Bacon denied trying to shock his audience with the violence or terror of his pictures. His work is, nonetheless, both shocking and terrifying, particularly where he avoids depicting actual horror, but rather paints its effect, as in his series of screaming Popes.

        Bacon, a self-taught painter, derived his lurid vocabulary from shock combinations of newspaper images, particularly of the violence of war, photographs of deformed people and other taboo subjects. In the case of the screaming Popes, the famous image of the dying nurse with her eye shot out from Eisenstein's film, Battleship Potemkin, has been superimposed on that of Pope Innocent X in his portrait by the 17th Century Spanish artist, Velazquez.

        The Pope in Velazquez' portrait looks fairly calculating, if not sinister. Bacon depicts him in a surreal space encased in a transparent box (inspired perhaps by that in which the Nazi Adolf Eichmann was kept during his trial to protect him from his victims). Bacon is obsessed, like Goya, with Man's capacity for cruelty. In this picture the Pope looks depraved, later in the series he is screaming. Man's spiritual Father is in the grip of terror.

        Perversely, Bacon portrays his repulsive images with sumptuous colour and paint, often throwing it onto the canvas using his hands and debris from the studio floor.

[The Great Picture Trail, BBC, 1993]

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