MIROIR DE LA TAUROMACHIE, 1990

  • MIROIR DE LA TAUROMACHIE, 1990, Francis Bacon

    MIROIR DE LA TAUROMACHIE, 1990

    colored lithograph, 48 x 36 cm

    ©The Estate of Francis Bacon

    MIROIR DE LA TAUROMACHIE, 1990, marks one of Francis Bacon’s final projects, created as a collaboration with the writer Michel Leiris. The portfolio pairs Leiris’s poetic reflections on bullfighting with Bacon’s stark visual interpretations of its brutality and beauty. Bacon, long fascinated by violence and ritual, saw in the corrida a mirror of existence itself: elegant, choreographed, and merciless. His images twist the bull and matador into a single, writhing entity, suggesting not victory but entanglement between life and death. Executed as a series of etchings and aquatints, the work captures the same raw physicality as his paintings, only distilled into shadow, gesture, and stain.
     
    There’s a strange calm in these late prints. Bacon no longer paints screaming Popes or shattered figures in cages; instead, he reduces the spectacle to movement and memory. The bull becomes a cypher for energy, instinct, and mortality, themes that haunted him throughout his career. In Miroir de la Tauromachie, Bacon doesn’t glorify the arena but exposes its psychological dimension: the matador’s grace masking fear, the crowd’s hunger cloaked as culture. It feels like a farewell, an artist confronting his obsessions one last time, knowing that art, like the bullfight, is both performance and sacrifice.
     
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  • “You can be haunted by an image, a shape, a way of feeling that keeps returning. Painting is a way of exorcising it, or at least, trying to.”

    – Francis Bacon

    The project also speaks to Bacon’s enduring dialogue with literature and philosophy. His friendship with Leiris, a surrealist and ethnographer, lent the series an added layer of intellectual intimacy. Leiris viewed the bullfight as a metaphor for the human condition, while Bacon translated that tension into visual form with his characteristic immediacy. The result is a fusion of word and image that feels ritualistic rather than illustrative.