Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon – Violence and debauchery shaped his childhood and youth

Francis Bacon was born the second of five children on 28 October 1909 in Dublin. He grew up caught in the strained atmosphere between his father, a former soldier who tended towards violence, and his educated, sociable mother. He actually owed his name to the English politician and philosopher Francis Bacon, from whom his father believed the family was descended. With the outbreak of the First World War, Francis Bacon was forced to cope with moving home many times as his father was working again for the War Office; the boy was therefore mostly left to his own devices and did not receive regular schooling. He ran away from boarding school after only a few weeks, and during the Easter uprising of the radical Sinn Féin party, he lived in Ireland in a house barricaded with sandbags. When his father caught the homosexual Francis trying on his mother’s underwear, he immediately threw him out of the house. Having scraped by in London with odd jobs, his father eventually put him in the care of a former war comrade who, however, moved in dubious circles, and pulled the young Francis into a whirlpool of alcohol, gambling and debauchery, from which the artist never escaped for the rest of his life.

Growing interest in art, the first watercolours and drawings

Francis Bacon created his first watercolours and drawings during a trip to Paris, but was not interested in attending art school. He earned a living with odd jobs as a designer and interior decorator and during this time visited many exhibitions; he was particularly impressed by a display of work by Pablo Picasso at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery whilst further artists of interest included Joan Miró, Giorgio di Chirico, Fernand Legér and Max Ernst. He soon had his own studio, designed carpets and furniture, and began painting in oils. The only teaching Bacon received his whole life was from the Australian painter, Roy de Maistre, who taught him the correct use of oil paint. His artistic activities remained without resonance, so he again took on various non-artistic jobs in order to secure his livelihood, whilst the application to a Surrealist exhibition failed as Bacon’s pictures were deemed not surrealistic enough. After his asthmatic condition saved him from military serve, he eventually returned to London.

Crucifixions, screaming popes and religion without god

In London, Francis Bacon destroyed a large part of his early work and triggered excited public debate with his new paintings of crucifixions; religious motifs were important for the artist, but he always assigned them to the earthly and avoided anything transcendent. His passion for gambling repeatedly drew him to Monte Carlo until the acquaintance with the gallerist Erica Brausen, arranged by Graham Sutherland, at last brought him the longed-for artistic breakthrough. Whilst teaching for a short time at the Royal College of Art in London, he started his series of portraits of screaming popes based on works by Old Masters such as Velasquez. Friendships with Lucien Freud and David Sylvester were fruitful, painting portraits of both, and he designed the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale. His relationship with the proletarian criminal George Dyer ended with Dyer’s suicide, which Bacon processed in several pictures. The motif of the scream as an expression of pleasure and pain ran through Bacon’s art; among other things, the artist used a photograph of the screaming nanny from Eisenstein’s classic film Battleship Potemkin, as well as a collection of medical photographs of open mouths, teeth and oral diseases.

Francis Bacon died in Madrid on 28 April 1992.