Francis Bacon British, 1909-1992

One of the foremost portrait artists of the twentieth century, Francis Bacon’s (1909-1992) work wrestles with the nature of the human experience with unparalleled force. Painted almost exclusively from photographs and memories of his sitters, Bacon’s work is saturated with jarringly contradictory vibrant and dark hues that blend, morph, and dematerialise his subjects. Pictorial spaces are collapsed into claustrophobic representations of both psychic and physical worlds.

In an age where abstraction and minimalism were the predominant artistic languages, Bacon remained committed to interrogating the complexity of the human figure. As a result, his oeuvre ruminates on the irreconcilable hypocrisies of post-World War Two society via the inherent slipperiness of the human form. His violent, writhing, and haunting figurative style forged new ways of seeing the body and maintains its inimitable charge still today.

Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 and lived there until 1915, when the outbreak of World War One meant that he spent much of his youth moving between London and Dublin. He led an itinerant and disrupted life throughout adolescence and his upbringing was generally fraught, thanks predominantly to his complex and often violent relationship with his father.

After completing his schooling in 1926, Bacon’s father cast him out of the family household due to his homosexuality. He spent the subsequent years up until 1929 travelling across Europe, taking odd jobs and befriending socialites and wealthy queer men for financial support. It was during this time that he immersed himself in the European contemporary and historical art scenes. While living in France, he saw a Pablo Picasso exhibition at Galerie Paul Rosenberg, Paris which he cited as motivating his interest in becoming an artist.

Upon returning to London in 1929, Bacon spent some years working as a furniture and interior designer while developing his painting skills as a hobby. However, by the late 1930s he had begun focusing primarily on his painting practice, encouraged and tutored in part by the Australian artist Roy de Maistre, with whom he had a brief relationship. De Maistre’s influence can be seen in Bacon’s early work The Crucifixion (1933), which was one of his first pieces to receive art world recognition. Despite his inclusion in a number of group shows at the time, it was not until 1934, when he set up the temporary Transition Gallery to show his work, that Bacon would have his first solo exhibition in London. The exhibition was, however, critically and commercially unsuccessful and his artistic output plummeted through the second half of the 1930s and into the early 1940s as a result of its failure.

At the outbreak of World War Two, Bacon’s chronic asthma made him unfit for active service or conscription. He subsequently spent the majority of the war in London experiencing the violence and destruction of Nazi bombardment. In the mid-1940s, Bacon began painting again and, in 1944, he created what has become one of his most recognisable paintings: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) (Tate, London). The triptych signalled his major entrance into the contemporary art world, having been show at the famous Lefevre Gallery, London upon completion.

Shortly thereafter, he executed another cornerstone work in his oeuvre, entitled Painting 1946 (1946). The piece was quickly bought by founder of the Hanover Gallery Erica Brausen, who became Bacon’s first gallerist (followed, in 1958, by his move to Marlborough Fine Art). Through Brausen, the work was shown extensively across the world and, in 1948, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where it remains today.

Bacon’s artistic career from this point experienced exponential growth. In 1954, following a number of international solo gallery exhibitions, he was selected to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale alongside Lucian Freud and Ben Nicholson. His inclusion in the Biennale brought Bacon to the forefront of the British Contemporary art scene and it was quickly followed, in 1955, with his first ever institutional retrospective – at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

Bacon’s life in the second half of the twentieth century was characterised in equal measure by success and tragedy. In this period, his work moved away from the cultural imagery for which he had become well-know (including Popes, crucifixions, and Furies), increasingly turning to self-portraits and portraits of those closest to him (typically friends, lovers, and patrons). Though the visceral immediacy and incredible power of his painting never dulled, the trend toward explicitly painting his personal life continued until the end of his life in 1992.

Bacon’s recognition and appreciation has continued to grow following his death, with major retrospectives having been held across the world. These have included at the Tate Britain, London (1962, 1985, 1999, and 2008), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1963), Centre Pompidou, Paris (1996 and 2019), and National Portrait Gallery, London (2024).