Art
1909–1992 · Irish-born British
Figurative art (School of London)
Francis Bacon was a Dublin-born British painter whose raw, distorted images of the human figure made him one of the most powerful artists of the post-war era. His screaming popes, smeared portraits and triptychs of isolated, contorted bodies express violence, desire, mortality and existential anguish.
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944)
Tate Britain, London
Three grotesque, long-necked, eyeless biomorphic creatures against a blazing orange background; caused a sensation in 1945
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Head VI (1949)
Arts Council Collection, London
A pope in purple cape screams inside a glass cage behind curtain-like strokes — his first work after Velázquez
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Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)
Des Moines Art Center, Iowa
The most famous "screaming pope": a seated pontiff shrieking behind vertical streaks of dark paint
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Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969)
Private collection
Triptych of Freud seated on a chair within a cage-like frame on an orange ground; sold for $142.4 million in 2013
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Triptych, May–June 1973 (1973)
Private collection
Black doorways and a slumped figure recall the death of his lover George Dyer in a Paris hotel room
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia