Francis Bacon

FRANCIS BACON

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There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

BIOGRAPHY

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Francis Bacon was born on 28 October 1909 , Dublin, Ireland.At that time, all of Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom. He is said to be a descent from Sir Nicholas Bacon, elder half-brother of The 1st Viscount St Albans (better known to history as Sir Francis Bacon), the Elizabethan statesman, philosopher and essayist.

EARLY LIFE

The family moved house often, moving between Ireland and England several times, leading to a sense of displacement which remained with Francis throughout his life. Bacon was shy as a child, and enjoyed dressing up. This, and his effeminate manner, angered his father. A story emerged in 1992 of his father having had Francis horsewhipped by their grooms.

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Upbringing and influence

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Bacon did not become an artist through any traditional route: he didn’t attend art school, for example, or serve a conventional apprenticeship. In early professional life, he worked in interior design, but decided to abandon this and take up painting after seeing an exhibition of Picasso’s at Paul Rosenberg’s Paris gallery in the late 20s. Picasso’s representations of the body as bone-like, biomorphic structures revealed to Bacon the ‘possibilities of painting’. He later acknowledged Picasso as a key influence and reference point.

Fun Fact At a fancy-dress party at the Firth family home, Cavendish Hall in Suffolk, Francis dressed as a flapper with an Eton crop, beaded dress, lipstick, high heels, and a long cigarette holder. In 1926, the family moved back to Straffan Lodge. His sister recalled that Bacon made drawings of ladies with cloche hats and long cigarette holders.Later that year, Francis 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.

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POPES

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Bacon's series of Popes, largely quoting Velázquez's famous portrait Pope Innocent X are striking images which further develop motifs already found in his earlier works, like the "Study for Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion“. Many of Bacon's paintings are "inhabited" by reclining figures. The composition of especially the nude figures is influenced by the sculptural work of Michelangelo.

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The figures of the popes, pictorially isolated by partly curved parallel lines indicating psychological forces and symbolising inner energy like strength of feeling. Many of Bacon's paintings are "inhabited" by reclining figures. Single, or, as in triptychs, repeated with variations, they can be commented by symbolic indexes turning painted images to blueprints for moving images of the type of contemporary.

The screaming mouth The inspiration for the recurring motif of screaming mouths in many Bacons of the late 1940s and early 1950s was drawn from a number of sources, including medical text books and the works of Matthias Bacon saw the film in 1935, and viewed it frequently thereafter. He kept in his studio a photographic still of the scene, showing a close-up of the nurse's head screaming in panic and terror and with broken pince-nez spectacles hanging from her blood-stained face. He referred to the image throughout

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The Screaming Mouth

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The Crucifixion The imagery of the crucifixion weighs heavily in the work of Francis Bacon. Critic John Russell wrote that the crucifixion in Bacon's work is a "generic name for an environment in which bodily harm is done to one or more persons and one or more other persons gather to watch".

Bacon admitted that he saw the scene as "a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation". He believed the imagery of the crucifixion allowed him to examine "certain areas of human behavior" in a unique way, as the armature of the theme had been accumulated by so many old masters.

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Though he came to painting relatively late in life – he did not begin to paint seriously until his late 30s – crucifixion scenes can be found in his earliest works. In 1933, his patron Eric Hall commissioned a series of three paintings based on the subject.

DEATH

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While holidaying in Madrid in 1992, Bacon was admitted to the Handmaids of Maria, a private clinic, where he was cared for by Sister Mercedes. His chronic asthma, which had plagued him all his life, had developed into a more severe respiratory condition and he could not talk or breathe very well.

He died of a heart attack on 28 April 1992. He bequeathed his estate (then valued at £11 million) to his heir and sole legatee John Edwards; in 1998, at Edwards' request, Brian Clarke, a friend of Bacon and Edwards, was installed as sole executor of the estate by the High Court, following the Court's severing of all ties between Bacon's former gallery, Marlborough Fine Art, and his estate

LEGACY

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On 14 May 2008, the Triptych, 1976, sold at Sotheby's for €55.465 million ($86.28 million), then a record for the artist and the highest price paid for a postwar work of art at auction up to 2008. On 13 November 2013, Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold at Christie's New York for $142.4 million, surpassing both Triptych and 1976 in auctioned value, and more importantly claiming the record for highest auction price of a work of art at that time, a title previously held by the fourth version of Edvard Munch's Scream and now held by Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi.

Thank you!

This presentation was created by: Bill Papachristos George Balomenos Markella Notara Nikos Notaras

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Jason Konstantagkas

SOURCES

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/francis-bacon-682/who-isfrancis-bacon?fbclid=IwAR37MTxqSsDkMmzS7zdF2ovTbnBcObALTFdzhYdsCqwsQtLJf1ZCiRuqyw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon_(artist)?fbclid=IwAR16e Utb4i2DhEsyF9eXIPO4t6r5Dcnr97NwzcfSXybC6d-lS5sS0RVhJm8

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