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Curator's Talk
Francis Bacon: The Sacred and the Profane
with exhibition curator Michael Peppiatt
Friday, May 4, 7 P.M.
FREE
Former editor and publisher of Art International magazine in Paris, Michael Peppiatt is the guest curator of the exhibition Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, and was a friend of Francis Bacon’s for thirty years. He has written extensively on Bacon and curated several exhibitions of his paintings. In 1996, Peppiatt published the definitive account of the artist’s life and work, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. In this illustrated lecture, Peppiatt will discuss a paradox that he believes lies at the core of Francis Bacon’s painting.
Although he never ceased to proclaim his atheism, Bacon remained in thrall to two of the most central and highly charged symbols of the Christian faith: the Crucifixion and the Pope – themes which the artist reinterpreted with a savage pictorial flair throughout this career. At the same time, Bacon celebrated the most “profane” acts of man: writhing figures coupled in grass, pinned to a bed by a syringe, or screaming in an empty, airless room.
Why did an artist so outspokenly atheistic as Bacon return obsessively to painting the Crucifixion as well as variations on Velàzquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, of which no fewer than forty-five have survived? And conversely, what transformative power enabled Bacon to give the most ordinary of everyday scenes – an unidentified man sitting or lying in an anonymous space – a near-mythical aura and status? In other words, how did Bacon delve into the two essential planes of human existence – the sacred and the profane – so deeply that he subverted all their established connotations and reinvented them?
Photograph by Tom Loonan. |
The exhibition catalogue is on sale now in the Gallery Shop. Francis Bacon in the 1950s is written by Michael Peppiatt and published by Yale University Press, with a foreword by Nichola Johnson, Director of Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. It includes seventy color illustrations. $50. |