FRANCIS BACON

“…Bacon then began to produce the paintings for which he has become famous: at first there were some figures in a landscape; but soon he moved definitively indoors. He displayed splayed bodies, surrounded by tubular furniture of the kind he had once designed, in silent interiors. A fascination with the crucifix and triptych format continued; but he painted the naked human body – usually male – in all sorts of situations of struggle, suffering and embuggerment. A picture of two naked figures wrestling on a bed of 1953 is surely among his most celebrated. By the 1960s, the echoes of religious iconography and the Grand Tradition of painting had become more muted. Bacon could never be accused of ‘intimism’: ‘homeliness’ is one of the qualities he hates most. The large, bloody, set-piece interiors continued; but the forms of their figures became less energetic, more statuesque. Bacon seemed increasingly preoccupied with portraits, usually in triptych format, of his friends and associates: Isobel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes, Lucien Freud, George Dyer (his lover), Muriel Belcher, the owner of a drinking club in Soho he frequented, and himself.” Peter Fuller, Images of God: The Consolations of Lost Illusions 1982, Chatto & Windus p. 65

(b Dublin, 28 Oct 1909; d Madrid, 28 April 1992). English painter. One of the most individual, powerful and disturbing artists of the period following World War II, he took the human figure as his subject at a time when art was dominated by abstraction. Though largely self-taught, he was widely read and of great independence of mind. His subject-matter and procedures of painting are too personal to be imitated with any real success by other artists, but in Britain and further a field he remains a towering example to those dedicated to the depiction of the human figure.

 

Study of the human body

(from a drawing by Ingres)
Colour lithograph on arches, A/P aside from the edition of 180, published by Galerie Lelong,
Paris, plate size 62 x 46.5 cm, sheet size 104.5 x 74.7 cm, 1982 

$6,500

 

George Dyer accroupi

Lithograph,  DLM 162, image size 33 x 24.5 cm, 1966

$850

 

George Dyer fixant un cordon de rideau

Lithograph,  DLM 162, image size 33.2 x 24.5 cm, 1966

$850

 

Henrietta Moraes

Lithograph,  DLM 162, image size 27.5 x 26.5 cm, 1966

$850

 

Isobel Rawsthorne

Lithograph,  DLM 162, image size 33 x 24.5 cm, 1966

$850

 

Detail of George Dyer parlant

Lithograph,  DLM 162, image size 37 x 27.1 cm, 1966

$700