Francis Bacon in St Ives

This special exhibition of paintings and drawings highlights a particular transitional phase in the work of renowned British artist, Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992). The show focuses on the years between 1957 and 1962, following new research by exhibition curator Ben Tufnell. Book-ended by the celebrated Van Gogh portrait series and Bacon’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1962, the period was intriguingly punctuated by his residency at No 3 Porthmeor Studios, St Ives in the autumn and winter of 1959.

Offering a unique insight into Bacon’s working process, the exhibition will reunite a number of the works painted in St Ives, between September 1959 and January 1960, and some abandoned, unfinished fragments. These are contextualised with a small group of paintings and drawings made between 1957 and 1962. During this period Bacon experimented with colour and paint handling, and embarked on a radical re-assessment of how the human figure might be located in space on the canvas. Despite his dismissal of abstraction as ‘decoration’ Bacon was aware of contemporary debates regarding the spatial qualities of colour and the use of shallow pictorial space, as seen in the work of artists such as American abstract artist Mark Rothko and St Ives artist Patrick Heron. These ideas are reflected in his own work of this time.

The works of 1957-62 are often characterised as a blip in Bacon’s career and until recently have been given little critical attention. Writer and curator David Sylvester described Bacon as being ‘lost’ at this time and invariably excluded works of this period from the Bacon exhibitions he selected. In fact the paintings of this period are of great interest and importance, and are crucial to Bacon’s later development. They function as a kind of hinge between the works of the late 1940s to mid-1950s, with which Bacon made his reputation, and the great works that followed. This exhibition presents an opportunity to examine this key stage in Bacon’s development in detail.

Francis Bacon was born in 1909 in Dublin, of English parents. He spent several years in Berlin and Paris in the late 1920s before settling in London. Self-taught, he began to paint about 1928, working slowly and intermittently for many years and destroying most of his early works. His paintings were rarely exhibited and very little known until after the war when, with the exhibition of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944 (Tate, London), he simultaneously achieved widespread critical acclaim and notoriety. Bacon was the subject of major retrospectives at the Tate Gallery (1962 and 1985), Grand Palais, Paris (1971), MoMA, New York (1990) and Centre Pompidou, Paris (1996). He died in 1992.

Francis Bacon in St Ives