Available in an Array of Colours

This article attends to the observation that the kinds of colours in Bacon's paintings, particularly after the 1962 triptych made for the Tate exhibition of the same year, intensified in tone and diversified in range. It argues that the observation should be connected to the ‘sensuous world of leisure’ offered by the meritocratic, design-conscious and brightly hued spaces of Sixties London. Taking the example of ‘those strange rainbow-hued shirts that he started wearing in the early seventies’, it reasons that the influence of homosexual ‘drag’ clothing on the return of peacockery and colour in male dress deserves consideration in relation to the artist's use of certain colours.

Published in Special Issue: Bacon Reframed: A themed issue on Francis Bacon.