This book, edited by the founder of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, Majid Boustany, offers a new perspective on Francis Bacon, by focusing on his unique ties with France and Monaco.
This publication presents a set of enlightening texts by art historians and various testimonies from people close to the artist. Elsa Boustany, Majid Boustany, Dr Margarita Cappock, Dr Rebecca Daniels, Milan Garcin, Michel Giniès, Martin Harrison, Yves Peyré, Sophie Pretorius and Jacques Saraben have contributed to this project.
The book also recounts the history of the Foundation and the encounter of its founder with the oeuvre of Francis Bacon, in an unpublished interview between Majid Boustany and Yves Peyré, a writer, poet and friend of Francis Bacon.
A French edition was also published under the title Francis Bacon sous un nouveau jour.
The Foundation is pleased to announce the release of the book Revisions: Francis Bacon in the Act of Painting, edited by Martin Harrison and Sophie Pretorius, and published by The Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing, in association with Thames & Hudson, and supported by the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation.
Bacon’s works often lost and gained a great deal after leaving his studio, as he frequently found ways to alter, improve or destroy his paintings, even as they hung on the walls of gallerists and collectors. From the sudden absence of a cigarette in Study of a Portrait of a Man, 1967, to the removal of Richard Chopping’s central figure in the centre panel of Triptych 1974-77, Bacon’s revisions vary dramatically in scale and intention. Diptychs become triptychs, seemingly important details disappear without ceremony, and figures travel between works like ghosts.
Many artists make changes to their paintings while they are in progress, but in few instances do photographic records exist. Francis Bacon’s oeuvre provides a rare exception. With first and final versions presented side by side for the first time, Revisions: Francis Bacon in the Act of Painting provides detailed, never-before-seen insights into Bacon the creator: his process, his intentions, and what does and doesn’t make a ‘Bacon’, according to the artist himself.
Over the years, through extensive research, publications, exhibitions, lectures and documentaries, and thanks to an active acquisition policy, the Foundation has positioned itself as an international research and study centre on Francis Bacon and an essential working resource for art historians, scholars and curators.
From the outset, we committed ourselves to forging lasting relationships with great European cultural institutions, contributing to the majority of solo or group exhibitions devoted to Bacon, through consenting to loans, giving financial support and providing our expertise. The Grimaldi Forum Monaco, the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Royal Academy and the National Portrait Gallery in London are among the institutions with which the Foundation has collaborated.
The Foundation has also consolidated its authority over the years by becoming the most important publisher, co-publisher and publication sponsor of books and documentaries on Francis Bacon.
It actively supports research and artists, by providing a research scholarship to a PhD student from the École du Louvre (Paris) whose work is about or related to Francis Bacon, and by providing a support grant to an emerging artist, graduating from the Villa Arson (Nice).
Lastly, as it has done since 2014, the Foundation presents exhibitions on its premises with the objective of showing the public the Founder’s collection (MB Art Collection), through a free weekly guided tour, by appointment only.
Majid Boustany, Founder and President of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, wished to associate the Foundation with the Musée du Louvre and the École du Louvre by becoming a leading patron of these prestigious institutions. He has also supported projects with the association AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions).
Around this anniversary, a variety of events will be reflecting ten years of commitment to the influence and legacy of Francis Bacon’s monumental oeuvre.
> The exhibition ‘Francis Bacon: Graphic Works’ presented until early 2026 at the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation in Monaco.
> The exhibition ‘Francis Bacon and The Golden Age of Design’ at the eac. Donation Albers-Honegger in Mouans-Sartoux, presented until 5 January 2025, co-curated and supported by the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation.
> The important loan of rare photographs of Francis Bacon to the National Portrait Gallery in London, for their ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ exhibition, presented until 19 January 2025.
> ‘The Anointing’ at the Villa Arson, Nice, an exhibition dedicated to Lukas Meir, the recipient of the 2023 Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation artist scholarship, presented until 2 February 2025.
> And especially conceived for this occasion, the publication of Francis Bacon in a New Light, a bookwhich offers a new perspective on the artist by focusing on his unique ties with the French Riviera, France and Monaco, with enlightening texts by art historians and testimonies from people close to Bacon, as well as a rare interview with Majid Boustany, by Yves Peyré.
Expanding the influence of his work is and will remain among my highest priorities. I cherish the hope that the research to come and the support provided for future projects related to Bacon will reveal yet unknown aspects of this unparalleled artist.
The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation is a major lender of photography for this Francis Bacon exhibition, currently presented at the National Portrait Gallery, in London, until 19 January 2025. On that occasion, our institution lent a series of rare photographs of Francis Bacon including two unique portraits of the British painter, taken by Helmar Lerski and Francis Julian Gutmann.
Featuring more than 55 works from the 1950s onwards, this exhibition will explore Francis Bacon’s deep connection to portraiture and how he challenged traditional definitions of the genre.
From his responses to portraiture by earlier artists, to large-scale paintings memorialising lost lovers, works from private and public collections will showcase Bacon’s life story. Accompanied by the artist’s self-portraits, sitters include Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne and lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer.
In September 2023, Lukas Meir received the fourth scholarship awarded by the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation to a young artist who has graduated from the Villa Arson with a National University Diploma in Artistic Expression, obtained by virtue of practice and production in the field of painting or drawing. As both a painter and a sculptor, Lukas Meir’s work depicts scenes from everyday life, using a visual language that evokes Renaissance religious painting.
His exhibition ‘The Anointing’ is on show at the Villa Arson until 2 February 2025. What has become of holidays in the age of late capitalism? This is the question that drives Lukas Meir’s pictorial and sculptural work, as he observes beaches crowded with bodies, veritable temples in which this strange, profane, yet, in the artist’s words, ‘almost religious’ ritual seems to take place. A ritual that ‘promises redemption from earthly suffering’, notably manifested in the joyous acceptance of an injury: sunburn. Lukas Meir sees it as an act of faith, the self-punishment of a martyred society ‘ready to die for its belief in eternal growth’. In the ironic and deliberately exaggerated use of this metaphor, a fundamental role is played by sunscreen: an attempt at protection and healing, an ‘anointing of SPF 50’. This sunscreen appears on the damaged skin of the bathers in a grotesque and disturbing way: sometimes applied like a clown’s make-up, at other times smeared on until it completely covers their faces, the coarseness of the white patches stands in stark contrast to the artist’s otherwise realist and highly refined brushwork, capable of referencing some of the great masters of the past while simultaneously desacralising them.
We are pleased to announce the release of Michael Peppiatt’s last book, entitled Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait in Words, which includes the most comprehensive collection of Bacon’s interviews and letters to date. This meticulously collated anthology offers a deep dive into Bacon’s life and thoughts, featuring interviews with Julian Jebb and Pierre Koralnik discussing Bacon’s struggles with alcoholism, as well as letters from various archives that reveal everything from mundane financial matters to profound insights into his psyche.
The founder of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation allowed the publisher to reproduce a selection of Francis Bacon’s correspondence from his collection. The Foundation archives encompass one of the most extensive collections of letters and postcards between the painter and a wide range of friends, companions, family, acquaintances, and also with writers, gallery directors and curators. They are a valuable tool for art historians and scholars.
The Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux has just published the eponymous catalogue for the exhibition ‘Francis Bacon and The Golden Age of Design’, on show until 5 January 2025, with the essential support of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation.
This bilingual French-English catalogue, featuring texts by Elsa Boustany, Fabienne Grasser-Fulchéri and Dr Rebecca Daniels, invites us to discover a little-known aspect of Francis Bacon’s practice: his creation of furniture in the early 1930s, as well as the British artist’s sources of inspiration for his creations and the influence of this period on his pictorial works. Bacon said that he was greatly influenced by French design, and also specified that post-cubism, as well as the Bauhaus, had a profound effect on him.
The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation has collaborated with the eac. for the exhibition ‘Francis Bacon and the Golden Age of Design’, running at the Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux from 9 June 2024 until 5 January 2025, by lending several works from the MB Art Collection: two paintings by Francis Bacon, one painting by Roy de Maistre, a rug, a table and a stool designed by Francis Bacon, as well as several archive documents. The Foundation has also sponsored the exhibition catalogue.
The exhibition features a significant collection of Francis Bacon’s works from the early 1930s. Along with design objects, it includes paintings by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Roy de Maistre and Fernand Léger to provide a fuller picture of the context of this period and the various influences on Bacon.
A large part of the exhibition is devoted to paintings from Fernand Léger’s ‘Purist’ period, which are directly echoed in the geometric designs of Francis Bacon’s rugs.
The exhibition examines the processes and tools used to produce Bacon’s prints and illuminates the circumstances of the works’ creation. Through a selection of engravings, it explores the recurrent themes that nourished the painter’s imagination.
Francis Bacon’s stance towards printmaking was characterised by a notable ambivalence. Despite claiming to have no interest in the medium, he ended up agreeing to the reproduction of some of his major works and even became involved in the process of creating these prints.
The first part of the exhibition shows the metal plates used to create some of the engravings, alongside the images that resulted from them.
The hang furthermore emphasises the importance of repeating images, a practice favoured by Bacon, which manifests itself in his graphic works in the principle of reproduction.
Through a selection of prints, the exhibition explores certain themes which were dear to the British painter. Bacon’s favoured themes, which encompass the human figure, bullfighting, Greek mythology and religious subjects, share a common characteristic: a marked interest in the human condition. The presentation of these graphic works therefore provides an opportunity to examine in depth the narratives which stem from these themes.
The display is also punctuated by photographs and working documents from the artist’s various studios, as well as journals and folios that provide a better understanding of Bacon’s approach to engraving.
All the pieces presented come from the MB Art Collection – the private collection of the founder of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation.
The Burlington Magazine has published in its September issue an article by Katharina Günther exploring the artistic relationship between the two British artists Denis Wirth-Miller and Francis Bacon. It summarises Katharina Günther’s research, supported in 2014 by our Foundation, on the content of Wirth-Miller studio located in Wivenhoe, Essex.
The image used for the magazine front cover is Study for ‘Dog in Movement’, painted c. 1953 by Denis Wirth-Miller, that is part of the MB Art Collection.
With its strong resemblance to his London studio, the overall set-up of Wirth-Miller’s Wivenhoe atelier must have been to Bacon’s liking. For almost 25 years, he shared the small, cluttered space with Wirth-Miller on a regular basis until in 1975, Bacon bought his own property close to his friend’s house. In the working environment provided by Wirth-Miller, Bacon had found an artistic home away from home.
Katharina Guenther undertook a twelve-month research project analysing a collection of hitherto un-researched material from the MB Art Collection, associated with Francis Bacon.
During a year, the items were thoroughly studied and carefully evaluated with the intention of gaining a better understanding of the material itself, the two men’s relationship to it and Bacon’s activities in the East Anglian countryside.
