If Francis Bacon’s career as a designer in the early 1930s is not well known, it is because he did his best to pretend it never happened. The artist seems to have been acutely embarrassed by his adventures in that world, possibly because ( pace Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens’s recent biography) ‘there was a moment when his design work was not an unpleasant chore but a chosen career’. He preferred to let it be known that he spent his youth drifting ‘from bar to bar’, merely dabbling in creative pursuits.
An exhibition currently at the Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux, however, sets out to investigate the artist’s work as a designer and trace his debt to contemporary trends in France. In terms of presentation, it is less an art-historical survey than a showroom, resembling the kind of ensemble a luxury design brand might stick in a Mortimer Street window display. A lack of contextual information works at cross-purposes to a visitor’s reasonable expectations: we have, after all, come to learn something about a little-discussed chapter of a famous artist’s life.
So what, if anything, do we learn? That the ostensible subject of the exhibition is represented only sparsely cannot be put down to curatorial negligence: for a start, Bacon didn’t actually make much furniture, and went to great lengths to destroy whatever paintings he realised before his late thirties. Indeed, what has been borrowed from Majid Boustany’s foundation – a painting, a gouach.