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Francis Bacon

© Nick Burton

Francis Bacon was born in 1909 in Dublin, Ireland, the son of a racehorse trainer who moved the family to London after the outbreak of World War I. In 1925, he left his family and began working as a interior decorator and furniture designer, but soon focused all his attention to his painting. It is said that a screaming face on Nicolas Poussin¹s 1630 canvas "Massacre of the Innocents" and a still of a crying wounded woman in Sergei Eisenstein¹s 1925 film "Battleship Potemkin" influenced Bacons' art, which often depicts the primal scream of the subconscious.

His style, which has been associated with surrealism at times, features a disturbing look at the human form, often in the tryptich format, that is marked by figures in sparse interiors, their features blurred as if the viewer was looking simultaneously at a photograph and an x-ray of the blood and bone underneath the skin. Bacon used x-ray and medical photographs as inspiration for some of his startling images, as well as motion studies by the 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge and Velazuqez¹s portrait of Pope Innocent X.

Bacon¹s work has a disquieting sense of alienation and sexual violence just underneath the surface, and perhaps no painter apart from Picasso captured the inner primal scream of 20th century life as well. Bacon died in 1992 on a trip to Madrid, but he has left an astonishing legacy of art behind. An excellent site to view his work is the UD Art site, which features a beautifully done online exhibit well worth bookmarking.

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