Three Studies launched Bacon's reputation in the mid 1940s and shows the importance of biomorphic Surrealism in forging his early style.
#Three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion series#
The Old Masters were an important source of inspiration for him, particularly Diego Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (c.1650) which Bacon used as the basis for his own famous series of "screaming popes." At a time when many lost faith in painting, Bacon maintained his belief in the importance of the medium, saying of his own working that his own pictures "deserve either the National Gallery or the dustbin, with nothing in between."ġ944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion Although Bacon's success rested on his striking approach to figuration, his attitudes toward painting were profoundly traditional.From these Bacon not only pioneered new ways to suggest movement in painting, but to bring painting and photography into a more coherent union. Bacon established his mature style in the late 1940s when he evolved his earlier Surrealism into an approach that borrowed from depictions of motion in film and photography, in particular the studies of figures in action produced by the early photographer Eadweard Muybridge.The work established many of the themes that would occupy the rest of his career, namely humanity's capacity for self-destruction and its fate in an age of global war. Surrealism, and in particular biomorphism, shaped the style of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), the work that launched Bacon's reputation when it was exhibited in London in the final weeks of World War II.This ability to create such powerful statements were foundational for Bacon's unique achievement in painting. Bacon's canvases communicate powerful emotions - whole tableaux seem to scream, not just the people depicted on them.
Together with those of Freud, Bacon’s paintings are some of the world’s most valuable and important works of modern art. As his career matured, distorted biomorphism mellowed into a more overt figuration, beautifully exampled in his late 60s masterpiece, Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), and Study for Self-Portrait - Triptych (1985-86). With the art world dominated by abstraction, Bacon’s work was not only emphatically figurative but drew on traditions of figuration, from Renaissance crucifixions, seen in Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962), to the works of Baroque Masters exampled in his endless reworkings of Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X (c.1650). While his early works had been inspired by Cubism and Picasso’s later works of biomorphic distortion, Three Figures saw the development of a unique figurative style.īy the 1950s, Bacon had become one of the most controversial painters in Britain and, together with Freud and Frank Auerbach, a leading luminary of the Soho avant garde. It was his 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion that brought him to wider attention. He received little critical or commercial success, however, and after a disappointing 1934 solo show his output dwindled. Bacon had begun drawing and painting in Berlin, but it was only in 1931 that he began devoting himself to his art.
He left home aged 17 for Berlin and then London, where he worked as interior decorator and designer of furniture and rugs. ‘Greedy for food, for drink, for being with the people one likes, for the excitement of things happening.’ Together with his contemporary, Lucian Freud, Bacon is widely considered the most important British painter of the modern age - a self-taught 20th-century master who lived his life in Bohemian excess, and whose work reinvigorated the figurative tradition through a unique exploration of the human figure in all its grotesquery and isolation.īorn in Dublin, the son of an English racehorse trainer, Bacon had no formal education. ‘I’m greedy for life and I’m greedy as an artist,’ said Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon.
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