PORTRAIT OF MICHEL LEIRIS, 1976

  • Portrait of Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, 1976
    Portrait of Michel Leiris, 1976
    Etching and aquatint in colours on Arches wove paper, edition size: 100. 
    Image size: 298 x 251 mm
    ©The Estate of Francis Bacon
    Portrait of Michel Leiris, 1976, is one of Francis Bacon’s most distinctive portraits from the late 1970s, capturing the French writer, ethnographer, and art critic Michel Leiris, a close friend, intellectual peer, and one of Bacon’s most perceptive supporters. Leiris, who had written extensively on art and psychology, shared Bacon’s fascination with the complexities of identity and the tension between intellect and instinct.
     
    In this portrait, Bacon distorts Leiris’s features into a dynamic swirl of movement and colour, blurring the boundary between representation and sensation. The face appears both formed and dissolving, as if caught between multiple moments of recognition. Unlike Bacon’s more brutal depictions of friends and lovers, this work carries a sense of admiration and respect. The composition, defined by its restrained palette and spatial isolation, reflects not only Leiris’s physical presence but also the psychological depth that bound the two men’s creative worlds
     
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  • “I paint to distort reality and to bring the fact more violently to the viewer.”

     
    – Francis Bacon
    Leiris first encountered Francis Bacon in Paris in the 1960s, and the two quickly developed a friendship built on shared curiosity about mortality, identity, and the human condition. Leiris became one of Bacon’s most articulate champions in France, writing the introduction for Bacon’s 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais, an exhibition that took place just days after George Dyer’s death. The relationship between the two men was grounded in mutual respect: Bacon admired Leiris’s psychological honesty, while Leiris saw in Bacon’s paintings a visual counterpart to his own literary investigations into vulnerability and truth.