|
HOME PAGE |
LUXURY NOW |
WINDOW SHOPPING |
BRAND GALLERY |
CITY GUIDE |
LUXURY TRAVELER |
ARTS PORTFOLIO |
A small yet powerful exhibition, entitled Francis Bacon: In Camera, reveals a dimension to the artist's creative process, by relaying finished works with the photographs that inspired them.
There is a myth surrounding the late figurative painter Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992), that his work was a product of psychological immediacy, splashed from unconscious mind to canvas, and that methodical preparation and studied draughtsmanship played little role in his creative process.
Co-curators Martin Harrison and Antonia Harrison are challenging this myth – often said to have been perpetuated especially by Bacon himself – by staging an exhibition in Warwickshire, England that examines Bacon’s work in relation to film and photography. Just five oil paintings, created between 1950 and 1989 and never before exhibited in the UK, are juxtaposed alongside photography-based media that he left behind in his Reece Mews studio in London.
After Bacon’s death, the chaotic contents of his studio, comprising two thousand samples of Bacon’s painting materials, were transported to and reconstructed within the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.
The exhibition Francis Bacon: In Camera temporarily retrieves to English soil extracted artifacts, photography and film stills – often ripped and folded – to encourage the view that photography was a significant part of Bacon’s preparatory method. Bacon’s personal planning notes and certain works with careful drawing underneath the oil paint further justify the hypothesis that this figurative painter of exceptional renowned, who only began painting in his thirties, actually applied an ordered process to his tortured and deformed, yet exquisitely composed, human figures.
Almost one quarter of the material found in his studio is of a photographic nature, including over 120 images by friend and Vogue photographer John Deakin (1912-1972) that Bacon used as a basis for portraits of George Dyer, Peter Lacy, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawthshorne and Lucian Freud; Bacon never painted from live sitters but always from photographs.
Likewise, Bacon drew inspiration and sourced references from the works of Michelangelo, Velázquez and Picasso by means of published sources including torn out pages from volumes of Velázquez reproductions and Michelangelo drawings. The sequential photographs found within The Human Figure in Motion by Edwaerd Muybridge, which are classic studies of human movement and form, were also an important resource for Francis Bacon, who is credited with having brought the tradition of figurative painting into modernity.
Francis Bacon: In Camera
March 27th through June 20th, 2010
Compton Verney
Warwickshire
CV35 9HZ England
T. +44 (0) 1926 645500
www.comptonverney.org.uk
Francis Bacon’s Studio
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
Charlemont House
Parnell Square North
Dublin 1 Ireland
T. + 353 1 222 5550
http://www.hughlane.ie/francis_bacons_studio.php?type=About&heading=Artist%92s+Materials&rsno=1