Francis bacon biography art

He had an older brother, Harley, [ 7 ] two younger sisters, Ianthe and Winifred, and a younger brother, Edward. Bacon was raised by the family nannyJessie Lightfoot, from Cornwallknown as "Nanny Lightfoot", a maternal figure who remained close to him until her death. Lightfoot helped him install an illicit roulette wheel there, organised by Bacon and his friends.

The family moved between Ireland and England several times, leading to a sense of displacement which remained with Bacon throughout his life. They returned to Ireland after the First World War. Bacon lived with his maternal grandmother and step-grandfather, Winifred and Kerry Supple, at Farmleigh, AbbeyleixCounty Laois, although the rest of the family again moved to Straffan Lodge near NaasCounty Kildare.

Bacon was a shy francis bacon biography art and enjoyed dressing up. This, and his effeminate manner, angered his father. Later that year, Bacon was thrown out of Straffan Lodge following an incident in which his father found him admiring himself in front of a large mirror wearing his mother's underwear. He found that by avoiding rent and engaging in petty theft, he could survive.

To supplement his income, he briefly tried his hand at domestic service, but although he enjoyed cooking, he became bored and resigned. He was sacked from a telephone-answering position at a shop selling women's clothes in Poland Street in Soho after writing a poison pen letter to the owner. Bacon found himself drifting through London's homosexual underworld, aware that he was able to attract a certain type of rich man, something he was quick to take advantage of, having developed a taste for good food and wine.

One was a relative of Winnie Harcourt-Smith, another breeder of racehorses, who was renowned for his manliness. Bacon claimed his father had asked this "uncle" to take him 'in-hand' and 'make a man of him'. Bacon had a difficult relationship with his father, once admitting to being sexually attracted to him. He spent two months in Berlin, though Harcourt-Smith left after one: "He soon got tired of me, of course, and went off with a woman I didn't really know what to do, so I hung on for a while.

Bacon, then 17, spent the next year and a half in Paris. He met Yvonne Bocquentin, pianist and connoisseur, [ 15 ] at the opening of an exhibition. Aware of his own need to learn FrenchBacon lived for three months with Madame Bocquentin and her family at their house near Chantilly, Oise. He travelled into Paris to visit the city's art galleries.

He took a studio at 17 Queensberry Mews West, South Kensingtonsharing the upper floor with Eric Allden — his first collector — and his childhood nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. Inhe met Eric Hall, his patron and lover in an often torturous and abusive relationship. Bacon left the Queensberry Mews West studio in and had no settled space for some years.

The Crucifixion was his first painting to attract public attention, and was in part based on Pablo Picasso 's The Three Dancers of It was not well received; disillusioned, he abandoned painting for nearly a decade and suppressed his earlier works. These and the scene with the nurse screaming on the Odessa steps from the Battleship Potemkin later became recurrent parts of Bacon's iconography, with the angularity of Eisenstein's images often combined with the thick red palette of his recently purchased medical tome.

In the winter of —36, Roland Penrose and Herbert Readmaking a first selection for the International Surrealist Exhibitionvisited his studio at 71 Royal Hospital RoadChelsea saw "three or four large canvases including one with a grandfather clock", but found his work "insufficiently surreal to be included in the show". Bacon claimed Penrose told him "Mr.

Bacon, don't you realise a lot has happened in painting since the Impressionists? Eric Hall organised the show. He showed four works: Figures in a Garden ; AbstractionAbstraction from the Human Form known from magazine photographs and Seated Figure also lost. These paintings prefigure Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion in alternatively representing a tripod structure Abstractionbared teeth Abstraction from the Human Formand both being biomorphic in form.

On 1 JuneBacon's father died. Unfit for active wartime service, Bacon volunteered for civil defence and worked full-time in the Air Raid Precautions ARP rescue service; the fine dust of bombed London worsened his asthma and he was discharged. Figure Getting Out of a Car ca. The photograph was taken shortly before the canvas was painted over by Bacon and retitled Landscape with Car.

An ancestor to the biomorphic form of the central panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixionthe composition was suggested by a photograph of Hitler getting out of a car at one of the Nuremberg rallies. Bacon claims to have "copied the car and not much else". High-vaulted and north-lit, its roof was recently bombed — Bacon was able to adapt a large old billiard room at the back as his studio.

Francis bacon biography art: Bacon produced iconic images

Lightfoot, lacking an alternative location, slept on the kitchen table. They held illicit roulette parties, organised by Bacon with the assistance of Hall. By Bacon had gained confidence and moved toward developing his unique signature style. It is generally considered his first mature piece; [ 23 ] he regarded his works before the triptych as irrelevant.

The painting caused a sensation when exhibited in and established him as a foremost post-war painter. Remarking on the cultural significance of Three StudiesJohn Russell observed in that "there was painting in England before the Three Studies, and painting after them, and no one Hall and Lightfoot would come to stay. Bacon spent much of the next few years in Monte Carlo apart from short visits to London.

His letters to Brausen show he painted there, but no paintings are known to survive. Bacon said he became "obsessed" with the Casino de Monte Carlowhere he would "spend whole days". Falling in debt from gambling, he was unable to afford a new canvas. This compelled him to paint on the raw, unprimed side of his previous work, a practice he kept throughout his life.

Bacon wrote to Sutherland asking that he apply fixative to the patches of pastel on Painting before it was shipped to New York. The work is now too fragile to be moved from MoMA for exhibition elsewhere. At least one visit to Paris in brought Bacon into contact with French postwar painting and Left Bank ideas such as Existentialism. InSutherland introduced Bacon to Brausen, who represented Bacon for twelve years.

Despite this, Bacon did not mount a one-man show in Brausen's Hanover Gallery until He kept an extensive inventory of images for source material, but preferred not to confront the major works in person; he viewed Portrait of Innocent X only once, much later in his life. Bacon was an early member, joining the day after its opening in Sylvester had admired and written about Bacon since Bacon's artistic inclinations in the s moved towards his abstracted figures which were typically isolated in geometrical cage-like spaces, and set against flat, nondescript backgrounds.

Bacon said that he saw images "in series", and his work typically focused more on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats. Stricken, Bacon sold the 7 Cromwell Place apartment.

Francis bacon biography art: Francis Bacon (–92) was a

In he aligned with the Marlborough Fine Art gallery, who remained as his sole dealer until In return for a year contract, Marlborough advanced him money against current and future paintings, with the price of each determined by its size. InBacon's lover Peter Lacy died from the effects of alcoholism the day before Bacon opened a retrospective exhibition in the Tate.

He came from a family steeped in crime and had till then spent his life drifting between theft and prison. Bacon's earlier relationships had been with older and tumultuous men. His previous lover, Peter Lacy, had a reputation for tearing up Bacon's paintings, beating him in drunken rages, and at times leaving him on streets half-conscious.

Dyer was impressed by Bacon's self-confidence and success, and Bacon acted as a protector and father figure to the insecure younger man. Dyer was, like Bacon, a borderline alcoholic and similarly took obsessive care with his appearance. Pale-faced and a chain-smoker, Dyer typically confronted his daily hangovers by drinking again. His compact and athletic build belied a docile and inwardly tortured personality, although the art critic Michael Peppiatt describes him as having the air of a man who could "land a decisive punch".

Their behaviours eventually overwhelmed their affair, and by Bacon was merely providing Dyer with enough money to stay more or less permanently drunk. As Bacon's work moved from the extreme subject matter of his early paintings to portraits of friends in the mids, Dyer became a dominating presence. The voyeurism between the two figures and the long grass that separate them echo the animal-spectator relationship central to safaris.

Bacon is known for his paintings of the human figure — figures that writhe, wrestle, crawl and scream. But his fascination with animals unlocks a new perspective on his approach to the human body. Caption toggle button.

Francis bacon biography art: Francis Bacon (28 October – 28

He started out as a furniture designer Despite never going to art school — or finishing school for that matter — Bacon painted his first major work, Crucifixion aged just Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. He loved We are all animals if you care to think about it. Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS He was allergic to animals Bacon was fascinated by animals over his career he painted monkeys, baboons, chimpanzees, dogs, owls, bulls, elephants, rhinos but he was effectively allergic to most of them.

He liked to splash the cash Bacon was a hugely successful artist in his lifetime and he certainly enjoyed the finer things. Hulton Deutsch - Reggie and Ronnie Kray, ca. Photo: Hugo Maertens. 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.

Artwork Images. Portrait of Innocent X c. Both were very important for Bacon. Influences on Artist. Vincent van Gogh. Eadweard Muybridge. Pablo Picasso. John Deakin. George Dyer. John Edwards. Lucian Freud. Damien Hirst. Julian Schnabel. Michael Peppiatt. David Sylvester. The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page.

These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet. Francis Bacon Our Pick. Francis Bacon: Commitment And Conflict. Sacred Monster Our Pick. Tate productions: film director Christopher Nolan reveals how paintings by artist Francis Bacon inspired the Joker's smeared make-up in 'The Dark Knight'.

Related Artists Lucian Freud. David Hockney. Frank Auerbach. Abstract Expressionism. Summary, History, Artworks. The central subject of most of Bacon's works is the human body, represented in various, sometimes bizarre, poses: elongated, curved, or inside geometric backgrounds without any complementary composition. This is how people see artists, exhausted; lonely; and locked in a cage of flesh, rules, and restrictions.

Francis Bacon preferred triptychs, as well as painting in series dedicated to a particular topic. The Bacon family often moved, which, along with Francis's asthma, hampered his formal education. At the age of 16, the young Bacon left his parents's home, deciding to start life on his own. For the next two years, Francis lived in London, earning money, before moving to Berlin, where relatives of the Bacon family lived.

After some time, he moved to Paris and devoted himself to learning French while working as an interior designer. Interesting francises bacon biography art Francis Bacon decided to start painting after visiting an exhibition by Picasso in He was completely self-taught. By studying such great masters as Rembrandt, Velasquez, Titian, and Michelangelo, Francis delved into their technique of stroke, composition, and blending shades.

The artist's gift, once hidden inside him, was fueled by his work as an interior decorator. Beginning inBacon was painting exclusively and living on money won at the roulette wheel. One of his first paintings was CrucifixionMurderme Collection, Londonwhich caught the attention of the public.