When the painter Francis Bacon died in 1992, his library—a stock of some 1,300 books—was donated to Trinity College in Dublin. Searching for what he called “imagination material,” Bacon read T. S. Eliot and Balzac, Nietzsche and Proust. In an exhibition focusing on the last two decades of Bacon’s life, the Centre Pompidou illustrates the role of literature in the Irish artist’s work. To help viewers read between the lines of Bacon’s eerie images, Didier Ottinger, senior curator of the exhibition, guides a virtual video tour that brings Bacon’s subtext to the surface. —C.J.F.