ABSTRACT
In the decade between the Tate retrospective in the spring of 1962 and the Grand Palais exhibition which opened in autumn 1971 – the two shows which established his international reputation – Francis Bacon was remarkably inventive and prolific. The London exhibition had alleviated the frustrations of half a career spent in semi-obscurity; and the Paris event, which took several years to develop and organize, gave the deeply Francophile artist a prestigious goal to work towards. As with the other artists he admired, Bacon knew Michelangelo's work mostly from reproductions. He visited certain museums in London and Paris regularly, but he found he was often more stimulated by works of art in reproduction than by seeing them in the flesh. Paris had missed the opportunity of taking the Tate's travelling retrospective in 1962-63, a project to give the city its own Bacon retrospective got under way, with the artist's boundless encouragement.
