Francis Bacon (artist) - Exhibitions

Exhibitions

Bacon's first retrospective was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1955. Bacon was given a solo show at the São Paulo Bienal in 1959. In 1962, the Tate Gallery, London, organized a Bacon retrospective, a modified version of which traveled to Mannheim, Turin, Zurich, and Amsterdam. Other important exhibitions of his work were held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1963 and the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971; paintings from 1968 to 1974 were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1975. Retrospectives of his work were held at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1989-90 and at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1996.

Another major retrospective of Bacon's work opened in September 2008 at Tate Britain, London. It was billed as the largest retrospective of his work ever mounted, containing around sixty of his works. In January 2009, it travelled on to the Prado Gallery in Madrid, Spain, where it was exhibited until April 2009. Then it travelled on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, "where it ended in the summer of 2009".