The exhibition on the portraits of Francis Bacon is held from 9 September 2017 to 10 December 2017 in Mamiano di Traversetolo – Parma, Fondazione Magnani-Rocca.
An exceptional auction at Sotheby's in London, in July 2015, decreed the "Bacon Myth": in the catalogue, in addition to two self-portraits from 1975 and 1980, the 1961 work Study for a Pope I, born from Francis Bacon's obsession for the Portrait of Innocent X by Velázquez and belonged to Gunter Sachs, well-known playboy in the 50s and 60s and third husband of Brigitte Bardot.
The myth of Bacon (Dublin 1909 – Madrid 1992) now reaches the Magnani-Rocca Foundation: the famous painting by Bacon Two Americans of 1954, belonging to the Barilla Collection of Modern Art, will in fact be exhibited from 9 September to 10 December 2017 alongside the masterpieces of all times collected by Luigi Magnani in the Villa of Mamiano di Traversetolo near Parma.
The legend of the artist had perhaps reached its peak in November 2013 when his triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud from 1969, sold at an auction at Christie's in New York, became the highest paid painting in history, surpassing the previous record which it belonged to Munch's The Scream.
“I too considered that work difficult, I suffered it a bit, but then as time went by, I understood it more and more deeply, I fell in love with it…” confesses Pietro Barilla in the pages of an interview only chronologically impossible drawn up by Francesco Alberoni one hundred years after the birth of the great industrialist.
The work that initially disturbs the patron of Barilla, but which he later falls under the spell of is Two Americans by Francis Bacon, purchased from the Mario Tazzoli gallery in Turin in 1968 to further enrich his private collection designed to share and make art usable as an experience that improves life, starting from the workplace itself which it will disseminate with paintings and sculptures: from Picasso to Max Ernst, to Ensor, de Staël, Soutine, Moore, to the Italians Morandi, Boccioni, de Chirico , Savinio, Marini, Cascella, Manzù, Messina, Pomodoro, Soldati, Morlotti, Burri, Fontana, Guttuso, Maccari, Ceroli.
The artist presumably painted in Ostia, the last stage of a brief stay in Italy in the autumn of 1954. However, he was not a frequent visitor to the Bel Paese; despite his declared love for Michelangelo's sculpture, he has never been to see the Medici chapel, he does not even consider it necessary to go to the Venice Biennale where some of his works are exhibited at that time, nor does he consider it advisable to visit the Doria Gallery Pamphilj in Rome to see Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X, the source of inspiration for a series of eight studies carried out between 50 and 53.
Two Americans: A simple quadrangular space originating from thin white filaments that trace the perimeter of the back wall and that of the side walls of a compact black cube creates a glass box, a frame that serves no other purpose than to isolate and concentrate attention to the image it contains, allowing you to see it better. A constant concern for the artist has been, since the very beginning, that a story inexorably tends to insinuate itself between two figures. Only the action of roundels or parallelepipeds which isolate the figure in the painting will prevent a story from creeping into the whole represented, thus exorcising its illustrative and narrative character. Isolating is for Bacon the simplest way to break up the narration, prevent the illustration, thus freeing the figure by sticking to the fact. Neither the landscape nor any informal element will fill the rest of the picture; rather, it will be occupied by large backgrounds of dark and gloomy color with the sole intention of attracting form. From this unfathomable space emerge two faces in the process of dissolving, subjected to an evident distortion under the strokes of brushes and palette knives, or due to the colors that the artist himself squeezes on his hand and then hurls directly against the canvas. Bacon explains that: "in those moments I'm ready for anything: I erase with a rag or take a brush and scrub away what I've just painted, I run white spirit over it, I paint something else over it ... anything to break the rational organization of the image, as long as it grows spontaneously, that is, according to its own structure and not the one I impose on it" [...] "I want to deform things beyond appearance, but at the same time I want the deformation to register the appearance".
The man on the left is characterized by a slightly enlarged mouth in a mocking grin that bares all the teeth and deforms the features of the face as in an X-ray image. Bacon would later admit that he referred to some radiographs published in the book Positioning in radiography purchased during a trip to Berlin. His is a disquieting smile because it is precisely because of this smile that his face is unraveling, as if under the action of a corrosive acid, becoming unbearable, intolerable. Only the insistent smile that Bacon suggests calling a hysterical smile will be able to survive the dissipation of the face and the next and inevitable erasure of the body. Even the man on the right, however, is subjected to the same forces of deformation that take possession of the head of the Figure, becoming visible as if his head were trying to shake off his own face.
Bacon, as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote in 1981, hopes “always to deform people to the point of obtaining the appearance; he cannot literally paint them”. His intention is to bring out, make visible, invisible forces. The whole body is stretched out to escape from the mouth which here does not scream, as often happens in the characters represented by the artist. In addition to the cry, there is in fact the smile which performs the function of dissolving the body. Difficult not to make use of the words of Lewis Carroll intent on describing the disappearance of the cat in Alice in Wonderland: "and this time it vanished very slowly (...) ending with the grin, which remained for a while when everything was already gone".
Francis Bacon, Two Americans, 1954, oil on canvas (photo Adriana Ferrari-Milan)
