Francis Bacon Prints For Sale

Francis Bacon is the most important British figurative painter of the 20th century and one of the most collected artists in the world. Born in Dublin in 1909, he moved to London in the late 1920s and spent decades finding his voice before Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) announced him fully-formed and unforgettable to the post-war world. His paintings — distorted figures in constricting spaces, screaming popes, wrestlers, lovers and friends rendered in states of dissolution and raw physical presence — are among the most viscerally powerful images in the history of art.

Bacon never sought formal training. He taught himself by looking — obsessively and voraciously — at Velázquez and Goya, at Eadweard Muybridge's photographs of figures in motion, at X-rays and medical imagery, at the Old Masters and the Surrealists. His studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington — preserved in its entirety at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin — was famously chaotic, every surface buried under photographs, magazine clippings and paint-smeared paper that fed directly into his canvases. He described himself not as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance.

His print catalogue is extraordinarily small for an artist of his stature. All works are produced after 1965 and based on specific paintings from his own catalogue, and encompass etchings, lithographs, lithographic offsets and posthumous aquatints — the full range documented across Bruno Sabatier's Francis Bacon Oeuvre Graphique and Alexandre Tacou's Francis Bacon: Estampes. These are not prints Bacon made at a press in the manner of Picasso or Matisse. They are works produced in close collaboration with skilled printmakers, translating his painted imagery into print under his supervision and bearing his signature. Bacon was selective to the point of severity in authorising his printed output — and a signed Francis Bacon print is the direct product of that severity.

Alex Yellop advise collectors internationally across Francis Bacon prints, rare signed editions and historically important published works.

For information on Francis Bacon original prints for sale, contact our London dealership via info@alexyellop.com. 

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