FRANCIS BACON

(1909 - 1992)
ART ::: PAINTER :::

Francis Bacon painted the human figure as if it were caught mid-impact—twisted, exposed, and brutally alive. Born in 1909, Bacon rejected abstraction in favor of a ferocious figurative style that treated flesh as both subject and battleground. His paintings are not portraits so much as confrontations, where identity collapses under pressure and emotion is rendered through distortion.

Works like Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion announced Bacon’s vision with shocking force, replacing religious transcendence with raw existential terror. Later paintings, including Three Studies of Lucian Freud, turn intimacy into something volatile, capturing friendship and rivalry as acts of mutual scrutiny. The body in Bacon’s work is never stable—it screams, slumps, or dissolves, caught between presence and erasure.

Bacon’s social and artistic life revolved around London’s Soho, particularly the Colony Room, where drinking, argument, and artistic exchange blurred together. That volatile atmosphere fed his work as much as any studio discipline. Bacon endures because he refused consolation, insisting that painting confront the violence, vulnerability, and urgency of being human.