Francis Bacon: France and Monaco

A bilingual publication in English and French exploring the work of British artist Francis Bacon and his long relationship with France, Monaco and French culture.

The first in-depth publication to uncover the long relationship Francis Bacon enjoyed with France, Monaco and French culture. Martin Harrison, the foremost expert on Bacon, brings a new light to a somewhat unexpected side of the artist’s life and work.

It was in Paris in 1927, at an exhibition dedicated to Picasso, that Francis Bacon grasped his vocation as a painter. In 1946, he moved to Monaco on the French Riviera where he lived for four years, his time in the Principality marking a turning point in his art; with his 'popes' series, he became a painter of the human figure. In Paris he befriended artists and intellectuals, such as Giacometti and Leiris, whilst the city would become the setting for the crystalisation of his reputation in 1971 with the retrospective at the Grand Palais. In 1975, Bacon would take a studio in the Marais district.

This bilingual publication – co-published by Albin Michel and The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation – tells of Bacon’s deep ties with France and Monaco, and has been overseen by Martin Harrison, author of Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné and curator of the coinciding exhibition Francis Bacon, Monaco et la culture française which ran at Grimaldi Forum, Monaco from 2 July 2016 until 4 September 2016. Harrison also curated a sister exhibition, Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez, at Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao from 30 September 2016 until 8 January 2017. A further major exhibition on Bacon opened in 2016: Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms, which ran from 18 May until 18 September 2016 at Tate Liverpool, and from 7 October 2016 until 8 January 2017 at Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.