PORTRAIT OF MICHEL LEIRIS, 1990

  • Portrait of Michel Leiris, 1990
    Portrait of Michel Leiris, 1990
    Lithograph, Edition of 150, H 48 X 36cm
    ©The Estate of Francis Bacon
    Portrait of Michel Leiris, 1990, is one of Francis Bacon’s final portraits, created as a tribute to his long-time friend, the French writer and art critic Michel Leiris. The two shared a deep intellectual connection rooted in their fascination with mortality, desire, and the human psyche. Leiris, who had written extensively on Bacon’s work, saw in him a rare honesty about the brutality of existence, something that this portrait captures with haunting clarity.
     

    Rendered in Bacon’s late style, the Portrait of Michel Leiris is intimate and unsettling. The face, twisted and dissolving into shadow, seems to hover between recognition and abstraction. The background is sparse, allowing the viewer’s attention to rest entirely on the features. Bacon’s use of subdued tones and soft edges reflects a quieter, more reflective mood than his earlier portraits, embodying the sense of time and transience that preoccupied him in his final years.

     
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  • Painting is the pattern of one’s own nervous system being projected on canvas.

     

    - Francis Bacon

    Leiris first met Bacon in the 1960s and quickly became one of his most articulate champions in France. His 1971 essay Francis Bacon: Face and Figure, remains one of the most insightful texts ever written about the artist, exploring how Bacon’s distortions of the body revealed psychological and spiritual realities rather than mere physical ones. Leiris saw in Bacon’s figures the same paradox that haunted his own writing: the conflict between life and death.
    The two men shared not just a friendship, but a deep philosophical understanding. Both were preoccupied with the fragility of the self and the impossibility of escaping one’s own nature. When Bacon painted Portrait of Michel Leiris in 1990, shortly before both of their deaths, it became more than a likeness; it was a closing statement on their shared worldview.