had become Jacob Epstein's model and was later sponsored through his letters of recommendation to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. It was here, sitting in the Dôme café near the Boulevard Montparnasse that the audacious, auburn-trussed woman was to meet dealer Pierre Colle. He asked her to model for André Derain who became consumed by the shape of her almond eyes and feline frame. Whilst drinking in the Dôme Isabel also caught the attention of Alberto Giacometti who after a number of days approached her. As she later recounted 'from that moment on, [Giacometti and I] met daily at five p.m. Months went by until he asked me to come to his studio to pose. I already knew he had changed my life forever' (I. Rawsthorne, quoted in V. Wiesinger, 'Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers', Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers: Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2008, p. 216).

Through her associations with Giacometti, Rawsthorne went on to form acquaintances, friendships and romantic trysts with men including Balthus, Georges Bataille, Tristan Tzara and Picasso. Shortly after her death, Bacon even suggested that he had once been her lover: 'you know I also made love to Isabel Rawsthorne, a very beautiful woman who was Derain's model and Georges Bataille's girlfriend' (F. Bacon quoted in Paris Match, May 1992). Rawsthorne was the person to introduce Bacon to Giacometti in 1965. It was an important encounter for the two mutually admiring painters, each of whom achieved such a tangible, sculptural sense of reality in their works. As Bacon later recounted, 'I do absolutely understand what Giacometti meant when he said to me 'why ever change the subject? Because you could go on for the whole of your life painting the same subject' (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, pp. 236-237).

          Christie's to sell Bacon's 'Portrait of Henrietta Moraes'

                 Auction Central News, Friday 20 January, 2012

                                    Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, from photograph by John Deakin 1963

LONDON – On Feb. 14 Christie's will offer the extraordinary Portrait of Henrietta Moraes in their evening auction of Post-War & Contemporary Art. Having remained in the same private collection for almost 30 years, this rare painting depicts the artist’s close friend and model Henrietta Moraes and comes to auction for the first time. An estimate on the painting, which measures 65 inches by 56 inches, will be provided upon request.

Francis Outred, Christie's Head of Post-War & Contemporary Art, Europe, writes: “Searing with raw colour and texture, Portrait of Henrietta Moraes is one of the most seductive and sexually charged paintings I have ever encountered by Francis Bacon. The carefully constructed mood through colour is forcefully invaded by the extraordinary swipes of the loaded brush, which create the woman’s voluptuous figure. This juxtaposition of the sheer beauty of colour with the brutal physicality of paint is what makes Bacon’s art so remarkable.

"Executed in 1963, this painting was undertaken in a landmark year, which saw the artist perfect his technique. It followed a period of intense experimentation in which Bacon investigated the properties of paint and the architecture of the human form. This turning point is widely acknowledged; three out of the seven large-scale paintings created in 1963 now form parts of major international museum collections including The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebæk, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff and the Tate Gallery, London. In the same year, Bacon also created a small-scale triptych Three Studies for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1963) currently held in the Museum of Modern Art. In a similar manner to the MoMA painting, Portrait of Henrietta Moraes is built up from a ground of papal red, which acts as a silhouette both in image and metaphor. The work has only had two owners since the day it was made, one of which was the important collector and post-War industrialist Willy Schniewind and the other being the present owner, a distinguished New Yorker who acquired the work in 1983. Portrait of Henrietta Moraes has not been seen in the public eye for 15 years and I am very excited to be presenting this important piece of British art in London.”

Portrait of Henrietta Moraes was painted by Francis Bacon toward the end of 1963, the year after his breakthrough retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1962, and the same year as his first major American exhibition at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. For many years, the work formed part of the Schniewind collection of important post-war paintings, the present owner acquiring it from the family in 1983.

Portrait of Henrietta Moraes represents part of the pantheon of great paintings by Bacon executed in 1963, the majority of which are now housed in major international museum collections. Over the preceding four years, Bacon had devoted himself to investigating the properties of paint, technique and undertaking studies of the human nude; a subject that he had rarely dared consider in his early career. Standing out proudly from a vivid lilac ground, Henrietta lies undressed in all her voluptuous glory on a simple ticking mattress. For Bacon, this visceral quality and the sheer physicality of his model’s body was a source of constant rapture. Indeed he returned to Moraes as a subject for numerous paintings over the course of his career including Three Studies for the Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1963) held in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, Bacon imbues the painting with a striking passion, as if carried over from the intensity of his own personal life. This was the year that Bacon embarked upon his all-consuming love affair with George Dyer, immortalizing his partner in his first painting.

While Bacon had often considered the figure of the male nude, his depictions of Moraes were the first to seriously consider the female form. As David Sylvester once observed: “Bacon’s lack of personal erotic interest in naked females did nothing to prevent these paintings from being as passionate as those of the male bodies that obsessed him.” Moraes herself was a notorious bonne vivante, a regular fixture at the artist’s favourite haunt, the Colony Room, Soho. The muse to a number of contemporary British artists, she was once the lover of Lucian Freud and appeared as the sitter in his Girl in a Blanket (1952). Bacon only ever depicted friends and never painted his subjects from life, preferring to use photographs instead. For Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, Bacon commissioned John Deakin, his friend and feted photographer to take a now renowned series of images that he would translate into his paintings.

Christie's Post-War Contemporary Art Evening Auction will conducted at their 8 King St. galleries on Feb. 14 beginning at 7 p.m. GMT. 

    Bacon's nude muse portrait to fetch €20m

       Irish Independent, Saturday January 21 2012

          The Portrait of Henrietta Moraes which Francis Bacon painted from a photograph by John Deakin in 1963. 

SHE was an 'It' girl of 1960s London. He was a gay painter who would become one of the giants of world art.

The unlikely bond between femme fatale Henrietta Moraes and Dublin-born Francis Bacon produced over a dozen paintings, one of which is expected to fetch more than €20m when it is brought to auction next month.

Having spent the past 30 years in a New York private collection, the Portrait of Henrietta Moraes will go under the hammer on Valentine's Day, February 14, as the highlight of Christie's auction of post-war and contemporary art in London.

While the anticipated price tag is enough to draw attention to the sale, the story of the lives behind the painter and his muse is even more intriguing.

Henrietta was the undisputed queen of bohemia in Soho in the late 1950s and 1960s, living a hedonistic lifestyle of nude modelling, drinking, drug-taking and many dalliances.

Born Audrey Wendy Abbott to an officer of the Indian Air Force in 1931, Henrietta had an unhappy childhood, raised by a disciplinarian grandmother in England, before attending secretarial school.

She was just 18 when she married an older man, the filmmaker Michael Law, then she wed the actor Norman Bowler before turning to a younger husband, the 18-year-old poet Dom Moraes (she was 25).

In her autobiography, she claims Mr Moraes went out for cigarettes one day and never came back.

She was a flatmate of singer Marianne Faithfull for years and had a brief career as a cat burglar for which she served time in Holloway Prison.

But her career as an artists' model will ensure she is never forgotten.

She was briefly a lover of Lucian Freud who painted her on three occasions.

But Bacon is believed to have painted her at least a dozen times and possibly more. The actual number is unverified as Bacon liked to paint from photographs and asked his friend John Deakin to take a number of images of Henrietta.

The large, vibrant nude painting up for sale has been described by Francis Outred, Christie's head of post-war and contemporary art in Europe, as "one of the most seductive and sexually charged paintings I have ever encountered by Bacon".

The image was painted in 1968 when Bacon was embarking on a stormy love affair with George Dyer, who became an important subject of his works both during his lifetime and after his death from an overdose in 1971.

The portrait, which measures over 1.5 metres, has only ever had two owners - post-war industrialist Willy Schniewind and the present owner who acquired it in 1983, identified as a "distinguished New Yorker".

The auction record for a Bacon was set at Sotheby's in New York in May 2008 when his 1976 painting Triptych sold for $86.3m (€67m).

- Grainne Cunningham

A Lilac-Hued Bacon at Christie's

By Carol Vogal, The New York Times, January 19, 2012.

                                  Christie's is selling Bacon's Portrait of Henrietta Moraes

Have a Francis Bacon to sell? London is where many auction house experts are advising collectors to try their luck. “We’ve seen extraordinary prices paid for Bacons in London in recent years,” said Brett Gorvy, international chairman of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department. “Americans have competed as aggressively as buyers from emerging markets.” And with so many rich Russians and Middle Easterners putting down roots in London, it’s the obvious place to sell.

That explains the image on the catalogue cover for Christie’s Feb. 14 London sale of postwar and contemporary art. It’s a 1963 portrait of Henrietta Moraes, the model and friend of Bacon’s, reclining naked on a white bed in a room with a deeply saturated lilac wall and a bright red floor.

Bacon generally painted his subjects from photographs rather than from life, and for this picture he commissioned his friend John Deakin to shoot Ms. Morales in 1961. Christie’s estimates the painting will sell for about $23 million to $30 million.

The record price for a Bacon painting at auction is $86.3 million, achieved in May 2008 when Sotheby’s in New York sold a 1976 triptych, supposedly to Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch. Christie’s in London sold Triptych 1974-77 that same year for a robust $51.6 million and a year later auctioned Three Studies for a Self-Portrait (1975) for $34.4 million. And in June Christie’s London sold Study for a Portrait (1953) for $28.7 million.

Mr. Gorvy isn’t saying who is selling Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, but art experts familiar with Bacon’s work said it was Sheldon Solow, the New York real estate developer and a well-known collector who bought the painting from Ernst Beyeler, the Swiss dealer, in 1983.

Mr. Solow is not known as an auction seller but at 83 is re-evaluating his collection.

The Bacon portrait is not all Mr. Solow is said to be selling at Christie’s next month. Two other works from his collection are coming to auction on the evening of Feb. 7: a 1925 Miró painting, Painting-Poem, which is expected to fetch $9.2 million to $13.8 million; and Reclining Figure: Festival, a 1951 sculpture by Henry Moore, expected to bring about $5.3 million to $8.5 million.

The paintings are on view at Christie’s in New York until Tuesday.

    Bacon's Nude Model May Fetch $30 as Owner Tests Demand

       By Scott Reyburn, Bloomberg, Jan 20, 2012 

                      Portrait of Henrietta Moraes 1963 by Francis Bacon

A 1963 female nude by Francis Bacon may raise as much as $30 million at an auction next month.

Bacon’s sexually charged Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, showing one of his favourite models sprawled across a bed, has a formally undisclosed estimate of about 18 million pounds at Christies's International (CHRS)  in its Feb. 14. London  sale.

The painting’s owner, an unidentified New York collector, is testing the market for high-value contemporary works. Bacon is the U.K.’s most expensive artist at auction. The portrait has never appeared at public sale before and has no guaranteed minimum price, said Christie’s. It dates from the year that the painter embarked on his relationship with George Dyer.

“Bacon’s lack of personal erotic interest in naked females did nothing to prevent these paintings from being as passionate as those of the male bodies that obsessed him,” said David Sylvester, a U.K.-based art critic, who interviewed the artist in the 1960s and 1970s

Moraes was a close friend of Bacon’s during the 1950s and 1960s. Like Bacon and Lucian Freud,  she was a regular visitor to the Colony Club Room in Soho. She battled drink and drug addictions, had many lovers, once shared an apartment with singer Marianne

Faithfull and was sent to prison after an unsuccessful attempt to become a cat burglar. She appears in a number of paintings using photos taken of her by John Deakin.

Her full-length portrait was done by Bacon about the time of his first major exhibition in the U.S., held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The work has only had two owners. It was first part of the collection formed by the German industrialist Willy Schniewind, then acquired by the current seller in 1983, said Christie’s

A 1976 Bacon Triptych sold for $86.3 million at Sotheby's (BID)  ew York, in May 2008, a record for the artist at auction.  Roman Abramovich was the buyer, dealers said. Though demand slumped in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., prices have since recovered. The artist’s 1964 painting Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud was sold at Sotheby’s last February for 23 million pounds ($37 million), the highest price achieved for a contemporary work in London in 2011

THE CHALLENGES OF AUTHENTICATION:

FRANCIS BACON - A CASE STUDY 

Wednesday, 25 January 2012

CANCELLED

Although the process of authentication is a subject that The Courtauld Institute of Art is interested in from an academic perspective, whilst there is the possibility of legal action being taken in relation to the “Bacon/Ravarino” drawings, it has been decided that this particular case study is not appropriate for a Courtauld Research Forum event.  Therefore, the debate that was proposed for 25 January 2012 at The Courtauld will not now take place

Are these Bacon artworks really kosher?

Experts spilt over supposed lover's claim that hoard of drawings is work of revered artist

Dalya Alberge, The Independent, Friday 30 December 2011

                     The authenticity of the drawings is to be debated at the Courtauld Institute of Art

The trouble with authenticating Bacon

Disputed sketches due to be discussed at Courtauld Institute forum

By Martin Bailey, The Art Newspaper,  20 December 2011

The Courtauld Institute of Art in London and the Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné project, set up the artist's estate, are due to host a debate on the problems associated with authenticating Bacon's work.

The law vs scholarship

Taking academics to court over authentication issues is eroding independent expertise

By Georgina Adam and Riah Pryor. The Art Newspaper, News, Issue 230, 08 December 2011

The news that a leading scholar felt constrained by legal advice from giving a full opinion on a group of drawings attributed to Francis Bacon highlights a growing fear among experts that they might be sued for giving their opinion.

On the advice of lawyers, Martin Harrison, who has published widely on 19th- and 20th-century art and is the editor of the Bacon catalogue raisonné, will only go as far as saying that these drawings, which some suspect are fakes, are “unlike any authenticated works”. An open seminar on these drawings is due to be held at the Courtauld Institute on 25 January. 

A similar problem arose concerning a group of newly discovered “Degas” plasters last year. Opinion is divided over their authenticity, but a number of those expressing doubt, including the Degas scholars Richard Kendall of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts and Patricia Failing of the University of Washington, decided not to discuss the matter publicly. 

“Many experts are reluctant to give their opinion in public because of the threat of legal action, which is in fact quite remote,” says Karen Sanig, the head of art law at Mishcon de Reya, London. “This perception is having a freezing effect on scholarship. It has [become] increasingly obvious as a problem over the past six months, partly due to the coverage of authentication issues in the press.” With the prices of 20th-century art rising so strongly over the past decade, it is little surprise that these disputes have become so heated. 

Litigiousness 

In New York, the art lawyer Ronald Spencer, of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn, agrees with Sanig. “This is a very serious problem. Specialists are often academics earning $100,000 [or less] a year and they can’t afford litigation they are fearful of being a defendant in a lawsuit, even if they should win.” He admits that there are more of these cases in the US: “It’s a cliché, but we are more litigious here.” He says that the US system, whereby the plaintiff does not have to pay the legal fees of the successful defendant, encourages this. “In England,” says Sanig, “it would be hard to bring a successful claim against someone who states their honest opinion in a public forum, in good faith. In the US, however, there may be a basis for a claim that doesn’t exist in the UK. Nevertheless, this does not mean that a claim would be any more successful than in the UK.” 

What are the grounds for such actions? Owners seeking authentication of their works are increasingly likely to go to court, sometimes claiming huge damages, if they do not get a stamp of approval. Possible grounds for a claim include product disparagement, negligence, defamation or even fraud). In the US, plaintiffs have taken authentication boards to court under anti-trust laws, accusing them of conspiring to exclude authentic pieces from the market in an attempt to increase the value of their own holdings. 

This was how Joe Simon-Whelan attempted to get the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board to reverse its rejection of his 1967 “red” Warhol Self-portrait. Simon-Whelan withdrew after running out of money: the board has now also announced that it is disbanding early next year, because of the enormous cost of lawsuits. For the same reason, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation disbanded in 1995 after completing the catalogue raisonné of Jackson Pollock’s work, but this has not prevented it being sued a number of times over disputed works. 

Compiling catalogues raisonnés is another source of potential risk. The Parisian curator Marc Restellini abandoned preparation of the catalogue of Modigliani’s drawings after a court challenge by a collector whose two drawings were excluded. Nancy Mathews, president of the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association, also refers to threats. “Issuing a negative opinion can expose a scholar to the anger of the owner,” she says. “In the US, this can prompt the owner to take legal action whether it’s justified or not—it’s emotional—and cause headaches for the scholar even if it has no real legal basis.” 

Most of these suits fail. However, says John R. Cahill, art lawyer at Lynn and Cahill in New York: “Even a baseless lawsuit costs money to defend and… is having a chilling effect on a number of foundations and scholars.”

Even keeping silent can be dangerous. Recent cases have seen owners of works attacking specialists and boards for not giving an opinion. The owner of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Fuego Flores, 1983, sued the artist’s authentication board, demanding that it either reach a decision or pay damages of up to $5m. After the lawsuit was dismissed, the Basquiat Authentication Com­mit­tee ruled the work genuine. 

Many fear that individuals may soon fear speaking openly in public platforms, such as in symposia, and institutions are also concerned. Sanig says that larger museums in the US appear to be stopping their curators from giving opinions on authentication matters. However, this can be resolved by seeking a disclaimer from any potential suit or an indemnity for legal costs from an interested party, in order to further academic debate. 

How can a specialist guard against the threat of lawsuits? “In the US, the law is such that an owner of a work of art is entitled to take you to court if you offer an opinion that is not specifically requested by him/her. Authors writing catalogues raisonnés learn this early on, so it’s always a part of proper procedure to offer opinions only to the owner and only when requested,” says Mathews. 

Auction houses have pages of small print at the back of their sales catalogues, plus teams of lawyers, and dealers generally outline their contractual obligations in their bills of sale. None of this has prevented a number of high-profile lawsuits. The recent case brought against Christie’s over Leonardo’s rediscovered work on vellum, La Bella Principessa (The Beautiful Princess), highlighted the vulnerability of auction houses accused of breach of duty and negligence (Christie’s won on the basis that the case was brought too late, but an appeal is pending). “A lot of the problems arise because there is no established international regime for authentication or due diligence generally in the art world. Many rely on the opinion of few experts, and this makes them potentially vulnerable or too powerful,” says Sanig. 

When art history disputes do end up in the court, it is often the least appropriate place for them. “The law courts, certainly since the Ruskin vs Whistler trial in 1878, have often been little more than a vehicle for the judiciary to parade its ignorance,” says Harrison. Manifold cases have seen judges dismiss expert opinion: for example, in the case of an Alexander Calder work, the judge declared the piece authentic, ignoring the opinion of the leading Calder dealer and the Calder Foundation, saying it was not a forgery but mis-assembled. The mobile, which cost the owners $500,000, is not in the Calder catalogue raisonné and reportedly languishes in a basement, now considered unsellable. 

As a result even flagrant fakes are not denounced, meaning that innocent people could be deceived. The authors of this article empathise with Eugene Thaw, who, when asked why he would not specify reasons for doubting a Pollock attribution, said: “It would land me in court.”

For further articles on authentication issues, including comment pieces by art law experts Peter R. Stern and Norman Palmer, see our December print edition

Chinese art market losing steam 

By Colin Gleadell, The Daily Telegraph, Tuesday 15 November 2011

Two early works by Francis Bacon were withdrawn from Sotheby’s sale in New York last week as they had been denied an export license by the British government due to their national cultural importance. Dating from c.1935, they are early views of interiors made when Bacon was making a living as an interior decorator. Tate is hoping to include one of them in its exhibition about the influence of Picasso on British art next year. Curiously, both had been on the market before in the last ten years had a UK institution wished to buy them.

Sotheby’s Sells Group of Clyfford Still Piantings for $114 Million

By Kelly Crow, The Wall Street Journal, November 10. 2011

      Francis Bacon, Detail, Three Studies for a Self Portrait, 1967

In all, Sotheby's sold 315.8 million worth of art—well over its $270 million high estimate and the third-highest sale total ever achieved by its contemporary art department. (Its peak remains a $362 million evening sale in May 2008.)

Co-curator of the Francis Bacon Retrospective at the Pompidou Center in 1996
Head of the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris.

 

 

Sotheby's
 

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
New York | 09 Nov 2011, 07:00 PM | N08791

ABSTRACTION - FIGURATION A PRIVATE COLLECTION

 

    

                           Corner of the Studio 1934 Francis Bacon

 

LOT 40

FRANCIS BACON BRITISH 1909 - 1992

CORNER OF THE STUDIO

signed and dated 34 pen, ink and wash on paper
20 3/4  x 15 5/8  in.  52.7 x 39.8 cm.

ESTIMATE 150,000-200,000 USD

This work has been requested for the upcoming exhibition titled Picasso and Modern British Art to be held at Tate
Britain, London (February - July 2012).

PROVENANCE

Gladys MacDermot, London (acquired directly from the artist in 1934)
Private Collection, Geneva
Sotheby's, London, June 26, 2009, Lot 106
Acquired by the present owner from the above

LITERATURE

Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, New York and London, 1964, cat. no. 12, illustrated
Exh. Cat., Paris, Centre National d'Art et de Culture, Centre Georges Pompidou, Francis Bacon, 1996, p. 15,
illustrated
Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, New York, 1996, p. 69 (text reference)
David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 15, illustrated
Exh. Cat., Paris, Musée Picasso, Bacon Picasso: La Vie des Images, 2005, fig. no. 81, p. 94, illustrated

CATALOGUE NOTE

Francis Bacon's Corner of the Studio is one of the earliest surviving works by the artist and one that deeply solidifies
his connection with Pablo Picasso. Bacon destroyed many of his earliest works and the fact this work escaped that
fate only affirms the artist's belief in its success. The mysterious forms exist in an uncannily familiar environment,
eliciting a mild sense of dislocation that draws the viewer's curiosity. Most importantly, the present work begins
Bacon's confrontation with the concept of model, artist and medium – a proficiency Picasso had already so brilliantly
accomplished.  Bacon looked to Picasso's ability to absorb Surrealism and place it within a more realistic
environment, causing the viewer to teeter on the fluctuating edge of understanding and confusion, realism and
abstraction.  Bacon died in Spain, the birth place of Picasso – an undeniably poetic connection to the mythological
character of Oedipus, who died in Colonus, near to the Athenian king Theseus to whom he was indebted.

Bacon's vocation as an artist followed a brief, but nonetheless successful career as an interior designer. When he
turned from designer to painter in the early 1930s, he did so with great passion and zeal. His first studio was located
at his residence at 71 Royal Hospital Road in Chelsea, a place where he lived from 1933 – 1936. Of the eight works
known to have been painted by him during this time, Corner of the Studio is one of the clearest representations of the
space in which Bacon began his career, as well as the first indication of the intimate proximity he felt throughout his
life towards his studio environment. The other representation of the studio from these years is a pastel in a primarily
red palette, Studio Interior, which is clearer in form but less articulated in terms of architectural environment. The
vibrancy of the background colour and the geometrically defined platform for the solitary figure anticipates the artist's
later paintings. Bacon's primary studio at Reece Mews in South Kensington would become one of the most studied
and remarkable artist studios in history. Perhaps as a result of his complex relationship with his father and eviction

from his own childhood home, Bacon strongly connected with having his own space, perhaps even more so than other
artists. The studio space provided him with autonomy and control. After his death, it was determined that the
seemingly chaotic space in which he had lived and worked was in actuality, quite distinctly organized into specific
areas.

In the present work, the shadowy, biomorphic and "figural" form is here set against an interior that represents a door,
floorboards and perhaps a busily wallpapered wall. The rectangular framing of the figure by the shape of the door, as
well as the gridding of the floor boards, recall compositions by the modernist, Piet Mondrian. In contrast, if Bacon's
figure had been realistic, the composition would virtually lose its successful impact. The illusion of shadowy forms
within the sepia-toned wash, be it a sphinx, dog, dancer, model or the artist himself are prescient to the distorted and
loosely formed figures that would consume Bacon's oeuvre. The composition is strongly influenced by the paintings of
Bacon's friend Roy de Maistre and Picasso's Cubist works, which Bacon had first encountered on a trip to Paris in the
summer of 1927. There is also a clear reference to Surrealism, notably invoked through the chance, involuntary
marks in fluid ink wash that seek to blur distinctions between its multiple forms and also lend it a dynamic sense of
movement. Similar in composition and subject to Pablo Picasso's Bather Opening a Beach Hut, both works have a
central biomorphic creature existing within an understandable environment. Bacon was acutely aware of Picasso's
influence and stated of the aforementioned painting, "As Picasso, I believe, absorbed everything, he absorbed
Surrealism, and those images are profoundly unillustrative but profoundly real about figures. For instance a curious
curved form unlocking the door of a bathing cabin is far more real than if it was an illustration of a figure unlocking the
door of that cabin."  (David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, 3 rd edition, London, 1987,
p. 170).

For Francis Bacon, his art was always based in ritual and frequently biographical. The figure in the present work is
indeed alone in the world and is suffused with solitary introspection. Corner of the Studio provides valuable insight
into the obscure early years of Bacon's oeuvre from which scant information exists, casting new light onto the thematic
and pictorial developments of one of the greatest masters of European Post-War art. Lorenza Trucchi (in translation)
notes, "Bacon's temporal dimension coincides with emotion, or rather, with instinct. His spatial dimension is reduced,
limited, condensed in the event. Time of the instance, space of the event, and – since the instinct is embodied in the
event – time and space coincide so perfectly as to create one highly concentrated existential situation." (Lorenza
Trucchi, Francis Bacon, New York, 1975, p. 3). The remaining works from his earliest years as a painter are essential
building blocks in the formation of his mature psychological and visual aesthetic and Corner of the Studio stands as a
keystone for this foundation.

 

 

Sotheby's
 

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
New York | 09 Nov 2011, 07:00 PM | N08791

ABSTRACTION - FIGURATION A PRIVATE COLLECTION

 

    LOT 41

 

    

                         Interior of a Room c. 1935, Francis Bacon

 

INTERIOR OF A ROOM FRANCIS BACON
oil on canvas44 x 34 in.  112 x 86.5 cm
Painted circa 1935.
 

ESTIMATE Estimate Upon Request

This work has been requested for the upcoming exhibition titled Picasso and Modern British Art to be held at Tate
Britain, London (February - July 2012)
 

PROVENANCE

Ms. Diana V. Watson, London (acquired directly from her cousin, the artist)
Sotheby's, London, November 30, 1989, Lot 600
Mr. James Kirkman, London (acquired from the above)
Sotheby's, London, July 2, 1998, Lot 117
Crane Kalman Gallery, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above in June 2000
 

EXHIBITED

Lugano, Museum of Modern Art, Francis Bacon, March - May 1993, cat. no. 5, p. 23, illustrated in colour
Paris, Centre National d'Art et de Culture, Centre Georges Pompidou: Munich, Haus de Kunst, Francis Bacon, June
1996 - January 1997, cat. no. 2, p. 82, illustrated in colour
Paris, Musée Picasso, Bacon Picasso: La Vie des Images, March - May 2005, fig. no. 108, p. 119, illustrated in colour
 

LITERATURE

 
Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, New York and London, 1964, cat. no. 11, illustrated
Hugh M. Davies, Francis Bacon: The Early and Middle Years, London, 1978, pl. 20, pp. 24 - 25, illustrated in colour
Richard Kendall, "Francis Bacon & Lucian Freud," Apollo Magazine, November 1996, p. 44, illustrated in colour
Christophe Domino, Bacon, Monstre de Peinture, Paris, 1996, pp. 24 & 25, illustrated
Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, New York, 1996, p. 69 (text reference)
Christophe Domino, Francis Bacon: Taking Reality by Surprise, London 1997, no. 25, illustrated in colour
Exh. Cat., New Haven, The Yale Center for British Art (and travelling), Francis Bacon: A Retrospective Exhibition,
1999, p. 21, illustrated
David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, New York, 2000, fig. 5, p. 16, illustrated
Exh. Cat., Milan, Palazzo Reale, Bacon, 2008, fig. 2, p. 28, illustrated in colour

CATALOGUE NOTE

On the eve of two decades passing since the death of Francis Bacon, we are today still unravelling the compound
mysteries of his extraordinary life and art. While the embers of immediate memory inevitably grow dimmer with the
progression of time, the prism through which we acquire historical distance and perspective concurrently grows ever
clearer and sharper. Although the strata of interpretation and analysis of the past progressively accumulate, the
topography of history can of course only be assessed from the ever-adjusting viewpoint of the present. Like Caspar
David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, we stand before a continually shifting vista of what has gone before
us: the impression of this panorama subtly mutating in accordance with the evolution of our perception.

For this reason each generation must revisit continually that which has passed; learn and relearn salient lessons both

old and new; and interrogate history to invigorate the present with new insight and understanding.

In recent decades curators of museums spanning the globe have mounted grand retrospectives of artists' lives and
works to advance the critical reception and received wisdom of their subjects. On occasion, these revisionist

representations of the record of human history strike a chord of such resonance that we are forced to confront and
reassess certain assumptions and prejudices we held about the past, sometimes to the extent that our previous views
seem almost to have been blind. Such was the effect during the five month long retrospective of Francis Bacon's work
conceived by David Sylvester and presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1996, when the present painting
Interior of a Room was selected as one of just three works to represent the period of the artist's life before 1944, his
thirty-fifth year. In the context of the exhibition, where it was shown alongside the ephemeral grisaille Crucifixion of
1933 and the intensely mystifying Figures in a Garden of circa 1936 (Collection of the Tate Collection), Interior of a
Room presented a stunning revelation. A sensationally multi-faceted and intricate masterwork, it is replete with
iconographic signifiers that denote the astonishingly wide-ranging sources of inspiration that fuelled Bacon's artistic
practice. Moreover, trapped within its dense layers reside the incipient indicators of much that would define Bacon's
subsequent output and enable him to advance so dramatically the course of artistic enquiry in the Twentieth Century.
Interior of a Room encapsulates the unrestrained ambition of a man in his early twenties who, despite his relatively
young age, had already amassed quite a remarkable and astonishingly diverse life experience. Aged no more than
sixteen, in 1926 he had abruptly abandoned his home, driven away from hearth and kin by his father, and embarked
for London. At the beginning of 1927, he was in Berlin and by the spring he had arrived in Paris, staying that summer
with a family in Chantilly before moving in the autumn to the Hôtel Delambre in Montparnasse, where he endured an
impoverished subsistence lifestyle for almost a year. Returning to London at the end of 1928 he became a self-styled
furniture designer and interior decorator, forging an idiosyncratic style indebted in part to the Bauhaus and in part to
the purists Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, whose architecture and designs he must have encountered while on the
Continent. Mirrors, hanging rugs, folding screens, curved metal tubes and geometric carpets are well-evidenced as
chief components of Bacon's design style in an article in The Studio magazine of 1930 and the documentary paintings
of his fellow painter and friend Roy de Maistre. By October 1933, however, the twenty four year-old's painting was
included in the ground-breaking exhibition Twentieth Century Art held at the newly-opened Mayor Gallery in Cork
Street alongside works by Braque, Dalí, Ernst, Klee, Léger, Miró, Soutine, Giacometti, Picasso and a host of other
renowned artists responsible for defining the international avant-garde.

Hence by the time of the present work Bacon had coasted to meteoric success in the blink of an eye, having been
selected for attention by the leading art critic, Herbert Read; exhibited in one of the best galleries; and bought by the
pre-eminent collector Sir Michael Sadler. It is near inconceivable that Bacon's newfound celebrity and success did not
spur his thoughts towards emulating the prodigious early achievements of his heroes from the pantheon of Art History,
likely none more so than the young Pablo Picasso, whose long shadow readily traversed the twenty-eight years that
separated them both. It is perhaps particularly characteristic of youthful ambition, driven by naïve and headstrong
audacity, to pursue the allure of the definitive masterpiece: autonomous greatness and the legend of genius being
prized above else at the dawn of a career. The ambition and scope of Interior of a Room, its pictorial and thematic
layering, its artistic and ideological complexity, to say nothing of its exhilarating technical execution, define it as just
such a painting: the summation of all Bacon had experienced thus far; his ultimate artistic undertaking to date; and the
defining work of his pre-war career. As declared by Anne Baldassari, now director of the Musée Picasso in Paris,
"This work, it is true, is the prime indicator of coherence in Bacon's painting between 1933 and 1944...

This large scale canvas, a subtle construction of three broad vertical bands, seems to deploy over each a dimension
representative of space... an ambivalent world where, around the figure, there extends a surface on which the
imagination may be inscribed... This space haunted by inadmissible figures would be the one through which an
awakened sleeper or a dreamer advances, making his way." (Exh. Cat., Paris, Musée Picasso, Bacon Picasso:

The Life of Images, 2005, pp. 106-107).

Bacon rejoiced in relaying the fact that as a painter he was entirely self-taught and his insatiable capacity for
innovation finds its first fully mature expression with Interior of a Room. The editor of the catalogue for the Pompidou
retrospective, and now director of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Fabrice Hergott, perceived there that
this "very complex composition" demonstrates not only Bacon's inherent discernment of Picasso's Analytic Cubism
and Matisse's appropriation of schematic decoration, but also marks the inception of outstanding iconographic and
conceptual themes that would reappear throughout his subsequent oeuvre. (Exh. Cat., Paris, Centre national d'art et
de culture Georges Pompidou, Francis Bacon, 1996, p. 82). Indeed, by explicitly inaugurating some of Bacon's most
influential pictorial lexica, this painting testifies to just how early Bacon was intoxicated by certain imagery and ideas
that would occupy him until his death. At the same time, Interior of a Room negotiates a steeply-raked precipice
between abstraction and figuration, drifting definitely into neither domain but brilliantly inhabiting an indeterminate
zone in which the spectator continually recognises, remembers and loses esoteric visual referents, apparently resident
of an ulterior dimension.

As a voracious student of the History of Art, the young Francis Bacon anchored his early innovation to paradigms of
the Western canon. With its vertically segregated composition, dramatic disposition of spatial compartments and
juxtaposition of interior and exterior zones, let alone a reclining white dog in the bottom right corner, Interior of a Room
is a clear reinterpretation of Velázquez' 1656 masterpiece Las Meninas. Thus, like his artistic ancestor, Bacon here
pursues archetypal concepts of perception and visual cognition; the totem of the mirror and attendant themes of
interpreting reflected realities; as well as the perplexing dynamic between painter and subject, between the viewer and
the viewed. This latest thread had been recently reinvigorated by Picasso in his famous work Painter and Model of
1928, which similarly confronts issues inherent to the nature of depiction; the silhouette profile being inscribed on his
artist's canvas in the picture apparently adhering more closely to a preconceived idea of reality than the 'actual' model.
Similarly, towards the upper right of Interior of a Room there is a black-outlined, purple silhouette that could be
interpreted as the outline of a human torso, extending from the shoulder to the elbow. Indeed, examination of this
canvas under x-ray reveals that this dark purple figure-outline may indeed have once been surmounted by a head,
which was subsequently over-painted by the purple and yellow folds of the curtain now above it. In discussing Bacon's
treatment of representation, Ernst van Alphen cites the words of Aeschylus' character Orestes, "You do not see them,
you don't – but I see them", and asks "whose vision is 'normal' and whose is 'deviant'...Precisely because these
questions are unanswerable, it becomes plausible that the problem of the instability of vision is related to the problem
of the instability of identity." (van Alphen p. 75). With the present work Bacon does indeed question the stability of both
visual cognition and, by association, the stability of identity, thereby embarking on a path of investigation he would
continue for the rest of his life.

Interior of a Room exhibits further parity with Painter and Model via three-dimensional solidity being reduced to a
scored network of diagrammatic black lines. Of course Bacon's overlapping linear schema here crucially prefigure the
cage-like space frames that later enclose his Popes inside their solitary nightmares; trap anonymous businessmen
within midnight blue voids; and imprison countless actors in triptychs throughout his oeuvre. The significance of these
frames' appearance here, so critical to Bacon's definition of compositional and psychological space throughout his
subsequent career, should not be underestimated. It is fascinating to note that the rectilinear grid-like railings towards
the centre right of this composition, seeming at first to belong to the same order of scored black lines as the progenitor
space-frames and contained to a window-like portal beneath the draped curtain, are precisely analogous to the metal
bars depicted outside the windows of Bacon's studio at 17 Queensberry Mews West, South Kensington in de Maistre's
1930 painting Interior (Francis Bacon's Studio). Interior of a Room represents Bacon's earliest fully-resolved
interrogation of the organisation and potentiality of pictorial, intellectual and emotional space, proving the prototype for
his consequent declaration, "I like the anonymous compartment, like a room concentrated in a small space. I would
like to paint landscapes in a box...If you could enclose their infinity in a box they would have a greater concentration."

(Studies, p. 111)

The purple and yellow drapery folds of the hanging curtain towards the top right are another iconographic device that
is both rooted in illustrious precedent, perhaps most obviously Titian's Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto of 1558,
and the inception of a thereafter recurrent trademark: hanging curtain folds coming to envelope Popes, Men in Blue
and others such as the Sphinx III of 1954. However, of paramount importance to Hergott is the ethereal depiction of
the dog in the lower right of Bacon's painting. While this creature finds highly comparative antecedent in Las Meninas
and startling concurrence with the dog in Piero della Francesca's St Sigismund and Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta of
1451, Hergott also proposes the thrilling possibility that in distortion and colour, this canine form is the direct precursor
for the howling, anguished beings in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion of 1944. Dogs, along with
horses, possessed a singular psychosomatic threat for Bacon as the unwitting aggravators of the chronic asthma that
he had suffered since a small child. According to Caroline Blackwood, "When he was a little boy his parents had put
him astride a pony and they had forced him to go fox-hunting. He loathed the brutality of the "Sport of Kings" and
developed a violent allergy to horses. He turned blue once he found himself on the hunting field and he started to
choke with chronic asthma...The subject made him freeze. He became agitated whenever I broached it. He started to
tug at the collar of his shirt as if he were trying to loosen some kind of noose which he found asphyxiating; for a
moment he resembled the agonized figures in his paintings whose faces turn a truly dangerous shade of indigo purple
as they go into the last stages of strangulation". At first sight the dog in Interior of a Room appears dismembered and
headless, but closer inspection reveals the neck and head re-emerging in the shadows; the elongated neck rising up
to bite the central green form. The mouth as orifice of threat and violence becomes a defining characteristic of the
awesomely terrifying demons of the 1944 triptych, and both they and this dog give physical form to Georges Bataille's
1930 observation that "Terror and atrocious suffering make the mouth an organ of searing screams." (Georges
Bataille, 'Dictionnaire – Bouche', Documents, no. 5, 1930, pp. 298-99). As extant prototype for Bacon's indisputable
masterpiece of 1944, itself equal in significance to Bacon's oeuvre as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is to that of
Picasso's, Interior of a Room occupies a place of historic importance in the visual arts of the Twentieth Century.
In many ways the threat of mortality inhabits every pore of Bacon's art. Danger, threat, violence and death constantly
linger in the recesses of his canvas, for the singular reason that he deftly stated: "Consciousness of mortality
sharpens one's sense of existing." (Studies, p. 96). Again, Interior of a Room provides abundant evidence that this
preoccupation was all-consuming while Bacon was just in his twenties. Raised by English parents living in County
Kildare, Ireland during violent times, Bacon's upbringing was intensely fraught and immersed in the threat of violence:
"My father warned us that at any time, not that we would be shot, but at night someone might break in or whatever. My
grandmother married three times, at that time her husband was the Head of Police in Kildare and in their house all the
windows were sandbagged. I lived with my grandmother a lot. I grew up in an atmosphere of threat for a long
time...And then I was in Berlin at the beginning of the Nazi thing, my whole life had been lived through a time of
stress." (Studies, pp. 104-5)

Amidst Francis Bacon's manifold sources of inspiration, classical literature was a lifelong obsession. The legend of
Oedipus, exemplified by Sophocles in Oedipus Rex, specifically provided a catalogue of potent imagery on which
Bacon's creative instinct could feed, not least the denouement of the protagonist blinding himself with the broach-pin
torn from the clothes of his wife-mother after she has killed herself. The pivotal character in that narrative of the
predatory and merciless Sphinx, the mythological creature comprised of a lion's haunches, a bird's wings, and a
woman's head and breast that preys on those who cannot answer her riddle, features as recurrent iconographic
catalyst within Bacon's art, appearing in various guises, such as Study of the Sphinx of 1953, throughout the six
decades of his career. As he later explicated, "I like the Sphinx, it unlocks valves of sensation. I don't know how, but it
does. To be able to explain my work would be like being able to explain the unconscious." (Studies, p. 106). Towards
the upper centre left edge in the present work, within the pyramidal black triangle, the darker silhouette can be
interpreted as a highly schematised insignia-glyph of the Sphinx, connoting Victorian photographs of the Great

Pyramid and the Sphinx in Egypt. The yellow-green lateral rectangle that extends from beneath this to the middle of
the composition - a horizontal armature that seems to latch onto the edge of the patterned screen in order to pull it
back while simultaneously being bitten by the attenuated jaws of the wraithlike dog's head - also hints at the
suggestion of the Sphinx's leonine long front legs, so conventionally depicted in similar outstretched pose.
Surmounting all this among the geometric architecture and integrated by a very long attenuated neck is the
penetrating and all-seeing cyclopean eye. Of course, Bacon was not alone in realizing artistic stimulus in the Oedipus
myth at this time. Published and premiered in 1934, and thus likely preceding the present painting directly, the play
La Machine infernale by the dramatist Jean Cocteau was heavily rooted in the legend. In Act II, the exchanges
between the Sphinx and Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of the afterlife, when they have ensnared Oedipus
on his journey provide a prescient rubric to the phantasm of the Sphinx and the biting dog in Interior of a Room. With
Oedipus trapped in her grasp, Cocteau's Sphinx, harbinger of death, cries "And I should make you go down on your
knees...And you'd bend your head... and Anubis would bound forward. He would open his wolf-like jaws!"

The final, objective analysis of Interior of a Room leads the spectator to just one plausible conclusion: within
astoundingly sophisticated strata of artistic and philosophical innovation lies the self-determined masterpiece of a new
artistic genius. It is an ever-changing artwork that offers myriad interpretations and no definite conclusions: as
Baldassari notes "The artwork...and model exchange their existential characteristics by dint of a stylistic transference
that shifts from the figurative to the abstract, biomorphic, or geometric mode" (Baldassari p. 96). Perhaps more
successfully even than the exemplar of the contemporaneous Picasso, Interior of a Room achieves an almost
inconceivable balancing act between abstraction and figuration. This work proves that already by this moment Bacon's
ready enlistment of diverse sources are too numerous to singularly identify or individuate, and that the scope and
extent of his creative vision already anticipated paths he would follow for the rest of his life. It is a canvas of endless
intrigue, almost as if Bacon purposefully sought to bury within its oil surface some cipher for his future development.
Indeed, a fitting coda is provided by one of Bacon's favourite passages from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, which he told
Hugh Davies had been a continual source of inspiration to him: "I have heard the key/ Turn in the door once and turn
once only/ We think of the key, each in his prison/ thinking of the key, each confirms a prison." (Studies, p. 102)

 

 

Contemporary Art Evening Auction
New York | 09 Nov 2011, 07:00 PM | N08791

Violence, loathing, beauty, pain: How Rembrandt influenced Francis Bacon

He brutally mutilated the old master's self-portraits – then endlessly echoed them. but just how influenced was Francis Bacon by Rembrandt? Charles Darwent explores a new exhibition that attempts to paint a clearer picture

By Charles Darwent, The Independent, Sunday, 16th October 2011

                          Rembrandt's Self-Portrait with Beret 1659

In June 1962, the American photographer Irving Penn shot a series of portraits of Francis Bacon at the latter's studio in Reece Mews, London. One (previous page) sticks particularly in the mind. It is of Bacon standing in front of a wall which he has covered, typically, with pages torn from books and magazines. Peering down over the artist's shoulder is one of these, the crumpled image of an old man. It is Rembrandt, painted by himself, in the famous Self-Portrait with Beret now at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence.

Us looking at Penn looking at Bacon looking at Rembrandt. Penn's portrait is full of questions, prime among them the one of who chose its mise-en-scène. Did Bacon ask to be photographed in front of a dead Old Master, or was it Penn who saw a connection between the two men, and if so of what kind? Bacon was 52 when Penn's picture was taken, although, with his cherub cheeks and boot-polish-blacked hair, he looks 20 years younger. Rembrandt was 51 when he painted the Aix self-portrait and seems 20 years older. Like Bacon, he had lived beyond his means; unlike Bacon, his luck had run out. In 1660, the year of the self-portrait, Rembrandt had been forced to sell his house and printing press and to go to work for his son, Titus. Etched into his face is the pauper's grave that would wait for him a decade later. Did Penn see, in Bacon's sybaritic life, a similar end? Or did Bacon choose to have Rembrandt look over his right shoulder – the angel's side – as a token of admiration, or self-admiration?

Nothing in Bacon's life or art is ever easy, his take on Rembrandt least of all. What we do know is that there was a take – that Bacon, a tireless gatherer of scraps, admired Rembrandt above all other artists. Again and again in his quarter-of-a-century of interviews with the critic David Sylvester, Bacon returns to the Dutchman, worrying away at him as if picking at a scab, or at Rembrandt's scabrous paint. It is hard to believe that so deep a relationship between two such great artists had never been the subject of an exhibition – Bacon has been paired off with everyone from Van Gogh to Eadweard Muybridge – but this is the case. Which makes Irrational Marks, the opening show of the new Ordovas gallery in London, which looks at the work of two men side-by-side, both welcome and revealing.

Maybe acts of homage are always tinged with loathing; certainly, Bacon's seems that way. Rembrandt painted or etched nearly 100 self-portraits over 40 years. Many – the Mauritshuis gallery's Self-portrait with Gorget, say – show him as young and strong, high on the hog's back. Bacon's fascination, though, is with the man laid low, stripped bare. There are half-a-dozen of his torn-out pages in this show, all of them taken from Reece Mews and bearing reproductions of Rembrandt self-portraits post-1655, when the artist was in his fifties, widowed and broke. To the violence of the Dutchman's own life, Bacon has added another: the pages are creased and spattered with paint. The housekeeping at Reece Mews was known to be slovenly, but the treatment to which the pages have been subjected seems harsh even so, less a lack of care than an outright attack. In one plate, torn from Claude Roger Marx's monograph on Rembrandt, the old man's throat has apparently been cut. His upper lip has been gouged out.

It may, of course, have been a kind of empathy. If you saw the film Love is the Devil, you'll know Bacon's taste for the lash. Pain was beauty for him; pain was truth. In a story he told, often and in several variants, Bacon's fox-hunting father had had his 14-year-old son horsewhipped when he was caught being buggered by a stable-boy. The punishment had backfired: from then on, the artist-to-be added masochism to his repertoire of happily delinquent sexuality. To enjoy Rembrandt's pain was to pay him an accolade, to enrol him in a club: not for nothing did Bacon refer to the Dutchman's clotted brushwork as a "coagulation". But, as with his father's horsewhipping, to feel Rembrandt's pain was to turn the Oedipal tables.

If there is hate in Bacon's love of Rembrandt, then it may have something to do with their differing views of age. The master of Reece Mews once disingenuously remarked to David Sylvester that he painted self-portraits, although he "loathed [his] own face", because he hadn't "got anyone else to do". By absolute contrast, Rembrandt loves his own face, not because it is his but because it is a face.

In a sense, all of the Dutch Master's self-portraits are double portraits. They depict a man who is getting older, but they also show an artist who is growing more mature. Every vicissitude that life can throw at Rembrandt – each pouch and jowl, every newly acquired line – calls for an artistic answer. There is a blessed equity to his self-depiction. It takes experience to paint an experienced face: Rembrandt had to be 51 to paint himself at 51. Old age, suffering, become cartes de visite, advertisements of his skill. The Aix self-portrait is like a fugue in which one voice is worn down by time, the other triumphant over it.

Talking to Sylvester about the Aix image, Bacon praised Rembrandt's abstraction, his capacity to make the "irrational marks" from which this show takes its title. The Aix self-portrait, he says, is "almost completely anti-illustrational". That both is and is not true – Rembrandt, like any 17th-century painter, would have viewed the lack of resemblance as a failure – but it is certainly revealing about Bacon's own view of himself. The point of a double portrait is to understand both sitters by reference to the other. This exhibition of the two men's work does just that. Where Rembrandt's images of himself are revealed as inescapably optimistic, Bacon's are endlessly pessimistic.

Only when you see him next to Rembrandt do you realise that Bacon is all about self-effacement. In one study for a self-portrait, made in 1973 (above left), Bacon's own face is eclipsed by another, the face of a watch. You sense an 11th hour: the artist, now 64, is reduced to two forms, a double-chin and the skull-like socket of an eye. There is no redemption in his self-image, none of Rembrandt's saving virtuosity: there is only age, and time ticking away. With its grey brushwork and hazy surface, the watch-portrait feels like a picture torn from a newspaper or magazine. Its monochrome palette seems to echo the brown-on-brown self-portraits of the ageing Rembrandt, at least as shown in black-and-white reproduction. The watch-portrait is Rembrandt rubbed out and then rubbed out again, faded and re-faded. It is a self-portrait of Bacon as someone else, someone he wanted to be.

Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt is on show at Ordovas, 25 Savile Row, London W1 in London, until December 16th

  Ordovas Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt

    Review by Naomi Richmond-Swift, Fad, October 12th, 2011

        Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt 7th October – 16th December 2011

Pilar Ordovas can rightly call herself something of a Francis Bacon expert, having been responsible for the auction in 2008 of Triptych (1974 – 1977), for a record-breaking £26million, the highest selling piece ever auctioned at the London branch of Christie’s. This forms part of an impressive thirteen years under her belt at the auction house, including another huge sale, Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, (£21 million). From Christie’s Pilar directed Gagosian London for two years, before leaving in March 2011 with the intention of starting her own gallery.

After seven months of building and preparation the gallery itself forms an impeccably chic addition to Savile Row, in keeping with its behemoth neighbour Hauser + Wirth, whose current Roni Horn exhibition seems a suitably introspective companion for Bacon’s self-portraits, Roni’s own face in You Are The Weather peering out of the window in duplicate as we cross the road.

It has been a while since I last attended an ‘inspiration’ exhibition – one which charts the influence of one artist over another. I always find them historically interesting, but great care must be taken curatorially to ensure nothing looks contrived. A very well-curated show can be satisfyingly enlightening. This isn’t a Tate-sized space but Ordovas makes the best use of her gallery to provide just enough bite-sized learning.

Bacon Rembrandt starts with two central images; the first is Irving Penn’s Francis Bacon, a photograph of Bacon in front of a poster of Rembrandt’s Self-portrait with Beret (Francis Bacon often talked about being influenced by Rembrandt and a number of source images like this were found in his studio), and the second, a coup for a commercial gallery and testament to Pilar’s art world connections; the original Rembrandt Self-portrait with Beret from the shot. Ordovas came across the first image in 2006 while handling the estate of Valerie Beeston, who managed Francis Bacon at Malborough Gallery, and a seed was planted.

It is a simple comparison but a very pleasing one; Ordovas surrounds Rembrandt’s face with six of Bacon’s Studies for Self-Portraits, symmetrically arranged either side instantly highlighting similarities of technique; the muted colours, the wide, sweeping brushstrokes, the darkness and shading. Rembrandt produced a huge number of self-portraits: at least thirty that are known about, the aim being a true likeness, which became a lifetime’s work. Bacon’s self-portraits manipulated the face to imply inner turmoil, so there are more jagged edges, unfinished shapes and dissolved portions.

Downstairs we are shown source documents from Bacon’s studio, and an interview with David Sylvester and Bacon from 1966, which plays on repeat but tonight is drowned by the chatter of the opening party. Ordovas herself warmly welcomes everyone and radiates a quiet pride at her inaugural (and non-commercial) exhibition here. Everything is well thought through and polished, whilst remaining open and accessible. I feel like I’ve come away with something – some of Ordovas’s knowledge happily shared, and I’m looking forward to what Pilar does next.

  Bacon and Rembrandt: Dark moments of self-appraisal

    The Economist, October 11th, 2011

                      Self-Portrait with Beret 1659 Rembrandt

IN 1962 Irving Penn, an American photographer, went to visit Francis Bacon at his studio in London to make a portrait of him. The photograph he took shows Bacon clasping the front of his dark shirt and gazing up and away. Hanging on the wall behind his right shoulder, bent and creased and covered in paint, is a reproduction of a sombre, unfinished painting by Rembrandt, Self-portrait with Beret (pictured), from about 1659. 

Bacon's debt to Rembrandt's self-portraits is the subject of Irrational Marks, the first show at Ordovas, a new gallery on Savile Row in London. Pilar Ordovás, the gallery’s owner is something of an art-world wunderkind, responsible for the sale of Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping for £21m in 2008. She has also managed Gagosian in London, and handled the estate of Valerie Beeston, who worked with Francis Bacon at the Marlborough Gallery. This exhibition shows intent: to put on contemplative considered exhibitions, as well as to be an art boutique with commercial clout. 

The exhibition is tiny and tightly focused. On the ground floor there are just six works by Bacon, including two triptychs, along with the Rembrandt painting he liked so much and Penn's photograph. Downstairs in the basement are three working documents from Bacon's studio—all reproductions of Rembrandt self-portraits—and a short excerpt from Sunday Night Francis Bacon, a film from 1966 in which the painter speaks to David Sylvester, an art critic. 

Bacon revered Self-portrait with Beret. It is an exercise in shadow and texture. The rough ruddiness of Rembrandt's ageing cheek is no more than a patch of vertical lines scratched into the paint; his coarsened and wrinkled forehead crafted from layers of thick impasto in pale yellow and mottled red. Sections are left unpainted, allowing the ground colour to contrast with the brown pigments in a play of light and dark. But it was the eyes that fascinated Bacon. In the interview with Sylvester he says "If you analyse it, you will see that there are hardly any sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational." 
    
Rembrandt made more than 90 pictures of himself during his life, from the early etchings of the 1630s, which show him gurning with laughter, anger and surprise, to the last self-portrait of 1669, the year he died. It is telling that Bacon fixated on an unfinished picture so spare in detail but so rich in character. What Bacon loved about Rembrandt's self-portraits was what he called the "tightrope walk" between the abstract and figurative. The paint remains paint. It doesn't disappear into what it depicts. Nevertheless, there is Rembrandt staring out implacably, sceptically. The feeling one has standing in front of the painting is that it is full of self-appraisal. This is a dialogue of a great painter with himself. If it could speak it would never use a long word, but each short one would go to the heart. 
    
Bacon was a slicer and a dicer. The portraits and self-portraits on show here are eruptions of violence and damage. In Study for Self-Portrait from 1964, the face is a mangle of red, white and black with dabs of green and yellow, thick swirls of impasto and striations made by pressing corduroy into the wet surface. On one side, the face has been carved away entirely. By the time he painted the triptych Three Studies for Self-Portrait in 1975, Bacon was depicting himself with great incisions in his cheeks and jaw, and with circular holes bored into his throat. These darkly beautiful paintings are dramas of flayed flesh and the frayed psyche, but he walks the same high-wire as Rembrandt, pushing appearance as far as it will go in pursuit of the inner life, but never beyond recognisability. 

The paintings by Bacon are all from private collections. The Rembrandt hangs in the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence in France—it was last seen in Britain 12 years ago at the National Gallery. This exhibition is a rare chance to see these paintings, all shockingly compulsive and rich in psychological flare. In fact, they are so good you're left wanting more. It is a frustratingly narrow show, representing a 13-year slice of Bacon's work as a portraitist. In Study for Self-Portrait from 1973, a watch face in the bottom left-hand corner reads 7.20. Both Bacon and Rembrandt were fascinated by ageing and mortality. This exhibition would have been bolstered by earlier and later work showing the span of Bacon's changing conception of himself. 
    
But despite its limitations, this show is wonderfully suggestive of Bacon's cannibalism as a painter. As Ms Ordovás says in her catalogue introduction, Bacon was a "magpie", pillaging from an astonishing array of sources. The most playful piece in the show is a document from Bacon's studio, where he has pinned together a fragment of Rembrandt's Self-Portrait at the Easel from 1660 which he'd torn from a book, with part of a photograph of "Papa" Jimmy Yancey, a jazz pianist. In the short film Bacon shows off a number of paint-spattered images-of Marilyn Monroe, of Hitler, of the gestures of chimpanzees and, lastly, of Self-portrait with Beret. Every object in his studio was there to be used, and every image there to be digested. Rembrandt may have been Bacon's companion, but he had to elbow for room among many others. 

Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt is on show at Ordovas in London until December 16th

New show examines artist Bacon's debt to Rembrandt

An exhibition at a new London gallery examines what its owner believes is a long overlooked subject - 20th century painter Francis Bacon's debt to 17th century Dutch artist Rembrandt.

 Mike Collett-White, Reuters, Friday October 7th, 2011

It was Rembrandt's Spanish contemporary Diego Velazquez who is most closely associated with Bacon in the minds of most art lovers, due to the Irish-born painter's famous series of interpretations of the 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X.

While the relationship between Bacon and Rembrandt is less obvious, gallery owner Pilar Ordovas believes it was nonetheless crucial to the way the modern artist worked.

"There have not been any exhibitions, any publications, nothing dedicated to the importance of Rembrandt in Bacon's work," she told Reuters at her new Ordovas gallery in central London.

"I really felt that it had been overlooked," added the former Christie's executive who helped negotiate some of the biggest art sales in recent years before leaving for a two-year stint at the Gagosian gallery in London.

"He (Bacon) really looked at Rembrandt, and what he loved about late Rembrandt was the use and the application of paint, how incredibly loose it is and how almost abstracted, but at the same time full of meaning."

The exhibition, Irrational Marks: Bacon, Rembrandt opens on Friday at the new space in an exclusive area of the city.

It takes up two of the gallery's white-walled rooms and features several Bacon self-portraits, photographs, a video of Bacon in which he discusses Rembrandt, and, perhaps most impressively, the Dutch master's Self-Portrait with Beret from 1659.

The painting, on loan from the Musee Granet in Aix-en-Provence, France, was the same work Bacon returned to several times to admire, and also appears in the background of a photograph of Bacon taken by Irving Penn.

That photograph, given by the artist to his influential friend, manager and confidante Valerie Beston, was what gave Ordovas the idea for the exhibition in the first place.

"If you wanted to do anything Bacon-related - write a book, do an exhibition or buy a painting - you needed to speak to Ms. Beston," Ordovas explained.

"She was a really, really crucial part of his life and he left her one of perhaps his most important self-portraits."

Ordovas handled Beston's estate in 2006, and at the subsequent auction at Christie's a Bacon self-portrait went for 5.2 million pounds.

"Bacon ... made several trips to go and see this (Rembrandt) painting. He never admitted to having seen the Velazquez portrait ... he always said that he didn't want to be disappointed by it."

Although Bacon often worked from photographs, Ordovas added that she, like others, suspected he may have seen the original Pope Innocent work despite denying it.

"The influence of Rembrandt on Bacon's painting is not a literal reference," she explained.

"It's not like with Velazquez ... to which he dedicates the series. The main influence from Rembrandt's work is the way that he uses the paint, the looseness of the paint."

Ordovas said that despite her success in the auction world, she was ready to launch her own gallery and stage "museum-quality" exhibitions.

The Bacon show is non-commercial and runs until December 16. The gallery will also allow her to offer a private space for selling 20th century and contemporary art in the secondary market.

Council scotches rumours that £5m painting could be sold off to raise cash

Batley & Birstall News, Monday 22 August 2011

                                  Figure Study II  1945 - 46  Francis Bacon   

Batley’s most influential piece of artwork, Figure Study II, has gone on display.

Previously left in storage, the contemporary painting by Francis Bacon, thought to be worth £5m, is up at Huddersfield Art Gallery until the end of the month.

The painting is affectionately known as Batley’s Bacon, as the Contemporary Art Society gave it to Batley Council in 1952. It was the first piece of Bacon’s work to be hung outside of London.

Because of this, current owners Kirklees Council are prevented from selling it, despite it being one of their most valuable assets.

A spokeswoman said: “The Contemporary Art Society purchased the painting and it was accepted by Ronald Gelsthorpe, the curator of the Bagshaw Art Gallery, on behalf of Batley Council in 1952. Because of this, there are restrictions that prevent the council from selling it on.”

Due to its high value, Huddersfield Gallery is the only building in the borough with the right conditions and security to display the painting.

A campaign to have it displayed in Batley Art Gallery failed due to the high security costs, but last February a replica was unveiled to adorn the gallery’s walls.

Excerpt: The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson

NPR Books, August 12, 2011

One should open one's eyes and take a new look at cruelty," Friedrich Nietzsche exhorted in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), in which Nietzsche famously attempts to lay waste to traditional notions of morality, especially those associated with Christianity. Nietzsche hoped that, in catapulting beyond the poles of good and evil, kindness and cruelty, the true energy and strength of mankind would be liberated: in art as in life, this energy — which Nietzsche termed our "will to power" — would pour forth; it would dance; it would shine.

This book asks different questions. It asks whether there are certain aspects or instances of the so-called art of cruelty — as famously imagined by French dramatist and madman Antonin Artaud — that are still wild and worthwhile, now that we purportedly inhabit a political and entertainment landscape increasingly glutted with images — and actualities — of torture, sadism, and endless warfare. It asks when and whether Artaud's distinction between a coarse sort of cruelty, based in sadism and bloodshed, and his notion of a "pure cruelty, without bodily laceration" can be productively made, and to what end. "From the point of view of the mind," Artaud wrote, "cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination."

I am attracted to this precision, this sharpness, this rigor. Why Artaud and so many others have muddled it up with cruelty, I do not know. That is another of this book's questions. In his interviews with David Sylvester, painter Francis Bacon, one of this book's recurring subjects, put it this way: "Who today has been able to record anything that comes across to us as a fact without causing deep injury to the image?" Bacon, being fairly convinced of this formula, did not expect an answer. I do. I want to know whether he is truly onto something about the relationship between injury and fact, clarity and cruelty — or whether he is simply illuminating his own vision, justifying his own practice or predilections. Bacon's suggestion that an image can sustain (or cause) injury will also come up for debate; this book will consider the question vis-à-vis literature and words as well as visual art. Throughout, the aim is to attend closely to the different excitements and effects of this "pure cruelty" (such as precision, transgression, purgation, productive unease, abjectness, radical exposure, uncanniness, unnerving frankness, acknowledged sadism and masochism, a sense of clearing or clarity), while also staying keenly attuned to the various sophistries and self-justifications that so often attend its valorization.

Cruelty, as the Buddhists see it, is the far enemy of compassion. Compassion also has a near enemy — that is, an enemy that so closely resembles it that it can be difficult, albeit utterly crucial, to differentiate between them. This near enemy is called idiot compassion. I would like to understand more about compassion, and I am gambling that one way of doing so is to get to know its enemies, near and far. I realize that this approach risks looking, for a time, at our condition through the wrong end of the telescope, albeit the more commonly used one.

But perhaps I'm fooling myself. Perhaps I'm not really all that interested in compassion. Certainly it has less grip than conflict, as screenwriters everywhere preach. Certainly it doesn't "return us to life more violently," as Bacon so often named the singular goal of his art. Would it be a relief to give up, as Bacon did, on the idea of compassion altogether? "I'm not upset by the fact that people do suffer," said Bacon, "because I think the suffering of people and the differences between people are what have made great art, and not egalitarianism."

Welcome to Bacon's bracing allure (which resembles that of Artaud, and of Nietzsche), which posits this "violent return to life" as a way to restore us, or deliver us anew, to an unalienated, unmediated flow of existence characterized by a more authentic relation to the so-called real. Unlike so many avant-gardists and revolutionaries, however, Bacon does not think or hope that this restored vitality will bring about the subsequent waning of inequalities, injustices, or radical forms of suffering. Quite the contrary: for Bacon (as for Nietzsche), some people were put on the planet to dominate and some to be dominated, and that's exactly as it should be. Rather than purport that this "violent return to life" is somehow in keeping with the goals of social justice, Bacon prefers the brutal whirlwind in and of itself, with all its attendant cruelties.

Wayne McGregor on Francis Bacon: Anatomy of a Failed Idea

By Patricia Boccadoro, Culture Kiosque, 2nd August, 2011

PARIS, 1 AUGUST 2011 — Wayne Mcgregor is currently the golden boy of British dance who made a name for himself with his physically exhausting movements and his collaborations across dance with film, computer technology and the sciences. Made a Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental psychology at Cambridge University in 2004, his 2006 creation, Chroma, opened doors for him and paved the way to his position of Resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet later the same year. He was the first contemporary choreographer to obtain this post. Since then he has been showered with awards, including the prestigious title of Commander of the British Empire for his contribution to dance, and he is much in demand from most of the major international companies throughout the world.

However, with L’Anatomie de la Sensation, his second work for the Paris Opera Ballet, he branched away from all his radical technological aids, concentrating on pure movement. The work is directly inspired, he says, by the paintings of the Irish artist, Francis Bacon (1909 -1992), but Bacon’s fascinating canvases in the Tate Gallery in London have a powerful, violent almost repulsive beauty. They disturb; bodies decompose and whole civilisations are stifled and suffocated. Moreover, there is the magnificence and brilliance of his palette, the vivid oranges he loved so well, the pungent blues and mauves, the shrieking pinks and yellows, the acidity of his greens. The work that McGregor created for the Paris Opera Ballet reflected none of this.   

The programme claims the British choreographer attempted to "shed light on the forces of life and death alike that run through Bacon’s paintings". And while this might be a laudable goal in itself, it failed. If one had not read about the piece beforehand, the work itself gives little indication of what it is about and neither is the audience helped along by the scenery. John Pawson’s minimalist and disappointing decor, giant- sized black and white panels dominating the Opera Bastille’s stage, bore no correlation to Bacon’s vision.

L’Anatomie de la Sensation, which is composed of eight movements, began with a duo between Mathias Heymann and Jerémie Belingard  set to a score by  Mark Anthony Turnage entitled, Blood on the Floor, after Bacon’s painting of the same name. This is the closest we get to Bacon, as the two brilliant interpreters, divesting themselves of their clothes, their young, muscled bodies clad in shorts, began a complex series of movements, rotating, gyrating, spinning and rolling around each other. From time to time, Heymann, the more ‘classical’ of the two, was allowed a spectacular jump in the air. This promised well, but then went nowhere. What was Mcgregor saying? Where was he going?  The dancers’ arms shot out at jerky angles and their feet and legs slashed in the air, as bemused spectators admired the personal beauty of the dancers, but little else.

The solo which followed, interpreted by Marie-Agnès Gillot, one of the most impressive contemporary dancers today, took no account of either her dramatic capabilities or her technique. What was she supposed to be, slithering around on the floor, curling up and around herself, reminiscent of a small insect rather than illustrating an emotion from a painting? The uncomfortable positions imposed upon her, the back movements in a letter S were painful indeed to watch, and her duo with Audric Bézard, undistinguished.

The best part of the evening was the pas de deux interpreted by Alice Renavand and Josua Hoffalt, and it was no surprise that most of it was danced in silence; the hallmark of this creation being it’s unmusicality, whether intended or not. Renavand and Hoffalt possess expressive, supple bodies, and they and they alone, seemed to enjoy what they were dancing. They also benefitted from mauve and acid green lighting on the panels which contributed to the atmosphere.

There was also a certain atmosphere in the fifth movement, with three go-go dancers in a disco, but it was, to quote from French, "hair in the soup". Did Bacon like jazz clubs? Were spectators aware of this? Even the last movement with the whole cast, quasi-naked, on stage seemed bitty, confused, and disconnected from the rest. Possibly one of the criticisms of Mcgregor’s work is that, not having studied classical dance himself, he does not understand a dancer’s body or what to do with it. His famous sharp, speedy, disarticulated gesticulating is better suited to his own lean and lanky frame. His broken angles, jutting out chins and fractured movements totally lacking in grace need the rubber joints and boneless physiques of circus acrobats.

It is also the speed, not of his dance, but of the number of his creations that is becoming alarming. It is maybe the reason for the repetitive nature of this particular work, for, though many sequences began differently, in the end, they all seemed the same. The work, a mere one hour fifteen minutes, dragged even with the luminous presence of Aurélie Dupont,  and the only sensation one felt was relief that it was all over.

Dance Review

Echoing the Tones of Francis Bacon

By Roslyn Sulcasn, The Ne York Times,  July 11, 2011

PARIS — The stakes are high for Wayne McGregor in his new Anatomie de la Sensation, at the Paris Opera Ballet. It is this British choreographer’s first full-length work for a ballet company; the music is by Mark-Anthony Turnage of recent Anna Nicole  fame; the sets by John Pawson, an architect well known for his minimalist rigor. Most pertinently, there is a discernible subject: the piece is subtitled Pour Francis Bacon and has more than a suggestion of narrative content from a choreographer best known for intellectually complex, sensually abstract dances.

L’Anatomie is the second piece, after the 2007 Genus, that Mr. McGregor has choreographed for the Paris troupe, which seems particularly well suited to his brand of knotty physicality and conceptual thinking. (The French like concepts on stage; Anglo-Saxons generally despise them there. Roughly speaking.)

It’s an odd work, choreographically repetitive and long-winded, but also intermittently compelling and strange, capturing something of the twisted bodies in Bacon’s paintings, and the imminent dissolution that always seems to possess them.

        L'Anatomie de la Sensation Jérémie Bélingard, left, and Mathias Heymann. 

That dissolution is linked to a sustained interest in the metamorphosis of body and shape in Mr. McGregor’s work. His ballet pieces only infrequently show the harmonious lines and static poses that inform much of classical dance; whole passages can go by during which you’d be hard pressed to name a ballet step. Almost every movement mutates as you watch: bodies curve and swoop, hips angle, legs buckle, chests and heads push out with ungainly emphasis.

There’s a kinetic fascination to all of this, but too often in Anatomie, Mr. McGregor seems hard-pressed to match Mr. Turnage’s score, Blood on the Floor, a nine-part 1994 composition inspired by Bacon’s artworks. (The title is a loose adaption of his painting Blood on Pavement . Originally composed for the Ensemble Modern, and played in Paris by the Ensemble Intercontemporain , it’s an often frenzied, powerful piece in which the influences of Gershwin, Bernstein, Miles Davis and Stravinsky are clear. But its relentlessly percussive energy and jazz riffs have little discernible dance impetus, and Mr. McGregor frequently seems to throw as much physical complexity at us as he can in the hope of meeting the music halfway.

                                     Blood on Pavement c. 1988

The piece opens with a long duet for two men (Jérémie Bélingard and Mathias Heymann on Saturday), who strip down to their briefs (the minimal, attractive costumes are by Moritz Junge) before engaging in grappling, erotic combat and the kind of formal partnering maneuvers more usually found in heterosexual pas de deux. The huge expanse of the Bastille stage is emphasized by Mr. Pawson’s simple set: two gray fins or wings that protrude from a flat backdrop and move throughout the piece to create different configurations, often evoking the triptych forms of Bacon’s paintings. The beautiful lighting, by Lucy Carter, similarly evokes the paintings in its intermittent washes of chartreuse, pink, orange and black, and its occasional smoky allusiveness.

Both Mr. Bélingard and Mr. Heymann — who presumably represent Bacon and a lover (perhaps Bacon’s companion George Dyer, whose suicide is suggested at the end) — are mesmerizing performers, but their encounter began to feel repetitive in tone and physicality midway through.

That feeling of repetitive time filling is a problem that pervades L’Anatomie, which invokes various paintings and biographical moments in Bacon’s life without undue emphasis over its nine movements. There is a plaintive, winding solo for Marie-Agnès Gillot; a nightclub scene) with three leading women (Mathilde Froustey stood out here) that is a bit of a mess; an inventive leg-slicing, undulating duet for Mr. Bélingard and Aurélie Dupont (also very well danced on Friday by Alexandre Gasse and Myriam Ould-Braham); and a marvelously quirky, humorous pas de deux, brilliantly danced by both Sabrina Mallem and Julien Meyzindi on Friday, and Alice Renavand and Josua Hoffalt on Saturday.

The elements of “L’Anatomie” never quite add up. The episodic pacing, dictated by the music, feels sluggish, there is no dramatic or emotional arc, an extensive ensemble (39 in total ) is underused, and many of the design elements (the steel bars, the mesh screen) feel extraneous. But there is also much to admire in the ambition of Mr. McGregor’s conception, its physical daring and aesthetic beauty. It makes you think about things: art, color, light, bodies, movement, stories, lives. That’s no small achievement in a ballet.

L’Anatomie de la Sensation continues through Friday at the Opera Bastille, operadeparis.com.

  Bacon outsells Warhol soup in £108m auction

    London Evening Standard, 30 June 2011

                                                      Crouching Nude (1961) Francis Bacon

Sotheby’s secured its highest total for a contemporary art sale in London when it took £108.8 million.

German and British paintings were the chief targets as the auction house last night doubled the total sales for the same auction last summer.

Twenty-nine lots sold for more than £1 million each as prices climbed back above the record levels of 2008.

Francis Bacon confirmed his status as the most sought-after contemporary artist when Crouching Nude (1961) - one of a series of visceral portraits of his muse Henrietta Moraes - sold for £8.3 million.

Bidding climbed rapidly but stopped just above the work's low estimate. Sotheby's called the price "strong".

At a  Christie’s auction in London on Tuesday, another Bacon painting, Study for a Portrait (1953), sold for £18 million - £7 million more than its estimate.

   Bringing home the Bacon

      By Neil Pendock, Times LIVE, 30 June, 2011

                                          Donald sells a Bacon

The news that the owner of Glen Carlou, Donald Hess, sold a Francis Bacon portrait for £18 million at Christie’s last night confirms that fine wine and fine art play in different leagues. Donald only collects artists with whom he has a personal relationship and in the case of Francis, Donald remembers him as ‘an extraordinary man. He was an unhappy homosexual and through that, started to drink. If you knew his background, you’d think him dumb and brutal. But he was the opposite – very well read, very accurate and very interesting when he wasn’t smashed. He was very opinionated and could also be very rude. He loved my first wife, Joanna, and we’d often meet at the Connaught Bar in the art heart of London and he’d say, “Joanna, come and sit right next to me”.’

The painting dates back to 1953 and was painted after the death of his nanny Jessie Lightfoot. The subject is unknown, but The Guardian quotes Colin Gleadell as saying “whoever it is, it is a figure of power, seated on a semi-gilded throne and staring menacingly down at the viewer from the dark, caged solitude in which he is trapped.”

What a pity that customs deposits and insurance premiums prevent other gems from Donald’s collection visiting the elegant art gallery on Glen Carlou.

Francis Bacon portrait sells for £18 million

The sale of a Francis Bacon portrait from one of his darkest periods has exceeded estimates by £7 million.

By Florence Waters, The Daily Telegraph, 29 Jun 2011

                            Study for Portrait by Francis Bacon from 1953

Study for a Portrait, 1953, became the second most valuable piece to be sold at a post-War and contemporary art sale at Christie's last night when it was sold to an anonymous telephone bidder.

The highest selling work in this category is Bacon's Triptych which went for £26.3 million in February 2008. The artwork had been expected to fetch somewhere in the region of £11 million but instead reached £17,961,250.

The work was painted in 1953 when, following the death of his former nanny and companion, Jessie Lightfoot, he spent a lot of time in his studio and painted a series of large moody dark works. It is thought to be one of his most inventive and prolific periods.

Nobody knows who the subject of the portrait, which measures two metres by 1.4m, is. In a recent feature about the resurgent demand for on the market, art market correspondent Colin Gleadell wrote

"The painting bears resemblances at once to Velazquez’s Portrait of Philip IV of Spain, to a photograph of Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, to the art critic David Sylvester and to Bacon’s lover at the time, Peter Lacy.

"Whoever it is, it is a figure of power, seated on a semi-gilded throne and staring menacingly down at the viewer from the dark, caged solitude in which he is trapped."

The masterpiece was sold by Swiss entrepreneur and wine producer Donald M Hess. But, historically, the work has been owned by two of Francis Bacon's contemporaries - Rodrigo Moynihan, a pioneer of abstract painting in the 1930's, and Louis Le Brocquy, one of Ireland's most important painters of the 20th century.

   Bacon painting sells for £18m as art buyers chase gritty Britons

      Godfrey Barker and Louise Jury, London Evening Standard, 29 June 2011

         Dark master: Study for a Portrait (1953) attracted fierce bidding at Christie's

A masterpiece by Francis Bacon has sold for £18 million after being given an estimate of £11million at an auction at Christie’s in London. 

Americans and Russians lined up to bid for Study for a Portrait (1953), which was being offered at auction for the first time.

Brett Gorvy, Christie's contemporary art expert, said a passion for British artists such as Bacon and Freud had become a permanent feature of the market.

   By Carol Vogel, The New York Times, June 28, 2011

                  Study for a Portrait by Francis Bacon

 LONDON–Even after the May auctions in New York and last month’s Art Basel, the giant contemporary art fair in Switzerland, collectors were still spending big on post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s here on Tuesday night, where examples of blue chip artists topped expectations.

John Hedgecoe: Artists off their guard

By Charlotte Cripps, The Independent, Wednesday, 22 June 2011

                   Francis Bacon 1969 by John Hedgecoe

Hundreds of portraits of famous artists including Francis Bacon and Henry Moore, recently rediscovered in a barn, are on display in The Face of the Artist: Photographs by John Hedgecoe at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich.

Hedgecoe died in 2010, but the pictures, all signed and dated, were found in boxes belonging to a friend of the family in Essex. Hedgecoe had boxed up much of the collection while living at Oxnead Hall in Norfolk. After he ferreted them away – some he sold and others he gave away – nobody knew what was left.

"There were some real discoveries when we unpacked the boxes," says the show's curator Calvin Winner. "A group of photos of Moore show a humorous and frivolous side to the sculptor that you don't usually see with a highly regarded artist. In one image Moore in Forte del Marmi, Italy, is wearing his daughter Mary's wig and in another he is reclining in a deck chair, in a holiday mood reminiscent of a Martin Parr photograph. It's rare to see artists let their hair down but there was real trust between him and the photographer."

The photographs reveal the artists in their studios or catch them just at the moment they realise they are being photographed; often Hedgecoe focused heavily on their hands, and he kept notes about his sessions in his diaries.

Bacon, pictured in 1969, is shown just after he had just accidentally burnt down his own studio and was working from a studio at the Royal College of Art, where these photos were taken. Moore has his hands outstretched, displaying how enlarged they had become through toil with chisels and hammers.

The John Hedgecoe estate contacted the Sainsbury Centre last year saying that the family wanted to keep the collection together and, because of Hedgecoe's connection with Norfolk, find a home for the works nearby. A central focus of this show will be photographs of Bacon and Moore, alongside their works from the Centre's permanent collections.

John Hedgecoe, who was born in 1931, was one of the leading British portrait photographers of the 20th century, and focused much of his work on artists and writers. He joined Queen magazine as staff photographer after he left the Guildford school of Art in 1957. By the mid-1960s he was taking portraits of eminent people for freelance commissions published in newspapers and magazines. He was also responsible for the 1966 photograph of the Queen which is still used on postage stamps.

In 1965, he established the photography department at the Royal College of Art, where he became Professor of Photography from 1975. He said: "A good portrait photograph should try to tell us something about the subject's character, for the portrait is a visual biography in a sense." Hedgecoe also wrote photography manuals and a novel, Breakfast with Dolly (1996). He was working on a second novel just before he died.

According to Dr Paul Greenhalgh, director of the Sainsbury Centre: "The physical appearance of the artist, his or her features, mannerisms, eccentricities, and posture has long fascinated us. John Hedgecoe, one of the great society photographers and educators of the last half century, brilliantly photographed many of the greatest painters, sculptors, poets, and cultural thinkers of his age. This exhibition presents these artistic faces, in celebration of a great photographer, and a great artistic age."

Francis Bacon, painter, 1969

"Francis Bacon was moody, and to really get on with him you had to enjoy his lifestyle, spending afternoons drinking and exchanging abuse with Muriel Belcher, owner of the Colony Room club in Soho. He loved drinking champagne and was incredibly generous. I often used to see him waiting in the queue for the bus to South Kensington, where he lived, and he was a frequent visitor to the Senior Common Room at the Royal College of Art. When I photographed him he'd just accidentally burnt down his studio, so Robin Darwin, rector of the RCA, let him have a studio in the college."

The Face of the Artist: Photographs by John Hedgecoe, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (01603 593 199)to 4 December

 Sotheby's

  Contemporary Art Evening Auction

   London|29 Jun 2011, 06:00 pm PM|L11022

                                Crouching Nude 1961 Francis Bacon

LOT 49 Francis Bacon

oil on canvas 198 by 145cm. 78 by 57in.

Executed in 1961.

ESTIMATE 7,000,000-9,000,000 GBP

SOLD 8,329,250 GBP

PROVENANCE

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd, London

Private Collection

Gagosian Gallery, London

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2006

EXHIBITED

Pittsburgh, Carnegie institute, The 1961 Pittsburgh International Exhibition, 1961-62, no. 17

London Tate Gallery; Mannheim, Kunsthalle; Turin Gallerie Civica d'Arte Moderna; Zurich, Kunsthaus; Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Francis Bacon, 1961 - 63, no. 85, pp: 87-88, illustrated

The Hague, Germeentemuseum, Nieuwe Realisten, 1964

Stockholm, Moderna Museet, Francis Bacon: Mainingar 1945 - 64, 1965, no. 41, illustrated

London, Gagosian Gallery, Francis Bacon Triptychs, 2006, p. 16, illustrated in colour

London Faggionato Fine Arts, Francis Bacon's Women, 2008

LITERATURE

Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, 1964, no. 187, illustrated

CATALOGUE NOTE

In 1959 the appearance of the first female nudes painted by Francis Bacon must have struck the contemporary art audience as a startling iconographical switch. Between 1959 and 1962 he made twelve further paintings on this theme, among which Crouching Nude, 1961, is one of the most remarkable. Formally, it is the most resolved of this group in terms of the figure/ground relationship, as well as the most sculptural in the plasticity of the figure. The illusion of depth is accentuated by the simplified geometry of the perspectival setting, a confined space with a sloping dais base painted in several shades of the iridescent green that Bacon had essayed as a dominant colour for the grounds of his paintings in St Ives at the end of 1959.1

Yet it is the woman's ambiguous pose and the enigmatic expression – simultaneously salacious, predatory, snarling and anguished – that most forcefully engage our attention. While several of the related nudes considered in this essay are seated or lying, Crouching Nude, 1961, is in many ways the most reposeful of them: indeed its title is only marginally applicable in this instance. In this respect it is more redolent of an Ingres odalisque, albeit a radically reformulated one, and although Ingres may not have been uppermost in Bacon's thinking, his admiration for his paintings is amply documented. Almost certainly in Bacon's mind was the nude woman (or youth?) leaning against a wine keg in Michelangelo's dramatic fresco of The Deluge in the Sistine Chapel, 1509. Did Bacon transpose this detail into Henrietta Moraes leaning against the bar of the Colony Room in Crouching Nude, 1961, secularizing the wine keg? Irrespective of the modern (photographic) imagery that Bacon absorbed, Michelangelo was almost invariably a potent stimulus for his paintings of nudes. Furthermore, Michelangelo's protagonists in the Sistine Chapel scene, cowering on the rocks from the flood, lend credence to the 'crouching' of Bacon's title, and the heads of the figures in both artists' paintings are slightly over-scaled.

Prior to 1959 most of Bacon's figures had been relatively static in their poses, if not in the movement of the paint – for example the enthroned Popes and seated businessmen. The explosion of mobile, twisted anatomies in attitudes of crouching, stretching, lying, bending, crawling and falling, represented a quantum shift in his visual index of the human figure. A trigger for this change may have been the violent depictions of the painter on the road to Tarascon in his Van Gogh paintings of 1957, but it was the animation of Rodin's sculptures that seems to have provided the main motivation for the transition. In December 1958 Bacon wrote on the flyleaf of one of the two copies he owned of V.J. Stank's Introducing Monkeys (c. 1957): 'Figure as Rodin figure on sofa in centre of room with arms raised', and 'use figure volante of Rodin on sofa arms raised'.2  Bacon's familiarity with Rodin's sculpture can be demonstrated in many contexts, but it should be remembered that Sir Cecil Harcourt-Smith, who as director of the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1914 oversaw (albeit with reservations) the acceptance of Rodin's gift of fourteen sculptures to the Museum, was Bacon's uncle. Rodinesque forms are conspicuous in many of the 'works on paper' that Bacon made in this period, particularly in the two collections of preparatory sketches (now in the collection of Tate Britain) that the artist presented to his friends Paul Danquah, Peter Pollock and Stephen Spender around the time of his removal from Battersea in1961.

Crouching Nude, 1961, and Seated Figure, 1960, were the first of Bacon's paintings in which strangely etiolated limbs become attenuated and exaggerated to even greater extremes. In their serpentine bending and twisting their substance seems to be liquid or rubbery – deliquescent rather than flesh and bone. The figure's right arm in Crouching Nude, 1961, is an anatomically improbable appendage, while the swollen, dangling or schematized breasts in Bacon's female nudes was a phenomenon described by Didier Anzieu as signifying an infant's 'clinging or attachment drive' rather than its libido.3

Bacon's admiration for Soutine in the 1950s has often been referred to, and although he denied it later he conveyed his enthusiasm to James Thrall Soby in 1959.4  The thick, bold impasto, vertiginous perspectives and staccato rhythms of Soutine's Ceret landscapes, in particular, clearly informed Bacon's landscapes immediately prior to, and including, the 'Van Gogh' paintings of 1956–57. Soutine's portraits evidently fascinated Bacon, too, both for the energy and immediacy of their technique and the deformation of his subjects' anatomies and facial features.

Among the visual material found in Bacon's studio after his death, only one item relating to Soutine survived, Monroe Wheeler's catalogue of the Soutine exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1950–51: the paucity of Soutine documents was no doubt a legacy of Bacon's peripatetic lifestyle between 1951 and 1961. But it is readily apparent from the extensive markings from splashed paint found in this single extant volume that several of the illustrations in it were consulted by Bacon, in his studio. Specifically, in relation to Crouching Nude, 1961, the black and white plates in Wheeler's catalogue of Soutine's Woman in Pink, c. 1924 and Woman in Red, c.1923–24, are directly comparable with the sinuously distorted limbs in Bacon's painting. Moreover, the spillage of pigment on these pages is consistent with several of the colours in the palette of Crouching Nude, 1961.

                            Henrietta Moraes by John Deakin, 1962                                                            Michelangelo  1508 - 1509  Sistine Chapel

The other ostensible pictorial source for the crouching nude is a series of photographs taken for Bacon by John Deakin. In fact the relevance of Deakin's photographs to Crouching Nude, 1961 raises a question that is not, as yet, resolved. Hitherto it has been generally accepted that Bacon first commissioned Deakin to take photographs of the friends he wished to paint in 1962 or 1963, but in the case of two separate sessions in which Deakin photographed a naked Henrietta Moraes this dating is open to question. There would appear to be three possible explanations. One, that Deakin took these photographs as early as 1959, which would mean that the images of Moraes upside-down are directly related to the lying figures that Bacon painted in that year, and that the photographs of Moraes on her bed informed Crouching Nude, 1961. This is not implausible, since Deakin kept no account books and Moraes's recollections of the sittings for Deakin were not entirely reliable – few of the events such as this which she recalled in her autobiography were dated. Secondly, the female nudes that Bacon painted between 1959 and 1962 may have been made quite independently of Deakin's photographs. If this is so, the existence of the Tate works on paper may be significant – they could have performed the function of rough compositional draughts, and thus obviated the necessity to employ photographs. By 1963, when Bacon embarked on the small portraits of his friends and also identified specific individuals in his large 'subject' paintings, the photographs by Deakin enabled him to extract key aspects of their physiognomies that would act as ciphers in his distorted depictions of them, leaving their specific identities in no doubt. It is possible, therefore, that Crouching Nude, 1961, represents to some extent Henrietta Moraes, but that Bacon had not yet established his repertory of distinguishing features for her, and that this had to await the photographs taken by Deakin after 1962. A third possibility is perhaps the most compelling. Among the 'Tate sketches' are images that parallel most of Bacon's paintings of male and female nudes from the period under review: for example there are sketches that closely correspond to  Lying Figure, 1959, Sleeping Figure, 1959, and Seated Woman, 1961. Yet there is nothing that resembles Crouching Nude, 1961. This may be because there were sketches that have not survived, but equally it is feasible that Bacon engaged John Deakin to photograph Henrietta Moraes (in poses that approximated Michelangelo's Deluge figure), rendering a sketch superfluous. While Bacon's intention may not have been to include a portrait of Moraes as such, and the evidence in the present painting is not conclusive, it does have affinities with the photographs that Deakin made of her.

Bacon, as was his usual practice, reserved his most intense application of paint for the head, the heavily-loaded brush moving in arcing strokes that echo the curvature of the body. The woman wears spectacles, indicated most clearly by the gold rim under her left eye, which appear to be vestiges of the pince-nez worn by the Nanny in Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin, an image that Bacon famously grafted onto his 'Popes'. They may signify that the subject wore glasses: Bacon himself had been astigmatic since the 1940s, and presumably wore glasses in the studio, though he would never let himself be seen wearing them in public.

Crouching Nude, 1961, was one of the last paintings Bacon completed in the room that doubled as his studio at Overstrand Mansions, Battersea, in the flat he had shared with Paul Danquah for six years. The recently-completed painting was photographed in June 1961 and in August of that year Bacon moved to 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, which he retained for the rest of his life. Formally, Crouching Nude, 1961, can be placed within the general category of major subject paintings (as distinct from portraits and heads) that he painted in his largest format – approximately 78 x 56ins.; 198 x 142cm. He returned to a similar composition in Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1963, but the painting that most nearly resembles Crouching Nude, 1961, is Portrait of Henrietta Moraes on a White Ground, 1964. He continued to paint female nudes – exclusively from photographs of Moraes – throughout the 1960s, after which only one female nude features in his oeuvre, Studies from the Human Body, 1975. Thus, not only is Crouching Nude, 1961, a most impressive conceptually economical yet affecting performance, it served as a crucial reference point for Bacon long after it was painted.

Notes

1. Notably in Miss Muriel Belcher (1959); Bacon referred to this colour thereafter as 'Belcher's Green'.

2. See Hugh M. Davies, Francis Bacon – The Papal Portraits of 1953, 2002

3.  Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, 1989, p. 99.

4.  See Martin Harrison, 'Bacon's Paintings', exh. cat., Francis Bacon, 2008

LITERATURE

   Francis & Frances

    The Focus Theatre, Dublin

       Peter Crawley, The Irish Times, Wednesday, June 15, 2011

 Bacon's portrait of mystery man likely to fetch €12m at auction‎

  By James J Gibbons, Irish Independent, Sunday June 12 2011

                        Study for a Portrait 1953 Francis Bacon

A painting by Irish artist Francis Bacon, which was once owned by artist Louis Le Brocquy, is expected to sell for £11m (€12.4m) at a London art auction next month.

The large picture, painted in 1953 and simply entitled Study for a Portrait, resembles Velazquez's Portrait of Philip IV of Spain, but the identity of the subject is unknown.

Neither Louis le Brocquy (94) nor his son Pierre would comment on the picture this weekend, which means that even if they do know the sitter's identity, it is still safe.

It has been said that if paintings had voices, then Francis Bacon’s would shriek. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once called him "that man who paints those dreadful pictures".

In 1951, grief-stricken at the death of his former nanny and companion, Jessie Lightfoot, Bacon left his flat in South Kensington in London, which they shared. He borrowed the studio of the professor of painting at the Royal College of Art, Rodrigo Moynihan, to work in and gave him this picture in return. The picture was acquired from Moynihan by Louis Le Brocquy, who in turn eventually sold it to Marlborough Fine Art. In 1984 it was bought from the gallery by the Swiss entrepreneur and wine producer Donald M Hess, the current vendor.

Bacon, who said his painting career was delayed because he had "spent too long looking for a subject that would sustain his interest", was born at 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, in 1909. His father, a former captain in the British Army, moved to Ireland to breed and train racehorses. The family was based in Co Kildare and rented Canny Court House, near Kilcullen.

Following a disagreement with his father, Bacon left home at the age of 16 and after a stint in Berlin settled in London, where he began his most dynamic work during the latter stages of World War Two. Despite what many see as an existentialist philosophy expressed through his paintings, Bacon always appeared to favour the lifestyle of the bon vivant, spending much of his days eating, drinking and gambling in London's Soho with other noted bohemians such as Lucian Freud and Jeffrey Bernard.

His work is one of the most sought after in the world, with his Tryptich 1976 making $86.3m (€60.1) when it was bought by Roman Abramovich  - the Chelsea FC owner - in 2008 at Sotheby's in New York

The auction takes place on June 28 at Christie's, London.

- James J Gibbons

 CHRISTIE'S

  Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction

   Sale 7977 / Lot 15, 28 June 2011, King Street, London 

   Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992)  Study for a Portrait

                             Study for a Portrait 1953 Francis Bacon

Sold £17,961,250

Lot Description

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) 
Study for a Portrait 
oil on canvas 
78 x 54in. (198 x 137.5cm.) 
Painted in 1953 

Special Notice

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 20% on the buyer's premium.

Provenance

Rodrigo Moynihan, London.
Louis Le Brocquy, Carros (Alpes Maritimes).
Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1984. 

Pre-Lot Text

PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION

Literature

W. Lewis, The Demon of Progress in the Arts, London 1954, no. 4 (illustrated, titled Man in a Chair).
J. Rothenstein and R. Alley, Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, London 1964, no. 78 (illustrated, unpaged).
D. Ades and A. Forge, Francis Bacon, London 1985, no. 23 (illustrated in colour, unpaged). 

Exhibited

London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Francis Bacon, 1955, no. 10.
Paris, Galerie Maeght, Francis Bacon, 1966. This exhibition later travelled to Rome, Marlborough Galleria d'Arte; London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd. and Siegen, Oberes Schloss.
Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art, Francis Bacon: Paintings 1945-1982, 1983. This exhibition later travelled to Kyoto, National Museum of Modern Art and Nagoya, Aichi Prefectural Art Gallery.
Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Francis Bacon, Retrospektive, 1987, no. 6 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).
Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, 2003-04, no. 89 (illustrated in colour, p. 237). This exhibition later travelled to Basel, Fondation Beyeler.
London, Tate Britain, Francis Bacon, 2008-09 (illustrated in colour, p. 131). This exhibition later travelled to Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Lot Notes

'He managed in the course of 1953 to produce over twenty pictures in an annus mirabilis as inventive as it was prolific' 
(M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, exh. cat., Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich 2006, p. 33)

Situated between the seminal first series of Popes in 1953 and the landmark suite of Man in Bluepaintings in 1954, Study for a Portrait represents a highly significant moment in Francis Bacon's oeuvre. Its vast scale makes it larger than most of the aforementioned, with Bacon making full use of the painting's extraordinary atmosphere to comment on the state of man in existentialist post-war Europe. Study for a Portrait is the last painting that Bacon created in his studio at the Royal College of Art, which Rodrigo Moynihan lent to him between 1951-53. It is imbued with all the pioneering works he created there including the Papal portraits and his first ever triptych portrait realised in 1953, Three Studies of the Human Head. All of these works were cast against the exquisite backdrop of his unique, ethereal liquid blue paint so expertly applied in Study for a Portrait. The painting has a distinguished and exclusive heritage of artistic ownership. Rodrigo Moynihan was the first owner and it later belonged to Louis Le Brocquy, the renowned Irish painter, who was the last to keep it before its acquisition by the present owner in 1984.

Enshrouded by a sea of midnight blue, Bacon artfully depicts a besuited man, seated on a gilded armchair evocative of a Papal throne. With his disdainful gaze cast through lightly rimmed, pince-nez glasses, the man imports an aura of authority, isolated and enclosed within the cage of Bacon's architectural spaceframe. His atmosphere is dark, rendered through washes of blue-black oil and turpentine saturated on canvas. The twilight of the painting is broken up by striations of pale parallel lines, evocative of the folds of rich drapery depicted in the artist's studies of Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X. Highlights adorn the man's armchair with flashes of ochre tracing its contours like some golden throne for a ruling leader or the corporate seat of the trenchant capitalist. As David Sylvester has described, '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). In Study for a Portrait, Bacon imports a sense of the era's European post-war existentialism, cutting through the veneers of civilised society to distil the raw and visceral qualities of the human character onto 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).

The early 1950s was a time of great interaction between the artist and his friends and peers Rodrigo Moynihan, Lucian Freud and David Sylvester. Indeed as David Sylvester recalls, 'in those early days Lucian clearly had a crush on Francis, as I did. (We both copied his uniform of a plain, dark grey, worsted double-breasted Saville Row suit, plain shirt, plain dark tie, brown suede shoes)' (D. Sylvester, 'All the Pulsations of a Person', The Independent, 24 October 1993). The shadows of all of these men, including the artist's caustic lover Peter Lacy can be found in the face of this extraordinary portrait. KA

Francis Bacon's Study for a Portrait, 1953
By Martin Harrison

'Study for a Portrait (1953) relates to the 'Pope' paintings that preceded it, and it is clear that it anticipates the Man in Blue series commenced in 1954, yet in some decisive respects it conforms with neither of these categories, nor with his other contemporary portraits of seated men, and stands as a unique work'
(M. Harrison, May 2011).

In evaluating Francis Bacon's entire oeuvre it is evident that between 1948 and 1963 he had a strong tendency to paint in series. These series - several of popes, heads, studies from the life-mask of William Blake, the seven Man in Blue paintings, the seven men in glasses - were sometimes identified as such and each painting numbered, while others constituted, in effect, a series, such as the three dog paintings dating from 1952. In some of these Bacon appears to have been exploring the cumulative impact of a group of paintings in which he made incremental shifts around the formal matrix, adjusting the mood, gestures and emotion of the 'sitter'. As Bacon explained to Ronald Alley, he saw the images 'in a shifting way, and almost in shifting sequences. The pictures are painted one after the other, the last one suggests the next.' 1 This explanation was appended to Alley's entry for Study for Portrait 1 (1953), the first painting in what became a notable series of eight papal portraits, which Bacon completed shortly before commencing the present painting.2

Conversely, other important paintings that Bacon made in this period appear to have been conceived as discrete statements: he may have regarded subjects such as Elephant Fording a River (1952), for example, as too specific to be susceptible to further development. Study for a Portrait (1953) relates to the 'Pope' paintings that preceded it, and it is clear that it anticipates the Man in Blue series commenced in 1954, yet in some decisive respects it conforms with neither of these categories, nor with his other contemporary portraits of seated men, and stands as a unique work.

Firstly, Study for a Portrait (1953) is the most rigorously grisaille among Bacon's paintings of the period. The ground is painted in a dark, stygian register, the deeply-saturated, inky, Prussian blue-black contrasting with the greys of the inner image. The monumental figure, bespectacled and wearing a dark suit and neatly starched (and somewhat constricting) white collar and purple tie, is pictured from a quite low viewpoint. Strictly speaking the 'spectacles' are pince-nez, and thus refer to the film still of the screaming nurse from the Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin that Bacon had grafted onto his Pope figures since 1949; this is further indicated by the extra 'falling' lens that Bacon painted under the man's right eye. Frontal, imperious, head raised, he is among the most magisterially aloof of all Bacon's 'authority' figures, be they popes or 'businessmen'. The atmosphere of hieratic indomitability is emphasised by the formal armature - the inner 'spaceframe' that interrupts the ground of vertical 'shuttering' (and secondary traces of curtaining) is virtually symmetrical and eschews the playfully 'incorrect' diagonals of which Bacon was so fond. The confined space that the figure occupies is delineated in pale blue paint, and its darker, receding planes mark this as one of Bacon's most coolly dramatic arenas, the spatial recession and the unlined dark 'roof' intensifying the isolation of the resolutely impassive man.

'Frontal, imperious, head raised, he is among the most magisterially aloof of all Bacons authority figures, be they popes or businessmen' (M. Harrison on Study for Portrait, 1953).

'Study for a Portrait (1953) shares some fundamental characteristics with the paintings of Mark Rothko, conspicuously its soaring abstract planes and subtle chromatic juxtapositions'
(M. Harrison, May 2011).

'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). 

Comparisons have often been made between Giacometti and Bacon, both figurative modernists committed to finding new ways to capture appearance and to represent the human body in space; for example, the the open cage construction of Giacometti's early sculpture The Palace at 4 a.m.(1933; Museum of Modern Art, New York) has been posited as a source for Bacon's spaceframes. The strong influence exercised on Britain's 'Geometry of Fear' sculptors by the gaunt, attenuated figures Giacometti evolved about 1946 was manifested in London in several of the entries to the competition for a 'Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner' in 1953 - contemporaneously, that is, with Study for a Portrait (1953). Bacon professed indifference to Giacometti's sculpture but greatly admired his paintings and drawings and called him the 'greatest draughtsman of our time'.3 In their unflinching frontality, monochrome palette and the device of the rectangular inner frame, Giacometti's Portrait of Peter Watson (1953; Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Bacon's Study for a Portrait (1953) have marked affinities; Bacon was closely acquainted with the art patron and collector Peter Watson, and probably knew this painting. But Bacon must have been familiar with the portrait busts in spaceframes that Giacometti had been painting since 1947, and it is likely that his own portraits were informed by them.

The chair in Study for a Portrait (1953) establishes continuity with the eight Popes that Bacon had painted a few months earlier in that despite being stripped down to a simplified, geometrical shape (it is shorn of the finials, for example) its edges are picked out in running lines and dabs of gold paint that refer back to the papal throne. In fact this was the first painting in which the legs and arms of the chair were painted in this more elaborate manner, and the immediate pictorial inspiration for this treatment was probably the studded armband worn by the king in Velázquez's Philip IV of Spain (c. 1656; National Gallery, London). Similarly, the man's purple tie was doubtless, like the vestigial tassel at the top of the painting, an atavistic reference to a leading motif of his pope paintings: Bacon initially believed, erroneously - he had only seen Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X in black and white reproduction - that the Pope's surplice was purple. The man's mouth is neither open in anguish nor baring teeth, but firmly closed, self-contained. Georges Bataille's observations in 'La Bouche' seem especially relevant here: Bataille claimed that 'human life is concentrated bestially in the mouth',4 and he evoked 'the magisterial aspect of the face with its mouth closed, beautiful as a strong-box'.5

The fleshy pink lips of Bacon's protagonist are unusual, and if they do point to an individual characterization it is possible they refer to David Sylvester, to whom Bacon was very close at the time the painting was made. The artist and critic briefly shared accommodation in 9 Apollo Place at the end of 1953 and lived in the same house at 19 Cromwell Road at the beginning of 1954; Sylvester was lecturing at the Royal College of Art while Bacon was painting there, and also dealing privately in Bacon's paintings during this period. Furthermore, Study for Portrait I (1953) had begun as a portrait of Sylvester 'who sat about four times for it until it turned into a pope'.6 Peter Lacy was possibly in the mix, too, but given Bacon's habit of merging and transposing the representations of individuals the identity of the 'sitter' will probably have to remain conjectural. A more definite comparison with the prominent lips is provided by Velázquez's portraits of Philip IV of Spain; besides the reproductions that Bacon owned of Velázquez's various versions of this subject, the National Gallery, London, held originals of not only the c. 1656 head-and-shoulders portrait, referred to above, but also Philip IV in Brown and Silver, c. 1631-32.

Study for a Portrait (1953), together with the painting that immediately preceded it, Portrait of a Man (1953), in which this detail is more cursorily delineated, represents the first occasion on which Bacon painted a man with his legs crossing. This pose, which recurred frequently in his paintings subsequently, was habitually adopted by Bacon himself when seated. In Study for a Portrait (1953) the suited body is painted quite thinly, with a broad brush, and evidently very rapidly, its energy providing an agitated, abbreviated counterpoint to the calmness and composure of the figure's general demeanour. The high reflectance of the oil-rich pigments in this passage is in marked contrast to the dominant low key of the painting. There is also implied movement in the positioning of the body, which twists round in the diagonally-positioned chair to confront the viewer directly.

Study for a Portrait (1953) was, then, a quintessential Bacon painting of the kind in which the leading art writers of the day found such compelling evocations of the existential zeitgeist. Their critical reception, and the resonance of Bacon's powerful (and powerless) figures, is clearly demonstrated in contemporary descriptions of them. Robert Melville thought Bacon's paintings fulfilled Nietzsche's gloomy prophecy to epitomise 'an age in which the breakdown in values has been completed', and he described Bacon's isolated figures as 'incarcerated' in glass boxes.7 The American critic Sam Hunter commented that Bacon's art was 'thoroughly contemporary in its vitality' and that 'No one has interpreted the acute postwar moods more vividly.'8 David Sylvester might have been addressing Study for a Portrait (1953) specifically in his remarks on Bacon's 'Settings which are luxurious and simple: lush velvet curtains and a gilded armchair. Like prison cells for highborn traitors.' 9

As a consequence of his peremptory departure from his flat at 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, in about April 1951, following the death of his former nanny and companion Jessie Lightfoot, Bacon had no access to a regular studio until the Autumn of that year, when Rodrigo Moynihan lent him his painting studio at the Royal College of Art. Moynihan had been appointed Professor of Painting at the college in 1948, and he was central to the drastic overhaul of its aims and syllabus initiated by Robin Darwin; it was in this studio that Moynihan painted the striking Portrait Group (1950; Tate Britain), which featured nine members of the Royal College's teaching staff. Bacon had already spent some time at the college deputising for John Minton in Autumn 1950. Although Bacon refused to teach any classes on either occasion, Albert Herbert was one of several artists who recalled the students' intoxication with Bacon's 'emotional realism' as well as his unconstrained attitude towards making art. These events serve as a reminder that at this stage in his career Bacon's interactions with London's cultural scene and its artists (Isabel Lambert, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Victor Willing and Michael Andrews) were of reciprocal significance.

Paradoxically, considering he was working in a borrowed space, Bacon had embarked on a creatively extremely fertile period. He began a passionate if turbulent love affair with Peter Lacy in 1952, and although their relationship eventually became problematical at first it undoubtedly acted as a stimulus for new paintings. Bacon was able to use the studio at the Royal College for two years, and Study for a Portrait (1953) was in fact the last painting that he finished there, in about October 1953. He apparently made a gift of it to Moynihan, a gesture of thanks he would repeat in 1969 when he presented the college with Study for a Bullfight No. I (1969), having been loaned a studio there for seven months while repairs were carried out on his house at 7 Reece Mews.10 Study for a Portrait (1953) was subsequently acquired by Louis le Brocquy, and was thus also unique in having been owned by two of Bacon's distinguished artist peers and friends.

That such a major painting as Study for a Portrait (1953) has not featured more extensively in the Bacon bibliography can probably be accounted for by its having been in private hands throughout the fifty-eight years of its existence. Since it had been acquired by Rodrigo Moynihan shortly after it was completed it was never exhibited at the Hanover Gallery and its sole public appearance in the 1950s was in Bacon's first museum retrospective, held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in January and February 1955. Thereafter, prior to its spectacular reappearance in the Tate centenary retrospective in 2008-09, it was exhibited only twice during the next thirty years, at Fondation Maeght in 1966 and in Japan in 1983; it was even absent from Lorenza Trucchi's comprehensive monograph of 1975. Interestingly, however, it had been published in 1954 by Wyndham Lewis in The Demon of Progress in the Arts, in which it was illustrated under the title 'Man in a Chair'. Lewis, who was responsible for some of the most perceptive writing on Bacon at this time, considered him 'the most astonishingly sinister artist in England, and one of the most original'.11

                  From left to right: George Dyer, Denis Wirth-Miller, Danny Moynihan, Francis Bacon and Rodrigo Moynihan in Provence, 1966.

Although, in The Demon of Progress in the Arts, Lewis compares him with Goya and Bosch, an analogy Bacon would have firmly repudiated, he observed that 'the ethical and literary impulses throughout the work of Bacon constitute him an artist at the opposite pole to the pretentious blanks and voids of Réalités Nouvelles.'12 Lewis's remark raises the question of Bacon's dialogue with abstract expressionism, about which he was also notoriously dismissive. In spite of his public statements, however, Study for a Portrait(1953) shares some fundamental characteristics with the paintings of Mark Rothko, conspicuously its soaring 'abstract' planes and subtle chromatic juxtapositions.13

Bacon's individual idiom generally precluded all but the most superficial imitations, but Graham Sutherland's controversial Portrait of Sir Winston Churchill (1954), which Churchill abhorred and his wife eventually destroyed, resembled Study for a Portrait (1953) in too many respects for a connection between them to be mere coincidence: in this instance the younger artist appears to have influenced Sutherland. The blurred, ethereal rendition of the man's head in Study for a Portrait (1953) is redolent of a plaster cast, and curiously prefigures the five variations he began in 1955 based on a life-mask of William Blake. The rapt expression and raised head suggest the self-possessed figure may have been involved in activity such as listening to music, or was otherwise deep in thought. Its spectral quality is also reminiscent of an early daguerreotype, as though the man were a sitter in a photographic studio a century earlier. As usual, the greatest attention is reserved for the head, its poignant, urgent brushwork recalling Robert Melville's contemporary remark that Bacon was 'unquestionably, the greatest painter of flesh since Renoir'.14

Study for a Portrait (1953) takes its place, then, in a pantheon of arresting images of male angst and seclusion, extending a lineage that embraces such disparate images as Durer's engraving Melancholia (1514), Rubens's Daniel in the Lion's Den (c. 1615; National Gallery of Art, Washington) and Blake's Elisha in the Chamber on the Wall (c. 1819-20; Tate Britain), to which Bacon added a modern image of unsettling power and distinction.

Martin Harrison, May 2011
Martin Harrison is editor of the Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné being published in 2013.


Notes

1. Sir John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, 1964, p. 72.

2. See: Hugh M. Davies, Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953, 2002.

3. David Sylvester, Looking back at Francis Bacon, 2000, p. 200.

4. G. Bataille, 'La Bouche', Documents 2, 1930, pp. 299-300.

5. ibid.

6. Rothenstein and Alley, op cit, loc cit.

7. R. Melville, 'The Iconoclasm of Francis Bacon', World Review, January 1951, pp. 63-64.

8. S. Hunter, 'Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of Horror', Magazine of Art, January 1952, pp. 11-15.

9. D. Sylvester, 'In Camera', Encounter, April 1957, pp. 22-24.

10. In 1975 Bacon exchanged this painting, at the college's request, for Study from the Human Body: Man Turning on the Light (1973-74). See: 'Study from the Human Body: Man Turning on the Light', An essay by Martin Harrison, Christie's, London, Post-war and Contemporary Art, Evening Sale, 14 October 2007, pp. 20-25.

11. W. Lewis, 'Round the London Art Galleries', The Listener, 21 September 1950, p. 368.

12. Wyndham Lewis, The Demon of Progress in the Arts, 1954; in 'Explanatory Notes', (unnum.)

13. The broad, coloured planes in several of Rothko's paintings dating from 1948/49 are comparable with the ground of Bacon's Painting (1950; City of Leeds Art Gallery). Rothko stayed in London twice during a tour of Europe in 1950, although it is not know if he and Bacon met then; but Bacon would certainly have encountered Rothko's paintings by 1953.

14. Melville, op cit, p. 64.

     The art world’s record breaker

         Bel Trew, London Evening Standard, 2 June, 2011

                                                   Pilar Ordovas with Francis Bacon's Three Studies for a Self Portrait 1975

Pilar Ordovas is something of a legend within the secret circle of the high-end art world. She was behind the world record-breaking sale of Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, which went for an eye-watering £21 million in 2008.

She also brought to auction Francis Bacon’s Triptych 1974-1977, which sold for £26 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at Christie’s in London. where, as one of its most successful dealers, Ordovas was responsible for nine out of 10 of the top sales.

From the auction house she went on to manage Larry Gaggosian’s   gallery in London. But after two years, much to the bemusement of the international art magnate, Ordovas, 38, quit.

Fast-forward to last month and the experienced researcher and curator announced that she was going solo, raising huge expectations, with her own gallery, Ordovas. "I know where the art is," she says meaningfully.

This is no mean feat for a woman working in a man's world. The majority of art galleries are still owned or run by men and the auction houses come across as stuffy old boys' clubs. "Yes, I've felt it, I've entered boardrooms where I have been the only woman present," Ordovas says. "Maybe some traditional female traits help, like being a good listener, but you don't want to be known because of your gender." Far from trying to match their masculinity, Ordovas is warm, feminine and driven.

Ordovas also managed Valerie Beston's estate after her death in 2005. "Miss B", the immensely private director of the Marlborough Gallery and beloved of Francis Bacon, left an extraordinary collection.

"Her flat was full of paintings nobody knew about." One of the discoveries Ordovas made was an unknown self-portrait Francis Bacon had given to Beston in 1969. It sold for £5.2 million.

"Miss Beston had touched many artists. I wrote to Frank Auerbach informing him which of his paintings she had. One of them, Frank said, was the only painting he sold in that particular show and his son had just been born. He was penniless. It was really important that she had supported him." Auerbach also told Ordovas how Miss Beston had sent him paints, because "when she asked him why he always painted in dark colours, he explained he couldn't afford brighter paints".

This personal contact is what tempted Ordovas away from the furious schedule of the auction house.

"You'd have a month to put together an auction catalogue and an exhibition; it becomes mechanical. When I put together the Crossing the Channel exhibition for the Gagosian I dedicated three months to the research. It was great to get my teeth into that."

Ordovas talks most warmly about her biggest passion: the artwork of Lucian Freud. "I've got to know Lucian personally over many years. I made it my mission to learn as much as I could about his work. If anyone was going to sell his paintings, it would be me."

The Ordovas gallery is her baby, although she is hoping her English husband, Nicholas, who works in the City, will help her with the financial side. She chose Savile Row  over the industry's traditional home of Cork Street. "There has been a drive to move out of the West End. [But] you need to make things more accessible and more convenient," says Ordovas, who lives in Battersea. 

"Savile Row with Sadie Coles's HQ, New Burlington and Hauser & Wirth, is becoming the centre of the arts."

She aims to set Ordovas apart by focusing on historical exhibitions and making new connections between existing artists, as well as providing one-on-one client services. "At an auction house at any one time you'd have 200 works and 500 collectors. With the gallery I want collectors to feel like they're developing an eye for what they really love. I want to give personal access."

Ordovas, which opens in October for the peak autumn season, is opposite Hauser & Wirth. I wonder, with her expertise and contacts, if the Swiss art house is nervous? "Competition is good," she says. Perhaps she has secured a killer opening exhibition? "That's a secret," she says, smiling.

Soutine/Bacon

Helly Nahmad Gallery 
975 Madison Ave. 

Through June 18

NY Culture | The Wall Street Journal | May 28, 2011

The Russian-born French painter Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) and the Dublin-born British painter Francis Bacon (1909-92), both expressionists, are often aligned by critics and art historians. Pairing 18 paintings by Soutine with 14 by Bacon, Soutine/Bacon, surprisingly, is the first of its kind. On the surface it makes tremendous sense. Soutine's paintings of skinned rabbits, plucked fowl, fish and beef carcasses—metaphors for suffering and martyrdom, especially the Crucifixion—were inspired by paintings of similar subjects by Titian, El Greco, Rembrandt and Chardin. When Bacon saw Soutine's pictures of hanging, slaughtered beef in Paris in 1927, they sparked his morbid imagination; not yet an artist, Bacon had long been fascinated by butcher shops.

After Van Gogh, Soutine is perhaps the most convincing of expressionists. In his best paintings, his figures, forms and their environments intertwine, seemingly struggling against one another like embattled elements of a single organism. Nearly every one of Soutine's paintings signals the end of the world; and he flays and eviscerates his subjects—as if unleashing the writhing bowels of hell.

In this show, Soutine's gnarled human arms suggest twisted roots. Trees, resembling prison bars, claw at the picture's surface. A set of forks, flanking a plate of fish, vacillate between threatening weapons and frail hands. And a flayed beef carcass is a yawning inferno. Yet Soutine's existential outcries and fiery whirlwinds build to a state of natural beauty and calm—as if they could not have happened any other way.

— Mr. Esplund writes about art for the Journal

  Bacons streaming back on the market

    A portrait of a mystery man from 1953 by Francis Bacon could go for £11 million

     By Colin Gleadell, The Daily Telegraph, 23 May, 2011

                            Study for Portrait by Francis Bacon from 1953 (detail)

A painting by Francis Bacon that he gave to another artist in return for the use of his studio could fetch as much as £11 million at Christie’s next month. In 1951, grief-stricken at the death of his former nanny and companion, Jessie Lightfoot, Bacon left his flat in Cromwell Place, South Kensington, which they shared, and embarked on a nomadic existence, borrowing the studio of the Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art, Rodrigo Moynihan, to work in. He used the studio for another two years, producing some of the most haunting images of his career, and exercising a powerful influence on the students at the college.

Study for Portrait was one of the last works he produced there. For Bacon, according to his biographer Michael Peppiatt, 1953 was an “annus mirabilis as inventive as it was prolific”. In spite of “flitting from debt to debt, and digs to digs”, he managed to produce more than 20 “majestic and terrifying” paintings including eight paintings of popes.

With the artist finding stimulation in adversity, Peppiatt concludes, “this was the period when Bacon acquired the means he needed to bring forth his vision.”

The subject of Study for Portrait is not known. The painting bears resemblances at once to Velazquez’s Portrait of Philip IV of Spain, to a photograph of Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, to the art critic David Sylvester and to Bacon’s lover at the time, Peter Lacy. Whoever it is, it is a figure of power, seated on a semi-gilded throne and staring menacingly down at the viewer from the dark, caged solitude in which he is trapped. Look closely at the darkness, and it is a vivid Prussian blue-black that recedes in tone to the depths of the unknown where the subject sits regally, his starched white collar and brilliant flesh tones glowing like a ghostly apparition.

At some point, the painting was acquired from Moynihan by the successful Irish artist, Louis Le Brocquy, known for his spectral paintings of Bacon, who in turn sold it to Marlborough Fine Art, which had become Bacon’s principal dealers.

In 1984 it was bought from Marlborough by the Swiss entrepreneur and wine producer Donald M Hess, who, though not identified as such by Christie’s, is the seller next month.

Hess, 75, who announced his retirement from the family business last week, is one of the world’s top art collectors with more than 1,000 contemporary art works, including 30 by the American light artist James Turrell, which he displays in three museums dotted around the world in locations where his winery business operates: in Napa Valley, California; Paarl, South Africa; and Salta, Argentina. A fourth museum is being planned in the Barossa Valley, Australia. Of his art buying, Hess has said: “When I have seen an art piece which keeps me awake over several nights, I know that this art piece has touched me deeply and this is one of my most important criteria to buy an art work.” But he is not known to have previously sold any art from his collection. His website states: “Sales of artwork are for Hess taboo.”

So why is he now breaking that taboo? Hess has also said that he favours buying the work of living artists. He bought this Bacon when the artist was still alive, and is now thought to be buying more works by living artists.

His timing might be good because the market for paintings by Bacon is back on the boil again. During 2007, buyers such as the investor Joseph Lewis and Sheikha Mayassa of Qatar paid record prices of between £25 million and £30 million for Bacon masterpieces, and in May 2008, Roman Abramovich lifted that record to £44 million for a large triptych. In the downturn that followed, several works went unsold, and then little appeared on the market.

This year, however, another Russian buyer, thought to be banker Pyotr Aven, paid £23 million for a small triptych of paintings of Lucian Freud. As a result, Bacons are streaming back on to the market, and two were sold this month in New York. Both had been on the market relatively recently, as has a reclining female nude which is to be sold by Sotheby’s next month with a £7 million to £9 million estimate.

The Hess portrait may be dark – and other dark paintings from this period, while relished by academics and critics, have not always proved commercially successful. But it is fresh to the market, which counts as a bonus. And, like the £44 million Bacon, which was sold by the Mouieux family, producers of Château Petrus wines, it comes from a collector with proven taste.

   Sotheby's to Sell Major Masterwork by Leading British Post War Artist Francis Bacon

      Art Daily, Friday, May 06, 2011

LONDON, FRIDAY 6TH MAY, 2011  Sotheby’s is delighted to announce that its forthcoming summer Contemporary Art Evening Auction will be led by Crouching Nude, an important masterwork by the renowned British artist Francis Bacon (est. £7-9 million / $10-15 million)* which has never before been offered at auction. The 1961 oil on canvas, which is one of Bacon’s large-scale paintings, measuring 198cm by 145cm, will be offered for sale on Wednesday, June 29, 2011. The appearance of this work on the market follows Sotheby’s unmatched track record** with the sale of works by the artist and the recently achieved triple-estimate sum of £23 million for Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon at Sotheby’s in February.

Commenting on the sale of this extraordinary work, Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s Deputy Chairman Europe and Senior International Specialist in the Contemporary Art Department, said: “Alongside Picasso, Bacon is the outstanding post- war artist and his Crouching Nude of 1961 is a magnificent painting which epitomises the artist’s work at this important moment in his career. This work holds within its remarkable paint surfaces all the elusive mystery inherent to the artist’s working method. We anticipate this painting will be highly sought after by discerning collectors across the globe.”

Crouching Nude was featured in the ninety-work major travelling retrospective that opened at the Tate Gallery in May 1962 as one of the artist’s most recent and striking paintings. The figure crouches ominously and through her uniquely distorted, highly complex form, references the singularity of psychological experience. Through Bacon’s unique existential vision, this animalistic nude is ultimately otherworldly. The 1962 retrospective established Bacon’s pre-eminence among contemporary British painters, and without doubt Crouching Nude sits in the highest tier of professional achievement of the artist’s formidable output.

Throughout his mature career, Bacon voraciously looked to friends and acquaintances around him as subjects for his existential masterpieces, including - in the 1960s – Peter Lacy, George Dyer, Lucian Freud, Isabelle Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes, and Muriel Belcher. Despite his obsession with the faces and bodies of those closest to him, he worked almost entirely from photographs, clippings and memories, and never from life itself. The figure of Crouching Nude evokes photographs Bacon owned of his friends Belcher, Rawsthorne, and Moraes, and is a sensational conflation of aspects of all three figures. While Belcher owned the Colony Room drinking club in Dean Street, Soho, which she had opened in 1948 and at which Bacon was given generous credit in return for bringing new customers; Moraes and Rawsthorne were close friends and together this was the most important female company of his 1960s existence. Crouching Nude was also painted at the height of Francis Bacon’s impassioned and tempestuous relationship with Peter Lacy, a Second World War fighter pilot, whom the artist had met around 1952 and conducted an intense and fraught relationship with until Lacy’s death from drink in 1962, which Bacon learned of via telegram on the eve of his 1962 retrospective. This painting therefore belongs to a salient moment of the artist’s biography and career, which heralded the sequence of masterpieces of the 1960s.

Notes:
*Estimates do not include buyer’s premium.
**Sotheby’s holds 4 of the top 5 auction prices for Bacon, including the record for any Contemporary work of art at auction with the artist’s Triptych ($86.2 million at SNY in May 2008).

  Two Meaty Visions of Flesh and blood

                            Bacon's Three Studies of Henrietta Moraes (1966)

Bacon thought about Soutine a lot, or so we’re told by Soutine/Bacon at Helly Nahmad Gallery, an intense pairing of Soutine’s still lifes, landscapes and portraits with Bacon’s caged, half-flayed figures. It comes accompanied by a catalogue of glossy reproductions, light on commentary but with detailed chronologies of both artists.

The exhibition is more of a one-sided conversation, with Soutine as the dominant voice. This may come as a shock to the general public, which is well acquainted with Bacon’s record-breaking auction prices and lauded international retrospectives. But it should not surprise painters, who have consistently mined Soutine’s roiling fleshscapes for abstract and figurative inspiration.

And in any case the organizers, Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, are co-authors of the Chaim Soutine catalogue raisonné. They also coordinated The New Landscape/The New Still Life: Soutine and Modern Art, a similarly ambitious and memorable undertaking  at Cheim & Read gallery in Chelsea in 2006. For this show, they’ve wrangled some incredible Soutines from the Tate and private collections in Europe.

Both artists exemplified the bohemian ideal, although in different ways. Soutine (1893-1943) emerged from the shtetls of Lithuania and found his way to the garrets of Montparnasse, nearly starving before the American collector Albert Barnes swept in and bought his paintings in bulk. During the World War II he lived in hiding in rural France, suffering from a stomach ulcer that eventually killed him.

Bacon (1909-92), born into and cast out of a well-to-do family, lived dangerously as a matter of preference. His proclivities for drinking, gambling and sado-masochistic relationships made him an enfant terrible of the postwar London set.

The two shared an appetite for viscera. An often-repeated, possibly apocryphal anecdote holds that the police and the department of health visited Soutine’s studio after neighbours complained about the stench of rotting meat and the blood dripping through the floors. Bacon was known to admire a line from Aeschylus’ Oresteia: “The reek of human blood smiles at me.”

Religion had something to do with it. “I’ve always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion,” Bacon said. One might go through this show with an eye to Soutine’s Judaism and Bacon’s Catholicism: kosher steak and blood pudding, as it were. Or one could focus on other signals of outsider status, with Bacon’s homosexuality as the counterpart to Soutine’s ethnicity.

It’s all there, for those who want to look. But this show isn’t really about identity or narrative or even subject matter. It’s about painting as “a direct assault on the nervous system,” as Bacon once wrote.

On the gallery’s cramped ground floor you will find Soutine’s “Flayed Beef,” from the Musée de Grenoble, one of the six nearly life-size renderings of bovine carcasses he made in 1924 and ’25. He had been looking at Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox at the Louvre, but his brushstrokes have a writhing urgency that evokes Titian’s more disturbing Flaying of Marsyas. 

He could serve up surf as well as turf, a glistening Still Life With Ray Fish made in homage to Chardin’s Skate. Poultry is on the menu in Dead Fowl and Brace of Pheasants, which flank a Bacon painting of a plucked chicken suspended over a platform or butcher’s block.

Bacon also liked to reinterpret masters, though he gravitated to different ones: Velazquez,  in his pope portraits, and van Gogh, in his landscapes. So the second-floor gallery’s pairing of Bacon and Soutine vistas feels forced, even if it includes some incredible Soutines like the Tate’s Landscape at Céret (the Storm) from around 1920-21, a crackling mass of thunderheads that anticipates Pollock and De Kooning.

The portrait section, also upstairs, is better matched. In works like Old Actress and Portrait of the Sculptor, Oscar Miestchaninoff, Soutine gives entire figures an astonishing plasticity, with Gumby-like limbs and twitchy features. In his triptych studies of friends and lovers Bacon goes right for the head, inducing Cubism with X-rays and deft, surgical strokes.

Soutine might not have held as much sway over Bacon as he did over School of London painters like Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach. But Bacon, out of all of these postwar figures, has had the biggest influence on contemporary art. You can’t have Damien Hirst without Bacon.

Can you have Bacon without Soutine? This show won’t resolve that question to everyone’s satisfaction, though it makes clear that Soutine was a vital part of the ecosystem that nourished Bacon. “In the 1950s Soutine was the artist who mattered, as Cézanne mattered in the decade before 1914, or Warhol in the 1980s,” as Martin Hammer asserts in the catalogue.

And as any painter will tell you, he matters still.

Soutine/Bacon continues through June 18 at Helly Nahmad Gallery, 975 Madison Avenue, at 76th Street, (212) 879-2075, hellynahmadgallery.com.

 Bidding War for a Warhol Breaks Out at Christie’s

   By Carol Vogel, The New York Times, May 11, 2011

                                  Three Studies for Self-Portrait, which brought $25.2 million.

If, as Andy Warhol, once said, “Making money is art,” he was responsible for a lot of creative activity at Christie’s sale of postwar and contemporary art on Wednesday night. He might also have added that making money is not just art, but theater, too.

Bring home the Bacon: This marble-lined Suffolk mansion – built with the legacy of Francis Bacon - is for sale at £3.5 million

    By Alexis Parr, The Daily Mail, 9th May, 2011

      Picture of elegance: The impressive Westgate Park in Suffolk was built by John Tanner and David Edwards
 

Most country houses priced at £3.5 million can be expected to have the odd nice painting on the wall. But this one is covered with the works of one of the world’s greatest artists – Francis Bacon.

The tortured, upper-class Anglo-Irish painter had a penchant for drinking and gambling in Soho’s demimondaine clubs, mingling with a markedly eclectic set of friends.

But none was more charismatic than the Edwards family, from the East End, who migrated to the Constable countryside of East Anglia where Bacon joined them on many of their lively weekends at the picturesque village of Long Melford.

When Bacon died in 1992, he left his entire estate to his devoted companion, former barman John Edwards. Although both were homosexuals, they were not lovers. John became almost a son to Bacon, who was 40 years older.

John died of lung cancer in 2003 and left a goodly chunk of the Bacon estate to David Edwards, his beloved older brother.

It is he who lives at the palatial Westgate Park with his companion of more than 40 years, dressage rider and interior designer John Tanner.

‘And now, after all these years in Long Melford, we are selling up because John wants to develop his equestrian facilities,’ explains David, drinking champagne on one of the terraces overlooking the property’s 14.5 acres.

The plan is for the couple to build a bigger house on land near Marks Tey, also in Suffolk but closer to London and with a direct rail link. The place will be fitted out with the latest equestrian gadgetry.

The two are obviously inveterate self-builders, having already completed Westgate Park four years ago, incorporating the outbuildings of the Georgian property next door, which was their home for 20 years. Bacon was a regular visitor, singing along to cockney anthems around the piano. ‘His favourite was Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner,’ says David.

They sold the Georgian house to move into Westgate Park, a modern, low-rise property with an authentic period atmosphere packed with antique fireplaces and yet with all the convenience of contemporary living, including a high-tech integrated music system, sophisticated security – with CCTV cameras and video entrance – and underfloor heating.

Tanner has also filled the house with expensive Italian marble and fixtures and fittings of high quality built to last. Even the Aga has solid gold attachments.

The house stands in a carefully landscaped parkland setting with surely one of the finest, uninterrupted country views in England – that of the belltower of Long Melford’s Holy Trinity church nestling in the hillside.

The church is recognised as one of the finest in the country.

David Edwards was one of six children brought up in the East End and had a tough life growing up in postwar London but, like his siblings, he was blessed with being handsome, hardworking and intelligent.

After a career owning pubs in the East End, he went on to create a successful career as an antiques dealer.

‘Eventually I left London altogether and it was Francis’s influence that brought us to Suffolk,’ says David. ‘Francis had an accountant who lived locally and his cousin Pam Firth lived nearby in the beautiful Regency house Cavendish Hall. So we would come out to visit him.’

David first met Francis at the Colony Room club in Soho in 1974 and introduced him to his brother John. ‘They became very close friends until his dying day,’ says David. ‘Francis recognised John as a loyal friend and treasured his brutal honesty as someone who would always tell him the truth. In the powerful world of art, with all its complex sensibilities, Francis valued that greatly.’

Superficially it seemed a strange friendship, given the social and intellectual gulf between them, but Bacon had had a loveless upbringing in Dublin.

He revelled in the straightforward warmth of the traditional Edwards family with their working-class values and their matriarch mother Beattie, who would cook Francis steak and kidney pies before pinning up a Bacon drawing on the wall of her East End council flat.

Bacon forged a strong friendship with John Edwards, and the artist’s portraits of him can now be found in art galleries around the world.

‘When Francis died his entire estate was left to John and was worth about £11 million, but in today’s terms it would be worth about £300 million – prices of Bacons have rocketed,’ says David. Caroline Edwards, of Carter Jonas, says that despite the recession, substantially larger houses are still selling well in Suffolk. While becoming increasingly fashionable, the county represents good value compared with countryside homes in the South East.

‘It is only larger houses with lower specifications which are a little harder to move but this is an aspirational, lifestyle home perhaps suitable for an international person,’ she explains.

‘You are getting a mini country estate and grand country home in the centre of one of the most popular and pretty villages in Suffolk – that is hard to find.

‘You don’t usually get both – grandeur and high quality with newbuild houses of that size.

‘It is also only about 25 miles to Newmarket, so somebody with equestrian interests might find it ideal,’ she adds.

      Bacon Nude May Fetch $15 Million as Owners Test Market demand

           By Scott Reyburn – Bloomberg, May 6, 2011

                Crouching Nude 1961 at the Gagosian Gallery, London 2006 Photo: Evert Potgieter

A 1961 female nude by Francis Bacon may raise $15 million at auction next month as owners regain confidence in the market for the U.K.’s most expensive artist.

Crouching Nude is valued at 7 million pounds to 9 million pounds and included in Sotheby’s (BID) London evening sale of contemporary works on June 29. The canvas of a grinning woman in an interior will be on show at Sotheby’s New York from today through May 9, the auction house said in an e-mailed statement.

The Bacon market was boosted when his 1964 triptych, Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud, fetched 23 million pounds at Sotheby’s in London on Feb. 10. The work was bought, at more than three times estimates, by the Cologne-based dealer Alex Lachmann, who acts for Russian clients.

“The market needed good works to gauge the new levels,” said James Holland-Hibbert, a London-based dealer. “Prices went up so quickly, then the crash came and no one was quite sure what Bacon was worth. The estimates had got too high.”

Crouching Nude - a composite of the artist’s friends Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes and Muriel Belcher - was one of 90 works included in a Tate Gallery travelling retrospective in 1962. It was also in a 2006 exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, London, where it was bought by an unidentified private collector, who is re-offering the work now, Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s European deputy chairman, said.

The seller hasn’t been offered a guaranteed price, he said. The estimate was based on a valuation of 7.5 million euros ($10.9 million) to 10 million euros placed on a similar 1961 Bacon female nude that fetched 13.7 million euros at Sotheby’s in Paris in 2007.

“Conservative estimates are the way to get the best auction prices,” Barker said. “The market’s still selective.”

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich paid a record $86.3 million for Bacon’s 1976 Triptych at Sotheby’s New York in May 2008, dealers said. Works by the Irish-born artist were in short supply at auctions during 2009 and 2010.

Bacon’s 1974 Three Studies for Self Portrait will be offered at Christie’s International, New York, on May 11 with a low estimate of $20 million.

(Scott Reyburn writes about the art market for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)

    Art Daily, Wednesday May 4, 2011

                  Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Seated Figure,1960.  

New York, NY. Helly Nahmad Gallery New York presents SOUTINE/BACON, the first comparative exhibition of Chaim Soutine and Francis Bacon, on view May 2 through June 18, 2011. 

Chaim Soutine's paintings have not only had a crucial impact on the development of modern art in the twentieth century, but also a sustained critical influence on contemporary practice. The artists most often associated and identified with his influence are the post-war Abstract Expressionists in the United States, best exemplified by Willem de Kooning, who referred to Soutine as his "favourite artist." 

Francis Bacon, who went to live in Paris in 1927 as a young man, with a future not yet determined, became aware of Soutine's already legendary paintings of beef carcasses. The images and the legends about their making resonated with him, as he had always since his boyhood in Ireland been fascinated to the point of obsession with slaughtered beef carcasses in local abattoirs. 

The present exhibition demonstrates that Soutine's paintings of carcasses were a trigger for Bacon's essential vision, possibly even the reason he was to become a painter. He intuited from Soutine's carcasses the basis for his art and art making. "If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there," Bacon explained, "it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me." It is no great leap to believe that Soutine's were among the works that had a decisive effect on him—that unlocked his valves of sensation. 

There are distinct links between the two painters: direct painting and general studio practice, the equation of oil pigment with flesh, and a certain aggressive re-invention of Old Master paintings. 

This groundbreaking SOUTINE/BACON exhibition is the very first to explicitly pair, compare, and historically situate these two magnificent painters. Museums and institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern and Bacon Foundation in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Albertina in Vienna, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, the Kunsthaus Zurich, and the Pearlman Foundation with the Art Museum of Princeton University have generously agreed to lend works. 

  Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale

    11 May 2011  New York, Rockefeller Plaza

     Sale Information  Sale 2440/ Lot 13

              Crouching Nude on Rail Francis Bacon (1909-1992) 

Estimate $10,000,000 - $15,000,000

Price Realized $9,602,500

Price includes buyer's premium

Lot Description

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) 
Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail) 
oil on canvas 
77½ x 54 in. (196.9 x 137 cm.) 
Painted in 1952. 

Special Notice

On occasion, Christie's has a direct financial interest in lots consigned for sale which may include guaranteeing a minimum price or making an advance to the consignor that is secured solely by consigned property. This is such a lot. This indicates both in cases where Christie's holds the financial interest on its own, and in cases where Christie's has financed all or a part of such interest through a third party. Such third parties generally benefit financially if a guaranteed lot is sold successfully and may incur a loss if the sale is not successful.
On occasion, Christie’s has a direct financial interest in lots consigned for sale, which may include guaranteeing a minimum price or making an advance to the consignor that is secured solely by consigned property. Christie’s may choose to assume this financial risk on its own or may contract with a third party for such third party to assume all or part of this financial risk. When a third party agrees to finance all or part of Christie’s interest in a lot, it takes on all or part of the risk of the lot not being sold, and will be remunerated in exchange for accepting this risk. The third party may also bid for the lot. Where it does so, and is the successful bidder, the remuneration may be netted against the final purchase price. If the lot is not sold, the third party may incur a loss. Christie’s guarantee of a minimum price for this lot has been fully financed through third parties.

Provenance

The Estate of Francis Bacon, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner 

Pre-Lot Text

PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE NEW YORK COLLECTOR

Literature

D. Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, pp. 63 and 268 (illustrated in colour).
L. Ficacci, Francis Bacon 1909-1972, Cologne, 2003, pp. 41-42 (illustrated in colour).
A. Zeite, Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real, London, 2006, p. 128, no. 22 (illustrated in colour). 

Exhibited

New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Francis Bacon: Important Paintings from the Estate, October 1998-January 1999, pp. 40-43 (illustrated in colour).
Dublin, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Francis Bacon in Dublin, June-August 2000, pp. 59 and 63, no. 16 (illustrated in colour).
Porto, Fundação de Serralves, Francis Bacon: Caged.Uncaged, January-April 2003, no. 108 (illustrated in colour).
New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Picasso, Bacon, Basquiat, May-July 2004, pp. 3, 24, 28 and 29 (illustrated in colour).
Düsseldorf, K20 Kunstsammlung, Francis Bacon: Die Gewalt des Faktischen, September 2006-January 2007, p. 128 (illustrated in colour).

Lot Notes

"Bacon is unquestionably the greatest painter of the human flesh since Renoir, but the intense beauty of the colour and texture of his flesh painting is at the same time horrifying, for it discovers a kind of equation between the bloom and elasticity of sensitive tissue and the fever and of iridescence of carrion. He is the painter of flesh considered as a communal substance, as the guinea-pig of senses, the trap of the spirit, the stuff of which murderers cannot get rid, the legitimate prey of pain and disease, of ecstasies and torments; obscenely immortal in renewal" (R. Melville, "World Review" 1951, quoted in M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon Anatomy of an Enigma, London, 2008, p. 176).

The startling vision of live, human flesh, twitching and throbbing, while seemingly trapped in a cage or impaled on a cold steel armature - a vision of man as meat on a hook, or as an ape in a cage - was one that fascinated Bacon throughout much of his life. A powerful existential image of the imprisonment of the flesh, Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail) of 1952, is one of the first of these great works. It is an extraordinarily painterly and expressive painting belonging to an important series of pictures of a lone and huddled human figure crouching naked and isolated in an apparently hostile environment that Bacon made in the early 1950s and which, periodically the artist was to revisit time and again.

Closely related in both its theme and subject matter to the painting Study for Crouching Nude in the Detroit Institute of Arts, Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail) is one of several early masterpieces that were discovered in a London arts storage space where Bacon had left them in the mid-1950s including one of his greatest Popes, Study after Velázquez, 1950. Leading Bacon authorities determined the discovery as one of the great finds of the 20th century. As David Sylvester wrote of this painting, soon after its rediscovery, the energy and vigour that Bacon has brought to this picture, make it "a more poignant" work than the "more controlled and more conventional" version in the Detroit Institute of Arts. With its shimmering "background cerulean blue ... (covering) ... a much wider area", Sylvester asserted, "its unabashed lyricism creates a violent contrast with the ungainly figure" (D. Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 60). This colour, "mixed with a chalky white thinned paint, and the shimmering pinkish flesh tints, so elegantly applied to the surface," gives the work "a Matissean sensuousness that evokes the flesh, in a mood," that Sylvester described as "combining eroticism and melancholy." Here, he continued, "the vertical 'curtain' lines commingle at the base of the railed structure with slanting, more vigorous, elongated brushstrokes that merge the interior space with the striated curtains of a more exterior one ...the essential lump of flesh asserts itself, in an apparently headless state, dramatically imprisoned but still performing despite its vital, missing parts.

The image is derived from one of Muybridge's motion studies, an image which seems almost purposely to deny the figure its defining crown and glory, the head. Muybridge's animalistic transformations of the human image are related to his fascination with malformed or paralytic children, which he also photographed in motion ... Bacon's powerful version of this imagery suggests his own overriding curiosity about the abnormal and the impaired physical shell of man, underscoring a darker view of humanity only partially evolved from an ignoble animal condition. The psychiatrist Bruno Bettleheim has suggested that the malformed and or half-animal, half-human creatures of folk myth may be fantasy projections of parental rage or discord, a condition that is usually corrected in the benevolent, stereotypical fairy tale resolution with the restoration of positive feeling for the child on the part of the parents. "In fairy tales and dreams," he writes, "physical malformation often stands for psychological misdevelopment" (D. Sylvester, "The Supreme Pontiff," Francis Bacon Important Paintings from the Estate, exh. cat, New York, 1998, p. 47).

Bacon painted Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail) in 1952 during a period when he had been making repeated visits to Africa to see his mother and sister. In South Africa and also in Kenya he became captivated with much of the imagery he saw there, beginning a lifelong fascination with wildlife photography, with the observation of large mammals moving through the long grass of the savannah. Of particular impact for him, for example was the image of a solitary baboon, (which he later painted) housed alone in a large wire cage in one of the wildlife parks. "I ... look at animal photographs all the time" Bacon later told David Sylvester, "because the animal movement and human movement are continually linked in my imagery of human movement" (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon London, 2000, p.66).

On his return to London, Bacon's art from this period centred on three closely connected themes: 1) the human scream - which at this time was primarily rendered in the form of his Pope pictures, 2) animal paintings - usually of dogs or monkeys though he also attempted paintings of an elephant and a rhinoceros in the savannah - and, 3) the male nude. Each of these three themes came to be rendered in a very similar manner in which the central figure, be it lone pontiff, animal or nude, was contrasted, pinned and isolated in direct conjunction with its environment, usually, a severe, cold and impersonal, geometric structure. In his human portraits particularly, this geometry often took the form of a cage-like grid (borrowed from Muybridge as in the Detroit Institute painting) or a strange metal armature of the kind used in gymnastics or found in animal cages at the zoo. Often reminiscent of both the modernist furniture that Bacon made in the early 1930s and of the contrast between nude and rail found in Matisse's 1911 painting Bathers by the River that Bacon so admired, these armatures had made their first appearance in Bacon's "butcher's shop" Painting of 1946 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) in which the association between man and meat was also first made plain. Subsequently these devices remain at their most sinister, severe and evocative in Bacon's depictions of the lonely, naked and seemingly fragile, isolated and defenceless human figure.

In Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail), in which the armature forms something close to a pair of parallel bars between which the hunched mass of heavy-pasted human flesh appears to be suspended, these metal bars are once again employed to provide a clear material contrast to the animate, living flesh of the figure. It is with the figure as a crouched seemingly headless, near-abstract but living carcass that Bacon seems fascinated in this and other works from this period such as the Detroit picture or Study for Nude of 1951, Man Kneeling in Grass of 1952, Study for figure in a Landscape of 1952 and the later Study of a Figure in a Room of 1953. In all these works Bacon's concentration is on the animate sense of life pulsating through the huddled and isolated ball of meat that is the human being. In Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail) in particular, Bacon has attempted to render this animate physicality through an intensely material surface, mixing sand and earth into his paint and creating an almost informel Fautrier-esque paste of flesh color that lends a distinctly animalistic quality to its surface. Recalling his heavy impasto of this period Bacon asserted that it was around this time that he discovered how, for him "one image can be deeply suggestive in relation to another. I had an idea in those days that textures should be very much thicker, and therefore the texture of, for instance, a rhinoceros skin would help me to think about the texture of the human skin" (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, pp. 66-7). 

In the same way, Bacon found that in his thinking about the human nude - as evidenced in this series of works - his deep knowledge of the imagery of Muybridge and Michelangelo seemed also to have become irrevocably fused in his memory and imagination. "Michelangelo and Muybridge are mixed up in my mind together," he once admitted, "and so I perhaps could learn about positions from Muybridge and learn about the ampleness, the grandeur of form from Michelangelo, and it would be very difficult for me to disentangle the influence of Muybridge and the influence of Michelangelo" (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 60).

Indeed, the source of the pose Bacon has used in Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail) as for many of the crouching nudes from this period, seems to derive from both Muybrdge and Michelangelo. Specifically, it derives from an image of Muybridge's called Man Performing Standing Broad Jump and Michelangelo's sculpture of a Crouching Boy circa 1530-34 now in the Hermitage, St Petersburg. Fused together in the artist's imagination these two images form the basis of several of the crouching figures that perpetually reoccur throughout Bacon's oeuvre. Heavily worked with layers of paint smeared and pasted onto the surface of the raw canvas and even mixed in places with sand to give a further sense of material texture, the huddled nude in Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail) is a compact and seemingly indistinct figure. As in the Detroit painting and the 1953 Study of Figure in a Room the bowed head of this nude is almost invisible, lending the rippled blob of flesh that comprises the rest of the torso a near-abstract appearance that brings the shock of its animate nature more into focus. It is this shock of reality, what Bacon once referred to as the "brutality of fact" that the artist has attempted to concentrate in this work through the juxtaposition of flesh and its seemingly hostile, alien and near-mechanical environment. "I hate a homely atmosphere," Bacon explained, and, following what he learned from the films of Luis Bunuel and also with particular relevance to this work, the beach-scene nudes that Picasso painted in 1929-30, he preferred what he described as "the intimacy of the image" to be set "against a very stark background. I want to isolate the image" (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 120).

In addition to this clear isolating of the image against a stark and alien background, Bacon has attempted to integrate his scene through the technique he called "shuttering." This was a striated use of brushwork that veils both image and background in a sequence of blind-like stripes that here extend down the picture from the top and also radiate out from the central figure across the plane of the floor at the bottom. This dramatic, painterly and highly expressive technique is one that Bacon used to greatest effect in what are probably his two finest Pope paintings, the 1950 Study After Velasquez (rediscovered along with Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail), and the 1953 Study after Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X now in the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa. Aimed at conveying a sense of the electric nature of living matter and what Bacon once called "all the pulsations of a person," this "shuttering," along with the pastel-like effect of the dry paint that Bacon has used in Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail), derives from Bacon's love of Degas' pastels and specifically, several works which he knew well in London's National Gallery.

Degas' similar use of striated form and colour in his pastels, lent a dynamic quality to the surface of the flesh of his figures in a way that Bacon greatly admired. It also meant that the "sensation" produced by the image, "doesn't come straight out at you but slides slowly and gently through the gaps," Bacon told Sylvester" (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, pp. 49 -50).

Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail) displays a dramatic extension of this technique into all areas of the canvas. Here, the shock and stimulus of Bacon's profound but also strange imagery now seems to shimmer and radiate throughout the picture in a way that holds and fascinates the viewer's attention for longer than perhaps otherwise they might wish to be the case. For, presenting the fleshy mass of a spectral human presence seemingly radiating a terrifying electric energy, Bacon has here, through the predominant use of radiant strips of cerulean and cobalt blue, created a powerfully persuasive image of agony or human suffering. It is an image that could well have served, for example, as a pictorial equivalent for the "Monument for the Unknown Political Prisoner" - a famous sculptural competition launched around the same time as this work in 1951 and eventually won by Reg Butler a sculptor whose work was in some degree inspired by Bacon's pictures. Indeed, Bacon himself may even have thought at some stage of this work in sculptural terms. It was, after all, exactly this subject - of a distinctly fleshy human presence somehow suspended on polished steel bars - that Bacon wanted in later years to turn into sculpture, and, for this ultimately never realized project that he kept copies of the Detroit painting close by him. As he told David Sylvester, "I've thought about sculptures on a kind of armature, a very large armature made so that the sculpture could slide along it and people could even alter the position of the sculpture as they wanted. The armature would not be as important as the image, but it would be there to set it off, as I have often used an armature to set off the image in paintings. I've felt that in sculpture I would perhaps be able to do it more poignantly" (D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p. 108).

 Christie's

   11 May 2011  New York, Rockefeller Plaza

    Sale Information  Sale 2440/ Lot 36  Estimate on request 

                                                       Three Studies for Self-Portrait  Francis Bacon (1901 - 1992)

Price Realized $25,282,500

Price includes buyer's premium

Lot Description

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) 
Three Studies for Self-Portrait 
titled 'Study for Self-Portrait' (on the reverse of each panel) 
triptych-oil on canvas 
each: 14 x 12 in. (35.6 x 30.5 cm.) 
Painted in 1974. 

Special Notice

On occasion, Christie's has a direct financial interest in lots consigned for sale which may include guaranteeing a minimum price or making an advance to the consignor that is secured solely by consigned property. This is such a lot. This indicates both in cases where Christie's holds the financial interest on its own, and in cases where Christie's has financed all or a part of such interest through a third party. Such third parties generally benefit financially if a guaranteed lot is sold successfully and may incur a loss if the sale is not successful.

Provenance

Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Pre-Lot Text

PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT COLLECTION

Literature

M. Leiris, Francis Bacon: Full Face and In Profile, New York, 1983, no. 96 (illustrated in colour).
W. Seipel, B. Steffen and C. Vitali, eds., Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, exh. cat., Milan, p. 219 (illustrated in colour).
F. Borel and M. Kundera, Francis Bacon Portraits and Self-Portraits, trans. R. Taylor and L. Asher, New York, 2006, pp. 90 and 91 (illustrated in colour).
D. Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York, 2007, p. 133 (illustrated). 

Exhibited

Lot Notes

"One of the nicest things that Cocteau said was: 'Each day in the mirror I watch death at work.' This is what one does oneself." (Francis Bacon in a 1975 Interview with David Sylvester. reproduced in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p.130-133)

For Francis Bacon, whose uniquely disturbing and somewhat timeless art seems, in many ways, to have stronger connections to the traditions of the Old Masters than to 20th century Modernism, self-portraiture was intrinsically connected to the artist's very strong awareness of the passing of time and the presence of death within everything in life.

Like Rembrandt before him, for Bacon, the self-portrait provided a window onto this process - a mirror of mortality that reflected an undeniable truth about the existential nature of the human condition. Excepting his earliest self-portraits, which were Expressionist portrayals of himself as an artist in the guise of Vincent Van Gogh - one of the very few artists with which Bacon openly identified - all of Bacon's other self-portraits are highly objective and dispassionate portrayals of himself as a seemingly ordinary and unremarkable man.

With a few exceptions, Bacon only really began to paint self-portraits with any frequency in the late 1960s. After suffering a spate of deaths among those close to him, Bacon began, in the mid-1970s, a prolonged series of self-portrait heads, painting his own face almost obsessively. "I loathe my own face but I go on painting it only because I haven't got any other people to do," he told David Sylvester in 1975, suggesting that he was only painting these self-portraits because people had been "dying around me like flies" and he had "nobody else left to paint." This was not strictly true. There were enough close friends around to provide him with alternate subject matter if he had so wanted, but the proximity of death all around him allied to his own encroaching mortality seems to have made Bacon, always very conscious of the temporality of man's existence, even more reflective on this subject. It also seems to have proved a highly cathartic exercise for Bacon during what was, in the wake of his former lover George Dyer's suicide, clearly a difficult time for the artist filled by periods of grief, guilt and self-reflection.

Depicting the artist with eyes distinctly shut, seemingly in sleep, bruised pain or inner contemplation, across a sequence of three panels, Three Studies for a Self-Portrait is a rare and richly-coloured example from the outstanding series of self-portraits that Bacon produced at this time. Executed in 1974, it depicts the distorted almost beaten-up, but still distinctly recognizable features of Bacon's owl-like face in three varying degrees of twisted expression and mutilation. The sequential effect of these three contrasting depictions of artist's face endows the complete work with a powerful sense of motion, fragility and life that is seldom achieved in Bacon's single panel portraits. Drawn perhaps from Eadweard Muybridge's sequences of analytical photographs on the motion of animals and human beings, the cinematic, slide-like progression of images in a triptych format appealed to Bacon because, as he once explained, "I see every image all the time in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences. So that one can take it from more or less what is called ordinary figuration to a very, very far point" (Ibid, p.21).

The triptych format also recalled the sequence of police mug-shots of a subject with which Bacon was also very fascinated. Mixing the clear, analytic facticity of the image inherent to both these and Muybridge's photographs, with the essentially more abstract and mercurial medium of paint was one of the consistent aims of Bacon's art. In Three Studies for a Self-Portrait Bacon depicts himself as a substantial and very material presence, flash-lit, almost like an apparition, and set against a dark monochrome purple background suggestive of an apparently infinite empty space. Using strong sweeping brushstrokes that appear to both mould and invade the artist's features, Bacon creates a series of images that in the restlessness of their distortions seem to suggest a series of alternating moods and expressions and an atmosphere of uncomfortable and shifting psychological unease. These are punctuated by the apparent progression of a lens-like ellipse - a kind of anatomical highlighting device derived from Bacon's book on positioning in radiography - that appears to move and cast a deep blue shadow across Bacon's face. This device, used frequently in many of Bacon's paintings in a way that seems to suggest the cold analytical view of an unseen perhaps even medical authority, here conveys a sense that the artist himself is under the microscope.

Throughout his life, Bacon worked mainly from photographs. His self-portraits were also often drawn from photo-booth portraits that he made of himself, but Bacon would also spend hours studying his own features in the mirror. According to John Richardson, he would even deliberately let his stubble grow for three or four days and then using Max Factor pancake make-up rehearse the brush strokes and distortions he intended to make in the painting on his face in front of the mirror. Presenting three seemingly sequential images of Bacon's face isolated against a rich purple background, this cosmetic aspect seems especially prominent in this work. For here, Bacon has heightened the paintings' already rich variety of colour by applying a sequence of striations in orange, turquoise and magenta in places by printing paint marks made by soaking either his sweater or a piece of corduroy with orange paint and impressing it onto the surface of these otherwise completed portraits. In this way, the final act of creation in Three Studies for a Self- Portrait echoes in some respects the prolonged and intensive process of putting on make-up and of self-examination and self-exploration that went into Bacon's preparation for making such an image. In addition to this however, when it came to his own face, Bacon was also able to bring all his emotional experience and familiarity with his own features to bear on what he once described as the attempt to "capture" and "trap" a true and revealing image of his subject. It was, after all, this elusive feature reflecting the visual effect of a person's unique inner energy - what he once called "all the pulsations" of a person - that Bacon sought. It was the element that he also referred to, for want of better word and in completely non-mystical terms, as a person's "emanation."

Strangely, perhaps, it is in this respect that Bacon's self-portraiture most closely resembled Rembrandt's genius for conveying the psychological intensity and life of his subjects using only the magical and essentially abstract materiality of paint. While Rembrandt never set out to "deform people into appearance," as Bacon once described his own aims, he did, as Bacon was well aware, use chance, accident and the fluid abstract and material qualities of paint to render more vividly the vital living nature of his subjects. Bacon, who often referenced Rembrandt's self-portraits as a source of inspiration, keeping a book of them in which they were sequentially illustrated, rather like his own self-portrait triptychs, close at hand in his studio, explained this quality of the Dutch master's self-portraiture by pointing to a Rembrandt Self-Portrait he knew well, in Aix-en Provence. In this painting, he said, "if you analyze it, you will see that there are hardly any sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely (an) 'anti-illustrational' work. I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks. And you can't will this non-rationality of a mark. That is the reason that accident always has to enter into this activity, because the moment you know what to do, you're making just another form of illustration. But what can happen sometimes, as it happened in this Rembrandt self-portrait, 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" (Ibid p.59.).

Chance, accident, and distortion often brought more life, realism and energy to an image than any painstaking scrutiny or representational copying of appearances could do, and it was this quality, what Bacon described as the "anti-illustrational" nature of painting, that he had observed in and most admired about many of Rembrandt's self-portraits. "Great art" he said, "is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormous instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless I think that they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way" (Ibid p.59.).

Echoing the humility as well as the psychology and existentialism of Rembrandt's late self-portraits, Three Studies for a Self-Portrait reveals Bacon's almost visionary eye conveying the extraordinary vitality and uniqueness of its subject in the manner of a kind of psychic X-Ray. Still recognizable, despite the sometimes brutal distortion Bacon has brought to bear on his own face, this self-portrait exudes a naked existential quality that speaks in simple and universal terms not just of mortality and of the fleetingness of human life, but also somehow of the unique miracle of the fact of its existence at all.

"I think of life as meaningless," Bacon said, "but we give it meaning during our own existence. We create certain attitudes which give it a meaning while we exist, though they in themselves are meaningless, really" (Ibid. p. 133). In Three Studies for a Self-Portrait the material and the non-material meet in what appears to be three fleeting flash-bulb moments that hauntingly capture in paint the very essence and vitality of Bacon's psychological and physical presence. Although each portrait clearly differs from the others, the radiating lines, smudges and blurred distortions of all three seem to communicate with one another between the paintings so that something of Bacon's living presence, his "emanation" perhaps, seems to magically infuse the work. "Of course," Bacon once commented, "what in a curious way one's always hoping to do is to paint the one picture which will annihilate all the other ones, to concentrate everything into one painting. But actually in the series one picture reflects on the other continuously and sometimes they're better in series than they are separately because, unfortunately, I've never yet been able to make the one image that sums up all the others. So one image against the other seems to be able to say the thing more" (Ibid, p. 22).

   Triptych set to bring home the Bacon

     ABC News | Tuesday April 19, 2011

                      Three Studies for a Self-Portrait depicts distorted, guttural images of Bacon. (Reuters: Luke MacGregor, file photo)

Three Studies for Self-Portrait, a 1974 work which depicts three distorted, guttural images of the British artist with eyes closed, against a dark background, are on display in London for the first time ever along with an untitled Bacon masterpiece known as Crouching Nude on Rail ahead of their sale in New York on May 11.

The nude, executed in 1952 by the then-emerging artist whose works in recent years have commanded some staggering prices, was among several works discovered in the 1990s in a London storeroom where Bacon had left them in the 1950s.

"The Bacon market is truly global and we have witnessed strong prices paid in recent months," said Brett Gorvy, Christie's deputy chairman and international head of post-war and contemporary art, who called Bacon one of the 20th century's greatest painters.

The cache also held one of Bacon's seminal Pope paintings, Study after Velazquez.

Christie's estimates the abstract depiction of a half-man, half-animal figure will command in excess of $15 million.

A year after completing the self-portrait, Bacon said, "I loathe my own face, but I go on painting it only because I haven't got any other people to do ... (there is) nobody else left to paint."

Bacon's lover and frequent subject, the troubled George Dyer, died in 1971.

Bacon's triptychs are among his most celebrated and prized works. The record for the artist set in May 2008 for Triptych, 1976, is $86.3 million. But with the market going into steep decline in late 2008 before bouncing back last year, works by the artist have seen uneven results.

Study for Self-Portrait, a 1964 work estimated to sell for upwards of $40 million, failed to sell at Christie's in November 2008. But the $37 million fetched by Bacon's Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud at Sotheby's in London in February bolstered confidence. The price was more than double the pre-sale estimate.

Reuters

                A Christie's employee with Francis Bacon's Three Studies for a Self-Portrait at Christie's in London April 15, 2011.

Francis Bacon Self-Portrait Triptych May Fetch $20 Million as Demand Grows

  By Scott Reyburn, Bloomberg, April 15, 2011

A triptych of self portraits by Francis Bacon may raise at least $20 million at auction next month as demand grows for the U.K.’s most expensive artist. 

Three Studies for Self Portrait, from 1974, are included in Christie’s International’s May 11 New York auction of contemporary art. They are part of a London show, opening tomorrow, that also includes Bacon’s 1952 painting, Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail), estimated at $10 million to $15 million in the same sale.

Owners of high-value paintings by Bacon are more confident about selling at auction after the 1964 triptych, Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud, fetched 23 million pounds at Sotheby’s in London on Feb.10.

“That result helped bring Bacons out of the woodwork,” London-based dealer Offer Waterman  said in an interview. “Up until then the market had been in a state of flux. Prices had dropped, and people found it difficult to value his paintings.”

Works by Bacon were in short supply at auctions during 2009 and 2010. In May 2008, before the financial crisis, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich paid a record $86.3 million for a 1976 Triptych at Sotheby’s (BID) New York, said dealers. Nine months later, the 1954 picture Man in Blue VI failed to sell at a Christie’s auction in London after being estimated at as much as 5 million pounds ($8.2 million).

Both of these latest Bacons have been offered by unidentified U.S. collectors and are being exhibited in the U.K. for the first time, Christie’s said in an e-mailed statement.

Guaranteed Price

The triptych of head-and-shoulder studies, one of 10 self portraits Bacon executed in the 1970s, has been owned for 35 years by the seller, who has been guaranteed a minimum price. The canvas of the nude, which doesn’t have a price guarantee, was one of a group of paintings by the artist discovered in a storeroom in London’s Chelsea in the 1990s, Christie’s said.

The 37-work exhibition, continuing through April 19, includes Impressionist and modern works from Christie’s May 4 sale, as well as contemporary pieces. Christie’s haven’t yet released an overall estimate for its auctions.

The works are on show from April 16 through 19, from 12 noon to 5p.m., at Christie’s, 8 King Street, St. James’s, London.

Francis Bacon masterpieces to fetch £22.5 at auction

A pair of Francis Bacon masterpieces that have never been seen in public in Britain are expected to fetch more than £22.5 million at auction, experts said.

By Andrew Hough, The Daily Telegraph, Friday 15 April 2011

       Francis Bacon's Three Studies for a Self Portrait 1974

The 1952 single canvas, titled Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail), was discovered 40 years after being lost, among “one of the greatest art discoveries in modern times”.

Britain’s most expensive artist is said to have stored the work at his art supplier’s store on the Kings Road, Chelsea, west London, shortly after he painted them.

But the unnamed owner, a close friend, is said to have forgotten about them after placing the paintings in the store backroom.

It was only discovered in the 1990s, together with a cache of other rare masterpieces, after the store closed down due to the owner’s death.

Experts said that the 10 paintings, which were in pristine condition, represented “one of the greatest art discoveries in modern times”.

They were passed to the artist's estate because they were found after his death in 1992.

Also among the cache, was his 1950 Pope painting, Study after Velazquez, thought to be one his best works and now owned by the American hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen.

The canvas of the nude painting was sold privately to a United States-based individual, who has now placed it up for auction.

It is to go under the hammer at Christie's in New York next month together with a rare 1974 triptych of self portraits titled Three Studies for Self Portrait.

The triptych of head-and-shoulder studies, one of 10 self portraits Bacon executed in the 1970s, has been owned for 35 years by the seller, who is also based in America.

Christie's expects the paintings, part of a wider free public view in London on Saturday of other arists including Monet and Andy Warhol, to fetch $US20m (£12.5) and $US15m (£10m) respectively.

Brett Gorvy, Christie's deputy chairman and head of post-war and contemporary art, said the paintings came from Bacon’s “prime periods of creativity”.

“The (nude) work was part of one of the greatest art discoveries in modern times,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

“Most of his works from that time were in museums, so this was an extraordinary grouping.”

Experts say that works by Bacon, who was known for “destroying” canvases, have been in short supply at auctions during the past two years.

In February a 1964 triptych of Lucian Freud by Bacon, his great friend, sold for more than £23 million.

In 1975, the artist was quoted said: “I loathe my own face, but I go on painting it only because I haven’t got any other people to do… [there is] nobody else left to paint.”

 Dessine italiens de Francis Bacon: une journaliste des Echos piégée 

  YOU, Le Parisien, 2 April, 2004

      Le Post, 02/04/2011

         Signature Francis Bacon is a Registered Community Trade Mark: E5988308

Art Paris a débuté cette semaine au Grand Palais jusqu'à dimanche soir. Plébiscitée par les galeries, cette foire leur offre des espaces plus vastes et plus luxueux qu'à la FIAC, avec un nombre de galeries plus réduit qu'à l'événement automnal (125, tout de même).  Cette année, l'une des attractions est l'exposition par la Galleria Nove Berlin de 12 tableaux de Francis Bacon datant de sa période italienne.

          The Signature Francis Bacon is a Registered Community Trade Mark: E5988308

Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann a Hit

World’s finest Modern Design Sale tallies US$60M in Paris

Live Trading News, April 02, 2011

The sale of a 20th-century design collection, described as the World’s finest, ended with furniture maker Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann the best-selling name.

The Christie’s International 3 day sale in Paris of the contents of the Chateau de Gourdon museum accumulated by Laurent Negro raised 42.4M Euros (US$60M) with fees.

The west just can't dictate democracy to the Arab world

Henry Porter, The Observer, Sunday 13 March 2011

Oddly enough, I am reminded of an exchange my wife once witnessed between Francis Bacon and the columnist Jeffrey Bernard in a Soho restaurant. Bacon asked Bernard whom in the world he would most like to bed. Bernard said Cyd Charisse and Monica Vitti, then asked the great painter about his ultimate fantasy.

"I'd like to get into bed with Colonel Gaddafi," replied Bacon after some thought. It turns out that all these governments and the previously revered LSE have a lot in common with Francis Bacon.

Unimpeachable sauces: 'The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon'

Lynn Barber, The Independent on Sunday, Sunday, 18 April 1993

Francis Bacon painting of Lucian Freud sells for £23m

BBC News 11 February 2011 

A painting by Francis Bacon of his friend and fellow artist Lucian Freud has sold at auction for £23m ($37m) - three times the pre-sale estimate.

The triptych, Three Studies For A Portrait Of Lucian Freud, went to an anonymous buyer at Sotheby's in London.

Cheyenne Westphal, from Sotheby's, said it was "an artwork that radiates 'wall-power'".

Bidding war

Bacon and Freud met in 1945 and became close companions, painting each other on a number of occasions.

Three Studies For A Portrait Of Lucian Freud has been kept in private since shortly after its completion in 1965.

It was expected to sell for between £7m and £9m, but when it came up for auction on Thursday the price was driven up by more than 10 competing bidders from four continents.

It eventually went for a £23,001,250, including the buyer's premium.

Ms Westphal, chairman of Contemporary Art Europe at Sotheby's, said: "This striking painting has everything a collector in the current market is looking for.

"It is an artwork that radiates 'wall-power' with its brilliant colour and dramatic brushstrokes.

"It narrates one of the most impressive artistic relationships of the 20th Century between two titans of British art and is desirably fresh to the market having remained in the same collection for almost half a century."

Francis Bacon triptych sells for £23 – three times its estimate

Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud by his friend Francis Bacon saw more than 10 bidders compete for the work

Mark Brown, The Guardian, Friday 11 February 2011

        The Francis Bacon had a pre-sale estimate of £7-9m.

A triptych of Lucian Freud portraits by his friend Francis Bacon have been sold for £23m at Sotheby's in London, three times the pre-sale estimate.

Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud (above) had created a buzz before the sale. The question was not if it would make its pre-sale estimate of £7m-£9m, but how much higher it would go.

More than 10 bidders competed for the work. After seven minutes of bidding, it reached £20.5m and a hopeful telephone bidder asked if £20.6m could be offered. The auctioneer, Tobias Meyer, insisted on £21m. "I don't want to sound arrogant, but we've come so far," he said. There was applause as he finally banged his hammer.

Cheyenne Westphal, the auction house's chairman of contemporary art in Europe, said: "This striking painting has everything a collector in the current market is looking for. It is an artwork that radiates 'wall-power' with its brilliant colour and dramatic brushstrokes."

The triptych has been in the same private collection for nearly 50 years and is a testament to the close friendship of two of the titans of 20th century British art. This triptych, Sotheby's said, contained an "intensity and intimacy that is rarely seen elsewhere".

Bacon, who died in 1992, and Freud were kindred spirits: close friends who often saw each other every day. They gambled together, drank in the same Soho dens and painted each other.

The paintings were part of a truly wondrous private collection. The sale of 60 works from it also included paintings by Modigliani, Giacometti, Chagall and Miró.

                                             Francis Bacon triptych sells for £23 – three times its estimate

Lucien Freud: rare artist painting by friend Francis Bacon fetches £23m

A three-panel painting of Lucian Freud by his great friend Francis Bacon sold last night for more than £23 million.

By Andrew Hough, The Daily Telegraph, 11 February, 2011

The triptych involving two of the most influential figures of 20th century British art fetched almost three times its reserve value during the sale at Sotheby’s.

The rare painting shows Freud with a variety of facial expressions.

It is understood that Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud was bought by Alex Lachman, a Cologne-based dealer.

It came after seven minutes of frenetic bidding involving ten potential buyers from four continents. It had been expected to fetch between £7m and £9m.

The 14-inch high triptych of expressively painted heads has rarely been seen in public. It has previously been offered for private sale at about $25 million (£15.5 million).

Experts say that works by Bacon, Britain’s most expensive artist, have been in short supply at auctions during the last two years.

"This striking painting has everything a collector in the current market is looking for," said Cheyenne Westphal, chairwoman of Contemporary Art Europe at Sotheby's.

"It is an artwork that radiates 'wall-power' with its brilliant colour and dramatic brushstrokes.

"It narrates one of the most impressive artistic relationships of the 20th century between two titans of British art and is desirably fresh to the market having remained in the same collection for almost half a century."

A Sotheby's spokeswoman said more than 10 people, from four different continents, put in bids for the painting until it sold to the buyer in the room for £23,001,250. She declined to confirm the buyer's identity.

The sale prices include buyer's premium. Mr Lachman was unavailable for comment.

 Bacon sizzles at sell-out auction

   By Georgina Adam, The Financial Times, February 11 2011

A rare triptych by Francis Bacon sold for a stunning £23m in a sell-out auction of modern art at Sotheby’s in London last night (February 10). It was the highlight of a session that also saw a Salvador Dalí painting soar to £13.5m, setting a new record for the artist and for any Surrealist work of art.

Eight bidders wanted the small scarlet-hued Bacon, Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud (1964), and after a prolonged battle it was hammered down to the Cologne-based dealer Alex Lachmann who specialises in Russian clients. It was estimated at £7m-£9m and was the top lot in the sale.

 Bacon Bounces Back at Sotheby’s Sale

  By Kelly Crow, The Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2011

              Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud

Sotheby's in London brought in £23 million ($37 million) on Thursday for a trio of crimson-coloured portraits of British artist Lucian Freud painted by his longtime friend and peer Francis Bacon. The triptych sold to an unknown bidder for more than double its high estimate

The sale signals an art-market comeback for Mr. Bacon, whose ubiquity and soaring prices at auction seemed laudable to collectors before the recession but struck others as worrisome ever since. Mr. Bacon is an Icarus no longer, and his strong performance could further fuel confidence in the rebounding global art market midway through London's major round of winter auctions.

Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud is actually three canvases standing a foot (30 centimeters) tall, depicting differing angles of Mr. Freud's face, each variation seeming squished or slashed by Mr. Bacon's signature brushwork. Mr. Bacon created the work in 1964, a decade after the pair and Ben Nicholson represented their country in the Venice Biennale, the art-world equivalent to the Olympics.

The late Geneva-based collector George Kostalitz bought the triptych the same year the artist created it; Mr. Kostalitz's heirs put the work up for sale with an estimate of £7 million to £9 million.

At the height of the boom-era three years ago, Mr. Bacon was a staple of major auctions in New York and London with works that regularly topped £10 million, thanks to demand from an influx of newly wealthy collectors from Russia and the Middle East. Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich famously broke the artist's auction record when he paid Sotheby's in New York $86.2 million in May 2008 for a teal-coloured Bacon triptych from 1976.

But when the recession hit and asking prices for artists everywhere began to plummet, Mr. Bacon all but disappeared from auction catalogues. His prolonged absence spooked some of his collectors—only three Bacons turned up at major auctions in 2009—and stoked Schadenfreude among dealers who questioned whether the auction houses had ratcheted his asking prices to an unsustainable level.

Three months ago, Sotheby's tested the waters by including his 1985 work, Figure in Movement, in their major fall sale in New York. The decision was rewarded when Figure sold for $14 million, over its $10 million high estimate.

  The essence of Bacon on menu at Bonhams

    The Independent, Tuesday, 8 February 2011

        Image of Francis Bacon No 18, by Louis le Brocquy

€8 Bacon on Sotheby’s menu

Michael Parsons, The Irish Times - Saturday, February 5, 2011

                       Right panel from Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud

“That man who paints those dreadful pictures” is set to steal the limelight – yet again

MARGARET Thatcher once famously referred to Francis Bacon as “that man who paints those dreadful pictures”. The former British prime minister sure had her finger on the pulse.

Abstract paintings of screaming popes, crucifixion scenes and grotesquely contorted naked men are not, quite, Middle England’s cup of tea. But, despite the Iron Lady’s disdain, he is one of the most admired – and collected – of all 20th century artists.

And his paintings – which can make even hardened adults flinch – sell for more than the work of any other Irish-born artist by a very wide margin.

Born in Dublin in 1909, Bacon grew up in Co Kildare where his father, a former British army officer turned racehorse trainer, reputedly had his son flogged by stable-hands to make a man of him. Not surprisingly, he bolted abroad at the earliest opportunity and, after stints in Berlin and Paris, settled in London where he spent the rest of his life.

Papa’s “cure” backfired and Bacon was notorious for consorting with toughie Eastenders with whom he indulged his taste for sado-masochism. Although his favourite haunts were the seedier bars and nightclubs of Soho, fame opened gilded doors. He once scandalised London’s beau monde when he booed and hissed Princess Margaret as she sang a Noel Coward song at a private party – causing her to rush, mortified, from the salon. Polite society (and the Daily Mail) was aghast.

Writing in The Observer, in 2008, Oxford University professor and critic Peter Conrad described Bacon as “the most celebrated painter of his time, all the more famous for the diabolical whiff of sulphur exuded by his alcoholic binges, his homosexual promiscuity and his voluptuous taste for pain”.

In 1946, a London art dealer bought one of his paintings for £200. Anyone who bought his early works has reason to be cheerful and may well be reading this article on a yacht moored off Cannes. By 1989, Bacon had become the worlds most expensive living artist. He died, while holidaying in Madrid, in 1992. Bacon’s South Kensington studio – lock, stock and dirty paintbrushes included – was donated by his heir, John Edwards, to the Hugh Lane Gallery and was transported to Dublin in 1998 to be reassembled for permanent display.

Since his death, his reputation – and prices – have soared. In 2008, Sotheby’s New York sold his Triptych, 1976 for $86.3 million, the highest price paid for any painting created since the second World War. The triptych was sold by France’s Moueix family, producers of Château Pétrus wines, and bought by Russian billionaire and owner of Chelsea Football Club, Roman Abramovich.

Next Thursday, February 10th, Sotheby’s in London is selling another of his triptychs, Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud – a fellow painter widely regarded as Britain’s greatest living artist. Sotheby’s described it as “a testament to the friendship between these two giants of 20th century art” and has estimated it at £7m-£9m.

 World’s First Online Art Fair Draws fire as Top Works Go Unsold

  By Scott Reyburn, Bloomberg News, February 1, 2011

   Francis Bacon's 1989 painting Man at Washbasin, valued at $18 million, didn't sell at the VIP Art Fair.

LONDON—Works by Francis Bacon and Richard Prince went unsold as the world’s first online contemporary art fair suffered from problems such as a jammed chat system.

“It was expensive and the things that were meant to make it special didn’t work,” said Gordon Veneklasen, director of the New York-based Michael Werner Gallery. “We were unhappy.”

The VIP Art Fair, which closed Monday, was billed as an unprecedented event where collectors could access 2,000 works and connect with more than 130 dealers from 30 countries. Some collectors are increasingly willing to buy at online auctions: 28 per cent of Christie’s International clients bid online.

Denis Wirth-Miller: Bohemian artist who enjoyed a close association with Francis Bacon

 By David Buckman, The Independent, Wednesday, 19 January 2011

                                    Denis Wirth-Miller with Francis Bacon

Denis Wirth-Miller was one of a group of artists who for many years injected the spirit of bohemia into the life of Wivenhoe, a small shipbuilding and repairing town on the Essex coast. The jollifications of Wirth-Miller, his partner, the James Bond illustrator Richard "Dickie" Chopping, and the painter Francis Bacon remain the stuff of local legend.

Such stories, true or untrue – among the latter is one that after Bacon's death his former Wivenhoe house was kept as a shrine by Denis and Dickie – have tended to overshadow Wirth-Miller's achievements as a painter. One recognition of this will be a forthcoming small retrospective at the Minories Art Gallery, Colchester.

Also undermining Wirth-Miller's reputation was the fact that from the early 1970s sight problems hindered him and that latterly he suffered from dementia. All this must have been hard for a man who had shown in London's leading galleries and had work in the collections of the Queen, the Arts Council and Contemporary Art Society.

Wirth-Miller was born in Folkestone, Kent, in 1915, where his Bavarian father Johann Wirthmiller (Denis later Anglicised his name) ran a busy hotel. Wirth-Miller's mother moved him to Bamburgh in her home county of Northumberland, where he was raised by his grandmother.

After school, he joined Tootal Broadhurst Lee, the textile manufacturers in Manchester, where innate talent prompted his appointment as a designer. After arriving in London early in 1937 he met Dickie Chopping, who moved into one of the painter Walter Sickert's former studios in north London, where Denis was living. Thus began a lifelong relationship; in December 2005 they became the first in Colchester to make a civil partnership.

It was not without disagreements, even how about they first met – according to Chopping at a Regent's Park charity garden party, according to Wirth-Miller at the Café Royal, a celebrated meeting point for gay men. A friend was concerned about the vulnerability of the Sickert flat to bomb damage and advised them to leave London, lending them the dilapidated Felix Hall in Kelvedon, Essex. There, they scraped a living gardening and other jobs.

Then, importantly, they met the painters Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, who had established the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, first at Dedham and, when that was destroyed by fire, at Benton End. The artist Mollie Russell-Smith recalled how, as a student lacking an easel, with trepidation she knocked on the door at Benton End and it was "flung open by three young men" – Chopping, Wirth-Miller and Lucian Freud. "They bundled me in, assuming that I had come to be a student, and Dickie showed me all over the house with great enthusiasm and charm. I was enchanted."

Benton End was an artistic Eden. Wirth-Miller must have absorbed much from Morris, artistically and as a plantsman. Later, in Wivenhoe, Wirth-Miller tended a walled garden producing magnificent vegetables. Their house on Wivenhoe Quay, then used as a sail storehouse, was bought in 1944, but wartime restrictions prevented their moving in until 1945, when they began converting it back to its original role as a merchant's house.

By the late 1940s Bacon was visiting Wirth-Miller and Chopping. The friendship between Bacon and Wirth-Miller had been instigated earlier in the decade by the two Scots painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, whom Wirth-Miller had known in his Soho days. For years, Bacon had a home and studio in Wivenhoe which eventually Wirth-Miller bought from him.

Wirth-Miller, Chopping and Bacon were close, holidaying abroad. "Denis had a deep intellectual friendshipwith Francis," says Daniel Chapman, a close friend for many years. "Their interests in literature, philosophy, art, gambling and life in general were coincidental and were live and vibrant up to each of their dying days." For most of the last 20 years Wirth-Miller and Bacon would hold extensive telephone conversations daily.

Wivenhoe’s artistic social life was boosted in when the journalist and local resident George Gale invited the politician Edward Heath to open a Wivenhoe Arts Club, which attracted painters and writers and had its own gallery. It was not so significant in the lives of Wirth-Miller and Chopping, insists Chapman, as Denis’s assisting others such as the primitive painter Ernie Turner to develop his talent.

Known as “Wivenhoe’s Alfred Wallis” – after the St Ives Cornish primitive – Turner began painting in 1964 when he retired as a shipwright. Wirth-Miller helped him with technical advice, encouraged him to experiment and fostered his sales in London and to overseas clients. Turner became so popular that clients had to order paintings.

Cultivating his friendships at home and abroad and partying hard were strong Wirth-Miller traits. A former near-neighbour of Bacon's cottage and studio in Wivenhoe remembers the "outrageous" reputation he, Wirth-Miller and Chopping had. "They frequented local pubs and restaurants, sometimes to the owners' dismay. At one time I lived above and worked in the restaurant the trio frequented.

"On those occasions the proprietor used to hide the bottles of champagne so there would not be all-night sessions. I heard tales of Wirth-Miller and Bacon having drunken painting sessions, painting on each others' canvases."

In contrast, Chapman recalls Wirth-Miller as a serious worker. When materials were in short supply during the war, like others he would resort to house paint and enamels.

After the war years his work was in oil on a large scale. "Early works were portraits, figures and still life," Chapman said, "later a series of very large dog paintings – hounds on the move, mastiffs, great danes in motion in the act of turning or hunting or disappearing into the mist. Later works were East Anglian or Dartmoor landscapes. He was always drawing in secret, often hands and feet."

Denis Wirth-Miller, artist: born Folkestone, Kent 27 November 1915; died Colchester, Essex 27 October 2010.

 Sotheby's

 Looking Closely: A Private Collection

  London 10 February, 2011 at 7.00 pm

   34 - 35 New Bond Street, W1A  2AA

LOT NO. 30

FRANCIS BACON

1902 - 1992

THREE STUDIES FOR A PORTRAIT OF LUCIAN FREUD

titled and dated 1964 on reverse

oil on canvas in three parts

each: 35.5 by 30.2 cm

14 by 11 7/8 in.

ESTIMATE

7,000,000 - 9,000,000 GBP

LOT SOLD

Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium:

23,001,250 GBP

PROVENANCE

Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London

Acquired directly from the above in 1964

EXHIBITED

Hamburg, Kustverein; Stockholm, Moderna Museet; Dublin, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Francis Bacon,1965, no. 57

CATALOGUE NOTE

Acquired prior to the breakthrough travelling exhibition in 1965 and executed at the very height of Francis Bacon's phenomenal career, Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud serves as testament to one of the most impressive artistic relationships of the Twentieth Century. In the 1950s and 1960s Bacon and Freud, then widely recognised as Britain's pre-eminent painters, met incessantly and were considered inseparable. From 1961 Bacon employed this fourteen by twelve inches canvas size exclusively for an epic portraiture cycle that depicted a coterie of close friends in a project that occupied him until the end of his life. While his friend Frank Auerbach has likened these fantastic portrayals to "risen spirits" John Russell has commented that "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 and p. 152). Among these phenomenal character investigations, the brilliant colour, dramatic brushstrokes and analysis of facial landscape across the three canvases of the present work are truly exceptional. Highlights converge and dissemble to describe passages of light across the three versions of Freud's visage: just as our eye is attracted to the seeming organisation of one area it immediately shoots to the apparent dissolution of another.

Lucian Freud had first learned about Francis Bacon from Graham Sutherland towards the end of the Second World War, and the pair thereafter became close friends, even seeing each other on a daily basis for a time. Freud painted his extraordinary portrait Francis Bacon in oil on copper in 1952, conjuring an intangible air of distracted distance in the face of his friend which so perfectly narrates the dimensions of their unconventional friendship. Two years later in 1954 the pair represented Britain, together with Ben Nicholson, at the Venice Biennale, firmly cementing their reputations at the vanguard of contemporary painting. Having started with the large Portrait of Lucian Freud in 1951, Bacon created paintings that included Freud in their titles for over twenty years, and the shadow of his unnamed presence long after that. However, the present work contains an intensity and intimacy that is rarely seen elsewhere, together with the paint handling that defines Bacon's inimitable masterworks. It is archetypal of Bacon's seminal cycle of triptych portrait heads, capturing an intense presence in mid-movement. This is Bacon's detached yet doting depiction of one of his closest friends and a true artistic companion, and it confirms David Sylvester's description that "Bacon had something of Picasso's genius for transforming his autobiography into images with a mythic allure and weight" (David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London 2000, p. 186).

Overlapping matrices of paint hatching, partly imprinted with Bacon's idiosyncratic use of corduroy material, describe the modulations of texture across the subject's faces, while Freud's stylishly dishevelled hair is variously presented with dragged streaks of dry pigment. Bacon's extraordinary aptitude to shift through different modes of execution, from exactitude to expressivity, from the diagrammatic to the painterly, is here exhibited at its instinctive best. Bacon's portraiture is critically-defined and world-renowned for achieving uncanny likeness via a seemingly chaotic assault of violent brushstrokes. Between the rich paint strata here he has buried a deep affection for Freud, which slowly reveals itself together with the gradual appearance of the sitter's character on the surface of the canvas.

The portrait is loaded with physicality, both literally with the weight of oil paint and as the material record of the artist's own brutal assault. Out of a flurry of swipes and blows Freud's unmistakable presence emerges: with each loaded stroke on the three canvases this most focused of portraits unravels the sitter's psychological and emotional kernel across the surfaces. It is almost as if Bacon has attempted to hide this face and to camouflage it in paint, yet suffers the burden of knowing it too well to conceal its true identity. It is often noted that Bacon's portraits reveal their sitter's inner essence because he painted people he knew closely, and at this time Lucian Freud was perhaps the closest that Francis Bacon ever had to a likeminded artistic equal.

The variegated textures of the surfaces recount the story of this work's creation: the artist has brushed, smeared, flicked, lifted and thrown paint in his drive to define likeness; scraping, reworking, and layering to impregnate the painting with both painterly and psychological depth. While the powerful scarlet reds introduce a radical charge of colour, the sinuous sweeps of highly viscous strokes define the topography of Freud's physiognomy in a rhythmic pattern of textural variety. All this is set against a backdrop of depthless black, coarsely woven canvas that results in the sculptural character of bitumen. Bacon's rich hues have been soaked into the absorbent unprimed canvas, which contrasts brilliantly with the explosive plasticity of the impasto.

While the renowned critic and Bacon's great friend Michel Leiris describes the artist's portraits in strictly corporeal terms; "his work carries the signs of his actions rather as a person's flesh bears the scars of an accident or an attack" (Michel Leiris in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, p. 17), William Feaver appraises them as figures of speech: "Here we have the slap round the chops. Then a good seeing-to, followed by a succession of abrupt images; gobsmacked, browbeaten, dumped on, cold-shouldered" (William Feaver in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon 1909-1992: Small Portrait Studies, 1993, n.p.). Because we see several aspects and angles of Freud's head all at once we are confronted by his character as a whole, rather than one specific snapshot. The representation is like an over-exposed photograph, or even some constantly adjusting oil-based hologram acting as a psychosomatic X-ray. Left on the canvas is the residue of the artist's impulsive action, simultaneously trapping different facets of facial expression and a sense of movement. However, rather than merely the few moments of a time-delayed photo, Bacon has caught Freud's character as he observed him over years, and thus the painting holds within it time, experience and the shadows of memory itself.

The celebrated Czech writer Milan Kundera has commented that "Bacon's portraits are the interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved being still remain a beloved being?" (Milan Kundera, Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits, London 1996, p. 12). Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud is an outstanding example of Bacon reaching that critical threshold between recognition and dissolution. He has navigated the precise point at which this head reveals both the character of Lucian Freud and the raw and seemingly arbitrary convergence of paint and brushstrokes. Indeed, within its extraordinary layers of execution lies the key to Bacon's portraiture project, as he defined to Hugh Davies in 1973: "In trying to paint a portrait I would like it to be all likeness – I would like it to be a universal image as well as a specific fact" (the artist interviewed by Hugh Davies, 7th August 1973, cited in: Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon, New York 1986, p. 45).

          Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud seen in New York January 10, 2011

Tom Lubbock: 1957-2011

The Independent, Tuesday, 11 January 2011

... on Francis Bacon at Tate Britain, 2008

Bacon's art is not a tunnel vision of horror, expressing the futility of the human condition or the special nightmare of the 20th century. And going to this retrospective, you shouldn't expect to be inching forward in agony through frescoes of the skull (to use a Beckettian phrase). You should expect your money's worth – and you'll get it. The art of Bacon is a variety bill. It's a hall of mirrors, a crooked house, a peep show, a ghost train, a circus, a limbo dance, a stand-up act, a piece of conjuring.

Its theatricality is obvious. Bacon's paintings are scenes, made of distinct stage areas, backdrops, doorways and assorted props and actors. His people are presented full on, usually centre-frame. I don't deny that those people are sometimes in a terrible mess. Everyone, on their first encounter with Bacon's art, gets an impression of car crash, bomb damage, burns, meltdown, slaughterhouse. The red paint and the open mouths, of course, encourage this response. But they shouldn't distract you from the amazing performance that's going on before your very eyes. Bacon is a magician, a quick-change artist. He brings off the most sudden disappearing and reappearing acts, fusions and transformations. The flesh slips, slurps, smears, flares, blurs, fades, evaporates, abruptly dematerialises. Legerdemain: you just can't see how it's done, how it moves from solid to film to spook to gleam to void and back.

... on Damien Hirst at the Wallace Collection, 2009

A few quick questions. 1. Are these new paintings, painted by Damien Hirst himself, any good? No, not at all, they are not worth looking at. 2. So why are you writing about them at such length? Because he is very famous. 3. And why has the Wallace Collection decided to exhibit them? Because he is very famous. 4. And why did Damien Hirst even paint them in the first place? Because he is very famous.

... Here is the director of the Wallace Collection – no names, no pack-drill – and what she says is: Hirst's paintings are "very classical in nature" and "his ethereal other-worldly treatment of the memento mori subject evokes centuries of great art ... a comparison can be made to the Wallace Collection's great Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time."

Actually, the Wallace thinks so highly of its great Poussin that currently it exhibits it with a statuette plonked directly in front of it, so you can't see it properly. Never mind. You can see those Hirst paintings clearly enough, and then imagine what could have moved the mind of this director. Was she dazzled by stardom? Can she really not see anything?

We're all blinded, I suppose, somehow. So many things obscure a pure attention to good art. The spectacle of blazing fame and self-delusion, the joy of people talking utter rubbish, and writing rude reviews: the freak show goes on. At least today I have detained you long enough.

Tom Lubbock, artist, critic and 'Independent' great, dies at 53

By Cahal Milmo and Rob Hastings

The Independent, Monday, 10 January 2011

Tom Lubbock, the chief art critic of The Independent for the last 13 years and a respected illustrator in his own right, has died after a battle with cancer which he chronicled with characteristic candour. He was 53.

The Cambridge-educated writer, who was admired by his peers and his subjects for his vast knowledge and unaffected insight into artists from Francis Bacon to Pieter Bruegel, was diagnosed with a rare brain tumour two years ago and continued to work virtually throughout his illness, submitting articles even as he incrementally lost control over his speech.

    Dali, Bacon Boost $85 Million Auction

       By Scott Reyburn, Bloomberg, January 6, 2011 

                                Bacon's triptych Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud. 

 A collection of 20th-century artworks that includes portraits by Salvador Dali, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud is estimated to sell for as much as 55 million pounds ($85 million) at a London auction.

The group of 60 paintings and sculptures will be offered by Sotheby’s in a stand-alone sale, titled Looking Closely, on Feb. 10. The minimum estimate is 39 million pounds.

“The works were bought between the 1960s and the 1990s,” Helena Newman, Sotheby’s European chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art, said in an interview. “It’s a personal collection of pieces that can be lived with on a domestic scale.”

Sotheby’s declined to identify the owner. The works belonged to the low-profile Geneva collector George Kostalitz, who died last year, said dealers with knowledge of the matter.

The most highly valued lot of the auction, held during the week of London’s Impressionist and Modern art sales, is Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud. The work was acquired by the collector from the artist’s dealer Marlborough Fine Art Ltd. in 1964, according to Sotheby’s.

The 14-inch (35.5 centimeter) high triptych of expressively painted heads has rarely been seen and carries an estimate of 7 million pounds to 9 million pounds. It has previously been offered for private sale at about $25 million, dealers said.

High-value works by Bacon, the U.K.’s most expensive artist, have been in short supply at auctions during the last two years. In May 2008, at the height of the art-market boom, Roman Abramovich paid a record $86.3 million for a 1976 Triptych at Sotheby’s New York, dealers said.

Bacon Confidence

“When artist prices go high, it creates concern,” London- based dealer Gerard Faggionato,  who represents the Bacon estate, said in an interview. “People began to wonder whether it was a real market, and then there were some failures at auction. Buyers now feel more confident about valuable paintings.”

Bacon collectors were reassured at Sotheby’s New York in November when the 1985 painting, Figure in Movement, sold for $14.1 million, above estimates.

        Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud: a friendship in portraits

              Culture, The Daily Telegraph, 3 January 2011

                                          Portrait of Lucian Freud  1964  Francis Bacon   

A painting of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon, which has been kept in private and not exhibited anywhere since 1965, the year after it was painted, has surfaced for sale at Sotheby’s in London next month. Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud is a testament to one of the most significant artistic relationships of the 20th century.

                                  Portrait of Lucian Freud  1967  Francis Bacon   

Bacon and Freud met in 1945 through the artist Graham Sutherland and became close if competitive friends, painting each other on several occasions. Art critic Charles Darwent has picked up on the rawness of Bacon's depictions of Freud: "Of all the portraits I can think of, the ones Bacon made of Lucian Freud in the mid 1960s are among the most painful. What Bacon saw when he looked at the famously beautiful Freud was his own loathsomeness reflected.”

                                    Portrait of Francis Bacon  1956-57  Lucian Freud 

This 1956-57 portrait was painted by Freud at the height of his friendship with Francis Bacon. It is the only surviving oil portrait that the artist made of his friend.

One of Lucian Freud's early memories of his impressions of Bacon's work was that packed " a lot of things into one single brushstroke, which amused and excited me, and I realised that I was million miles from anything I could ever do.”

                                         Portrait of Francis Bacon  1952  Lucian Freud 

  Francis Bacon’s painting of Lucian Freud revealed

   Francis Bacon’s triptych of his great friend Lucian Freud emerges after 45 years.

    The Daily Telegraph, 31 December, 2010

             Powerfully rendered: Francis Bacon's Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud (est £7m-£9m)