Bacon, Francis
The British painter Francis Bacon was born in Dublin. In 1928 or 1929 he went to London where he worked as an interior decorator. He was self-taught as a painter; the small number of his surviving works from before 1944 show the influence of Picasso in their distorted, attenuated figures. This influence is also apparent in his earliest important painting, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944; Tate Gallery, London), a triptych depicting sinister, stunted creatures, both threatening and agonized, starkly modeled in gray against a piercing orange background. The impact this made when first exhibited in London in April 1945 should be understood not only in the light of contemporary events, but also in contrast to the apparent trend in British painting towards mellow romanticism, or a new humanism.
A Biographical Dictionary of Artists, © Andromeda 1995
