Francis Bacon (philosopher)

Francis Bacon was born on October 28, 1909, at 63 Lower Baggot Street in Dublin, to English parents. His father, Edward Bacon, was a retired army officer who trained racehorses, and the family moved repeatedly between Ireland and England during Francis's childhood ^[1]. The boy suffered from severe asthma, which kept him out of regular schooling for long stretches and left him with an aversion to the horses and dogs that surrounded his father's world ^[2].

Relations with his father were harsh. Edward Bacon was a strict disciplinarian who had little patience for a sickly, artistically inclined son, and the household atmosphere during the Irish troubles of the late 1910s added to the tension ^[2]. In 1926, when Francis was sixteen, his father expelled him from the family home, reportedly after discovering him trying on his mother's clothes. The teenager left for London with a small allowance and no clear plan ^[1].

A formative period followed. In 1927 and 1928 Bacon spent time in Berlin and then Paris, absorbing the nightlife of Weimar Germany and the art on view in French galleries. A Picasso exhibition at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg in Paris made a lasting impression on him, and he later credited it with turning his attention toward painting ^[3]. He returned to London around 1929 with no formal training but a growing conviction about what images could do.

Bacon began his working life not as a painter but as a designer. In the early 1930s he produced modernist furniture and rugs from a studio in South Kensington, and his interiors received a short notice in The Studio magazine in 1930 ^[1]. Painting remained a sideline. His Crucifixion of 1933 was reproduced in Herbert Read's book Art Now and bought by the collector Sir Michael Sadler, an early flicker of recognition that did not immediately lead anywhere ^[3].

The following decade was one of false starts. Bacon exhibited little, destroyed much of what he made, and supported himself through odd jobs and the generosity of older companions. Rejected for military service during the Second World War because of his asthma, he served for a time in Air Raid Precautions rescue work in London before being discharged, again on health grounds ^[2].

Everything changed in April 1945, when Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was shown at the Lefevre Gallery in London. The triptych's writhing, eyeless creatures, set against a hot orange ground, shocked a public emerging from war, and critics immediately marked Bacon as a singular new force ^[4]. The Tate acquired the work in 1953, and Bacon himself treated 1944, the year of its completion, as the true beginning of his career, disowning most of what came before ^[4].

From the late 1940s Bacon developed the imagery that defined him. His series of popes, begun around 1946 and continued through the 1950s, reworked Velázquez's seventeenth century portrait of Pope Innocent X into howling figures caged by scaffolds of paint. Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), now in the Des Moines Art Center, is the best known of roughly forty-five variants ^[5]. He drew on an eclectic bank of sources: Eadweard Muybridge's motion photographs, film stills from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, medical textbooks, and news photography ^[3].

Bacon worked in oil on the raw, unprimed side of the canvas, smearing and scrubbing the figure while leaving flat fields of color around it. He painted friends and drinking companions from London's Soho, among them Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes, and Muriel Belcher, usually working from photographs taken by John Deakin rather than from life, because he said the presence of sitters inhibited the injury he did to their likenesses ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Francis Bacon in the London art world of the 1950s and 1960s would have received the same answer: the most feared and most discussed painter in Britain.

Institutional recognition arrived steadily. The Tate Gallery mounted a retrospective in 1962, and in 1971 the Grand Palais in Paris gave him a retrospective of a scale previously accorded to a living painter only rarely, an honor Picasso had received before him ^[3]. A second Tate retrospective followed in 1985, when the gallery's director described him as arguably the greatest living painter ^[6]. Among Francis Bacon achievements after his death, the market added its own measure: in November 2013 his triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold at Christie's in New York for 142.4 million dollars, at that time the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction ^[7].

Bacon lived openly as a gay man decades before the partial decriminalization of homosexuality in England in 1967, and his relationships shaped his art directly. An early, volatile bond with Peter Lacy, a former fighter pilot, dominated the 1950s; Lacy died in Tangier in 1962, on the eve of Bacon's first Tate retrospective ^[2]. In 1963 Bacon met George Dyer, an East End petty thief, who became his lover and most frequently painted subject ^[1].

Dyer's death was the central catastrophe of Bacon's life. In October 1971, two days before the opening of the Grand Palais retrospective in Paris, Dyer died from an overdose of drink and pills in the hotel room the two men shared. Bacon attended the opening regardless, then spent the following years working through the loss in the so-called Black Triptychs, including Triptych May June 1973, which reconstructs Dyer's final hours ^[3].

Away from the easel Bacon was a fixture of Soho, holding court at the Colony Room club run by Muriel Belcher, drinking champagne through afternoons and gambling heavily at private tables and in Monte Carlo ^[2]. He was famously generous with money and famously chaotic with everything else. From 1961 until his death he lived and worked in a small mews house at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, painting in a studio so dense with debris that its entire contents, more than 7,000 items, were later catalogued and reconstructed at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin ^[8].

The last two decades of Bacon's life brought a steadier rhythm. His companion from the mid 1970s onward was John Edwards, a younger East Londoner with whom the relationship was protective rather than stormy, and Edwards appears in numerous late portraits ^[1]. Bacon's palette calmed somewhat, the compositions grew sparer, and self portraits multiplied; he remarked that he painted himself because the people around him kept dying ^[3].

Honors he mostly refused. Bacon turned down a knighthood and other official distinctions, preferring the identity of an outsider even as museums competed for his work ^[2]. Exhibitions carried his reputation abroad: a 1988 show at the New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow made him the first living Western artist of his generation to be exhibited in the Soviet Union ^[6].

He kept painting and traveling into his eighties despite worsening asthma and a heart condition. In April 1992, against medical advice, he flew to Madrid to visit a friend. He fell ill there and died of a heart attack on April 28, 1992, at the age of eighty-two, in the care of the Sisters Servants of Mary at a Madrid clinic ^[9]. He left his estate to John Edwards.

Few painters of the twentieth century have proved as durable in the public imagination. Any Francis Bacon biography must reckon with the gap between the horror of his imagery and the discipline of his method: he insisted that he was not illustrating violence but trying to trap the sensation of a living body in paint ^[3]. Critics have connected his work to existentialist thought and to the aftermath of the Second World War, though Bacon himself resisted programmatic readings and claimed to be an optimist about nothing ^[6].

His influence runs through later figurative painting, from the School of London painters who were his contemporaries to artists and filmmakers who borrowed his caged spaces and smeared faces. Damien Hirst has cited him repeatedly, and the director David Lynch has acknowledged Bacon's imagery as a touchstone ^[6]. The 1998 donation of the Reece Mews studio to Dublin, the city of his birth, returned the artist physically to Ireland; the reconstructed room opened at the Hugh Lane Gallery in 2001 and remains a place of study for scholars of his process ^[8].

Among the plainest Francis Bacon facts is the scale of his posthumous standing. Major retrospectives at Tate Britain in 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009, and the Royal Academy in 2022 drew large audiences, and his triptychs occupy the top tier of the art market ^[5][7]. The paintings continue to divide viewers, which is close to what he wanted: images, he said, that work directly on the nervous system.