Portrait De Michel Leiris 1977

Year1977

Hand SignedSigned By the Artist in Pencil. Publishers Blindstamp Below Right 

Condition Excellent 

Other Frame 

Story / Additional InfoFrancis Bacon (1909 - 1992) Title: Portrait de Michel Leiris, Portrait of Michel LeirisMedium: Original Etching and Aquatint in colours, 1977, on Arches France watermarked paper, signed by the artist in pencil. Publishers blindstamp below right (Georges Vivat Editions) Edition: From the edition of 46 in Roman numbering. There was also a signed and numbered edition of 100 in Arabic Numbereing. There were no artists proofs or HC copies made. Literature: Bruno Sabatier: Francis Bacon: Oeuvre Graphique (Catalogue Raisonee) Number 2Alexandre Tacou “Francis Bacon: Estampes” Number 34. Published by: Editions Georges Vivat et Cie (Paris) in 1978 Size: Plate size 297 x 250 mms; - Sheet size : 680 x 520 mms. Note: This was issued for a portfolio "Requiem pour la fin des temps" from Eddy Batache. The text was by Eddy Batache. This illustrated the chapter “Francis Bacon ou les ultimes convulsions de l’humanite” Francis Bacon met Michel Leiris in 1965 and the following years made several portraits of his friend writer and ethnologist, in different techniques (paintings, lithographs, engravings); portraits that David Sylvester, critic and friend of the painter will consider as "hypnotic images (which) are both portraits and rebuilding of the architecture of the human head”. For much of the 20th century Leiris was at the forefront of French Intellectual life. He was intimately connected with the Surrealist movement and a friend of Picasso’s. During his many visits to Paris Bacon would often lunch with Leiris who certainly influenced the artists tunking. Leiris would later produce a well illustrated Monograph on Bacon’s oeuvre. He also translated Bacon’s interviews with David Sylvester into French. 

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LID139301

Francis Bacon - Ireland

Art Brokerage: Francis Bacon Irish Artist. b. 1909-1992. Bacon was an Irish artist and one of the most unique, engaging figurative painters to emerge during the post-war period. His grotesque imagery—contorted limbs, howling mouths agape, blood—served as method of exploring nihilism and death at a time when Europe had been repeatedly savaged by war. Inspired by both the Old Masters and Surrealism, Bacon produced several compositions based on the work of other painters, notably including his arresting Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953). In this iconic work, Bacon transforms Diego Velazquez's classic portrait into a screaming, terrifying figure. "I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs," he once said. "The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility." Born on October 28, 1909 in Dublin, Ireland, the self-taught artist moved to London to escape a hostile home life. Bacon became part of the local art scene in the British capital, which included his friends Lucian Freud, Isabel Lambert, and John Deakin. After the death of Bacon's lover in 1972, his work became even more personalized, with a renewed focus on mortality. In 1963, a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York brought international prestige, which continued until his death on April 28, 1992 in Madrid, Spain. Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hugh Lane in Dublin, and the Albertina in Vienna, among others. Listings wanted.