Francis Bacon

11 September 2008 - 4 January 2009

Explore the exhibition

Room 3: Apprehension

Man with Dog 1953
Oil on canvas
1520 x 1170 mm
© The Estate of Francis Bacon/DACS 2008
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York enlarge

Implicit throughout Bacon's work of the mid 1950s is a sense of dread pervading everyday life. Not only a result of Cold War anxiety, this seems to have reflected a sense of menace at a personal level emanating from Bacon's chaotic affair with Peter Lacy (who was prone to drunken violence) and the wider pressures associated with the continuing illegality of homosexuality. The Man in Blue series captures this atmosphere, concentrating on a single anonymous male figure in a dark suit sitting at a table or bar counter on a deep blue-black ground. Within their simple painted frames, these awkwardly posed figures appear pathetically isolated.

Bacon's interest in situations that combine banality with acute apprehension was also evident in other works. From figures of anxious authority, his popes took on malevolent attributes and physical distortions that were directly echoed in the paintings of animals, whose actions are also both sinister and undignified. Some of these images derived from Bacon's close scrutiny of the sequential photographs of animals and humans taken by Eadweard Muybridge, which he called 'a dictionary' of the body in motion.