'Prisoner and Ruler'
3 April 2010 -March 2011
Leeds was the first regional public collection to acquire a painting by Francis Bacon in 1950 through the agency of the LACF; in fact at that time the only other museums to have a Bacon in their collection were Tate and Museum of Modern Art, New York
This special collection display 'Prisoner and Ruler' puts the Leeds picture, 'Painting 1950' alongside Bacon's iconic 'Head VI' (1949) on loan from the Arts Council Collection, in the context of the Leeds' collection, taking as a theme John Russell's defining remark that Bacon was 'a painter of figures in rooms'.
The display aims to show how, behind the relative simplicity of this definition, a key aspect of the artist's development in this crucial period was his experimentation and configuration of space, which was to become a defining feature of his work throughout his subsequent career.
As Laurence Gowing, writing at the time on Bacon's 'Head VI', said:
"The sense of enclosure, of situations pushed to their extreme between four walls is powerful enough to offset all the shortcomings of assurance in the way those situations are handled…
The cubicle reveals itself as a veritable cube…a figure who is both prisoner and a ruler"
Other artists in the display are Matthew Smith, one of the few artists Bacon wrote ever about; Walter Richard Sickert, another artist Bacon admired, particularly for the way he'd used photography in his painting; Roy de Maistre, who in some ways was Bacon's mentor; contemporaries of Bacon, Roberts, Colquhoun and Macbryde, and Leon Kossoff as well as artists as diverse as James McNeil Whistler; Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore with 'Camden Town' nudes; William Orpen and Martin Naylor, all of who wrestled in different ways with the rendering the figure in an enclosed space.