Get to know the biography of the painter Francis Bacon

El Francis Bacon painter He is known for his post-World War II paintings, in which he depicted the human face and figure in an expressive and often flamboyant style. He discovers with us who he was and what motivated the paintings that amaze the world.

FRANCIS BACON PAINTER

Who was the painter Francis Bacon?

This iconic artist from the Irish capital is a descendant of Captain Anthony Edward Mortimer and his very young wife, Christina Winifred Firth.

He lived very hard years under the authority of a domineering and brusque father figure. Francis was ridiculed and mistreated for being weak and sickly, many memories and stories claim that his father whipped and punished him a lot during his youth.

He was a boy with delicate health due to his chronic asthma problem and was educated at home, maintaining a reserved, very shy and silent character as a child. At 17, he was kicked out of the family home for good when he was caught trying on his mother's underwear.

After traveling to Germany and France as a young man, Francis Bacon settled in London and began a career as a self-taught artist. Most of his paintings from the 40s to the 60s depict the human figure in scenes that reflect alienation, violence, and suffering, and are considered some of the most important post-war works of art.

But despite his constant asthma attacks and the mistreatment he suffered, Francis Bacon was strong-willed and resilient. He drank, ate, played, loved and painted with such passion that the time to sleep was less and less, about two or three hours a night was usual. Through this haze of debauchery, hard living, deep friendships, and aesthetic obsessions, Bacon produced a collection of paintings that were not only hauntingly beautiful, but also bold and original for his time.

His striking work brought together and animated the group of painters around him in mid-century England, which became known as the London School, and also influenced several generations of artists to come, including Damien Hirst, Jenny Saville and Jake and Dinos Chapman, among a large number.

FRANCIS BACON PAINTER

Childhood, youth and artistic beginnings

Painter Francis Bacon was born to an English couple living in Dublin, Ireland on October 28, 1909. He is of the lineage of the renowned philosopher Francis Bacon of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He was raised in Ireland and England and was unable to maintain an education like any child his age, so he was home schooled for health reasons.

His father, Captain Anthony Edward Mortimer Bacon, who was nicknamed Eddy, was Australian, born in the city of Adelaide, in the south of the country, of an English father and an Australian mother. Eddy was a Boer War veteran, horse trainer, and grandson of Anthony Bacon, who claimed to be from the family of Sir Nicholas Bacon, half-brother of the Elizabethan statesman, philosopher, and essayist, Sir Francis Bacon.

Little Francis's mother, Christina Winifred Firth, nicknamed Winnie, was heiress to a Sheffield steel business and coal mine, so her financial status was quite comfortable. Bacon had a large family, an older brother, Harley, two younger sisters, Ianthe and Winifred, and finally a younger brother, Edward.

The family moved houses often, switching between Ireland and England several times, causing a sense of instability and displacement that remained with Francis throughout his life.

The family lived in Canny Court House in County Kildare from 1911, then in Westbourne Terrace in London, very close to the Land Force Records Office where the father was employed and later emigrated to Ireland at the end of the First World War..

Bacon lived with his parents, but also his maternal grandparents, Winifred and Kerry Supple, at Farmleigh, Abbeyleix, however he was always in the care of the family nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, from Cornwall, affectionately known as Nanny Lightfoot, a warm and maternal figure who remained close to him until her death.

FRANCIS BACON PAINTER

Bacon was a shy boy, who enjoyed clothes and dressing well, also had excessively delicate and somewhat feminine manners, things that together often infuriated his father, who according to some later stories mistreated him.

It was 1924, when he was still a teenager, his parents continued to change residence and Francis' personality began to change, he liked to draw female figures, with daring dresses and hats. At a fancy dress party at a family friend's house in Cavendish Hall, Francis dressed as a flapper, complete with rhinestone dress, lipstick, high heels and a long cigarette holder.

In 1926 the family returned to Straffan Lodge and his sister, Ianthe, twelve years his junior, always remembered those drawings and her brother's different tastes. That year was decisive for Francis, who was expelled from his parental home after his father found him admiring himself in front of a large mirror, with his mother's underwear on him.

In 1927, aged just 17, homeless and with parents who did not accept his sexuality, Francis Bacon traveled to Berlin, Germany, where he participated in the city's gay nightlife, as well as in its intellectual circles. He then moved to Paris, France, where he became even more interested in art through constant visits to galleries. The future painter returned to London in the late XNUMXs and began a short career as an interior decorator, also designing furniture and rugs in a modern, Art Deco-influenced style.

When the war broke out, he tried to enlist but was turned down due to severe asthmatic condition, but joined the ambulance rescue team.

He then began to paint, first in a cubist style influenced by Pablo Picasso and later in a more surreal manner. Bacon's self-taught work attracted interest and in 1937, he was included in a group exhibition in London entitled "Young British Painters".

FRANCIS BACON PAINTER

Outstanding works between the 40s and 50s

Francis Bacon shared at some point that the true beginning of his artistic career was in 1944, since it was the period in which he dedicated himself fully to painting and created the works that made him famous and for which he is still remembered.

Three Studies for Figures at the Foot of a Crucifixion, is considered an important turning point. His canvases exhibit human figures, often it was a single figure, totally isolated in a room, a cage or a black background.

He made a series of paintings, inspired by the portrait of Pope Innocent X by Diego Velázquez made in 1650, but giving each one his own style, with the dark colors that characterized him, rough brushstrokes and distorted faces. These works are often referred to as Francis Bacon's Screaming Pope Paintings.

They were very varied themes, on one canvas you can see a figure painted standing and next to it a piece of skinned meat, while on others they were inspired by traditional religious themes. But all of his paintings had one thing in common, the painter Francis Bacon's insistent emphasis on universal experiences of suffering and alienation.

His life and art after 1960

Even though it was a time when modern art was dominated by abstraction, this outstanding painter continued to paint the face and figure of people, without succumbing to the trend. His emotional use of colors and brushstrokes, his exaggeration of forms and gestures earned him the label of an expressionist artist, although he rejected that term.

Bacon's works from the 1960s often depict male figures as solitary, in formal business suits, others as nude figures with parts and features considerably altered. There were years where he used some bright tones at certain times, however, the themes of violence and mortality were still his main inspiration and the dark and cold tones were very common.

FRANCIS BACON PAINTER

He also frequently painted portraits of acquaintances, peers, artists, and some rivals in the area, including George Dyer, who met Francis when he was trying to rob his house.

The painter Francis Bacon met George Dyer, one of the models he painted and desired the most, when Dyer, who was a young petty criminal living in East London, fell through the skylight of the artist's house one night of 1963, with the intention of committing a robbery.

It is said that Bacon told him that he was very clumsy for a thief, but this young man definitely caught the attention of the pinto, who was 25 years older than him. Bacon's unconventional relationship with Dyer lasted eight years, until the young man died of an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates in his Paris hotel room.

This event occurred two days before the opening of the Bacon retrospective at the Grand Palais, in October 1971. By then, the artist was world famous and the prices of his works rivaled those of Picasso. This individual exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris was an exceptional honor for a living artist and the death of his mistress was kept quiet, to avoid overshadowing this great achievement.

George Dyer was a passionate and tumultuous romance, marked by ups and downs and madness, so much so that Dyer, among other things, accused him of drug possession. Many of his experiences were represented in the film Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, from the year 1998 and starring Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig and Tilda Swinton. Bacon, known for his revelry, love of drink and passion for art, kept a notoriously crowded home and studio in London and continued to paint until the end of his life.

He died while on vacation in Madrid, Spain on April 28, 1992, a victim of heart disease at the age of 82, never having ceased to be the British gentleman with a youthful face and well cared for despite a life of revelry and few hours of sleep, who dressed with elegance and subtlety. But above all, he never stopped painting, eating, drinking, loving and reading. This voracious reader left behind a library of around XNUMX books, almost all of them with notes and comments.

Legacy of the painter Francis Bacon

Bacon is considered one of the leading British painters of the post-World War II generation, as well as a major influence on a new generation of figurative artists in the XNUMXs.

His work is owned by the main museums in the world and has been exhibited in various retrospectives. After her death, her work room was bought by the Hugh Lane Gallery, where they set up a room for visitors to appreciate.

Three studies by Lucian Freud by the painter Francis Bacon broke the record for the most expensive work acquired at auction, in 2013. The final price was 142,4 million dollars and the auction was carried out by Christie's in the United States.

This painter, who lived 82 years, was very controversial among traditional artistic groups, since the powerful works he executed with masterful brushstrokes often cover very controversial topics such as sex, pain, suffering and death, considered by many as paintings obscene.

In his work, Bacon broke with all serious standards and rules of traditional English art, leaning towards a more European tradition and style. He was self-taught and full of genius, without formal artistic training, sometimes painting with his fingers, using brushes or rags alike, combining images from different media to produce surprising compositions.

What inspired you?

After Bacon was kicked out of his family home, he embarked on a series of European escapades that opened his eyes to art and design, not to mention other earthly pleasures, like sex and wine.

Various works that he encountered and admired during his travels had a lasting and indelible impact on his work and would not leave his mind until his death in 1992. For example, while studying French near Chantilly in 1927, he came across the great Massacre of the Innocents. de Poussin (1628–29), being impressed by the agony exhibited in the scene.

The emotion embodied with great intensity in the figure of a mother, whose little son is about to be killed by a figure without a hint of mercy, was shocking to the artist.

Later that year, he encountered and viewed material that was highly influential on his career: a book detailing diseases of the mouth, Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, and the scene where a bloodied nurse howls. Images that were unforgettable for him, remaining as an image permanently tattooed in his mind.

Another decisive event for the painter was a trip to Paris just in that period, which allowed him to see the first figurative drawings of Picasso. All of this material and the impact of it represented Francis Bacon's early artistic education and a permanent influence on all of his subsequent works, which exhibit his unique and original approach.

It should be noted that the painter Francis Bacon never received formal training, however, that did not stop him from creating works where the human body was a malleable, grotesque container filled with crude feelings. The wide-open mouth would later materialize in some of the painter's great canvases: his series of Weeping Potatoes, on which he worked from 1949 to 1971, showing blurred, enthroned men caught right in the act of an intense and seemingly eternal scream. .

Many presume that they simultaneously reflect the militaristic orders of Bacon's father, the furious disputes between the painter and his tortured lover Peter Lacy, a simple cry of fear, or the climax of a shuddering orgasm. That was the power of this painter's work, rare and unique, he could fuse a variety of references, a monster or a beast that trembled due to diverse and subtle emotions, full of frustration, tension or fear.

Bacon's series of Popes was the product of another great influence: Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X from 1650, a work that Bacon fell in love with, and he did not hesitate to admit it.

On many occasions Francis reworked his own version of this masterpiece, although he refused to see the painting in person when he traveled to Rome. He stated that he felt embarrassed that he had stupidly handled this impressive piece so many times. Bacon claimed that the work of many great artists such as Giacometti, van Gogh and Matisse were influential on his work, but he never stopped looking to writers and poets such as Racine, Baudelaire and Proust for inspiration and creative guidance.

Always emphasizing that what most attracted him to literature was the ability to summarize the complexities of the individual's existence in a few concise lines and phrases. Something that he tried to do with the diverse and fascinating figures that were housed in his canvases.

At some point he specified that he did not emphasize death, he simply accepted it as part of existence, since one is always aware of mortality in life, simply a rose that blooms, then dies.

What was your way of working?

The reproductions that served as inspiration for Bacon, such as The massacre of the innocents, worn photographs of wild animals, Egyptian talismans, books and more, were grouped on the floors of the studios where he worked, always as a great jumble that accompanied him throughout his career.

The lush mess was always spiced with paint and traces of the parties he occasionally threw, after nights out in London's clubs and gambling dens.

Many described their workplace as chaotic, where anything unexpected could turn up. However, for all his messiness and all his decadence, the painter Francis Bacon was also extremely dedicated to his work and had his own very particular set of rules.

He affirmed that one had to be disciplined in everything, but above all in frivolity. His passionate interest in socializing seemed to feed his inspiration and his work, since he himself stated that after a night out, he could wake up very early in the morning and paint for several hours with the best light of day, those of the first hours after dawn.

Afterward, he could eat and drink himself drunk, touring the city and mingling with his many friends and acquaintances, who frequently included his fellow painters Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. Also renowned London collectors, such as Sainsbury's, some of his many lovers, such as Lacy or Eric Hall, among other personalities.

He was an extravagant artist, who claimed to work better after a night of drinking, because he repeated that his mind came alive and filled with energy after those endless nights of partying, he felt that drinking made him freer. However, as is well known, this type of routine generates some risks, if not many dangerous risks. On several occasions, after the parties, he would arrive at his house late and very drunk, so much so that he would decide to "perfect" some painting that had been finished that day.

Then he would wake up and discover that what he had perfected was simply ruined. After several episodes of this type, her gallery began to collect the works and paintings from his studio after they had been completed.

This was also taken care of by the nanny who raised him and accompanied him during his life, his nanny Jessie Lightfoot, who lived with the painter until her death in 1951 and the two main distributors of his work, Erica Brausen at Hanover Gallery and later Valerie Beston at Marlborough Gallery, who also played a crucial role in the organization and development of his life and career.

The irreverent artist who had financial problems during his youth, had the support of Lightfoot, who helped him start some businesses or find lovers who would provide financial support. Brausen became her close friend and confidant, united by art, her shared homosexuality, and her love of risk-taking, Bacon's on canvas and hers on her gallery walls.

Beginning in 1958, Miss Beston, as she was affectionately called, organized nearly all of Bacon's daily logistics during his most successful years, taking care of paying his bills, organizing his schedule, making sure his apartment was kept clean, and managing to keep him on schedule. work, dedicated to painting. In addition, she took care to keep his canvases out of the trash can, because on some occasions he destroyed them.

Why is your job important?

This incredible artist brought a new emotional intensity to the figures he painted, depicting his subjects, be they his friends, models, or mythological figures, as a twisted, fleshy, grotesque, and emotionally exposed mass.

He tried to reveal the complexity behind the facade of human beings, the energy, the suffering and the ecstasy. Figures that with their blurred and distorted limbs revealed the most primary impulses, perhaps for this reason in his productions in the XNUMXs, the representations of monkeys and men often bear a strong resemblance to each other.

In his life and his art, the painter Francis Bacon embodied and fed on extremes, translating them into recognizable images whose tension shows that it is the product of a life lived on the edge.

Themes of his works

The painter Francis Bacon was innovative and had a powerful style of work, but as we have previously seen, he had a certain predilection for some specific themes to carry out his works, which undoubtedly gave him great success. These include:

The crucifixion

The images of the crucifixion weigh heavily in the work of Francis Bacon, since any number of emotions and sensations can hang and reflect on it. It is a space in which bodily harm is done to one person and others gather around to watch, exploring certain areas of the individual's behavior.

This theme was recurrent in his first works, when he began to paint seriously, around the age of 30. Around 1933, Eric Hall commissioned him for a series of three paintings based on the theme, the first paintings being influenced by early exponents such as Matthias Grünewald, Diego Velázquez and Rembrandt. Also for Picasso's works from the late twenties and early thirties.

Papas

Citing much of Velázquez's famous 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X, now in the Doria Pamphili Gallery in Rome, Bacon's series of Popes are striking images that develop motifs already found in his earlier works, such as the Study of three figures at the foot of a crucifixion and like the open mouth that screams.

The figures of the popes, pictorially isolated by partially curved parallel lines that indicate forces and inner energy, are different and seem alienated from their original representation, they are in the work stripped of their power and it is a metaphor for suffering humanity.

reclining figures

Many of Bacon's paintings have among their inhabitants reclining figures, alone or in triptychs, where they are repeated with certain variations. The composition of the especially nude figures is influenced by Michelangelo's sculptural work and the multiple phases of his interpretation which can also be applied to models in portraits, is a reference to Eadweard Muybridge's chronophotography.

the mouth that screams

Primarily inspired by the still from Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent film The Battleship Potemkin is a recurring motif in many of Bacon's works of the late 1940s and early 1950s. However, some models of screaming mouths were inspired also by various sources, including medical textbooks and the works of Matthias Grünewald, in addition to the stills of the nurse in the Odessa Steps.

Bacon saw the film The Battleship Potemkin in 1935 and has watched it frequently since then, keeping a still photo of the scene in his studio, which showed a close-up of the nurse's head screaming in panic and terror, with the broken glasses dangling from his bloodstained face. An image he referenced throughout her career, using as a source of inspiration.

Francis Bacon described the screaming mouth as a catalyst for his work and incorporated its form when painting the chimera. The use of the motif can be seen in one of his earliest surviving works, Abstraction of the Human Form.

It can be seen that in the early 1950s it became an obsessive concern and perhaps if the viewer could really explain the origins and implications of this cry, they would be closer to understanding all of this painter's art.

Important works of the painter Francis Bacon

From his small London studio, where source material abounded, champagne bottles and paintings everywhere, painter Francis Bacon brought to life a series of groundbreaking and influential twentieth-century paintings. His canvases house a series of twisted figures, with dramatic and contorted gestures, representing personalities from the religious and artistic world to friends and unbridled lovers.

His work embodies a series of cultural discomforts and anxieties of the post-war era, as well as the demons and obsessions of the artist himself.

Francis Bacon brought to life iconic images and figures that showed how incredibly wounded and traumatized society was after the war. Inspired by surrealism and sources such as cinema, photography and other artists, the artist succeeded in forging a distinctive style that made him one of the most famous and admired exponents of figurative art in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs.

Bacon concentrated his energies on portraiture, depicting the regulars of Soho's bars and clubs as violently distorted subjects, almost pieces of meat, isolated souls imprisoned and tormented by existential dilemmas.

But, many people still wonder what was his secret to create these enigmatic images and figures? What made it so fascinating and surprising? With deeply moving paintings, a sulphurous power that has endured, and works auctioned for exorbitant amounts, his influence will definitely not fade anytime soon.

The painter Francis Bacon was a very complex man, whose work reflects the tangle of intense relationships, historical-artistic fixations and a good number of vices that he possessed, creating truly fascinating artistic samples:

Crucifixion (1933)

The Crucifixion is the work that brought the artist into the public spotlight and was followed by far greater successes of the post-war years.

This triptych may have been inspired by Rembrandt's well-known 1655 work Le Boeuf écorché (The Skinned Ox), but influenced by the Surrealist style of Picasso. It recreates three forms of violent death, defeated, massacred figures lying on beds and hanging upside down.

The translucent whiteness on the body frame in this work gives a certain ghostly air, generating a quite disturbing composition, where pain and fear are exposed as one of the fixed and obsessive ideas of the painter.

The Crucifixion, made in 1933, measures about 197,5 x 147 centimeters and was exhibited for the first time at a time when the sadness, brutalities and horrors of the First World War were still latent, reflecting what everyone knew, how the cruelty and atrocity changed the world forever.

I know that for religious people, for Christians, the crucifixion has a totally different meaning. But as a non-believer, it was just an act of one man's behavior towards another.

The Figure in the Landscape (1945)

Figure in a Landscape is a work done in oil on plain weave canvas, presumed to be inspired by a photograph of Bacon's lover at the time, Eric Hall, dressed in a flannel suit, half asleep on a seat in Hyde Park.

A substantial part of the body has been painted dark, suggesting a void, with an open mouth discernible, somewhat reminiscent of a leader giving a speech and said to be inspired by photographs of Nazis addressing their followers. This image surrounded by a pastoral setting reveals a great contrast between violence and aggression and the daily reality of the artist.

Painting (1946)

The layered images of this enigmatic painting blend into one another, giving it a nightmarish appearance. It is impressive to appreciate from above, the extended wings of a bird skeleton that seem to perch on a hanging corpse, this last motif influenced, like the Crucifixion in 1933, by the works of Rembrandt.

In the foreground, a well-dressed man under an umbrella sits in a circular enclosure that could be decorated with more bones and another corpse. The strange composition of this work, which resembles a collage, reveals Bacon's method for this painting. It was simply an accident, because he only wanted to recreate the image of a bird perching on a field, the painter would say a little later.

This oil and pastel on linen, was cataloged by its creator as a series of accidents that accumulated one after another and although it may have been related in some way to the three previous forms, the lines that he drew suggested something totally different and as such the image was raised in a totally different way.

The painter stated that his intention was not to make this strange film, he never imagined it like that, it just happened. The truth is that intentional or not, it was a work that, like many of Bacon's others, created a lot of expectation and stir.

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944)

This work simply gives Bacon a reputation in the mid-1940s and shows the importance of biomorphic surrealism in forging his early style. It is a surrealist style triptych, measuring 74 x 94 centimeters for each panel.

He may have originally intended to incorporate the figures into a crucifixion, but his reference to the base of such a composition suggests that he envisioned them as part of a predella. The twisted and distorted bodies are made somewhat more terrifying by their vaguely familiar human forms, which seem to reach out toward the viewer with pain and an air of agony and pleading.

The figures are based on the Furies, goddesses of revenge from Greek mythology who play an important role in the Oresteia, a three-part tragedy by Aeschylus, and it is possible that Bacon was drawn to the play's themes of guilt and obsession. . This incredible piece profoundly and radically influenced images of the body in post-war British art.

Study of the Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez (1953)

Although the figure in this image derives from a 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X by artist Diego Velázquez, painter Francis Bacon avoided seeing the original painting, preferring to work from reproductions. He unfolds a cage-shaped frame that surrounds the image that personifies the Pope, also introducing a vertical brushing on the surface of the painting, an element that he described as a curtain, relating the figure to a precious object that requires a protected space.

However, the linear strokes are destructive to the image and are more like the bars of a jail cell than a curtain. The lines almost seem to vibrate and the complementary shades of purple and yellow add to the tension of the composition.

The painter Francis Bacon was not a man related to Christianity, he never considered himself religious, however, his work shows an attraction to symbols such as the Crucifixion and the Pope, drawing inspiration from them to display a wide range of emotions and feelings.

With a disjointed face and the famous scream, the painter assures that it was not the way he wanted it, he rather thought of something that resembled a Monet sunset. However, his enigmatic gesture full of brutality demonstrates something undeniably beautiful and serene.

This Bacon painting has that particular captivating style of displaying hideous subjects in a way that makes them compatible with the luxurious salons in which many of them hung. This 153 x 118 centimeter oil painting, whose original name is Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, currently on display in the museum Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (United States).

Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror (1968)

The painter Francis Bacon was 60 years old when he met the young George Dyer, the relationship, although romantic, always had more of a father-son style, as Dyer constantly needed attention and reassurance.

Inspired by the portraits of Picasso from the mid-XNUMXth century, the Irish painter manages to surprisingly capture the internal conflict of this human being, who was his sentimental partner for many years. The work exhibits George Dyer, sitting in a swivel chair, which in turn is facing a mirror on a piece of furniture in a very particular way.

The image with its distorted body and face reflected in the mirror is separated into two parts by a space of light, but this still does not suffer the same distortions, since both pieces of the reflection together would provide a fairly realistic portrait of the man. This oil on canvas of about 200 cm × 150 centimeters, whose original title is Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror They currently belong to a private collection.

Portrait of George Dyer speaking (1968)

Portrait of George Dyer Talking has subdued colors compared to other works, though the red and green highlights hint at an inner struggle, perhaps reflecting George Dyer's lifelong addiction to drugs and alcohol. Added to the colors, the painted figure looking down into a central abyss is perhaps the best expression of that torment.

The work houses a George Dyer sitting on a swivel stool, similar to those in an office in a colorful room, exhibiting the body and the twisted face, like a kind of contortionist. His lower limbs are tightly crossed and his head appears to be inside a frame. This human figure stands under a solitary dangling lightbulb, and apparently discarded leaves are strewn around him at his feet. The body of the figure is positioned in the foreground and background,

Two Figures (1953)

Due to its homosexual connotations, the inaugural exhibition of Two Figures caused quite a stir. Inspired by anatomical drawings and the movement photography of Eadweard Muybridge, the painting is an exploration of the body in action, through a representation of the physical act of love. The two intertwined figures on the bed are covered by the striated-line "curtain" created by the painter Francis Bacon, which somewhat obstructs the view and enhances the movement of the figures.

However, despite representing the physical act of love, it is a work that does not exactly evoke the romance that can occur on a date night, the somewhat dark colors make us think of a sinister moment.

Many interpret the work as an expression of the artist's supposed masochistic tastes, which could be due to the cruelty in which he grew up. It was common for some paintings to exhibit the abuse to which he was exposed in his aggressive relationships. This oil on canvas is part of a private collection in London.

Heads Series (1948 -1949)

Between the years 1948 and 1949, the painter Francis Bacon studied intensively and created a group of six paintings known as the series Heads (Heads), placing some of these in particular among the artist's most important and rarest works, being the series that laid the foundation for many of his explorations of portraiture for decades to come.

All identical in size and featuring a similar balanced color palette of cool grays and whites, these works caused quite a stir, to the point that Head III, created in 1949, was sold at auction for £10,442,500 in 2013, the current world record for a Bacon work from the XNUMXs.

FRANCIS BACON PAINTER

The second half of this decade represents an important change in the international recognition of the artist, starting a successful collaboration with Erica Brausen, owner of the Hanover Gallery. The London gallery owner donated a work by the artist to Alfred Barr for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1948, which can be taken as an excellent start to his world career.

The first solo exhibition was held at the Hannover Gallery just a year later, in November 1949, with this important series of six heads. Earning the artist very good reviews, who considered him one of the most powerful artists in Europe.

Study for Crouching Nude (1952)

Study for Crouching Nude It is a work made in oil and sand on canvas, which measures 198,1 x 137,2 centimeters and is currently located in eThe Detroit Institute of Arts. 

A bar-like effect separates the imprisoned subject from the curious viewer, a scene that appears to be exhibited within imaginary glass walls that create an aura of suffocation, perhaps related by many to the artist's asthmatic condition.

The sources that inspired Bacon's images are surprisingly diverse, including Eisenstein's film stills, Velázquez's court scenes, and Joyce's meandering writings, as well as medical textbooks.

But for Study for Crouching Nude produced in the spring of 1952, he may have taken some ideas from the tabloids and the motion photography experiments of British photographer and researcher, Eadweard Muybridge. The work showing a figure perched on something may be derived from The Man Jumping Up, by this Briton.

The painting was first presented in Recent Trends in Realist Painting, which was organized by Robert Melville and David Sylvester, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, in 1952.

FRANCIS BACON PAINTER

Three Figures in a Room (1964)

It is a work composed of three oil-painted panels of about 198 × 147 centimeters, forming one of his famous triptychs. In this work, George Dyer shows his love for him for the first time as a model, however it would not be the last. Dyer whom the painter Francis Bacon met in 1963 was the subject of many of his paintings.

En Three Figures in a Room exhibits again his constant interest in showing a subject from different angles, because even when it is made in three separate canvases, each painting has the same size, highlighting an elliptical brown floor, walls in a yellow tone and the presence of a single model that is repeated in each panel, with crooked positions.

The work is presumed to be inspired by various sources, including the drawing by Edgar Degas, the Woman drying off after bath (After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself), in the Belvedere Torso. Michelangelo's sculptures in the Medici Chapel and Bathers with a turtle by Henri Matisse.

Three Figures in a Room, was purchased by the French government in the late 1976s and has been part of the Center Georges Pompidou collection since XNUMX.

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