Francis bacon how many paintings

This contributed to a troubled childhood; he ran away from school, and subsequently drifted through the late s and early 30s in London, Berlin and Paris, living off his allowance and occasional jobs, and dodging the rent.

When in London, he lived in the epicentre of the bohemian scene; a regular in Soho, he led a hedonistic life. From the mids his work met with critical success, establishing his reputation. Today, he is recognised as one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. He later acknowledged Picasso as a key influence and reference point.

It was first exhibited in April , and though the two were not directly related, the fact that this painting was unveiled the month that the concentration camps were revealed to the world, inevitably led to the way it has been understood as a statement of human brutality and suffering. Bacon suggested he had intended to paint a larger crucifixion beneath which these would appear. And the only reason I ever used the crucifixion [was] because it was an armature on which I could hang certain sensations.

Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait , oil and sand on canvas, All Rights Reserved. DACS Years later in , at the opening of his large retrospective in Paris, he learned of the suicide of friend and former lover George Dyer. Many subsequent paintings were dedicated to the subject such as Triptych March Throughout the s, Bacon was internationally recognized with a Tate retrospective in and international showings in Moscow and Washington Francis Bacon died of pneumonia on April 28th while on a visit to Madrid.

Francis Bacon 28 October — 28 April was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, grotesque, emotionally charged, raw imagery. He is best known for his depictions of popes, crucifixions and portraits of close friends.

His abstracted figures are typically isolated in geometrical cage like spaces, set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon said that he saw images "in series", and his work typically focuses on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats.

His output can be broadly described as sequences or variations on a single motif; beginning with the s Picasso -informed Furies, moving on to the s male heads isolated in rooms or geometric structures, the s screaming popes, and the mid-to-late s animals and lone figures, the s portraits of friends, the nihilistic s self-portraits, and the cooler more technical s late works.

Bacon took up painting in his late 30s, having drifted as an interior decorator, bon vivant and gambler. He said that his artistic career was delayed because he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his interest.

His breakthrough came with the triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition. From the mids he mainly produced portraits of friends and drinking companions, either as single or triptych panels.

Following the suicide of his lover George Dyer, his art became more sombre, inward-looking and preoccupied with the passage of time and death. The climax of this later period is marked by masterpieces, including his 's "Study for Self-Portrait" and Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych, — Despite his bleak existentialist outlook, solidified in the public mind through his articulate and vivid series of interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon in person was highly engaging and charismatic, articulate, well-read and openly gay.

He was a prolific artist, but nonetheless spent many of the evenings of his middle age eating, drinking and gambling in London's Soho with like-minded friends such as Lucian Freud though the two fell out in the mids, for reasons neither ever explained , John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes, Daniel Farson, Tom Baker, and Jeffrey Bernard.

After Dyer's suicide he largely distanced himself from this circle, and while his social life was still active and his passion for gambling and drinking continued, he settled into a platonic and somewhat fatherly relationship with his eventual heir, John Edwards.

The art critic Robert Hughes described him as "the most implacable, lyric artist in late 20th-century England, perhaps in all the world" and along with Willem de Kooning as "the most important painter of the disquieting human figure in the 50's of the 20th century.

Since his death his reputation and market value have grown steadily, and his work is among the most acclaimed, expensive and sought-after. In the late s a number of major works, previously assumed destroyed, including early s popes and s portraits, reemerged to set record prices at auction.

In his Three Studies of Lucian Freud set the world record as the most expensive piece of art sold at auction. Article Wikipedia article References Wikipedia article. Their relationship, although romantic, always had the sense of a father-son dynamic. Dyer was constantly in need of attention and reassurance, and the naked embryonic form kneeling precariously on a ledge expresses his vulnerability.

The circular sofa, however, surrounds him in a protective embrace. Uncharacteristically, the coloring is light and subdued, although the red and green highlights hint at an inner struggle. Dyer suffered from a lifelong addiction to drugs and alcohol, which is alluded to by the painted figure looking downward into a central abyss.

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I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I'm greedy for what I hope chance can give me far beyond anything I can calculate logically.

And it's partly my greed that has made me what's called live by chance - greed for food, for drink, for being with the people one likes, for the excitement of things happening.

So the same thing applies to one's work. They were trying to trap the fact, because after all, artists are obsessed by life and by certain things that obsess them that they want to record. How can you work for an audience? What do you imagine an audience would want? I have got nobody to excite except myself, so I am always surprised if anyone likes my work sometimes. I suppose I'm very lucky, of course, to be able to earn my living by something that really absorbs me to try to do, if that is what you call luck.

It always remains on one level. It is only really interesting in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility. Cages provide areas for Bacon to stage his ferocious meditations on human anguish and savagery, but they also assume more distorted forms, shifting like the spaces within a bad dream.

Summary of Francis Bacon Francis Bacon produced some of the most iconic images of wounded and traumatized humanity in post-war art. Read full biography. Read artistic legacy. Artwork Images. Influences on Artist. Vincent van Gogh.

Eadweard Muybridge.