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I guess 3 years ago I was sitting around worrying about absence of a major exhibition for the
end of this year thinking you know we have done Caravaggio, done Monet, we have done
Picasso. We need another figure of that sort of monumentality.
We weren't looking to do something that gave you a sense of one aspect of his work.
We wanted it to be a full picture.
This is a major exhibition covering Five Decades of Bacon's life.
We approached maybe 130 owners of Bacon works.
First place I went was the Tate. They very generously lent us five in fact so then I
knew that we were on a roll.
At this point in time we have about 55 works in the show from all over the world.
So this exhibition is somewhat different from previous retrospectives
and you will encounter a room which conjures up the studio.
Bacon's studio contains 7-1/2 thousand items within that he had a large collection of photographs
these were an intrinsic part of Bacon's creative process.
That studio material I think that is something that I think a lot of people respond to very strongly
Successive directors of the Tate have said this is the greatest figurative artist after
Picasso.
He divides people of course to some extent because people react negatively in one way to the
shocking content of his work.
The violence of the images, their immediacy he has just produced some of the most technically
brilliant paintings of the 20th Century.
There is great beauty in terms of the application of paint.
Big canvasses, they are mostly 8 foot by 5 foot with gold frames around them looking
very much like old masterpieces.
You can't understand this thing unless you see it in the flesh, which is why it is so
important to have a show like this in Australia.
A painting which captures a moment that plays out on the nervous system of the viewer. Bacon
is up there with Caravaggio and with Picasso, he really is. Whether the audience fully appreciates
that they will after this show.