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Francis Bacon
Dublin, 1909-Madrid, 1992
Francis Bacon was born in Dublin of English parents, and moved to London in 1925 where he began his career as an interior decorator. At the beginning of the 1930s, after he had seen an exhibition of Picasso at the Galerie Rosenberg in Paris, he began to paint as a self-taught artist. Although as early as 1933 Herbert Read published Bacon's Crucifixion in his book Art Now, his work was not generally well received. The failure of his early painting led Bacon to destroy most of them in 1942. Considered unfit for military service in World War II, Bacon joined the Air Raid Patrol and therefore only dedicated himself to painting full time from 1944 onwards. In 1946 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired his work entitled Painting of 1946, and from then on his reputation began to grow. In 1956 he was invited to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, together with Ben Nicholson and Lucian Freud.
Bacon was always interested in the darkest side of human existence and his works are a metaphor for man's struggle with his environment. His unique pictorial language reveals the most mysterious and troubling facets of the human figure. His portraits do not aim for physical likeness, but rather for the model's spiritual condition.
The fact that many of his figures are screaming derives both from Edvard Munch's The Scream and the soundless scream of the woman in the film The Battleship Potemkin by Eisenstein. Bacon was also very interested in Eadweard Muybridge's sequential photographs of men and animals in motion. He combined this interest in photography with an admiration for the great Old Masters, particularly Velázquez, Rembrandt and Goya. With regard to his technique, Bacon was a perfectionist and had an unrivalled ability to combine chance and structure in his work.
Francis Bacon. Exhibition catalogue Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1996.
Russel, J.: Francis Bacon. London, 1971.
Sylvester, D.: Interviews with Francis Bacon. London-New York, 1975.
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