Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992) was a successful, irish figurative painter. His paintings became popular because of its violent, erotic character that often show masculine figures in isolation, such as glass, steel or in geometrical cages with scarying backgrounds. It is known that Bacon often visited slaughterhouses to get his inspirations. In his beginnings he worked as an interior decorator and designer of furniture. Once he said that he started his career so late because he didn’t find any subject that really interested him in his early years. His first big success was in 1944 when he did the triptych ”Tree Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion”. Because of this work, in 1940-1960s he got the reputation as a world famous painter. In the middle of 1960 he mainly did portraits of heads of his friends. He used to say that he imagines like in series and he focused on single themes for longer periods of time (like Papal heads, crucifixion and later single and triptych heads series.) In 1971 his lover George Dyer became suicide and after that his paintings became more and more personal, like looking inside and focusing on the different sides of death. His masterpiece in 1985-1986 is called “Study for a Self Portrait-Triptych. In the late 1940s he did the great series of portraits – inspired by Velazquez- of Pope Innocent X. Bacon, famous for his dreadful paintings, had two big Tate retrospectives during his life time.