921. Francis Bacon (1909-1992), English,

Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953.

Oil on canvas, 153 x 118 cm. Des Moines Art Center,

Des Moines. Abstract Expressionism.

 

 

Francis Bacon

(1909 Dublin – 1992 Madrid)

 

The British painter of Irish birth, Francis Bacon, is probably one of England’s most controversial and disturbing artists. Marked by Picasso and later by the Surrealists, his work was expressionist in style. Bacon nevertheless remained an independent artist. Obsessed by pictures of diseases of the mouth, Bacon set out to capture expression without total abstraction and specifically tried to represent corrupt and disgusting humanity, intolerable pain or panic, seen in the faces of the damned in the painting of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment (1536-1541) and particularly in Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893). In works such as Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion which portrayed carcass-like figures on crosses, he expressed the satirical, horrifying and hallucinatory. Bacon deliberately subverted artistic conventions in painting a series of variations on figural themes such as the famous portrait by Velázquez Pope Innocent x into a shockingly grotesque screaming mask.