01.12.11: Britain's Greatest Artist - Born 1909 - Died: 1992
Francis Bacon was born October 28, 1909, in Dublin. At the age of 16, he moved to London and subsequently lived for about two years in Berlin and Paris.
Although Bacon never attended art school, he began to draw and work in watercolor. Upon his return to London in 1929, he established himself as a furniture designer and interior designer. In the fall of that year he began to use oils and exhibited a few paintings as well as furniture and rugs in his studio. His work was included in a group exhibition in London at the Mayor Gallery in 1933. In 1934, the artist organized his own first solo show at Sunderland House, London, which he called Transition Gallery for the occasion. He participated in a group show at Thomas Agnew and Sons, London in 1937.
Bacon painted relatively little after his solo show in 1934 and in the 1930's and early 1940's destroyed many of his works. He began to paint intensively again in 1944. Pablo Picasso's work decisively influenced his painting until the mid 1940's. From the mid 1940's to the 50's, Bacon's work reflected the influence of Surrealism.
In the 50's, Bacon drew on such sources as Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X and Vincent Van Gogh's The Painter on the Road to Tarascon. Bacon soon developed his distinctive style as a figure painter. In his mature style, developed in the 1950's, the paintings include images of either friends or lovers, or images of people found in movie stills, reproductions of historic paintings and medical photos. His people scream in physical and psychic pain, seemingly tortured in bedrooms, bathrooms and cages. His work was always expressionist in style with distorted human and animal forms, potent images of corrupt and disgusting humanity.
Bacon's dramatic and riveting work gained international recognition and acclaim. His first major show took place at the Hanover Gallery, London, in 1949. His first solo exhibition outside England was held in 1953 at Durlacher Brothers, New York. His first retrospective was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1955.
In 1962, the Tate Gallery, London, organized a Bacon retrospective, a modified version of which traveled to Mannheim, Turin, Zurich, and Amsterdam.
Other important exhibitions of his work were held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1963 and the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971; paintings from 1968 to 1974 were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1975. Retrospectives of his work were held at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1989-1990 and at the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, in 1996.
The artist died April 28, 1992, in Madrid.
Francis Bacon was a self-taught painter who destroyed a large
part of his output, so much so that virtually nothing of his early work has
survived. In 1944 he exhibited a triptych of three distorted figures at the base
of a crucifix, in a violent orange colour, who appear to be howling desperately.
Through his highly personal subject-matter, which includes a Self-Triptych
(1986) expressing his mental conflict and turmoil, he concentrated chiefly on
dogs, carcasses, and evocations of men, including elderly tycoons and Velazquez's Innocent X, caged in plate glass and screaming in a silent world of
horror,
dissolution and fear, and expressed with energy and singleness of aim all the
gradations of emotion from pity and disgust to horror, traumatic revulsion and
the unbalance of panic. His work, which can be interpreted as an attempt to
evoke an essentially partial, since incomplete, catharsis in the spectator, raises
in its most acute form the problem of the relationship between art and pleasure.
He considered his paintings to be the reflection of his nervous system projected
on to canvas, and his opinion, expressed in 1953, that painting is pure intuition
and luck, was the presage of the action painting and Abstract Expressionism
that was soon to dominate the scene, although he rejected abstract art for
himself, since he felt that it evaded the problem of the representation of the
human figure which he regarded as the artist's principal challenge. He has been
acclaimed as the greatest English artist since Turner. He may have a few
imitators, but his art is so extremely personal that he has no successors.
There
are pictures by him in Aberdeen, Batley, Belfast, Birmingham, Berlin, Brussels,
Buffalo NY, Canberra, Chicago, Detroit, Edinburgh (M of MA), London
(Tate), Manchester (Whitworth), New York (M of MA, Guggenheim),
Ottawa, Paris (Pompidou) and Yale.
Francis Bacon was born in Dublin of
British parents, he moved to London in 1925,
and soon after left Britain to live in Berlin and
Pans. He settled permanently in London c.
1928-9. After working first as an interior
designer, he began to paint c. 1930 without
formal training, and without much success at
first. But ever since 1944 with his Three Studies
for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, he has
held
the central position in British painting and
world figurative art. His paintings are usually of
a male or female figure set in an enclosed
interior space. The scenes depicted with distorted figures in action often seem disturbing
and are frequently presented in three panels, as
tnptychs - a format Bacon has virtually invented in
modern painting - relating in formal rather
than narrative manner. Often ideas for pictures
originate in an existing visual source: X-ray
photographs, Eadweard Muybridge's sequential
studies of figures in motion, photographs and
film stills.
Bacon's response to the art of the past
which he admires deeply is for the paintings of
Rembrandt, Velazquez and Goya (e.g. the
series of screaming popes which he began in
the mid-1950s based on Velazquez's portrait of
Pope Innocent X, which are also related to the
'still' of the screaming nurse in Eisenstein's film
The Battleship Potemkin, and the detail of the
woman screaming in Nicolas Poussin's The
Massacre of the Holy Innocents). Bacon's paintings
are
not, however, solely about subject matter; he is
a perfectionist concerning technique, seeking a
balance between chance and order in the way
images are built up 'accidentally' from the
application of paint on canvas.
01.12.11: BIOG. II - FRANCIS BACON OVERVIEW
Related: Lucian Freud
01.12.11: BIOG. III - FRANCIS BACON & THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN
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