Lottie Cushway
Interactive Media
Samantha Winnard
‘Complete an analytical review on the work of Francis Bacon’
Originally from Dublin, Francis Bacon, who was born in 1909, moved to London at the age of sixteen due to the outbreak of war in 1914 and then subsequently lived in Berlin and Paris for two years. Bacon never attended an art school but in his own time he began to work in watercolour .At his return to London, Bacon began to establish himself as a furniture and interior designer. During the time he was creating furniture, he also experimented with oils, which he then exhibited in his studio as well as furniture and rugs. His work was then included in a group exhibition in London at the Mayor Gallery in 1933. He had his first solo show at Sunderland House in London. After his solo show, Francis Bacon rarely painted and destroyed many of his works in the early 1940’s. In 1939, Bacon was exempt from military service and released by the ARP on account of his asthma and due to this he began to paint more. In 1941 he spent his time painting in Hampshire and returned to London where he met Lucian Freud. Bacons work was prominently influenced by Pablo Picasso until the mid 1940’s where he was inspired by surrealism. During the 1950’s Francis Bacon began to develop his distinctive style as a figurative painter. His work was almost always taken from photographs, not from real life and his subjects were artists,friends,lovers and himself and he often painted them in bedrooms, bathrooms or cages.
’Three studies for figures at the base of a Crucifixion’ was first exhibited at the end of the war in 1945 to great controversy, and sold for £200 in 1946 to dealer, Erica Brausen. This image is what made Francis Bacon recognized as a important artist. For this style of imagery to be produced during that time, made Bacon known as a modern artist.
This triptych image was of his long time lover George Dyer, who supposedly killed himself in 1971 on the eve of Bacons retrospective exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. The three panelled image shows the events of Dyers death, where he is hunched over a toilet, shadowed in the door frame and vomiting in a sink. In an interview, Bacon admitted that painting this image was his own way of reflecting on the death and his feeling of guilt. It has been clear that since the death of his lover, Bacon’s work has been deeply affected by that occasion.
Francis Bacon’s work is related to pain and torture and a lot of people find his work violent. However, I feel his work doesn’t often reflect that emotion and find that I can relate to the images and a lot of them are very futuristic for the time he lived in. He has often denied that the images portray his emotions, but I feel that he does use them to influence his style and subject matter.
Webliography
www.tate.org.uk
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