The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation takes part in the ‘Picasso – Bathers’ exhibition presented at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation is participating in the ‘Picasso – Bathers’ exhibition held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon until 3 January 2021 by lending a work from the MB Art Collection: ‘Painting’, 1930, Francis Bacon’s first oil on canvas.

In this exhibition, the Musée des Beaux-Arts takes a fresh look at the theme of the bather in Pablo Picasso’s work, with the counterpoint of works by nineteenth-century artists who influenced him in his treatment of this subject. Also presented are works by Picasso’s contemporaries and those who followed on from him – specifically artists who took an interest in Picasso’s bathers or found in them a source of inspiration or a springboard from which to take a very different direction.

The exhibition has been organised in partnership with the Musée national Picasso-Paris and with the assistance of the Guggenheim Foundation, Venice. The painting that inspired the exhibition, Woman Seated on the Beach (10 February 1937), was bequeathed to the museum by the actress and collector Jacqueline Delubac and has become one of the icons of the museum’s modern art collection.

The exhibition includes almost one hundred and fifty works from many of the major public collections of Europe and the United States, as well as from private collections; it also incorporates archival material relating to the different periods Picasso spent at the seaside. It is punctuated by a wide range of photographs of the artist and his friends and family, many taken by Dora Maar and Eileen Agar.

More information on the exhibition here