[set both at 1-1/2  col]

Francis Bacon, “Man with Dog,” 1953, oil on canvas, 60¼ by 46½ inches. Albright-Knox Art Gallery Buffalo, N.Y.; gift of Seymour H. Knox Jr, 1955.

Francis Bacon, “Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh V,” 1957, oil and sand on canvas, 78¼ by 541/8 inches. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Joseph H. Hirsh-horn Foundation, 1966. —Lee Stalsworth photo

FOR 4-20

ALBRIGHT-KNOX TO HOST EXHIBITION OF PAINTINGS BY FRANCIS BACON w/2 cuts

wd/gs set 4-12 #696000

BUFFALO, N.Y. — During the 1950s, painter Francis Bacon began to formulate the iconography of his dark and troubled world in paint. The exhibition, “Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s,” on view at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery May 4–July 29, features nearly 50 paintings from the period in which Bacon was at the height of his creative powers.

In this intensely fertile time, many of Bacon’s themes — screaming popes, howling dogs and haunting figures trapped in tortured isolation — began to materialize as the man himself was becoming one of the most significant artists of the Twentieth Century.

“Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s” takes a profoundly personal look at this fascinating period in Bacon’s career and is the first exhibition to examine Bacon’s formative works. Organized by Michael Peppiatt, a close friend of Bacon’s, the exhibition provides a first-person perspective on the artist’s emerging style in the first decades of his career through paintings, drawings and a selection of archival materials that illustrate the artist’s life and work.

At the core of the exhibition are 13 paintings collected by Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury, who were among the artist’s earliest patrons and, eventually, close friends. The works include loans from public and private collections across the world, a number of which have rarely been seen in public.

Throughout his life, Bacon controlled every aspect of his art, from the selection and presentation of his work to the interpretation. He commanded that all exhibitions of his art be classic retrospectives, focusing on his most recent works. As a result, his later work was more visible. In contrast, “Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s” brings together paintings from a single decade in that earlier, less visible period.

By the 1950s, bacon had acquired sufficient technical prowess as a painter and expressed his often-dark vision with force, but he was not fully in command of his disturbing images. Eager to explore themes and take risks in his early career, Bacon created images that contain a rawness and sense of urgency that would be lost in his later works.

To guest curator Peppiatt, the 1950s seemed to hold a lot of the clues to who Bacon was, noting, “That was when he located his biggest themes. He felt that he had to focus on the most important things of all to man…his existence.”

Bacon is one of the most unique and powerful artistic visionaries of postwar European art. The 1950s were the most fruitful years in Bacon’s career, but were also the most tumultuous and tortured of the artist’s existence. During this time, the artist was regularly without a fixed address, borrowing rooms and changing studios with incredible frequency.

The artist established a pattern of all-night revelry, culminating in a feverish fit of creativity — painting into the early morning hours. Much like Bacon’s approach to life, his approach to the canvas was radical, aggressive and seething with raw human emotion.

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery is at 1285 Elmwood Avenue. For information, www.albrightknox.org or 716-882-8700.