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FRANCIS BACON/ 2011
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Prints on paper: Portraits 2 | | Medium: | Giclée on Japanese matte paper | | Size (inches): | 16.5 x 11.7 (paper size) | | Size (mm): | 420 x 297 (paper size) | | Edition size: | 25 | | Catalog #: | PP_0193 | | Description: | From an edition of 25. Signed, titled, date, copyright, edition in pencil on the reverse / Aside from the numbered edition of 5 artist's proofs and 2 printer's proofs.
"I don’t think people are born artists; I think it comes from a mixture of your surroundings, the people you meet, and luck. "
- Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon -
Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992), was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, austere, graphic and emotionally raw imagery.[1] Bacon's painterly but abstract figures typically appear isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. He began painting during his early 20s and worked only sporadically until his mid 30s. Before this time he drifted, earning his living as an interior decorator and designer of furniture and rugs. Later, he admitted that his career was delayed because he had spent too long looking for a subject that would sustain his interest.[2] His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, and it was this work and his heads and figures of the late 1940s through to the mid 1950s that sealed his reputation as a notably bleak chronicler of the human condition.
From the mid 1960s, Bacon mainly produced portrait heads of friends. He often said in interviews that he saw images "in series", and his artistic output often saw him focus on single themes for sustained periods including his crucifixion, Papal heads, and later single and triptych heads series. He began by painting variations on the Crucifixion and later focused on half-human, half-grotesque portraits, best exemplified by the 1949 "Heads in a Room" series. Following the 1971 suicide of his lover George Dyer, Bacon's art became more personal, inward looking and preoccupied with themes and motifs of death. The climax of this late period came with his 1982 "Study for Self-Portrait", and his late masterpiece Study for a Self Portrait -Triptych, 1985-86.
Despite his existentialist outlook on life expressed through his paintings, Bacon always appeared to be a bon vivant, spending much of his middle and later life eating, drinking and gambling in London's Soho with Lucian Freud, John Deakin, Daniel Farson, Patrick Swift,[3] Jeffrey Bernard, Muriel Belcher and Henrietta Moraes, among others. Following Dyer's death he distanced himself from this circle and became less involved with rough trade to settle in a platonic relationship with his eventual heir, John Edwards. Since his death in 1992, Bacon's reputation has steadily grown. Despite Margaret Thatcher having famously described him as "that man who paints those dreadful pictures",[4] he was the subject of two major Tate retrospectives during his lifetime and received a third in 2008. Bacon always professed not to depend on preparatory works and was resolute that he never drew. Yet since his death, a number of sketches have emerged and although the Tate recognised them as canon, they have not yet been acknowledged as such by the art market. In addition, in the late 1990s, several presumed destroyed major works,[5] including Popes from the early 1950s and Heads from the 1960s, surfaced on the art market, some of which are considered equal to any of his "official" output.
Themes:
The Crucifixion
The imagery of the crucifixion weighs heavily in the work of Francis Bacon.[40] The critic John Russell wrote that the crucifixion in Bacon's work is a "generic name for an environment in which bodily harm is done to one or more persons and one or more other persons gather to watch".[41] Bacon admitted that he saw the scene as "a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation".[42] He believed that the imagery of the crucifixion allowed him to examine "certain areas of human behaviour" in a unique way, as the armature of the theme had been accumulated by so many old masters.[42]
Though he came to painting relatively late in life – he did not begin to paint seriously until his late 30s – crucifixion scenes can be found in his earliest works.[43] In 1933, his then-patron Eric Hall commissioned a series of three paintings based on the subject.[44] These early paintings were influenced by such old masters as Matthias Grünewald, Diego Velázquez and Rembrandt,[43] but also by Picasso's late 1920s/early 1930s biomorphs and the early work of the Surrealists.[45]
The scream
Bacon called the image of a screaming mouth a catalyst for his work, and incorporated the shape of the mouth when painting the chimera. Bacon's finding of the theme is examined in one of his first surviving works,[46] Abstraction from the Human Form. By the early 1950s it became an obsessive concern, to the point, according to art critic and Bacon biographer Michael Peppiatt, "it would be no exaggeration to say that, if one could really explain the origins and implications of this scream, one would be far closer to understanding the whole art of Francis Bacon."[47] The inspiration for the recurring motif of the screaming mouths in many Bacons of the late 1940s and early 1950s were drawn from a number of sources, including medical text books, the works of Matthias Grünewald[48] and photographic stills of the nurse in the Odessa Steps scene in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent The Battleship Potemkin. Bacon first saw the film in 1935, and viewed it frequently thereafter. In his studio, he kept a photographic still of the scene which showed a close-up of the nurse's head which showed her screaming in panic and terror and with broken pince-nez spectacles hanging from her blood-stained face. He referred to the image throughout his career, using it as a source of inspiration.[49] One can relate this particular image to that of Nanny Lightfoot, as she, like the wounded nurse, wore the same oval spectacles.
Notes:
1. ^ Martin Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), 7
2. ^ Schmied (1996), 121
3. ^ whose ‘X’ magazine published images of Bacon’s work
4. ^ Francis Bacon obituary, The New York Times, April 1992. Retrieved 28 February 2009.
5. ^ Some had appeared in the as black and white reporductions in the late 1950s Catalogue raisonné
40. ^ For his relation to Deleuze, the body and religion, see Francis Sanzaro's “A Review of Francis Bacon: A Centenary Review at the Metropolitan Museum of Art” in Comparative and Continental Philosophy vol. 1 no. 2 (2009): 279–85
41. ^ Russell, 113
42. ^ a b Schmied, 78
43. ^ a b Sylvester, 13
44. ^ Davies & Yard, 12
45. ^ Bürger, Peter. In Zweite (2006), 30
46. ^ Throughout his career, Bacon destroyed a great many of his paintings
47. ^ Peppiatt, 24
48. ^ Schmied, 73
49. ^ Davies
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon_(artist)
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