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Francis Bacon and the Masters presents more than twenty of the artist’s paintings, the majority coming from the extraordinary collection assembled by Bacon’s patrons, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, over the course of the artist’s lifetime and now in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich. Along with other landmark paintings from the Tate Collection and other major public and private collections, these are placed in the context of masterpieces from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg: Egyptian mummy masks, Roman and Renaissance sculpture, and a number of the museum’s most famous paintings such as Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Man, Matisse’s Nymph and Satyr and Picasso’s A Young Lady. These remarkable works, brought together for a ground-breaking exhibition at the Hermitage and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, are given further context by items and photographs from Bacon’s own studio archive, now in Dublin.
The exhibition is guest curated in both venues by Dr Thierry Morel, and co-curated by Amanda Geitner and Calvin Winner from SCVA. The contributing authors are Dr Thierry Morel, Professor Paul Joannides (Cambridge University), Amanda Geitner (SCVA), Calvin Winner (SCVA) and Margarita Cappock (Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane).
