« Le grand jeu de Francis Bacon »
Signed presentation inscription: “À Bernard avec mes meilleures amitiés. Francis Bacon, Paris, 20/1/77.”
This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition organized in Paris by Claude Bernard, in collaboration with the Marlborough galleries of London, New York, Rome and Zurich. Its important preface was written by Michel Leiris, a close friend of the artist and his “most penetrating critic”: “I often saw,” Philippe Sollers would later write, “in the old days, at the back of the bar of the Pont-Royal in Paris, Leiris and Bacon together, leaning toward each other in complicit conversation. I loved watching them, Leiris serious, Bacon striving to appear so.”
Ten years earlier, Leiris had written “Ce que m’ont dit les peintures de Francis Bacon” as the preface to the catalogue of the Maeght exhibition (1966); he went on to write the preface for the 1971 retrospective devoted to the painter at the Grand Palais, and then this one, for the Galerie Claude Bernard (1976). These three events are the only solo exhibitions of Francis Bacon held in Paris between 1960 and 1980.