Study for self-portrait, 1976 Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon Study for self-portrait 1976 © Estate of Francis Bacon/DACS. Copyright Agency
Francis Bacon, one of the 20th century’s most important figurative painters, was openly gay at a time when few people were. Coming to painting late, and after several false starts, he settled on his expressive figurative imagery of popes, crucifixions and portraits after the Second World War. This intense and even tortured self-portrait was painted five years after his lover George Dyer had killed himself, and it conveys a deep unease through its brutal distortions.
Bacon often depicts motifs suggesting imprisonment. In this painting he is isolated and contained within a transparent structure reminiscent of the glass cage that the Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann was held in during his trial for war crimes in 1961. The horrors of the Second World War continued to haunt figurative art in the following decades. In his paintings of caged beings, Bacon conveys what he called ‘the brutality of fact’, where the distorted figures seem to be subject to, or contain the potential for, psychological and physical violence.