Francis Bacon’s studio transplanted

The London studio of the late gay artist Francis Bacon, who died in 1992, has been moved from its South Kensington location and reconstructed in a Dublin art gallery, according to the BBC. Bacon used to use the plaster on the walls as his palette, and great care was taken by project manager Margarita Cappock to make sure that every smudge made the journey intact. Though Cappock claims, “This is exactly the mess he left behind,” she did, in fact, discover a sort of order: “There was an area with books and photos, the table was piled high with artists’ materials, and behind the easel the space is full of empty champagne and wine boxes.” The whole has been reassembled in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin—a city Bacon said he’d never return to until he was dead—where it will be on permanent exhibition beginning May 23. The contents of the room have been entered into a database and serve as a uniquely complete archive of an artist’s methods and source materials.