Self-Guide
Please note that this is an archived mini-tour. Some works may no longer be on view or may have been moved to a different gallery.
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
While the game might be more conventionally played with a Bacon of the Kevin variety,
this tour shows how the small world phenomenon is just as easily demonstrated through
the 20th-century English painter Francis Bacon, known for his gruesome, unsettling
images. (You’ll find one of his works in Gallery 399.)
GALLERY 392A
Portrait of Nathlija Gontcharova and Mihajl Larionov (1913)
by Aleksei Alekseevich Morgunov
Though Bacon most often painted from photographs, one of his most frequent models was
the artist Isabel Rawsthorne, who also sat for Picasso, Giacometti, and Derain. Rawsthorne
was married three times, and lucky number two was the composer Constant Lambert who
wrote several ballets for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, including a commission for
Romeo and Juliet. Lambert was just one of many of the leading artists of the day—painters,
composers, and dancers—who lent their talents to Diaghilev’s spectacular stage
productions. The Russian artists Nathlija Gontcharova and Mihajl Larionov, depicted here
by fellow countryman Aleksei Alekseevich Morgunov, both made their names in the West
through the stage and costume designs they created for Diaghilev’s troupe.
GALLERY 397
The Anthropomorphic Tower (1930) by Salvador Dalí
In 1942, Bacon, then 36, met the 23-year-old painter Lucian Freud en route to the English
countryside, and the two artists remained close friends for the next 50 years until Bacon’s
death in 1992. The younger artist’s grandfather was, of course, the legendary founder of
psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, whose ideas about the unconscious mind and the
significance of dreams were highly influential for the Surrealists. Salvador Dalí, that
movement’s most publicized practitioner, actually met the elder Freud in 1938 and had
derived from the doctor’s theories much of his “paranoiac-critical method”—using double
images or image associations to let “the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality.”
We bet you’ll figure out the double meanings in this work.
GALLERY 161
Spinning (modeled 1882–83, cast c. 1886) by Thomas Eakins
Of his greatest influences, Bacon reported, “My principal source of visual information is
[Eadweard] Muybridge, the 19th-century photographer who photographed human and
animal movement. His work is unbelievably precise. He created a visual dictionary of
movement, a living dictionary.” Indeed, the influence of Muybridge’s pioneering work is
apparent in Bacon’s movement-infused portraits as well as his portrait series, in which a
subject becomes progressively more animated. But Muybridge’s revelations about the
human form were also inspiring to his contemporaries including his fellow Philadelphian
Thomas Eakins. Renowned for his meticulously realistic portraits, Eakins followed
Muybridge’s innovations and brought a similar scientific precision to this rare relief.
Gallery 242
Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando) (1887–88)
by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
A horrifying close-up of a nurse mid-scream, her pince nez askew as blood drips from
a fresh bullet wound in head—this image from the final moments of Sergei Eisenstein’s
1925 film Battleship Potemkin haunted Bacon and became a frequent theme in many of
Bacon’s works. Five years after making his influential film, the Russian filmmaker traveled
to Mexico for a project where he met the famously tempestuous couple, Frida Kahlo and
Diego Rivera. Amid the couple’s rocky relationship, each pursued their own love affairs,
Kahlo notably with the queen of Parisian burlesque, Josephine Baker, who also enjoyed
assorted extramarital affairs, the writer Colette among them. Before her writing career took
off, Colette performed at nightclubs including the Moulin Rouge where this work hung
above the bar for many years.
Gallery 209
Kitchen Scene (1618/20) by Diego Rodríguez de Velásquez
While this work by the 17th-century Spanish master Velásquez is the furthest removed
from Bacon in terms of time, it is surprisingly just one link away in terms of influence.
Beginning in the early 1940s, Bacon became obsessed with Velásquez’s painting Pope
Innocent X, and though he admitted he never saw the actual work, only reproductions,
he produced at least 45 of his own interpretations including the Art Institute’s Figure
with Meat, in which grisly carcasses of beef replace the lush velvet drapery that flanked
Velásquez’s pope. This work by Velásquez was created much earlier in his career when
he produced many such masterly bodegones—tavern or shop scenes with picturesque
characters engaged in common chores.
Gallery 220
The Captive Slave (1827) by John Philip Simpson
Though Bacon made little of the claims, his family was said to have descended from the
16th-century philosopher, statesman, and scientist Sir Francis Bacon. Conventionally
remembered for his philosophical treatises, political contributions, as well as the
development and promotion of the scientific method, this earlier Bacon has also been
rumored to have been the true author of the plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare. So
what does that have to do with this exquisitely rendered portrait by John Philip Simpson?
Simpson’s model was the freeborn American Ira Aldridge who became a celebrated
Shakespearean actor and the first black man to have played Othello on the London stage.
How’s that for unexpected connections?
Got a taste for more Bacon?
Be sure to stop by Gallery 399 to see Bacon’s Figure with Meat, and return on March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day) at
12:00 for an in-depth tour of the Dublin-born artist’s work.