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At a time when abstraction was hailed as the epitome of an avant-garde sensibility, Bacon seized the figure as his primary subject and abstracted its anatomies in bizarre ways. In the end, the figure was Bacon’s stepping stone to another kind of painting, tough and provocative, poetic and mysterious, that has earned him a distinguished place in the pantheon of great twentieth-century painters.
"I'm like a grinding machine. I've looked at everything and everything I've seen has gone in and been ground very fine."
- Francis Bacon
With little or no formal training, Bacon attacked the medium empirically, learning as he went along, driven to express the strange and unsettling images that occupied his mind. He had an insatiable appetite and a remarkable ability to absorb and reconfigure any source germane to his way of thinking. He was influenced by everything and everyone, and was constantly watching, observing, and absorbing. Surrealism, silent films, tabloid newspapers, photographs, images from medical textbooks, old master paintings and the work of Pablo Picasso are some of the many sources he mined.
Above and beyond these many visual sources, perhaps the most poignant influence was war-torn Europe. The implied violence and anguish of a Bacon painting mirrors the uncertain state of the human condition in the wake of World War II. “You can’t be more horrific than life itself,” Bacon once said. Paint stained Holocaust images together with propaganda photographs of Hitler could be found strewn across the cluttered floor of Bacon’s chaotic London studio. Suffering and despair, fundamental life forces, infuse the work with an undeniable pathos.
Bacon was fascinated by the human condition, man’s bestial nature and inherent capacity for violence. He explored such base impulses through the human figure, but was also fascinated by the way that animals lived by instinct – unlike humans, they did not have to hide under a surface veneer of civilization. It was the animal instinct that Bacon wanted to reveal in the people he painted. For his paintings of animals, he used a variety of sources, but was especially interested in monkeys, chimpanzees, and other simians. He also painted numerous images of dogs in positions that suggest various human emotions.
- Anna Kaplan, Curatorial Assistant
- Mariann Smith, Curator of Education