Francis Bacons In Memory of George Dyer (1971) is one of 12 triptychs on show in Paris © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2018. Photo: Hugo Maertens
To present-day museum goers, the name Francis Bacon evokes images of screaming popes. Bacons pope series, inspired by Diego Velázquezs Portrait of Innocent X (around 1650), has featured extensively in exhibitions and auctions in recent years, and is considered a high point of the Irish-born British artists career.
A new exhibition opening at Pariss Centre Pompidou takes a different view. Bacon: Books and Painting examines the last couple of decades of Bacons career, between 1971 and 1992, when he had stopped painting popes. And the shows curator Didier Ottinger is presenting those paintings as “the best works that Bacon ever produced”.
“The aim is to change the image of Bacon completely,” says Ottinger, who masterminded the Pompidous recent David Hockney and René Magritte blockbusters. “If were putting on a show at the Centre Pompidou, we need to make an original proposition. Otherwise, anybody could do it.”
“The aim is to change the image of Bacon completely”
Among the exhibitions 60 works will be 12 triptychs. Visitors will get a rare chance to see the three so-called Black Triptychs—which were painted after Bacons lover George Dyer died in 1971—gathered in one place. They include Triptych August 1972 (1972), on loan from the Tate, and Triptych May-June 1973 (1973) from the rarely shown Esther Grether Family Collection in Basel.
“There is a qualitative chasm between the end and the beginning” of Bacons career, Ottinger insists. “Were practically not talking about the same artist.” Bacon himself once said on camera (in an interview that will be shown at the Pompidou) that, prior to 1970, he failed at everything he undertook.
The central panel of Bacon's Triptych, May-June 1973 (1973) Photo: Hugo Maertens, © The Estate of Francis Bacon, All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2018
The turning point in Bacons career appears to have been his retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, which opened in October 1971. Bacon became only the second living artist to be given a show in that hallowed hall. He received instant international recognition, and an invaluable opportunity to look back at his own career. Yet two days before the opening, his partner George Dyer died by suicide in a Paris hotel. The context was, for the artist, life-changing.
And yet late Bacon has so far not been examined closely, no doubt, explains Ottinger, because David Sylvester—the late critic and curator who was considered an authority on Bacon—did not rate works from this period as highly as the paintings that came before.
Ottinger got the idea for the exhibition in 2016 after visiting the Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture show at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, where he found the late Bacons to be the standout works. While researching the exhibition, he discovered that whole strands of Bacons work were inspired by books that he was reading. As a result, the show will have a literary flavour. It will contain six enclosures, each dedicated to a different author: Aeschylus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Joseph Conrad and T.S. Eliot.
