STUDY OF A HUMAN BODY AFTER INGRES, 1984

  • Study Of The Human Body From A Drawing By Ingres, Francis Bacon
    Study of the Human Body after Ingres (1982), 1984
    Lithograph in colours on arches, edition of 180, 62 x 46.1 cm
    ©The Estate of Francis Bacon 
    Study of a Human Body after Ingres (1984) is a late work by Francis Bacon that reflects his ongoing dialogue with art history and his fascination with the fragility of the human form. Drawing inspiration from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a master of classical precision and idealised beauty, Bacon reinterprets the figure through his own lens of distortion, movement, and vulnerability.
     
    Rendered with his signature intensity, the work transforms Ingres’s refined anatomy into something unstable and alive. The figure appears in motion, the lower body twisting against a minimal background, suspended between elegance and disintegration. By the 1980s, Bacon had refined his palette and composition, favouring open spaces and sharp contrasts. 
     
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  • The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.


    -Francis Bacon

    For Bacon, Ingres represented both perfection and constraint, the very qualities he sought to undo. Where Ingres painted the human form as a vessel of grace and order, Bacon saw it as fragile, unstable, and subject to the violence of existence. His Study of a Human Body after Ingres (1984) can be read as both homage and defiance: an acknowledgement of Ingres’s mastery and a rebellion against his idealism.

    Bacon once said that he wanted to “distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion bring it back to a recording of the appearance.” This principle is at the heart of his engagement with Ingres. By pulling apart the precision of the classical figure, Bacon exposed something closer to lived reality, flesh as fallible, the body as a site of anxiety and decay. 

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