If you are in London and want a small dose of art to add to the routine of your day, we highly recommend the “Bacon and Rodin in dialogue” at Pilar Ordovas‘s gallery in Mayfair. Since Ms. Ordovas opened her smart looking gallery on Saville Row (across the street from Hauser&Wirth), she has been putting together small focused exhibitions underlining the influences artists had on each other. Her opening show in October 2012 was on Bacon and Rembrandt: how both artists were very interested in portraiture and self-portraits in particular, and focusing on Rembrandt’s influence on Bacon’s late self-portraits.
Bacon Rembrandt show at Pilar Ordovas
For the exhibition Pilar borrowed one Rembrandt, “Self-Portrait with Beret” from the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, where Bacon often visited to admire this work. Then came the exhibition on the great 17th century Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci and Lucian Freud at the end of the year. Co-curated with Dr. Xavier Bray, Chief Curator of Dulwich Picture Gallery, this exhibition brought together a group of head studies and focused on Freud’s interest in the Old Masters, highlighting and exploring the visual connections between Carracci and Freud. 
And now we have the Bacon and Rodin comparison. According to the gallery press release, Movement and Gravity: Bacon and Rodin in dialogue is the first exhibition that has ever been dedicated to exploring the dialogue and connections between these artists. Such connection makes sense, as both artists were took great interest in the human body as evident in their works. At the exhibition (which we haven’t had a chance to see yet!) three bronzes by Rodin are shown alongside three paintings by Bacon. This is the first time that Bacon’s “Three Studies from the Human Body” (1967) is publicly shown in the UK. It was previously exhibited in New York and Paris in 1971. Bacon would have been 58 when he painted this work, depicting three gyrating, weightless figures said to be represent the three ages of man. With the Rodin and Bacon works side by side, we get to see “the profound effect that Rodin’s interpretation of the human body, with its emphasis on exaggerated limbs, fractured forms and the articulation of movement, had on Bacon.”
