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6/4/2004

Francis Bacon

Musee Maillol, Paris

42 major paintings shed new light on a profoundly disturbing oeuvre.

Curator: Michael Peppiatt

Francis Bacon was, to an extreme, living proof of William Butler Yeats' saying that: ''No mind can create until it is divided in two''. In his life as well as in his art, he was able to maintain a precarious yet lasting balance between totally conflicting points of view. This ambivalence, which appears clearly in his works, reaches extraordinary proportions in his interpretation of christian symbols.

The Sacred and the Profane, the two extreme poles of this oeuvre.
Bringing together 37 paintings and 5 triptyches provenating from museums and private collections, a certain number of which have rarely been exhibited, this show serves as an inventory of the Sacred and Profane within Francis Bacon's art. Crucifixions, popes or irreverent images of couples entwined on the grass, isolated men screaming in cages and women nailed to their bed by a syringe in a lather of paint. Bacon inverts all traditional concepts of the Sacred and the Profane, replacing them with his own ,both unsettling and unpredictable visions. A crucifixion may appear in the guise a cut of meat or a threatening animal, whereas the lustful embrace of two bodies assumes all the tender suffering of a Pieta.

The enigmas behind an intensely disturbing iconography.
This show addresses some of the underlying enigmas which the intensely disturbing iconography of this great English painter embodies. It is remarkable that someone as fiercely atheist as he was relentessly kept on painting, in an obsessive manner, the motif of the Crucifixion or variations on a specific theme. A case in point is the portrait of the pope Innocent X by Velasquez., of which there are at least forty-five variations. At the same time, his uncanny powers of transformation enabled him to lend an almost mythic dimension to the most commonplace everyday scenes: a man alone in a room becomes a kind of crucifixion of modern life.

Publication
Exhibition catalogue : 174 p., ill., 23 x 28,5 cm, Musée Maillol Editions. 35 euros

Press contact: Claude Unger - i&e Consultants Tel: 01 56031225 - Fax: 01 56031300
ArtAujourdhui info contact@art-of-the-day.info

Fondation Dina Vierny - Musée Maillol
59-61, rue de Grenelle 75007 Paris
Opening hours:
Everyday, except Tuesdays and May 1st, from 11am to 7pm.
Admission fees:
Price: 8 euros Reduced price: 6 euros Free under 16.

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