Francis BACON Exhibition Poster - Papes et autres figures

Main works

Three studies of figures at the foot of a crucifixion, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, and Triptychs in general.

Artistic movements

Expressionism, Surrealism, Cubism

Inspiration, influence

Diego Velasquez, Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Rembrandt

His contemporaries

Isabel Rawsthorne, Michel Leiris, Lucian Freud, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Ben Nicholson

To keep in mind

Self-taught, Bacon studied the painters he loved to capture their essence. From Rembrandt, he borrowed the brown tones and putrefied flesh, from Picasso, the battered bodies, from Velasquez, he drew the sense of religious, and from Van Gogh, a sense of movement that he managed to make his own. Bacon is a unique painter who, although connected to several pictorial movements, is an iconoclast in his time. His way of using his own life to tell a story on canvas is also very singular.

To go further

Irishman dead in Madrid (like one of his heroes Velasquez) and having lived all over Europe, Bacon is the painter of pain, moral and physical, the one who magnified tragedy, inhabiting all of his paintings and all of his being.