MFAH | The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston | Francis Bacon: Late Paintings
FRANCIS BACON: LATE PAINTINGS
23 FEBRUARY – 25 MAY 2020
MFAH | THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON | USA
Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait, 1971, oil on canvas, Centre Pompidou,
Musée national d'art modern - Centre de création industrielle, Paris.
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved.
DACS, London / ARS, NY 2019
Organized by the Centre Pompidou, this is the first in-depth museum consideration of Bacon’s production in his final decades, and the first museum exhibition of the artist’s work to be seen in the U.S. since the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2009 retrospective in New York.
On October 24, 1971—two days before the opening of Bacon’s Grand Palais retrospective— Georges Dyer, his companion of many years, died by suicide in a Paris hotel. Over the decade that followed, Bacon repeatedly paid tribute to Dyer in an ongoing series of paintings. The exhibition pairs two of his most powerful triptychs dedicated to Dyer, the harrowing In Memory of George Dyer, 1971, and Triptych August 1972, 1972. Introducing one of the exhibition’s central themes, the immediacy of experience and the role of memory, these paintings also touch on Bacon’s literary sources, which ranged from the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus to the contemporary writings of T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre.
MOBILE APP OF THE TRETYAKOV GALLERY MAGAZINE
