| Bacon, Francis (1909-1992) , Irish-born British artist noted for paintings in which the human body is bizarrely, even terrifyingly, distorted. Bacon’s achievement as one of the most powerful figure painters of the 20th century is all the more remarkable because he emerged as a figure painter in the 1940s and 1950s, an artistic era dominated by abstraction. The figures in Bacon’s paintings are blurred and twisted and are typically confined within mysterious arenas or boxlike enclosures. Critics stress the horror and violence in Bacon’s pictures. But Bacon himself felt a kinship with old masters, including Spanish baroque artist Diego Velázquez and Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo, and with 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge used photographs to study the body in motion, and the blurring in Bacon’s paintings suggests blurred photographs of moving bodies. Many of Bacon’s paintings refer to specific art works from the past. In 1949 he painted the first of a series of so-called Screaming Popes, which were based on a Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X (1649-1650, Palazzo Doria-Pamphili, Rome). In Bacon’s paintings, the popes’ mouths are distorted, and the figures appear as if caged in glass. Later, Bacon concentrated on a series of triptychs (three-paneled paintings) based on a 13th-century depiction of the crucifixion of Christ. An example from this series is Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), with mutilated male figures set in nightmarish rooms. Throughout his career, Bacon also painted powerful self-portraits and portraits of his friends. Bacon was born to English parents in Dublin, Ireland, and brought up in Ireland and England. In 1925 he left home, going to London and then on to Berlin and Paris. In Paris he began to take an interest in painting. An exhibition in Paris of works by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso appears in particular to have inspired him. By 1929 he was back in London, and his earliest works from this period reflect the influence of cubism, a style pioneered by Picasso. Moreover, the distorted, elongated figures that Bacon painted soon afterward seem to draw on Picasso’s biomorphic forms of the late 1920s. Bacon was entirely self-taught as a painter, and his work remained for the most part unknown until the late 1940s. In 1954, he was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, a major international art exhibition. Bacon enjoyed international renown during the 1980s, when figurative painting regained prominence in the United States and Europe. |
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