Death on a toilet: the shocking Paris show that almost sank Francis Bacon
(The Guardian France)

It was meant to put the artist on a par with Picasso. But it was thrown into chaos by the suicide of his lover and muse. As Bacon returns to haunt the French capital, we recall a tragic, game-changing showLast Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci´s controversial piece of 70s art cinema, begins with an oil painting of a man on a red bed wearing just a T-shirt, flashing fleshy legs as his face explodes in inky smears. He´s in a room with a green carpet and yellow walls. For a few moments, Bertolucci shows just this portrait - of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon - then a sensual jazz score slowly starts, and the film´s opening credits roll alongside this unmoving canvas. It is succeeded by a brutally dissected female figure sitting on a wooden chair - another Bacon portrait, this time of Henrietta Moraes. Eventually, the two paintings are seen side by side. Then we cut to Marlon Brando in a camel overcoat on a Paris bridge, yelling: `Fucking God!`Behind Bertolucci´s eerie use of these oil paintings is the shocking story of an art exhibition that gripped Paris, established Bacon as the great European artist he had always dreamt of being - and left a man dead in a hotel toilet. Bertolucci was so astounded by Bacon´s solo show at the Grand Palais - which opened in October 1971, just as he was preparing to make his film in the French capital - that he took Brando to see it. He urged the actor, he later recalled, to `compare himself with Bacon´s human figures because I felt that, like them, Marlon´s face and body were characterised by a strange and infernal plasticity`.Realising he couldn´t directly bid for Picasso´s crown unless he painted the female body, Bacon got in training Continue reading...