Francis Bacon was born in 1909 in Dublin to English parents and grew up between Ireland and England, largely self-taught as an artist. His career began in earnest with the 1944 exhibition of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, three biomorphic figures writhing against a flat orange ground that struck the London art world with the force of a bomb. In the bleak aftermath of World War II, Bacon’s vision of the human body as meat — vulnerable, suffering, distorted by primal forces — seemed to capture something essential about the modern condition.
His most famous works take existing images — Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Muybridge’s photographs of motion, newspaper photographs — and subject them to violent transformation. His screaming popes, trapped in transparent cages, their vestments dissolved into slashes of purple and white, are among the most terrifying images in modern art. His portraits of friends and lovers — George Dyer, Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne — twist their subjects’ faces and bodies into contorted forms that somehow capture their essence more truthfully than any photograph.
Bacon was a paradox: a man of enormous charm and wit who painted images of unrelenting horror; a technically brilliant painter who claimed to work through accident and chance. He destroyed much of his early work and was notoriously dismissive of his own achievements. He died in Madrid in 1992, and his Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) sold in 2013 for $142.4 million, then the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.