Bacon, Francis

1909-1992
Bacon, Francis Biography

Bacon was born to English parents in Dublin, Ireland, and brought up in Ireland and England. In 1925 Bacon left home, going to London and then on to Berlin and Paris. Bacon is noted for oil 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 oil paintings are blurred and twisted and are typically confined within mysterious arenas or boxlike enclosures. Critics stress the horror and violence in Bacon's oil paintings. Many of Bacon's oil paintings refer to specific art works from the past. His mature style emerged completely with the series of works known as The Screaming Popes (1949-mid-1950s), in which he converted Diego Velezquez's famous Portrait of Pope Innocent X into a nightmarish icon of hysterical terror.

Bacon's devotion to his art stood in curious contrast to his subject matter and the eccentric squalor of his personal life. Because he destroyed many of his early artworks, only a few examples can be found, mainly in American and European museums.

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