Connection: Art historian David Alan Mellor with painter Francis Bacon in 1987.
One of the 20th century's greatest artists, Francis Bacon, is the subject of a special lecture to be given by Sussex art historian Professor David Alan Mellor- one of the few Bacon scholars alive today who actually knew the painter.
David, who has curated exhibitions of Bacon's paintings and is an academic authority on his work, met the artist a few years before his death in 1992.
David says: "Bacon was taken by an exhibition I curated at the Barbican Art Gallery, in 1987, called 'A Paradise Lost'. He was surprised that I'd used photographs of birds by Eric Hoskins, a photographer he admired: but I had no prior knowledge that he liked his work and it was only a hunch of mine that made me put them in the show."
David's lecture on 18 November is a timely one. Next year is the 100th anniversary of Bacon's birth, while this month an exhibition devoted to his work opens at London's Tate Britain. David has written one of the essays - on Bacon's relationship with film - for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition.
The lecture will also focus specifically on the influence of cinema and photography. David says: "From the Hollywood film Lust for Life to the classics of German expressionist cinema and Soviet film, the shocks and impacts of cinematic and photographic experience shaped Bacon's art."
Connection: Francis Bacon talks to David Alan Mellor's young son Leo in 1987. Photos: Nicolas Sinclair.
David says Bacon disliked talking about art. "But we had a common interest because of an aspect of our rather poor health: medication, specifically inhalers, for the treatment of asthma."
Although Bacon is celebrated alongside the likes of Picasso for his portrayals of humans and animals, his personal life earned him a certain notoriety. David, however, remembers him as "a very sympathetic man whose humour could be sardonic, but who was attentive and kind to my son Leo, who was then not ten years old and was a fellow asthma sufferer".
The University of Sussex connection with Francis Bacon does not end there: one of the curators of the Tate Britain exhibition is Dr Chris Stephens, whose doctoral thesis was supervised by David in the 1990s.