The Horrifying Paintings of Francis Bacon

Men­tion Fran­cis Bacon, and you some­times have to clar­i­fy which one you mean: the twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry painter, or the sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher? Despite how much time sep­a­rat­ed their lives, the two men aren’t with­out their con­nec­tions. One may actu­al­ly have been a descen­dant of the oth­er, if you cred­it the artist’s father’s claim of rela­tion to the Eliz­a­bethan intel­lec­tu­al’s half-broth­er. Bet­ter doc­u­ment­ed is how the more recent Fran­cis Bacon made a con­nec­tion to the time of the more dis­tant one, by paint­ing his own ver­sions of Diego Velázquez’s Por­trait of Inno­cent X. We refer, of course, to his “scream­ing popes,” the sub­ject of the new Hochela­ga video above.

As Hochela­ga cre­ator Tom­mie Trelawny puts it, “no image cap­tured his imag­i­na­tion more” than Velázquez’s depic­tion of Pope Inno­cent X, which is “con­sid­ered to be one of the finest works in West­ern art.”

Bacon’s ver­sion from 1953, after he’d more than estab­lished him­self in the Eng­lish art scene, is “a ter­ri­ble and fright­en­ing inver­sion of the orig­i­nal. The Pope screams as if elec­tro­cut­ed in his gold­en throne. Vio­lent brush­strokes sweep across the can­vas like bars of a cage, strip­ping away all sense of grandeur and leav­ing only bru­tal­i­ty and pain.” In many ways, this har­row­ing image came as the nat­ur­al meet­ing of exist­ing cur­rents in Bacon’s work, which had already drawn from the his­to­ry of Chris­t­ian art and employed a vari­ety of anguished, iso­lat­ed fig­ures.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Por­trait of Pope Inno­cent X inspired all man­ner of con­tro­ver­sy. The artist him­self denied all inter­pre­ta­tions of its sup­posed impli­ca­tions, insist­ing that “recre­at­ing this papal por­trait was sim­ply an aes­thet­ic choice: art for the sake of art.” In any case, he fol­lowed it up with about 50 more scream­ing popes, each of which “embod­ies a dif­fer­ent facet of human dark­ness.” These and the many oth­er works of art Bacon cre­at­ed pro­lif­i­cal­ly until his death in 1992 reflect what seems to have been his own trou­bled soul and per­pet­u­al­ly dis­or­dered life. His style changed over the decades, becom­ing some­what soft­er and less aggres­sive­ly dis­turb­ing, sug­gest­ing that his demons may have gone into at least par­tial retreat. But could any­one capa­ble of paint­ing the scream­ing popes ever tru­ly have lost touch with the abyss?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Bril­liant­ly Night­mar­ish Art & Trou­bled Life of Painter Fran­cis Bacon

Fran­cis Bacon on The South Bank Show: A Sin­gu­lar Pro­file of the Sin­gu­lar Painter

William Bur­roughs Meets Fran­cis Bacon: See Nev­er-Broad­cast Footage (1982)

The “Dark Relics” of Chris­tian­i­ty: Pre­served Skulls, Blood & Oth­er Grim Arti­facts

The Scream Explained: What’s Real­ly Hap­pen­ing in Edvard Munch’s World-Famous Paint­ing

When There Were Three Popes at Once: An Ani­mat­ed Video Drawn in the Style of Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­script

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.