Francis Bacon was an Irish figurative painter, influenced in his earlier years by Picasso and surrealism , whose unique expressionist style of painting, which emerged during the s, featured pictures of people screaming or in pain, often portrayed inside bathrooms or cages.
His tortured, nightmarish imagery projected a world of violent and shocking humanity. His talent as a modern expressionist artist blossomed alongside a shambolic personal life, marked by extreme sensuality, gambling and alcoholism. Even so, he was one of the most famous figures in Irish painting and a unique figure in the history of Irish art. Francis Bacon was born in Dublin.
His parents were English and moved several times between England and Ireland. A shy asthmatic child with an effeminate manner, Bacon had little formal schooling, or instruction in either drawing or painting , being taught instead by private tutors. Muriel Belcher Theme - 3 artworks. George Dyer Theme - 19 artworks. Isabel Rawsthorn Theme - 10 artworks. John Edwards Theme - 7 artworks. Peter Lacey Theme - 3 artworks. Crucifixion Theme - 6 artworks. Painting Theme - 4 artworks. Related Artists.
Titian c. Diego Velazquez - Rembrandt - Paul Cezanne - Vincent van Gogh - Matthew Smith - Pablo Picasso - Egon Schiele - Chaim Soutine - Graham Sutherland - Bacon's self-taught work attracted interest, and in , he included in a London group exhibition entitled "Young British Painters.
Francis Bacon later dated the true beginning of his artistic career as It was around this time that he devoted himself to painting and began creating the works for which he is still remembered, with "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion" seen as a major turning point.
His large canvases depicted human figures — most often a single figure isolated in an empty room, in a cage or against a black background. These works came to be known as Bacon's "screaming pope" paintings. In other works, a figure might stand beside a flayed carcass of meat. Still other paintings were derived from traditional religious subject matter.
In all of his paintings, Bacon emphasized the universal experiences of suffering and alienation. Francis Bacon with photographer Cecil Beaton at an exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, London of the artist's works. Even during a period in which modern art was dominated by abstraction, Bacon continued to paint the human face and figure. His emotional use of brushwork and color as well as his exaggeration of forms caused him to be labeled as an Expressionist artist, though he rejected the term.
Three Studies launched Bacon's reputation in the mid s and shows the importance of biomorphic Surrealism in forging his early style. Bacon may have originally intended to incorporate the figures in a crucifixion, but his reference to the base of such a composition suggests that he imagined them as part of a predella, the scenes at the bottom of a traditional altarpiece.
The twisted bodies are all the more frightening for their vaguely familiar human-like forms, which appear to stretch out toward the viewer in pain and supplication. The perspective lines in the background create a shallow space, alluding to captivity and torture. The figures are based upon the Furies, goddesses of revenge from Greek mythology that play an important role in the Oresteia , a three-part tragedy by Aeschylus.
Bacon may have been drawn to the play's themes of guilt and obsession. The piece profoundly influenced images of the body in post-war British art. The layered images of this enigmatic painting blend into each other, giving it a dreamlike or nightmarish quality. From the top, the outstretched wings of a bird skeleton seem to be perched upon a hanging carcass, the latter motif influenced, like Bacon's Crucifixion from , by Rembrandt.
In the foreground, a well-dressed man under an umbrella sits in a circular enclosure which might be decorated with more bones and another carcass. The strange, collage-like composition of this work reveals Bacon's method.
And it may have been bound up in some way with the three forms that had gone before, but suddenly the lines that I'd drawn suggested something totally different, and out of this suggestion rose the picture. I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another. Once again, he deploys a cage-like frame that surrounds the pope, but also introduces vertical brushing across the surface of the painting, an element he described as a curtain, relating the figure to a precious object requiring a protected space.
However, the linear strokes are destructive to the image, and seem more like the bars of a jail cell. The lines almost seem to vibrate, and complementary shades of purple and yellow add to the tension of the composition.
About his famous scream, Bacon says, "I didn't do it in the way that I wanted to I wanted to make the mouth, with its beauty of its color and everything, look like one of the sunsets or something of Monet. Backgrounds of boudoir pink, persimmon, lilac and aqua combine with the calligraphic grace of his fleshy figures in images of stylized elegance.
Due to its homosexual overtones, the inaugural exhibition of Two Figures caused an uproar. Drawn from studies of anatomical drawings and Eadweard Muybridge's motion photography, Two Figures is as much an exploration of the body in action as it is a representation of the physical act of love.
The two figures entwined in bed are covered by Bacon's "curtain" of striated lines, which both obstructs the view and enhances the movement of the figures. Instead of evoking the romance of a nighttime rendezvous, the dark colors of the painting allude to a more sinister encounter.
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