Do you love Francis Bacon, artist, as much as we do? Create your own tribute to Francis Bacon with Francis Bacon prints from which to choose. Vintage art like Francis Bacon prints make for unique and thoughtful gifts as well as exquisite and cultured home decor.
Sotheby's virtual auction sold one of his tryptychs June 29, 2020, for $84m!
An Irish-born (28 October, 1909-28 April, 1993) British figurative painter known for his bold, grotesque, emotionally charged and raw imagery, His painterly abstracted figures are typically isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages, set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. He drifted as a highly complex bon vivant, homosexual, gambler and interior decorator and designer of furniture, rugs and bathroom tiles. He later admitted 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 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition.
Bacon was impressed by Goya, African landscapes and wildlife, and took photographs in Kruger National Park. On his return journey he spent a few days in Cairo, and wrote to Erica Brausen of his intent to visit Karnak and Luxor, and then travel via Alexandria to Marseilles. The visit confirmed his belief in the supremacy of Egyptian art, embodied by the Sphinx. He returned in early 1951.
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 1930s Picasso-informed Furies, moving on to the 1940s male heads isolated in rooms or geometric structures, the 1950s screaming popes, and the mid-to-late 1950s animals and lone figures, the 1960s portraits of friends, the nihilistic 1970s self-portraits, and the cooler more technical 1980s late works.
Francis Bacon was a member of a disparate group of Artists, termed collectively as the School of London in 1976. What their work shared in common was the central role granted to the human figure in a city recovering from the devastation of war and the subsequent reconstruction.
