Art of the 20th Century

 

Art Styles in 20th century Art Map


 

Francis Bacon (1909-1992), arguably the preeminent British painter of the twentieth century, was also for forty years the most controversial. Bacon's art often appears deliberately disturbing. His subject was the human form. Bacon reinterpreted the physical construction of the body with a new and unsettling intensity. To him it was something to be taken apart by the artist's penetrating gaze and then put back together again on canvas. He forces us to see, perhaps for the first time, the separate shapes and stresses hidden in the familiar human figure.

Bacon's treatment of the face could be especially challenging. In his portraits, generally of people the artist knew well, the subjects are sometimes shown screaming. Even in repose the features shift and reshape themselves before our eyes, yet they never become unrecognizable despite the swirling paint.

Often called an Expressionist or even a Surrealist, Bacon himself strongly rejected both labels. He insisted that in its own way his work was close to the world we see every day, remaining true to what he called "the brutality of fact."

 

Although they are less renowned than his paintings of his intimate circle, Bacon frequently made portraits of himself. His series of self-portraits can be understood almost as a pictorial diary, but they show the same curious mixture of cold objectivity and intense immediacy as in his paintings of his friends. The method is, of course, the same as in the other portraits, dislocating the features by pulling them around the face's central axis. However great this distortion becomes, Bacon's subjects remain recognizable. Representation is pushed to that ambiguous moment when presence seems about to dissolve, but has not yet completely lost its distinguishing features.