Francis Bacon (1909 to 1992) was a painter born in Dublin to Anglo Irish parents, self taught, who made his name in London with screaming popes, twisted bodies and canvases in three panels that show people as raw meat. He is not the earlier philosopher of the same name. The popes, begun in 1949, repaint a portrait by Velázquez with the mouth torn open in a scream.
The screaming pope is what most people come looking for, and its story begins with a painting Bacon never went to see.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
The Velázquez hangs in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome. Bacon reached Rome in late 1954, five years after he painted the first of his popes from it, and he did not go to see the original. He worked from reproductions in books, and he kept painting the series until the mid 1960s.
That sits oddly with the way he is remembered. The book of his conversations with the critic David Sylvester, recorded over twenty five years, is called The Brutality of Fact, and in it he talks of his effort to record and recreate the human form. Yet the most famous pictures he made began with a painting he knew only from reproductions.
Nobody had taught him how. Bacon had a few months of formal schooling and no art training of any kind. The man Paris would honour in 1971 with a retrospective at the Grand Palais spent much of the 1930s designing rugs and furniture, and destroying most of the canvases he painted on the side.
What You'll Discover
Who sent him away at sixteen.
What hung at the Lefevre Gallery.
Where the scream really comes from.
What he said we all are.
Who died before the Paris show.
Why he went to Madrid.