Francis Bacon

Bacon borrowed heavily from art history, using it almost like a musician samples earlier songs. A lot of his paintings draw directly from earlier works. His series based on Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X mixes that classical structure with emotional chaos. When he paints screaming mouths, the influence of Munch’s The Scream is clear. In other works, he adds elements like hanging sides of beef, which echo Rembrandt’s painting The Slaughtered Ox. You could almost describe the mix as Velázquez plus Rembrandt plus Munch equals Bacon.

One of the unique aspects of his process was how he painted. He worked on the reverse side of the canvas—the raw, unprimed sid e—which absorbed the paint differently. Bacon called it “the wrong side.” It made the paint soak into the surface in unpredictable ways, giving the paintings a rough, unstable look. That technique added to the atmosphere of decay and emotional stress in his work.

Even though some critics were unsure about where Bacon fit in art movements like Surrealism, his work has a strong link to those ideas. He reworked earlier imagery with an intensity that focused on human suffering, distortion, and the instability of identity. His place in 20th-century art connects him not only to Surrealists but also to painters like Lucian Freud, who were also interested in the raw, often uncomfortable sides of being human.

Francis Bacon once explained that he started painting on the reverse side of the canvas simply because he ran out of prepared ones. Instead of stopping, he flipped a canvas over and worked on the raw, unprimed side. He liked how the oil paint soaked into the surface—it created a mark that felt both permanent and fragile. That experience stuck with him, and he kept painting that way.

But using the raw side of the canvas has caused problems over time. Most painters use gesso, a white primer, to seal the canvas and protect it from the oils in the paint. Without that barrier, oil paint reacts directly with the fibers of the fabric—usually cotton or linen—which causes it to break down. The paint soaks in, and the material starts to rot. That’s why many of Bacon’s paintings today are hard to preserve. Conservators struggle with how to stop the deterioration without changing the look of the original work.

Bacon was part of a broader movement in the early to mid-20th century where artists were testing the limits of materials. He didn’t follow traditional techniques. His use of color shows this clearly. Many of his colors seem to come straight from the tube—highly saturated and not blended much. This is very different from Impressionist painters, who usually worked with subtle relationships between warm and cool colors to create depth and light. Bacon didn’t aim for that kind of optical realism. His color choices were emotional and intense, more in line with German Expressionists like Edvard Munch or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. These artists also used bright, flat color to express emotion instead of depict real-world scenes.

Bacon’s paint surface often shifts between thin washes and heavy areas of thick paint, known as impasto. But one of the more distinctive features of his work is how he combines smeared or distorted forms with sharp, geometric lines. In his Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, for example, Bacon uses long vertical smears to blur the face and robes. He surrounds the figure with angular, almost diagram-like lines—yellow arrows and shapes that seem to float around the throne. These lines suggest motion or energy. Some of them resemble perspective guides or technical drawings, which could reflect his early background in design and interior architecture.

These lines appear in other paintings too. They don’t follow traditional shading or depth systems; instead, they act almost like frames or containers that trap the figure inside the space of the painting. Sometimes they feel like cages or spotlights, heightening the sense of isolation.