The great majority of Francis Bacon’s paintings are of people. Their subjects range from his friends and lovers to famous western portrait paintings and images he found in books, films and magazines. But unlike most figure or portrait painters, Bacon did not want to create a close physical likeness. Instead he used radical distortions to convey a sense of the person as a living energy or as he put it ‘to trap this living fact alive’.

Bacon’s extreme treatment of the body, and his often repeated statements about the ‘brutality of fact’ have contributed to the widely-held idea that his visceral paintings are horrific and morbid, existential essays on the condition of man in the modern world. This alarmist tone stems from a belief in the spiritual or socially progressive ideals of Modernism; ideals that Bacon did not subscribe to. His vivid depiction of the flesh, blood and bone of the male body was often underpinned by an evident delight in homoerotic sexual violence; a fascination that exists well outside the moral compass of Modernism.

This display includes Bacon’s 1968 triptych Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants, which is on temporary loan to Tate by kind permission of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

This display has been devised by Toby Treves

BP British Art Displays 1500-2005