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FRANCIS BACON (1909-1992) STUDY FOR PORTRAIT OF HENRIETTA MORAES titled and dated "Study for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes 1964" on the reverse oil on canvas 78 x 58 in. (198.1 x 147.3 cm) painted in 1964 Estimate: - $5,000,000-7,000,000 PROVENANCE Marlborough Gallery, LONDON Marlborough-Gerson, NEW YORK McCrory Collection, NEW YORK Galerie Beyeler, basel Private collection, switzerland EXHIBITED SAO PAULO, Brazil, XXI BIENAL DE SAO PAOLO, 1991 BASEL, Galerie Beyeler, HOMAGE TO FRANCIS BACON, June-September 1992, no. 3 (illustrated) LUGANO, Museo d'Arte Moderna, FRANCIS BACON, March 7-May 30, 1993, pp. 71 and 147, no. 32 (illustrated) BASEL, Galerie Beyeler, WHO IS AFRAID OF RED...?, June-September 1995, no. 3 (illustrated) SAPPORO, Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art; NAGASAKI, Huis ten Bosch Museum of Art; KYOTO, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art and TOKYO, Mitsukoshi Museum of Art, THE EXHIBITION FROM SWISS PRIVATE COLLECTIONS, COORDINATED BY ERNST BEYELER, BASEL, May 17-November 24, 1996, pp. 124-125, no. 54 (illustrated) SYDNEY, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, MASTERPIECES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, THE BEYELER COLLECTION, December 7, 1996- March 2, 1997, p. 217, no. 100 (illustrated) MUNICH, Kunstverein Munich, DIE VELETZTE DIVA, HYSTERIE, KÖRPER, TECHNIK IN DER KUNST DER 20. JAHRHUNDERTS, 2000, p. 251 (illustrated) LITERATURE BACON - TRIPTYCH 71, COLOGNE 1993, pl. 23 (illustrated) Acclaimed for his paintings of post-war, existential angst, Francis Bacon consistently based his figurative imagery on photographs, newspaper clippings and other reproductions. Deriving inspiration from sources as diverse as Edweard Muybridge and Michelangelo, Bacon translated pre-existing images of bodies in motion into his own highly expressive brand of figuration. The artist continued this practice throughout the 1960s, when he began to paint portraits in earnest. Rather than work from models posed in his studio, Bacon commissioned John Deakin, a well-known British photographer, to snap casual pictures of his friends and acquaintances. Taken in 1963, these photographs became the basis for many subsequent paintings, including the present work. Among Deakin's subjects were the painter Lucian Freud, Bacon's lover George Dyer, and several female friends of the artist, including Henrietta Moraes. Of this group, Moraes was the only sitter willing to pose in the nude. Extant prints of these photographs capture Moraes sprawled naked on a rumpled bed, her arms and legs disposed in much the same manner as in the present work. Although this general correspondence is notable, Bacon never copied the Deakin photographs slavishly. Instead, the artist carefully edited the photographic information, summarized and distorted the visible forms, to achieve painted portraits of maximum expressive impact. In the present work, for example, Moraes' bedroom has been reduced to a pink ground plane that floats against a vivid red backdrop. While the mattress is given a realistic blue ticking, its rectangular shape has been distended, so that it gently cradles the reclining nude. Bacon's inventive translation of the physical setting is clearly meant to emphasize the figure, which the artist began describing in a commanding new manner in the early 1960s. In 1962, when Bacon presented his Three Studies for a Crucifixion (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), the central panel of this triptych announced a new conception of the human body, one that Bacon brought to fruition in his related portraits of Henrietta Moraes. As David Sylvester has explained, "Three Studies for a Crucifixion introduced one of the most typical features in Bacon's treatment of the human body till the end of the 1960s-its turning of the body inside out. The opening up of the carcass was nothing new: it had been there since Painting, 1946. What was new made its first tentative appearance in the reclining figure of the center panel: to depict the epidermis as if it were the flesh within, to replace the skin with red meat....Perhaps the most extreme manifestation of this phenomenon was to occur in some of the reclining nude images of Henrietta, where the paint is used to break the body up and lay the pieces out like bits of offal on a butcher's slab." (D. Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, New York, 2000, p. 108.) Sylvester's description certainly applies to the present portrait, where Moraes' body appears flayed, and the passages of gray and red pigment suggest bruises and blood respectively. Yet the morbid suggestion of raw, exposed flesh is countered by an opposing sense of the sitter's vitality. Moraes' voluptuous figure seems to throb and pulsate before one's eyes, as though it were releasing a powerful, visceral energy. Indeed, Sylvester has astutely noted that, "The paintings based on Deakin's photographs of Henrietta Moraes rejoice in her vitality and animality and respond to her femininity and fleshiness as warmly as Bacon did to Dyer's masculinity and muscularity." (Ibid., p. 131.) That Bacon intended this positive celebration of a vital life force is suggested by the painter himself, who explained his portraiture as follows. "The living quality is what you have to get. In painting a portrait, the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person. The sitter is someone of flesh and blood and what has to be caught is their emanation. I don't know whether it would be possible to do a portrait of somebody just by making a gesture of them. So far it seems that if you are doing a portrait you have to record the face. But with their face you have to try and trap the energy that emanates from them." (Quoted in ibid., p. 98.)
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Viewing in Chelsea Saturday May 4, 2002 - Sun
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