Francis Bacon — En toutes lettres — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 11, 2019 → January 20, 2020

Francis Bacon — Centre Pompidou Le Centre Pompidou propose, avec Bacon en toutes lettres, une exposition radicale qui, si elle détonne au cœur d’une telle institution, ne dépare en rien la peinture foudroyante de l’artiste et, en maintenant le champ de possible ouvert, active un souffle créateur bienvenu.

Tickets are only sold online, on the Centre Pompidou’s website

After the exhibitions showcasing Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, André Derain and Henri Matisse, the Centre Pompidou continues its re-examination of key 20th century works by devoting a major exhibition to Francis Bacon. The last major French exhibition of this artist’s work was held in 1996 at the Centre Pompidou. More than twenty years later, Bacon:Books and Painting presents paintings dating from 1971, the year of the retrospective event at the national galleries of the Grand Palais, to his final works in 1992. Didier Ottinger is the curator of this innovative exploration of the influence of literature in Francis Bacon’s painting.

The exhibition includes six rooms along the gallery, placing literature at the heart of the exhibition.

These rooms play readings of excerpts of texts taken from Francis Bacon’s library. Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Marc Barr, Carlo Brandt, Valérie Dreville, Hippolyte Girardot, Dominique Reymond and André Wilms read from Aeschylus, Nietzsche, Bataille, Leiris, Conrad and Eliot. Not only did these authors inspire Bacon’s work and motifs directly, they also shared a poetic world, forming a ‘spiritual family’ the artist identified with. Each writer expressed a form of ‘atheology’, a distrust of any values (abstract beauty, historical teleology or deity, etc.) likely to dictate the form and meaning of ways of thinking or of an art work. From Nietzsche’s fight against the ‘Backworlds’ to Bataille’s ‘Base materialism’, Eliot’s fragmentation, Aeschylus’ tragedy, Conrad’s ‘regressionism’ and Leiries’ ‘sacred’, these authors shared the same amoral and realist vision of the world, a concept of art and its forms liberated from the a priori of idealism.