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Francis Bacon

1909–1992 · British · School of London

ESTABLISHED MARKET
—Auction record
1Realized lots on file

Biography

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin on 28 October 1909 to English parents and moved to London in 1925, subsequently travelling to Berlin and Paris before establishing himself as one of the most consequential figurative painters of the twentieth century. He received no formal art-school training, and his self-directed development produced a body of work in oil on canvas that redefined the possibilities of the human figure in postwar painting. He died in Madrid on 28 April 1992.

The pivotal moment in Bacon's public emergence came in 1945, when Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) — three contorted, screaming forms rendered in oil and pastel on hardboard, now held at Tate, London — announced a mature language of bodily distortion and existential violence that would define his practice for decades. The crucifixion motif had already appeared in Crucifixion (1933), purchased by Sir Michael Sadler and recognised as one of Bacon's first genuinely original paintings. That preoccupation deepened into monumental form with Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962), held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York — his first large-scale triptych, establishing the architecturally organised, three-panel structure central to his mature work. Study for a Portrait (1952), now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, marks a crucial stage in his development of the isolated-head painting during the early 1950s. As late as 1988, Bacon returned to his own foundational imagery in Second Version of Triptych 1944, held at Tate, London, demonstrating his sustained practice of revisiting earlier work and transforming autobiographical and art-historical memory into new painting.

Bacon's exhibition history spans the major institutions of the postwar era. A solo presentation at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1962 travelled to Kunsthalle Mannheim, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna in Turin, Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, followed by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1963 and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964. A landmark solo at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, in 1971 cemented his standing in Europe. Subsequent retrospectives brought his work to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington in 1989, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1990, and a centenary retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2009. He represented Britain alongside other artists at the XXVII Venice Biennale in 1954. More recently, solo exhibitions have been held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2022, and a major presentation, Francis Bacon: Présence humaine, opened at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny, in 2025. His work entered collections across six continents, from Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London and the Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, MoMA in New York, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and institutions in Tokyo, Seoul, Tehran, Johannesburg, and beyond. The authoritative reference for his painted oeuvre is the five-volume Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné (2016), published by the Estate of Francis Bacon under the direction of Martin Harrison and covering his complete output from 1929 to 1992.

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Related artists

Frank AuerbachHenry MoorePhilip de LászlóRachel WhitereadDamien HirstIan Davenport

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