Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
With a stiff upper lip, Britain survived the Blitz, World War II, and the loss of hundreds of
thousands of men—but at war's end, the bottled-up horror came rushing out. Bacon's 1945
exhibition, opening just after Holocaust details began surfacing, stunned London with its
unmitigated ugliness.
His deformed half-humans/half-animals—caged in a claustrophobic room, with twis-
ted hunk-of-meat bodies and quadriplegic, smudged-mouth helplessness—can do nothing
but scream in anguish and frustration. The scream becomes a blur, as though it goes on
forever.
Bacon, largely self-taught, uses “traditional” figurativism, painting somewhat recog-
nizable people and things. His subjects express the existential human predicament of be-
ing caught in a world not of your making, isolated and helpless to change it.
