Bacon, Francis

Bacon, Francis (1909-1992), British painter, regarded as one of the most powerful and individual figurative artists in the period since World War II. His view of the human condition was extremely pessimistic and his paintings typically depict people in isolation and anguish. In an interview in 1962 he said: “I think that man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason.”

Bacon—a descendant of the famous Elizabethan statesman Sir Francis Bacon—was born in Dublin on October 28, 1909, one of five children. His father, Edward Bacon, was a racehorse trainer, and Bacon inherited from him a lifelong love of gambling. The family moved frequently between England and Ireland, and Bacon had very little conventional schooling, partly because he suffered from severe asthma. He became an avid reader, however.

From 1927 to 1928 Bacon spent 2 months in Berlin and about 18 months in Paris before settling in London in 1929. During his time abroad he visited galleries and exhibitions, but he never had any formal training in art. His earliest known pictures date from 1929, but he destroyed much of his work of this time, so little is known of it in detail. For a while he earned his living mainly by designing furniture and rugs, but by the mid-1930s he was becoming disillusioned by art. He took on various odd jobs, and for a while ran an unlicensed casino.

Bacon returned seriously to painting during World War II (being excused military service owing to his asthma, he worked in civil defence). In April 1945, one of his paintings, on show at an exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery, London, caused a sensation because of its horrific and shocking imagery, and Bacon suddenly became famous. The painting is Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944, Tate Gallery, London), showing half-human, half-animal creatures of nightmarish fantasy.

After this Bacon’s work was regularly exhibited, but it was so unusual and disturbing that general recognition was slow in coming. Sir John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery from 1938 to 1964, wrote that: “Critics and public vacillated uneasily between the opinions that he was a flashy sensationalist and that he was the most significant painter whom Britain had produced for several generations.” However, an exhibition of 90 of his paintings at the Tate Gallery in 1962 was greatly acclaimed. A smaller version of the exhibition travelled to several European countries, and from this time Bacon began building up a worldwide reputation as one of the towering figures in contemporary art. In his later years he was regarded by many critics as the greatest living painter, expressing alienation and despair with unrivalled force, although he always had detractors as well as admirers. He became famous and controversial for his personal life as well as his art. In addition to being a heavy drinker and gambler, he was a homosexual and sometimes depicted with brutal frankness homosexual activity in his work.

Most of Bacon’s paintings show a single figure or pair of figures. Often he painted people he knew well (he produced numerous portraits, including self-portraits), but he based other works on news photographs and similar images. In about 1950 he began a famous series of pictures based on a portrait of Pope Innocent X by Diego Velázquez. Whereas the Velázquez showed a man of immense authority, Bacon gave his figure an anguished screaming mouth inspired by a still from the celebrated film Battleship Potemkin, directed by Sergey Eisenstein. In Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef (1954, Art Institute of Chicago) and several other of his paintings, Bacon showed his figures alongside hunks of raw meat; he said: “We are all meat, we are potential carcasses.” In spite of his horrific imagery, Bacon painted with a sumptuous richness of technique that has led to comparisons with some of the great Venetian Old Masters.

Although he became extremely wealthy as well as famous, Bacon cared little for material possessions. In 1985 he said: “I want to die as I was born—with nothing. I just want my work to be better. I hope I shall go on painting—in between drinking and gambling—until I drop dead, and I hope I shall drop dead working.” He died in Madrid on April 28, 1992, aged 82. In spite of his huge reputation, his work has had little influence on other painters, for it has proved too personal to inspire imitation.