Who is Francis Bacon?

Francis Bacon (1909–92) was a maverick who rejected the preferred artistic style of abstraction of the era, in favour of a distinctive and disturbing realism. Growing up, Bacon had a difficult and ambivalent relationship with his parents – especially his father, who struggled with his son’s emerging homosexuality.

This contributed to a troubled childhood; he ran away from school, and subsequently drifted through the late 1920s and early 30s in London, Berlin and Paris, living off his allowance and occasional jobs, and dodging the rent. When in London, he lived in the epicentre of the bohemian scene; a regular in Soho, he led a hedonistic life.

From the mid-1940s his work met with critical success, establishing his reputation. Today, he is recognised as one of the most important painters of the twentieth century.

Bacon did not become an artist through any traditional route: he didn’t attend art school, for example, or serve a conventional apprenticeship. In early professional life, he worked in interior design, but decided to abandon this and take up painting after seeing an exhibition of Picasso’s at Paul Rosenberg’s Paris gallery in the late 20s. Picasso’s representations of the body as bone-like, biomorphic structures revealed to Bacon the ‘possibilities of painting’. He later acknowledged Picasso as a key influence and reference point.

When the triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944, was first exhibited at the end of the war in 1945, it secured Bacon’s reputation. Chris Stephens, Head of Displays and Lead Curator, Modern British Art at Tate Britain called the work ‘a turning point in the history of British art. It’s one of the masterpieces in the Tate’s collection… It’s a work that was seen immediately as a brutally frank and horrifically pessimistic response to the Second World War. It was first exhibited in April 1945, and though the two were not directly related, the fact that this painting was unveiled the month that the concentration camps were revealed to the world, inevitably led to the way it has been understood as a statement of human brutality and suffering.’  

Bacon suggested he had intended to paint a larger crucifixion beneath which these would appear. Speaking about this work in an interview in 1955, the artist said: ‘I have no religious feelings but at the same time I was [going to] do a crucifixion and put these figures around the base of it. And the only reason I ever used the crucifixion [was] because it was an armature on which I could hang certain sensations.’

Study for a Portrait 1952 dates from a crucial point in Bacon’s engagement with portraiture; Bacon painted his first head in isolation in 1948, and his contemporary Lucian Freud, a close friend, sat for Bacon’s first identifiable portrait of an individual in 1951. As is the case with other examples of the artist’s work in which he has employed a cubic, architectural framing device, or space-frame, implicit in this painting is a sense that the central figure has been trapped by the transparent cage that surrounds him. Asked by the critic and curator David Sylvester about the persistence of this technique, Bacon explained that the device was used simply to ‘concentrate the image down’.

For Bacon, the format of Triptych 1967 was a tactic, in some ways akin to the cubic cages, to isolate images from each other in order to ‘avoid story-telling’. References to poetry and drama became a central element in Bacon’s work in this period. Formerly titled Triptych Inspired by TS Eliot’s ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, rather than illustrating the verse drama (first published in 1926), this work can be understood as evoking the experience of reading the themes of violence and life’s futility in Eliot’s poetry.