Francis Bacon
Study for Portrait V, 1953Oil on canvas
60 1/8 x 46 1/8 in. (152.7 x 117.1 cm.)
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His early years in London and Dublin during World War I and the Irish Home Rule movement imbued Francis Bacon with a lifelong awareness of human suffering and the violence of everyday life. Following World War II, as painters were increasingly drawn to an art of abstraction, Bacon boldly conveyed a sense of postwar existential despair though his distortion of the human figure.
"Study for Portrait V" is the fifth of eight variations painted in 1953. It began as a portrait study of art critic David Sylvester and evolved into a satirical reinterpretation of Diego Velasquez's "Portrait of Pope Innocent X" (1650) as a grotesque, godless being. The menacing grimace and rubbed-out eyes convey a sardonic, soulless creature more indicative of the "innocent" pope's corrupt nature. Gold paint strokes suggest three-dimensional space and define a throne that entraps the figure as he floats in a dark void. Conceived as a shifting sequence of images, Bacon's serial format was influenced by Eadweard Muybridge's nineteenth-century photographic studies of figures in motion. Related canvases from 1951 present a similar papal figure emitting an anguished scream that intensifies even more the sense of terror, the absence of God, and the violence of human existence conveyed in "Study for Portrait V." Ê Adapted from text by Colette Crossman. |