Francis Bacon (October 28, 1909 – April 28, 1992)
Study After Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
1953
Bacon is very hard to describe as an artist and a man. It can easily be said that he was extremely obsessive and you can tell this from his pieces, which often went through nearly endless editions (the painting above is the most famous piece of a group of over forty versions of Velázquez's famous painting of Pope Innocent X). His artworks macabre sense derives from the New Objectivity movement, but even surpasses the grotesqueness that the Weimar Republic's painters could ever achieve. And what is most glaring about Bacon's works is not the presence of death as a symbol, but the nearly constant visualization of suffering; thoughts on that suffering haunted me as a child when I first saw his works, and somehow remain more potent and material than any imagery or symbolism of death in other pieces.
