Francis Bacon at Centre Pompidou: What I learned

I went to Paris in early January of 2020 specifically to see the Francis Bacon show at Centre Pompidou. I had tried to get to the show "Bacon en toutes lettres" a month earlier from Venice, but it coincided with the beginning of the transit strike in the Parisian capital and I had to abort the trip. But I really wanted to get to the exhibition, so I left in January from home, here in New York. The show was ending soon and I absolutely did not want to miss it. I got myself two entry tickets for two consecutive days and hoped that after all this trouble, I would not be disappointed. I wasn't. After spending four hours (a record for me) looking at the works of the last twenty years of his career, my only regret is that I did not get myself a third entry ticket. Francis Bacon is without a doubt one of the greatest Western artists of the twentieth century.  

Artists have recurring themes in their work. Take the single bare lightbulb in Francis Bacon’s work—what it means is up to interpretation. In one painting, the lightbulb has been scribbled out with red paint, but it is still visible.

Before turning to art, Francis Bacon spent some time as an interior decorator. They say we are the sum of all our parts and it certainly is true of Bacon’s work. Look at the beauty of his lines and the objects that make it into his paintings, always meticulously crafted—i.e. chairs and tabletops.

Another image that appears often in Francis Bacon‘s work is the circle. In many of his portraits and self-portraits, the circle—sometimes oval in form—is filled with black and encased solidly into the face. At other times, the circle is just used to feature a certain section of the painting.

The pointing arrow is a motif that also appears often in Francis Bacon’s work. Picasso has used it in his work as well. Bacon’s painting as seen at Centre Pompidou; Picasso’s work seen at the Picasso Museum.

The image of a freestanding door is present in both Francis Bacon’s work and Pablo Picasso’s. You will agree the meaning is quite different. Bacon’s painting as seen at Centre Pompidou; Picasso’s work seen at the Picasso Museum.

Bacon also frequently includes a light switch without showing the light source, or a lampshade tassel while keeping the shade itself out of view.

Francis Bacon is, in my opinion, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Although he has been dead for 28 years, his popularity has not diminished. One of his favorite forms of artistic expression was the triptych. He created 28 triptychs, and it was pure delight to see so many of them in one show. Unfortunately, they are so large that they are hard to photograph in their entirety. The catalog for this exhibition reproduces them well—each triptych is a three-page spread.

This triptych by Francis Bacon is one of my favorite works in the exhibition. It places Bacon himself in the central panel, flanked by two of the most significant figures in his life: on the left, his lover George Dyer—who tragically took his own life just before Bacon’s major retrospective at the Grand Palais—and on the right, his close friend and fellow artist Lucian Freud. Though their friendship spanned decades, the two eventually grew apart for reasons that remain unclear. Notice, too, the drawings pinned to the wall with thumbtacks—another motif that recurs throughout Bacon’s oeuvre.

Francis Bacon’s triptych In Memory of George Dyer deals with a deeply painful theme: the agony and despair of a human being before taking their own life, and the utter helplessness of loved ones to prevent it.

TThe final piece in the exhibition is, fittingly, the very last painting Bacon ever completed.

Life does bang you up a bit. Sometimes you can read it in a person's face or posture. But still... life has to be lived in technicolor. That is the ultimate message I took away from the Francis Bacon exhibition at Centre Pompidou.