Francis Bacon Presentation

Notes for my presentation on Francis Bacon (I ad-libbed a lot of the presentation so the notes were mostly used as jumping off points):

·         Bacon was born in October 1909 in Ireland to English parents. He lived much of his life in England but also lived and worked in Paris and Berlin early in his career. He started out as an interior designer and never went to art school as he felt it taught bad habits. The works of Picasso were what inspired him to become a painter.

Triptych – August 1972

·         ‘This work is generally considered one in a series of Black Triptychs which followed the suicide of Bacon’s lover, George Dyer. Dyer appears on the left and Bacon is on the right. The central group is derived from a photograph of wrestlers by Edward Muybridge, but also suggests a more sexual encounter. The seated figures and their coupling are set against black voids and the central flurry has been seen as ‘a life-and-death struggle’. The artist’s biographer wrote: ‘What death has not already consumed seeps incontinently out of the figures as their shadows.’

                                                                                                                                                 –Tate excerpt

·         The Triptych is from a series informally called ‘The Black Triptych’s’ – all based around the life and death of George Dyer

·         Bacon met Dyer in late 1963 when he caught him attempting to burgle his home. The story goes that Dyer fell in through the sky light of Bacon’s studio.

·         The relationship between the pair was often rocky.  Dyer – a Boxer and sometimes criminal from the East End often clashed with Bacons friends

·         Dyer died 2 days before the opening of Bacons exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, a huge event where even the president of Paris attended. October 1971. They were both alcoholics and heavy amounts of alcohol and an overdose on barbiturate pills were what killed Dyer.

·         Bacon had many relationships after Dyer, but the death of George haunted his work throughout much of his later career

·         Bacon often used a lot of reference images for his work and then manipulated and deformed them

·         Wrestlers derived from an Edweard Muybridge photo

·         Figures of Bacon and Dyer derived from photos by John Deakin, a close friend of Bacon’s

·         I like how visceral the paintings are. Bacond often described painting as ‘attacking the canvas’ and the sense of motion shows this

·         Last month one of Bacon’s triptychs sold at auction for $142.4 million

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