Lot 179

Artcurial (S.V.V), Estampes et Livres Illustres, 2 July 2003
Collins & Kent, Sydney
acquired from the above 2004 or 2005

Francis Bacon is one of the most significant painters of the modern age; a self-taught artist, his paintings are renowned for their raw and unsettling imagery, merging figurative portraiture with abstracted settings. Three Studies for a Self-Portrait is a three-plate lithograph printed on one sheet, after his painting of the same title from 1983 currently housed at the Honolulu Museum of Art. In this self-portrait Bacon confronts the "brutality of fact" in his own visage as it emerges, ghostlike, from the surrounding darkness.[1] He proceeds to drag a cloth or dry brush through the wet paint to blur and abstract the details. These swirling distortions convey a sense of movement and emphasise the passage of time evoked by the triptych format.

Bacon was first inspired by the arts after visiting an exhibition of Picasso's drawings at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg in 1927, this led him to first try his hand at interior design before finding painting following the influence of Australian artist Roy de Maistre. De Maistre has been described as Bacon's most significant artistic contact in the 1930s, and Bacon's works from this period closely echo the cubist and surrealist forms, and at times also the colour palette, found in de Maistre's work[2].

Initially experiencing only brief success as an artist, Bacon's early efforts failed to establish a unique style of his own separate to what he had already absorbed. As a result, he experienced a period of frustration and subsequent artistic hiatus between 1937 and 1943. However, in 1944 Bacon found new inspiration and began working on the paintings he came to consider as the beginning of his career, first with the triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (housed at the Tate, London). From this point onwards he began to forge the legacy by which the world now remembers him.
Bacon painted Three Studies for a Self-Portrait at the height of his global recognition and at a time when he was preoccupied with reflections on mortality and the temporality of man's existence. Following the death of his former lover George Dyer, just prior to the opening of his retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, Bacon became almost obsessively occupied with self-portraiture. He stated "I loathe my own face but I go on painting it only because I haven't got any other people to do." [3] By 1983, his presence on the canvas had transitioned from rage and grief to resignation and acceptance of the world's hard truths. As a result his self-portraits from this time, the current lot included, with his face emerging from a deep abyss tightly constricted within the confines of the canvas, imbue the sitter with a deep sense of introspection.

[1] David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with
Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987).
[2] Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels, "Australian
Connections", pp. 33–34 in exhibition catalogue Francis
Bacon: Five Decades, Art Gallery of New South Wales,
Sydney, 17 November 2012 – 24 February 2013
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2012), p.33.
[3] David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with
Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p.129.

© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS/ Copyright Agency, 2021