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March 5, 2016 8:01 AM   Subscribe

Francis Bacon's final painting 'Study of a Bull', never publicly seen before, has been found in a private collection and will now go on show for the first time.
posted by fearfulsymmetry (14 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Immediately recognizable as Bacon, but also reminiscent of some Giacometti paintings in some ways.
posted by beerperson at 8:08 AM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


OH. This is striking. Thank you.
posted by MonkeyToes at 8:15 AM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


Always interesting to speculate about an artist's intent in light of--in this case, his imminent death. Not very postmodern of me, I know. But the fact that he chose a bull as a subject is enigmatic. Almost all of his ouvre were paintings of humans. Magnificently strange ones. There is this one, though, not immediately obvious to me as a Bacon painting.
posted by kozad at 8:18 AM on March 5, 2016


wow, I'm a big fan of this genius ostensibly slap-dash style, whatever it is.

looking at his oeuvre on google I can't pick out anything else I particularly like, but this work speaks to me.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 8:30 AM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


France is bacon.

You were all thinking it.
posted by srboisvert at 9:20 AM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


The time-travelling Viscount of Alban was a painter too? Amazing!
posted by blue_beetle at 9:23 AM on March 5, 2016


Heywood Mogroot III: As I alluded to earlier, you may like some of Giacometti's portraiture (scroll down). It's much messier but may twinge that same part of you.
posted by beerperson at 10:08 AM on March 5, 2016


From the article: "What seems certain is that this final, extraordinary painting by Francis Bacon, unseen and undocumented until now, is by an artist who knows he will soon die."

Lots of things seem certain, and then they turn out to be wrong or irrelevant. Is Paul still dead?

(I don't mean to disparage Mr. Harrison's expertise, but why should we always draw a straight-line conclusion based on this one guy?)
posted by sneebler at 1:58 PM on March 5, 2016


Finding never before seen paintings from renowned dead artist? Makes me think of the amazing documentary Beltracchi.
posted by vorpal bunny at 2:49 PM on March 5, 2016


Sneebler: On the one hand, if he had painted his final statement in London in 1991 and died in Monaco in the later part of April 1992, he was laid up in a remarkably mobile deathbed. On the other hand, he was in his 80s and in severe physical decline due to the many preceding decades of rough living, and had been repeatedly hospitalized from the late 1980s onward. It's reasonable for him to assume his remaining days were probably numbered in the small integers, and he may as well not start on something he might not be able to finish.
posted by ardgedee at 4:28 PM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


On the other other hand, it makes me wonder how well the provenance for this painting has been documented and verified. The account of an unnamed very secretive collector caching the previously-unknown final work of a major master (who himself has been indifferent to the preservation of his career) not only seems suspect, but vaguely familiar after having read stories about other arts forgeries.
posted by ardgedee at 4:42 PM on March 5, 2016


And now I notice vorpal bunny got there before me...
posted by ardgedee at 4:50 PM on March 5, 2016


Stunning.
posted by sallybrown at 6:40 PM on March 5, 2016


The 1929 watercolor is far more significant, I think. Here's Bacon at nineteen or twenty, developing the language of his abandoned decorative career. It's like another artist entirely--and certainly not a great one--but considering what he'd learn to do with pigment and the human form, one worth looking at.
posted by Scram at 11:02 PM on March 5, 2016


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