Francis Bacon

Born – Dublin, Ireland 1909

Died – Madrid, Spain 1992

 

Born of English parents, Francis Bacon came to London from Dublin in 1925. He established himself as a furniture designer and interior decorator. In 1929, on his return to London – after travelling to Berlin and Paris from 1927-1928 – he began painting. He was declared unfit for military service in 1943 and in 1944, after destroying his earlier works, produced the painting with which he declared his career as an artist began. The painting, a triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, provided a format and subject that was to recur in Bacon’s oeuvre, as shown by Triptych, completed nearly thirty years later. He settled in London in 1950. Despite having no formal art training, Bacon explored the artistic achievements of the past, particularly those of Velasquez and Rembrandt, to formulate his art. The innovation of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of figures in motion also had a profound effect on his work and the human cry was an emotive subject he investigated to startling effect. Bacon’s technical abilities have produced some of the most powerfully disturbing and controversial images of twentieth-century European painting.

 

Masterpieces:

  • Study from the Human Body – Figure in Movement
  • Pope II

Text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.