Bacon, Francis (1909-1992)

Irish painter. Self-taught, he practised abstract art, then developed a stark Expressionist style characterized by distorted, blurred figures enclosed in loosely defined space. He aimed to ‘bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly’. One of his best-known works is Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953; Museum of Modern Art, New York).

Bacon moved to London in 1925, began to paint in about 1930, and held his first show in London in 1949. He destroyed much of his early work. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (about 1944; Tate Gallery, London) is an early example of his mature style, which is often seen as a powerful expression of the existential anxiety and nihilism of 20th-century life.