Francis Bacon the Painter: The Complete Story
Francis Bacon was the British painter of screaming popes, smeared faces and figures trapped in glass cages. His raw, disturbing images of the human body in pain made him one of the most powerful and unsettling artists of the 20th century.
He is not the Renaissance philosopher of the same name, who lived three centuries earlier.
Bacon painted the nightmare under the skin. No religion, no comfort, just flesh, fear and the animal fact of being alive in a violent century.
Born: Dublin, 1909
Known for: distorted figures, screaming popes, raw triptychs
Died: Madrid, 1992
For readers who stay
Three that take a single painting apart, properly:
Six women, one monster, what Picasso did to the women who loved him
The darker truth about Gauguin, the part of the Tahiti story that never makes the wall label
Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, what is actually on those scales
A self taught outsider
Bacon had almost no formal art training. Thrown out of his Irish home as a teenager, partly for his homosexuality, he drifted through Berlin and Paris, worked as an interior decorator, and taught himself to paint.
He destroyed most of his early work and only found his voice in his late thirties. When he did, it hit like a shock.
The screaming popes
His breakthrough came in 1944 with grotesque, half human figures. Then he began a long series based on a famous portrait of a pope by Velazquez, twisting that calm authority into a figure screaming on a throne, trapped behind vertical streaks like a cage.
He mixed this with the image of a screaming nurse from a famous film still, and with medical textbooks. The pope, the symbol of order, became an image of pure terror.
Flesh, friends and loss
Bacon painted the people around him in the rough, hard drinking world of Soho in London. His lovers and friends became his great subjects.
The suicide of his lover George Dyer, on the eve of Bacon's biggest exhibition, haunted a series of his darkest triptychs.
He showed the body as meat, beautiful and horrifying at once, owing as much to the butcher's shop as to the old masters.
Francis Bacon, common questions
What is Francis Bacon the painter famous for?
Distorted, anguished figures and his screaming popes. He worked in raw, expressive paint linked to Expressionism.
Is he the philosopher Francis Bacon?
No. The philosopher lived in the 1500s and 1600s. This is the 20th century painter.
Why screaming popes?
He twisted a serene Velazquez portrait into an image of modern dread.
Why the popes still scream
Bacon refused every comfort, religious or sentimental, and painted the raw human animal with terrible honesty. Decades on, his triptychs still make viewers flinch, which is exactly what he wanted.
In 2013 his Three Studies of Lucian Freud, a portrait of his friend and rival, sold for 142.4 million dollars, at the time the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.