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CR Number
57-11
Artist
Francis Bacon

Study for Portrait of Van Gogh III

1957

Oil and sand on canvas

78 ⅛ x 56 ⅛ in. (198.4 x 142.5 cm)

Further Details
Specific Date and Location
Painted March 1957
1964 Cr Number
Alley 130
Collection
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Solo
'Francis Bacon', Hanover Gallery, London, 21 March 1957 - 26 April 1957
'Francis Bacon, Tate, London (1962)', Tate Gallery, London, 24 May 1962 - 01 July 1962
'Francis Bacon', Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim, 18 July 1962 - 26 August 1962
'Francis Bacon', Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Turin, 11 September 1962 - 14 October 1962
'Francis Bacon', Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, 27 October 1962 - 25 November 1962
'Francis Bacon', Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 11 January 1963 - 18 February 1963
'Francis Bacon', Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 18 October 1963 - 12 January 1964
'Francis Bacon', Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 24 January 1964 - 23 February 1964
'Francis Bacon Retrospektive', Galerie Beyeler, Basel, 12 June 1987 - 12 September 1987
'Francis Bacon: Paintings', Central House of the Artists, New Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 23 September 1988 - 06 November 1988
'Francis Bacon', Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 12 October 1989 - 07 January 1990
'Francis Bacon', Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 11 February 1990 - 29 April 1990
'Francis Bacon', Museum of Modern Art, New York, 24 May 1990 - 28 August 1990
'Francis Bacon', Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris, 27 June 1996 - 14 October 1996
'Francis Bacon', Haus der Kunst, Munich, 01 November 1996 - 26 January 1997
'Van Gogh by Bacon', Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, 05 July 2002 - 06 October 2002
Group
'New Images of Man', Museum of Modern Art, New York, 30 September 1959 - 29 November 1959
'New Images of Man', Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, 09 January 1960 - 07 February 1960
'Francis Bacon - Hyman Bloom', Art Galleries of the University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, 30 October 1960 - 11 December 1960
'Critic's Choice: Art Since World War II', Providence Art Club, Rhode Island, 31 March 1965 - 24 April 1965
'International Expressionism, Part I', Marlborough-Gerson Gallery Inc, New York, April - May 1968
'Inaugural Exhibition', Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 04 October 1974 - 15 September 1975
'Westkunst: Zeitgenössische Kunst seit 1939', Rheinhallen Messegelände, Cologne, 30 June 1981 - 16 August 1981
'La grande parade: Highlights in Painting after 1940', Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 15 December 1984 - 15 April 1985
'Van Gogh Face to Face: The Portraits', Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, 12 March 2000 - 04 June 2000
'Encounters: New Art from Old', The National Gallery, London, 14 June 2000 - 17 September 2000
'Van Gogh Face to Face: The Portraits', Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 02 July 2000 - 24 September 2000
'Van Gogh Face to Face: The Portraits', Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 22 October 2000 - 14 January 2001
Martin Harrison, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné (London: The Estate of Francis Bacon, 2016). pp. 13, 156, 460, 474, 480, 486, 498, 500, 502, 504, 508, 510, 526, 528; ill. p. 501

The information in the present section on francis-bacon.com is based on the data in Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné by Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels, which was published by The Estate of Francis Bacon in 2016. The following ‘Notes for readers’ are extracted from the catalogue raisonné (Vol.1, p.102 and 103) and elaborate on the methodology and thinking behind the compilation and presentation of some data, such as titles, dates and media.

 

Notes for readers

Paintings are catalogued chronologically, under the year of their completion: thus a painting dated 1956-57 will be found in 1957. Undocumented paintings, to which only approximate (circa) dates can be attached, are generally placed at the end of the year in which they are believed to have been painted; this rule is departed from when there is firm evidence that a painting was made at a specific date during a certain year (for example ‘Street Scene (with Car in Distance)’, 1984 (84-03).

Titles of paintings placed in inverted commas, for example ‘Figure with Cricket Pad’, c.1982 (82-09), were not applied by Bacon or by his gallerists, and are merely descriptive. Among the paintings with descriptive titles in the catalogue, many did not emerge into public view until after 1998. Some of the titles initially given to them have been revised here; for example, ‘Figures in a Landscape’, c.1956 (56-11) has been substituted for ‘Two Figures in the Grass’, which is more logical in view of its relationship with Figures in a Landscape, 1956-57 (57-01).

 

Media

In the past most of Bacon’s paintings have been described as ‘oil on canvas’. But he employed many other media, and was fond of mixing sand, dust, fibres and pastel, for example, with his oils. While every effort has been made to include these details, until paintings are examined (and ideally scientifically tested) with the glass removed, the descriptions of media will inevitably be incomplete.

 

Dimensions

Canvas dimensions are given in imperial measurements, height preceding width, followed by metric; this conforms with the British manufacture of Bacon’s canvasses.

 

Signatures

After 1969, Bacon titled, signed and dated, on the reverse of the canvas, a majority of his paintings: before that date he only did so intermittently. It has been our aim to record all such details, but there are almost certainly omissions. The modern practice of fixing backing boards on paintings means that, even when granted privileged access to works, it is not always possible to inspect the reverse side.

 

Photography dates

Paintings were usually sent to be photographed shortly after leaving Bacon’s studio. The photography dates provide key data, therefore, in the chronology of paintings.

 

Alley

Alley numbers, for example (Alley 106), are those assigned to each painting in the first catalogue raisonné, Ronald Alley and John Rothenstein, Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson; New York: Viking Press, 1964).

 

Destroyed paintings

Bacon destroyed many hundreds of paintings. The so-called ‘slashed canvasses’ are not (with one exception, Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, 1964 (64-03)) included in this catalogue. Forty such canvasses, found in Bacon’s studio after he died, are now in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. Margarita Cappock published them in 2005 under the heading ‘Destroyed Canvasses’, which raised questions regarding Bacon’s intentions with the destructions. On small portrait canvasses he – or a friend – invariably cut out the head, and on the large canvasses the heads and sufficient of the main figurative elements to nullify the ‘image’ were excised. Doubtless Bacon cut the canvasses so as to leave the stretchers intact for reusage, but while he could not have foreseen the tattered fragments eventually having a commercial value, or being exhibited, he could have rendered the destruction more complete (by burning the fragments, for example). His partial destructions were, typically, ambivalent, while as the creator of images that had ‘failed’, the connotations of violence in his taking a knife to them has clear psychological implications.

Four canvasses removed from Bacon’s studio in 1978 appeared on the market in April 2007, and a further five, from a separate source, were sold in June 2007; six fragments of canvas which had been given in the 1950s to the Cambridge artist Lewis Todd, who painted on their primed sides, were auctioned in March 2013.

Paintings with the suffix ‘D’ in the catalogue (for example 67-15D) are destroyed. Two of these are paintings which had been sold and were destroyed in accidents while in private ownership; a third was damaged beyond restoration when it fell into Tokyo Dock. Other paintings with this suffix in the present catalogue were destroyed by Bacon but had been exhibited publicly before he did so; since images of them are accessible in catalogues, they have been included for the sake of completeness.

In the 1964 catalogue raisonné, under pressure from Bacon, Ronald Alley consigned abandoned or destroyed paintings to two appendixes, classified as ‘A’ and ‘D’. These compromise categories have been jettisoned in the present catalogue, and the extant paintings placed where they occur in the chronology. A compelling reason for ceasing to adopt these categories is that of the nine paintings Alley listed as ‘Destroyed’ in 1964, four in fact survive.

Abandoned paintings

On 30 July 1996 David Sylvester wrote to the then owner of ‘Lying Figure’, c.1953 (53-21), who was disappointed he had not included it in the Bacon retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. He explained that none of the pictures listed in the 1964 catalogue raisonné as ‘Abandoned’ was treated as a candidate for inclusion, adding ‘it seems reasonable to me that during an artist’s lifetime and for a few years after his death, a retrospective exhibition should not include works that he considered abandoned. I think that a different attitude should be taken when an artist has been dead for some years.’ Sylvester volunteered the comment: ‘As we all know, works which an artist abandoned can still be works of great value: there are any number of such works by a variety of masters in the museums of the world. In my opinion “Lying Figure” is a very fine example of Bacon’s work.’

The question of ‘finish’, as signifying a putative state of completion, is probably less relevant in the case of Bacon than most other artists. An atheist and nihilist, the only ‘finish’ he recognised – and was haunted by – was death: to finish a painting was, perhaps, analogous to dying. It was neither whimsical nor accidental that he called so many of them ‘Study for…’: he was being not so much tentative as open-ended. Moreover, if Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1950 (50-02), in which more than half of the canvas is unpainted, was considered by Bacon a ‘finished’ painting, it is counterintuitive to categorise ‘Lying Figure’, c.1953 (53-21), for example, as ‘unfinished’.

Notes on titles

Robert Melville, reviewing the 1964 Alley/Rothenstein catalogue raisonné in Studio International, July 1964, observed that Study from Innocent X, 1962 (62-2), despite having been painted only two years previously, had already been given three different (if unofficial) titles – Red Pope, Red Pope on Dais, and Red Figure on a Throne. Melville doubted that Bacon gave any of his paintings the title ‘Pope’, and pointed out that when he was working for Erica Brausen at the Hanover Gallery, ‘we used to call them “cardinals” rather than “popes” in the presence of visitors, to make sure that no one would be offended.’ Melville predicted that all the paintings in the 1964 catalogue would be thenceforth known by the titles assigned to them by Ronald Alley. This precept has been adhered to in the present catalogue. Furthermore, for the ‘post-Alley’ years, 1963 to 1991, the titles established by Bacon and Marlborough Fine Art have been adopted consistently; for example, although Painting, 1980 (80-09) was exhibited in 1999 with the descriptive title Three Figures, One with a Shotgun, subsequent research has shown that its original title was Painting, and has been reverted to here.

The five works Bacon included in his first exhibition, in 1930, all had specific titles. In the present catalogue the titles of paintings dating from 1929 and 1930 follow those adopted by Alley, but they have been placed within inverted commas since it is highly unlikely that Bacon titled them as they are, by their media; (Alley had to negotiate Bacon’s indifference – or hostility – towards his pre-1944 œuvre).

© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2018