FRANCIS BACON (Dublin, 1909- Madrid, 1992)."Les anées 50, Francis Bacon", 1986.Offset poster on paper.Signed and dedicated in pencil by the artist.The frame is damaged.Sizes: 69 x 49 cm; 73 x 53 cm (frame).Poster made for the exhibition of the artist Francis Bacon, in 1986 at the Centre d'art Pompidou. The poster designed by Christian Beneyton has one of Francis Bacon's most iconic images, his painting entitled "Head IV", which was painted by the artist in 1949. It reveals the artist's interest in the paintings of Velázquez, and his particular fixation with the work of Innocent X, which he reinterpreted by adapting it to his personal language of dramatic and exacerbated aesthetics.Born in Dublin, although of English parents, Francis Bacon began painting as a self-taught artist. When he was only 17, in 1927, the Paul Rosemberg gallery opened its doors to the painter. There he became acquainted with the work of Pablo Picasso, an artist he would admire throughout his career. Like Picasso, other painters made an impression on Bacon's work: Velázquez (whose version of Pope Innocent X he painted, producing at least 40 "popes") and Nicolas Poussin, whose "The Massacre of the Innocents", now in the Musée Condé, aroused intense emotion in him. In 1945 he exhibited in London, together with the English artists Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland, his painting Three Studies for Figures at the Foot of a Crucifixion (c. 1944), a triptych which, according to Bacon himself, marked the starting point of his career. By 1945 Bacon had developed his own unmistakable style. In 1949 the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA) bought an impressive work by Bacon entitled Painting 1946. In 1956 he was invited to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale alongside Ben Nicholson and Lucian Freud. With his work, Bacon decided that the subject of his paintings would be both life in death and death in life. He sought to express his vital condition, which was also linked to his self-destructive side. Michel Leiris suggested to him that masochism, sadism and similar manifestations were really just ways of feeling more human. Portraits and self-portraits form an important part of Bacon's paintings, including George Dyer in a Mirror of 1968, a work in which the painter suggests the vulnerability and fragility of the self. Bacon made portraits without poses taken from life, developed from photographs. He portrayed his intimate companions and friends as well as famous people: Peter Lacy, George Dyer and John Edwards, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne, Muriel Belcher, Lucian Freud, Peter Beard and Michel Leiris, as well as Hitler, Pius XII and Mick Jagger. Some of his works can be seen in the most important art galleries in the world, such as the Tate Britain in London (which has one of the artist's most extensive collections), the MET and the Moma in New York, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Museo Reina Sofía.