Modern & Postwar Artists

Francis Bacon

1909 - 1992

Francis Bacon, one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century, remained devoted to figuration and portraiture throughout his career.

In his art, modernity and tradition converge. His ectoplasmic figures and faces strain like savage forces of nature against shallow fields of intense color and the sketchy armatures that bind them back to the picture plane. In his gut-wrenching serialization of the human body and its sensations, he showed himself to be the unflinching witness of the hysterical reality of the body and the primal fear of those who inhabit it.