Francis Bacon was an Irish painter of great intensity. Believing that art is entwined with life and that it should serve to deepen experience, Bacon took artistic and personal risks. His most famous paintings are Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), Study after Velasquez (1957), and his triptyches of the 70s.
Bacon's Life
Francis Bacon was born in 1909 in Dublin to British parents. He had two brothers and two sisters. The family moved back to London during WW1 but subsequently returned to Ireland. After a fight with his father, Bacon left home at sixteen, failing to complete his schooling. Shifting first to Berlin and then to Paris, Bacon fell under the influence of exhibitions of Picasso, Soutine, and the Surrealists. He began as a furniture designer, but soon developed his style as a painter, his themes drawn partly from the homosexual and drag underground world he inhabited. He also used sources from Muybridge's photographs to movies like Battleship Potemkin.
Male muses were a powerful channel for Bacon, several of them younger, illiterate and drug-addicted individuals, like John Edwards, who expressed the darker side of existence. His seven-year relationship with George Dyer culminated in the latter's suicide in 1971. Bacon achieved fame for his disruptive and evocative works of art prior to his death in Monte Carlo in 1992.
Bacon's Art
Bacon was an Expressionist artist. He used paint to access the ravages of the human spirit, chronicling the pointlessness of the quest for meaning in lurid colours and violent textures. As a gambler and drinker, Bacon was always short of finances. Thus, he reused canvases, incorporated discarded materials and often integrated the dirt and chaos of his studio into his pieces. His portraits, such as those of George Dyer or John Edwards (from the 80s) often seem like slabs of deformed meat, abstract lunges away from the superiority of surface into the abject innards.
Bacon was interested in a wide range of sources: wrestling, religious iconography, and film, to name a few. Encompassing all these external modes of inspiration was his internal source: the quest to depict human frailty and insubstantiality in the face of death. He began to achieve renown in the 40s for his garish figure studies. However, fame arrived with the painting Three Studies of 1944, a surreal foray into the war behind the spiritual. His turbulent self portraits, his sexually wrangling men and his triptyches of his muses, including one of George Dyer's suicide on the toilet (May-June 1973), also affected public perceptions of him. Until the end, Bacon celebrated a gutter vision that is both endlessly compelling and relentlessly difficult to endure in our sanitized society.
Catherine Owen - Catherine Owen, MA 2001, has published ten award winning books of poetry/prose. Her writing is lyrical, well-researched and fully ...
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