THREE STUDIES FOR SELF PORTRAIT, 1990

  • Three Studies For Self Portrait, Francis Bacon, 1990

    Three Studies for Self Portrait, 1990

    Lithograph, edition size of 60, H 52 cm X W 94cm 

    ©The Estate of Francis Bacon 

    Three Studies for Self-Portrait (1990) is a late lithograph by Francis Bacon that revisits one of his most personal and enduring subjects: himself. Based on his 1979 oil painting of the same name, the work presents three distorted views of Bacon’s face, each suspended against a deep slate blue background. Created in a limited edition of 60, this piece reflects the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with self-examination and the passage of time.
     

    By 1990, Bacon was in his eighties and acutely aware of mortality. These portraits lack the rage and violence of his earlier self-images, replacing them with a quieter, more reflective tension. The shifting expressions and twisting forms suggest both fragmentation and endurance, a life examined through the distortions of memory and decay. The triptych format, a structure he had long used to explore psychological depth, here becomes a mirror of identity itself.

     

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  • I’m just trying to make images as accurately as possible off my nervous system as I can.


    - Francis Bacon

    Francis Bacon’s lifelong preoccupation with mortality shaped much of his art, becoming especially pronounced in his later years. Death, for Bacon, was not a subject to be feared or avoided, but a constant, undeniable presence, an inescapable truth that underpinned existence itself. His paintings and prints confront this reality with brutal honesty, revealing the body not as an idealised form, but as something fragile, transient, and inevitably decaying.
    Bacon often described his work as an attempt to capture “the brutality of fact,” and nowhere is that clearer than in his late portraits and self-portraits. Faces blur, collapse, and reform, caught between vitality and dissolution. His figures appear trapped within moments of transformation, as if time itself is eroding them. Rather than seeking beauty or redemption, Bacon found meaning in the raw condition of being, the knowledge that life’s intensity exists only because it ends.