Beschreibung:

33 PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED EUROPEAN COLLECTION Francis Bacon Seated Woman 1961 oil on canvas 64 7/8 x 55 7/8 in. (165 x 142.2 cm) Seated Woman has been requested for inclusion in the upcoming exhibition "Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture", which will open at the Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, on July 2nd 2016, per the request of Martin Harrison, Curator and Editor of the Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné.
Provenance Collection Roger Vivier Paris Marlborough Gallery, London Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris Galerie Beyeler, Basel Kent Fine Art, New York Private Collection Sotheby's, Paris, Contemporary Art Sale, December 12, 2007, lot 23 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner Exhibited Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Salon de Mai, 1961 Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Salon de Mai, June 7 – July 7, 1961 Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Porträt einer Sammlung. z. B. Kasack, April 7, 1978 – May 7, 1978 Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Nudes-Nus-Nackte, June - August, 1984 Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Francis Bacon June - October, 1987 Dublin, Kilmainham, Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Moderns, October 19, 2010 - March 25, 2011 Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Traces of Time, October 5, 2012 - January 27, 2013 Literature Salon de Mai, exh. cat., Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, 1961, n. 9 (illustrated) Salon de Mai , exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1961, n. 4 (illustrated) Cimaise, VIII, Paris, July – August, 1961, p. 69 XXe Siècle, n. 21, Paris, May, 1963, p. 34 R. Alley, Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1964, p. 136, n. 181 (illustrated) Nudes-Nus-Nackte, exh. cat., Galerie Beyeler, Basel, 1984, n. 2 (illustrated) Francis Bacon exh. cat., Galerie Beyeler, Basel, 1987, n. 11 (illustrated) The Moderns, exh. cat., Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham, Dublin, 2011, cat. 113, p.177 (illustrated) Video Francis Bacon 'Seated Woman', 1961 "The body is actually a reflection of Francis' own mind thinking through how to create a figure that is at once quite powerful and robust, but vulnerable at the same time. It has a narrative outside of itself. He is one of the truly great painters of the 21st Century..." Phillips' Deputy Chairman of Europe & Asia Matt Carey-Williams presents Francis Bacon's 'Seated Woman', 1961 to be offered in our Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 14 May in New York. Catalogue Essay Francis Bacon’s art, much like the creative enterprise of fellow twentieth-century geniuses Picasso, Duchamp, Pollock or Warhol, speaks powerfully of a period that underwent extraordinary social, political and cultural change. Bacon, much like Picasso, depicted the magnitude of such change by focusing primarily on the human body. The human body; the sheer corporeality of it becomes, for Bacon, his chosen vessel with which he can both explore and expose this period of monumental change; a change at once physical, sexual, experiential and psychological. The status of the body becomes the agent of Bacon’s understanding of material change: often isolated in an existential funk, delineated by coarsely lined cages and set against flat, often nondescript backgrounds of solid color, vigorously pushing both the crude cage and its dynamically-executed sitter out of the pictorial space; always confronting and challenging the viewer in the process. The twentieth century challenged the status of the object and thus posed questions of the artist, the art work and the creative devices employed to fashion art. The realms of possibility were constantly stretched, so that the streams of signification pertinent to both the lexis and praxis of object making ebbed and flowed more energetically than ever before. Bacon’s contribution to that discourse is crucial—the object, for him, was the body, in flux, in transition, and often in distress. For Bacon, the body was fundamentally both Sign and Signifier of our time. The very early part of his career saw Bacon heavily influenced by Picasso’s bodies, particularly his geometric variants from his Studio series in the 1920’s. The body becomes more isolated and more profound in the 1940’s with Bacon’s series of single heads, often imprisoned in crudely outlined geometric structures; their physiognomy seemingly coalescing in front of our eyes with luscious licks of impastoed paint on the canvas. In to the 1950’s, Bacon’s interest in the body is exemplifi