Francis Bacon: Study (Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII), 1955 Oil on canvas 108.6 x 75.6cm, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, UEA 30.
The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts will present Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, on view through December 10, 2006. Francis Bacon (1909 -1992) created many of the most central and memorable images of his entire career during the 1950s. From the screaming heads and snarling chimpanzees of the late 1940s through the early Popes and portraits of Van Gogh to the anonymous figures trapped in tortured isolation of some ten years later. For a painter whose imagination so rarely strayed beyond the walls of dark claustrophobic interiors, there were even glimpses of landscape, recollections of Africa and the South of France. It was a period which saw Bacon still searching for himself and eager to explore a variety of impressions and take all kinds of risks.
Throughout his life, Bacon carefully controlled the way his work was selected, presented and even interpreted. He ensured that all museum exhibitions devoted to his work took the form of classic retrospectives, with the emphasis placed on his most recent paintings and especially on the late triptychs. As a result, the latter part of Bacon’s oeuvre has been far more widely exhibited than the earlier half of his career.
This exhibition will take the thirteen Francis Bacon paintings in the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection as the nucleus for a show which will include loans from public and private collections across the world, a number of which have rarely been seen in public before. The exhibition will explore the major themes that interested Bacon between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, affording an unprecedented insight into the artist’s imaginative powers as well as his constantly evolving sources and techniques.
The exhibition is curated by Michael Peppiatt on behalf of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. A fully illustrated catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition
