Rudy Chiappini

Published for the exhibition in Milan between March 4th and June 29th, 2008, this catalog offers a selection of approximately sixty works by Bacon. The collection spans his works from his first paintings in the 1930s, which reveal how early he was attracted to a figure’s deformation and ambiguity, to his late triptychs, in which the artist’s existential torment seems to move towards a suffered serenity. This publication includes important contributions from leading international scholars as well as technical information on all the exhibition works. Artworks are gathered from such prestigious museums as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Birmingham Museum, the Sara Hilden Museum in Tampere, the Fondazione Beyeler in Basel, the Museo de Arte Contemporanea in Caracas, the Toyota Municipal Museum in Aichi, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. The publication also includes a series of documents—drawings, photographs, and works on paper such as collages and retouched photographs—from the Dublin City Gallery.

Rudy Chiappini has been director of the Modern Art Museum in Lugano for almost twenty years. In 1993 he was commissioner of the first posthumous exhibition dedicated to Bacon.