Francis Bacon

The British painter Francis Bacon was born in Dublin. In 1928 or 1929 he went to London where he worked as an interior decorator. He was self-taught as a painter; the small number of surviving works from before 1944 show the influence of Picasso in their distorted, attenuated figures. Their influence is also apparent in his earliest important painting, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, (1944, Tate Gallery, London), a tryptic depicting sinister, stunted creatures, both threatening and agonised, starkly modelled in gray against a piercing orange background.  The impact this made when first exhibited in London in 1945 should be understood not only in light of contemporary events, but also in contrast to the apparent trend towards mellow romanticism, or a new humanism. 

His later paintings are similarly horrific. they include a series of Popes with mouths wide open in a scream or yawn based on Velazquez, a motif he began to use in 1949 which reappears throughout his work. The juxtaposition of living flesh alongside hunks of meat in these pictures and elsewhere acts as a memento mori. Their similarity is emphasised by Bacon’s handling of paint, heavily worked in smears to suggest the vulnerability and flexibility of flesh and blood. His technical procedures result in the blurring of the image reminiscent of photography, a constant source for Bacon. He was fascinated by the way in which a figure caught in a violent action loses its human identity, a theme he has explored in paintings based on Eadweard Muybridge’s study of a body in motion. 

Bacon’s art is dominated by a sense of risk, an element he believed is vital to life; it is expressed both in his intense, unpremeditated manner of working, which necessitates the destruction of many spoiled paintings, and in the mood of the finished canvas. Even portraits of friends are precariously poised in the briefest indication of support and space. 

Text Source: A Biographical Dictionary of Artists, ed. Sir Lawrence Gowling (Macmillan)