Photo By Gail
Three Studies for Portrait of Lucien Freud (1965) shows the artistic dialogue between artists Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. While their visual styles differed, both were interested in the human figure and sat for each other on multiple occasions. Bacon painted Freud 14 times from 1964 to 1971, working from photographs rather than real life.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Three Studies for Portrait of Lucien Freud By Francis Bacon
Photo By Gail
Created in the aftermath of World War II, Painting (1946) is likely a veiled portrait of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who often carried an umbrella and has gone down in history for his policy of accommodation of the Nazi regime. His dark suit is punctuated by a bright yellow boutonniere, yet his bared teeth and concealed gaze suggest brutality. This sense of menace is accentuated by the cow carcasses suspended behind him. The drawn window shades evoke those found in a widely circulated photograph of Hitler’s bunker, an image that Francis Bacon included in mulipleworks. Bacon claimed that this work was an accident; he had originally set out to paint a bird descending onto a field.
Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.
Three Studies of Lucian Freud, a 1969 triptych by Francis Bacon of his friend and artist Lucian Freud, sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s Tuesday night. The unknown buyer won the piece after six minutes of “fierce bidding.”
Thanks to both Geoffrey and Thomas for Encouraging me to Post this as a Bacon Thing! I will be doing a Post next week about the new incredible elo boost services!
The fabulous Jeff Koons, one of our very favorite contemporary pop artists, is the latest in a long line of artists to create an original work for Château Mouton Rothschild, which has commissioned avant-garde artists to design its labels since 1945. In his design, pictured above, Koons works over a Pompeii fresco of The Birth of Venus with a silver line drawing of a ship sailing under a bright sun.
Among the other artists to have created a label for Mouton Rothschild are Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Georges Braque, Juan Miró, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud.
Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953
Most Sundays, Geoffrey and I like to have what we call an Urban Adventure. The plan for today called for G and I to head uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, with the intention of checking out their latest acquisition, The Torment of St Anthony – the first painting by the great Michelangelo. But while we were stumbling through the dozens upon a dozens of galleries clotted with Renaissance artworks, looking desperately among them for the one 12-inch square canvas that we’d come to gaze upon, we made an intentional detour through a dense retrospective of the paintings of Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992), the famous Irish-born English artist. Continue reading Bacon Thing of The Day: Francis Bacon Retrospective at The Met, NYC
