The Haunting Allure of Francis Bacon's Paintings

Figure with Meat (1954)

The pope howls between suspended sides of beef. It's a disturbing triptych of flesh – living form bracketed by raw, hanging carcasses. While the pope's purple robes blur into violent streaks, the meat is rendered with disturbing precision, its raw reds and yellows pulsing with greater vitality than the screaming figure at center. "We are all meat," Bacon declared, "the perishable meat of simple mortal beings." The suspended meat carcasses evoke both Rembrandt's "Slaughtered Ox" and the meat markets of London, transforming these inspirations into a meditation on mortality and the thin line between human dignity and animal flesh.

Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)

Papal authority dissolves into primal terror. The Pope, captured mid-howl, his face contorted in an expression that suggests both power and impotence, seems to melt within vertical streaks that evoke prison bars. "It was an homage to Velázquez," Bacon revealed, though he never saw the original in person. "I collected reproductions, postcards of that painting, it was truly an obsession." The purple robes blur and twist as if caught in violent motion, yet retain enough of their original grandeur to remind us precisely what's being desecrated. The face, with its gaping black void of a mouth, emerges through what appears to be a curtain of falling water or glass. "We scream at birth, when we are hurt, when we climax, when we die," Bacon observed. "It's an extreme expression of most living species."

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944)

Against a stark orange background that burns like nuclear afterglow, three writhing, mutant forms embody the raw terror of existence. Each panel presents a distorted figure existing between human and beast - elongated necks terminate in gaping, teeth-ringed maws; twisted limbs suggest both agony and metamorphosis. The leftmost figure's beak-like protrusion recalls the Furies of Greek mythology, while the central figure's bandaged, eyeless head screams into the void. The rightmost panel presents perhaps the most unsettling image – a howling form with a mouth that seems to consume its entire head, mounted on what suggests both executioner's block and altar. "I paint the human condition," Bacon once said, "man's awful consciousness that he will die, how he follows poor instincts in search of fun." Created near the end of World War II, these witnesses to horror embody the collective trauma of an age marked by unprecedented human brutality.

Painting (1946)

A grotesque figure, part Nazi officer, part butchered carcass, sits beneath an umbrella-like canopy. The sickly flesh tones seem to decompose before our eyes, while behind him hangs what appears to be sides of meat, creating a macabre throne of flesh. The geometric precision of the umbrella structure and cubic space frame stands in stark contrast to the liquefying figure below. A business suit, partially visible beneath the corruption of flesh, suggests the banality of evil. "My paintings were influenced by what I lived through," Bacon reflected, "my unhappy childhood, the violent episodes that damaged my sensibility. As a painter, I cook with my own meat."

Two Figures (1953)

Male figures locked in ambiguous embrace merge and separate against rumpled white sheets. What began as Bacon's study of Muybridge's wrestling photographs transforms into something far more psychologically complex. For Bacon, the mattress was a theater of existence: a space where one dreams, makes love, and ultimately dies. Their flesh, rendered in ghostly pale tones, contrasts with the deep void of the background and the stark geometric frame of the bed. "Painting is an infinitely physical act," Bacon observed. "When I paint men making love, it gives me a lot of pleasure. It's instinctual, and my instinct drives me to paint it." The brushwork alternates between precise architectural lines and violent smears, reflecting the painting's central tension - are we witnessing an act of violence or passion, wrestling or embrace?

Triptych August 1972

 A ghost story told in three acts. Following his lover George Dyer's suicide hours before Bacon's career-defining retrospective, the artist creates a spectral narrative of dissolution. In the left panel, a dark mass of flesh leaks onto a beach, the shadow more substantial than the figure casting it. The central panel captures Dyer's form wrestling with his own shadow on a threshold, caught between existence and non-existence. The right panel presents the most devastating image - a figure hunched over, possibly on a toilet, a direct reference to how Dyer was found. "An artist works with his life," Bacon reflected. "When someone I loved has died, those influences will of course come through in the painting." Small touches of pink and blue suggest terrible tenderness amid the mortuary atmosphere, while geometric frames both define and dissolve the domestic settings.

Study for Portrait (1952)

The businessman becomes the beast. Within a transparent geometric cage, a suited figure sits caught in quiet existential collapse. Unlike the violent contortions of Bacon's religious figures, this transformation is more insidious - features sliding off like wax under heat, the suit becoming a second skin failing to contain the horror beneath. "We are all in boxes, rooms, offices, walled gardens, homes— those are all boxes," Bacon observed of his recurring cage motifs. The precise architectural lines of the cage structure contrast with the dissolving form within, while dark cavity-like shadows suggest both a scream and a yawn - as if horror and banality have become indistinguishable.