Lot 147: Head

1) Drawing of F. Bacon: pencil on paper, 32 x 22 cm, 1985 2) Catalogue: Francis Bacon: Works on Paper: a catalogue of the drawings by the artist donated to Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino, Bologna 2015. The drawing is on the p. 248 (ill. num. 332, cat. num. 104)

Francis Bacon was a painter of the School of London, whose main figurative subject was a human body. He often painted crucifixion, pops, his friends and abstract figures. His characters, even when they appear to the Renaissance epoch, contradict the "classic” body proportions and idealization of Salons. He also was a figurative artist, what means, that he opposed to abstract or conceptualistic art, which was very popular in this time. Bacon was not fascinated about drawing and did not appreciated its meaning for an artist. An art critic and author Edward Lucie-Smith wrote "Bacon many times and even vehemently, denied that he made any use of drawing. < ...> In it, Bacon admits that he does draw, but coyly says that he puts his drawings aside and doesn't look at them, when the monument comes to paint a picture”. Nevertheless Bacon left a pretty huge heritage of drawings. This sketch is one of the many further grotesque head’s by Francis Bacon. Some of them are called "pope”, "study after Leonardo” (Leonardo da Vinci), "study after Guercino” (Il Guercino, a baroque Italian artist) and so on. Some of them are self-portraits. Umberto Guerini – curator of Bacon’s exhibitions and the lawyer, who dealt with the donation of Bacon’s drawings – compared Bacon’s paintings and drawing: "In the drawings, on the hand, the form appears closed first and foremost in the portraits, for a call to order, perhaps even for the need to take back up that which seemed lost, in the sudden gesture of the hand that paints. The drawings are composed, at times even definitive, as cannot happen with Caravaggio who never made drawings), unlike Guercino”.