Francis Bacon
The painter of distorted bodies.
Francis Bacon painted screaming popes and distorted bodies in bare rooms. His pictures are about anguish and the flesh.
Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents. His father was a horse trainer and found it hard to accept his son's homosexuality. As a teenager Bacon left home after a quarrel with his father. He lived for a time in Berlin and Paris, where a Picasso exhibition in 1927 made him want to become a painter. He had no formal art training and first worked as an interior decorator and furniture designer in London.
His breakthrough came in 1945 with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion of 1944, three howling creatures against an orange background. It is in Tate Britain in London. In the 1950s he painted his famous popes, taking Velázquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X as his starting point but making the pope scream behind transparent curtains of brushstrokes. The scream came partly from a still from the film Battleship Potemkin.
Bacon often worked from photographs, including Eadweard Muybridge's studies of motion and pictures of his friends. His figures writhe and seem to melt, often inside bare rooms or transparent cages. He painted on the unprimed reverse of the canvas and liked to work in triptychs, three panels side by side. His London studio was famously chaotic and has now been reconstructed in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.
His private life was stormy. His lover George Dyer took his own life in Paris in 1971, just before the opening of Bacon's major exhibition at the Grand Palais, and Bacon afterwards painted several black triptychs in his memory. In Soho he mixed with Lucian Freud, among others, and his Three Studies of Lucian Freud of 1969 sold in 2013 for one of the highest prices ever paid for a work of art at auction.
Bacon died in Madrid in 1992. He is regarded as one of the foremost painters after the Second World War and as one of the artists who have most powerfully depicted anguish, violence and human physicality.