Museu Guggenheim Bilbao Spain
Sept. 30, 2016- Jan. 08, 2017
Francis
Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez presents a selection of nearly 90 of the
Anglo-Irish artist’s most compelling paintings, including many rarely exhibited
works, alongside those by artists who influenced his career.
While a
fervent Francophile, Francis Bacon was also well-versed in the work of Spanish
masters such as Diego Velázquez, and the exhibition explores the influence of
both cultures on his art. Bacon, who became a painter after seeing the
exhibition Cent dessins par Picasso at Paul Rosenberg’s gallery in Paris, was a
great connoisseur of French literature and painting. He avidly read the
writings of Jean Racine, Honoré Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, and Marcel Proust
and admired the art of Édouard Manet, Edgard Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van
Gogh, Georges Seurat, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.
Aside from
the initial contact with Picasso’s Parisian output of the 1920s and 1930s, the
clearest evidence of Bacon’s connection with Spanish culture is undoubtedly his
obsession with Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent x painted in 1650.
Although Bacon had the chance to see the work at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj
during a trip to Rome in 1954, he preferred, however, to have reproductions of
the work rather than a memory of the original while producing his more than 50
variations on the motif. In addition to Velázquez, Bacon was fascinated by
Francisco Goya, El Greco, and Francisco de Zurbarán, whose works he viewed at
the Prado Museum, Madrid.
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