“I explained the nature of the diptych I wanted to achieve...Without my saying a word, he understood what my portrait was about, what it called for from him, and he still remained true to himself. No one could act Bacon but Bacon.”
--Richard Avedon: Portraits, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2002, n.p.

When this portrait was taken in 1979, both Richard Avedon and Francis Bacon were at the height of their careers - Avedon having photographed top cultural figures of the era and Bacon being celebrated with major retrospectives across the world. With experience in directing sitters for his own paintings, Bacon knew exactly how to conduct himself when he sat for the esteemed photographer. Together, they made this iconic work.

For the final portrait, Avedon merged two negatives as a tribute to Bacon’s own artistic practice, for which he often creates several paintings to explore the same subject or motif. In doing so, Avedon highlights two different sides of Bacon – on the left, engaged and in direct dialogue with the viewer, and on the right, perhaps hesitant and more vulnerable as he drifts into the background. The cropping of the right image was intentional on Avedon’s part, presenting Bacon’s pensive right side hiding behind the more performative left.

Ultimately, this meeting between two legendary artists yielded something larger than the sum of its parts – the collaboration of two titanic figures in 20th century art, merging both their distinctive explorations of the human condition into something entirely new. Other prints of this images can be found in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.