Francis Bacon’s Popes
(see Francis Bacon)
Extra special thank you to the official Francis Bacon website, http://www.francis-bacon.com/ – an absolutly stupendous resource full of great and fascinating information, as well as a place to enjoy such an enormous selection of artwork! Please check it out!
I always enjoyed drawing, but I didn’t really ever go to museums as a kid, or have art books lying around; my first real experiences with museum artwork weren’t really until college, buying art history textbooks, and seeing slides in class. Francis Bacon’s Study After Vélázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) was one of the first pieces that was taught in one of my earliest classes, that really caught my attention.
Compared to everything else we studied, there was such a darkness and horror portrayed in the image, which really spoke to my interests at that time and place in my life (and still does!). The screaming, anguished Pope could be getting electrocuted in an electric chair. Little did I know Bacon had created this enormous body of work, beginning to expore this theme as early as 1946, and continuing to work at it for twenty years.
Preparing for my Brush with Peril comic, it was exhilarating to realize how many of these paintings he’d produced (around 50 of them), and fascinating to learn that he destroyed his paintings whenever they didn’t meet his standards. These pieces remain one of my favorite series of museum art ever produced, even though Bacon in his later life confessed that he found the pieces silly and wished he’d never made them.
It looks like some of his pope paintings were specifically labeled a “screaming pope” series (nice little article about them at francisbacon.com), but not others (perhaps they’re simply “grumbling popes,” or “writhing-in-agony-but-not-screaming popes,” or “irritated popes,” or “unpleasant popes.”)
Below I’ve included anything that basically looked pope-like to me, for comparison/similarity purposes. Notice the use of confinement-looking geometrical forms enclosing the pope or figure, as well as curtains that could be bars of a prison or cage, and thrones that could be bedposts or electric chairs. Notice the palette changing over the years, from bluish purples and golds, to greens and purples, to reds and purples, to reds and beiges. Notice the occasional inclusion of slabs of meat, or owls, and one monkey. Many of these objects, and many compositions like these below, pop up in other non-Pope pieces by Bacon. Notice the dramatic shift in his style of portraying a disturbing monsterish or ghoulish human anatomy, into more distorted, more-imaginary-less-photo-referenced-looking swollen or skeletal figures and faces around 1957-58, and then by 1959, he goes all in with this “cartoonish” blobby fleshy change in look, accentuated with his new color palette.
Bacon didn’t paint from life, he prefered to work from photographs, movie stills, and he even studied dental text books to get those horrifying mouths. His Pope paintings were inspired by these two below images (the first, the piece he sought for his work to “triumph over;” the second, he called “a catalyst” for his work:
In 1989, it looks like Francis Bacon’s Figure With Meat (1954) left its home at the Art Institute of Chicago to go on tour for an exhibit in Gotham City:
I wrote a review of the exhibit here. Jack Nicholson, as the Joker in Tim Burton’s film, Batman (1989), breaks into The Fluggelheim Museum with a gaggle of thugs, who deface one work of art after another. As one of his thugs brandishes a knife to slash at Francis Bacon’s Figure With Meat (1954), the Joker blocks the lunge and says, “Whoa! I kinda like this one, Bob. Leave it.”
Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:
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You can read about how I came to receive this letter from Wayne Thiebaud, on my 
