Francis Bacon is a seminal artist of the 20th century, with a reputation for being a brilliant observer of the bleakness of the human condition.
Bacon’s triptych of his close friend “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” fetched over $142 million at a New York auction Tuesday night, setting a record for the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.
The Irish-born figurative painter was renowned for his stark and bold style — frequently returning to the themes of The Scream and The Crucifixion, influenced by Rembrandt and Picasso.
His best-known detractor was former British Prime Minister Margret Thatcher who described Bacon as “that man who paints those dreadful pictures”.
As a young man, Bacon drifted between Berlin, Paris, and London where he worked as a domestic servant and later an interior designer, meeting painters, wealthy patrons and lovers along the way.
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Bacon’s Crucifixion was his first painting to attract attention and fame in 1945.
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A scene from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin would be become a major influence of Bacon’s scream obsession. He kept a film still in his studio showing the nurse’s face screaming in fright, with bloodied glasses hanging off her face, describing it as his source of inspiration.
Between 1935 and 1936 curators rejected Bacon’s paintings as being backwards-looking, but by 1948 he had achieved the reputation of being one of the most influential artists of his time.
He began a relationship with the young criminal George Dyer after he broke into Bacon’s home in 1964. Dyer became a frequent and dominating subject of his work.
Bacon’s previous relationships were with older, violent men. His first lover Peter Lacy threw him out a plate-glass window. “His face was so damaged that his right eye had to be sewn back into place,” wrote Art critic John Richardson wrote in the New York Review of Books. “Bacon loved Lacy even more. For weeks he would not forgive Lucian Freud for remonstrating with his torturer.”
His new relationship grew rocky after Dyer abandoned crime for a life of alcoholism, leaning on Bacon as his benefactor. Dyer at one point said he did not understand or like Bacon’s paintings, describing them as horrible.
In the middle of one of Bacon’s shows in 1971 at the Grand Palais, it was announced that Dyer had overdosed on barbiturates. Dyer’s demise had a deep affect on Bacon, whose work was haunted by death then on.
Afterward Bacon painted the highly regarded “Black Triptychs” depicting Dyer’s suicide.
Bacon died from cardiac arrest on April 18, 1992.
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