Francis Bacon (1909.10-1992) was the most distinctive British modernist figurative painter of the 1940s. By figurative painter, I mean that he specialized in painting portraits or figures. The style of his early works was similar to that of late Cubism, and after 1932 he turned to Surrealism. During the period when abstract art ruled the British painting scene, Bacon's works rose to prominence and became the center of discussion. Bacon was born in Dublin, Ireland, and moved to London in the late 1920s. He was initially engaged in interior decoration and furniture design, and later specialized in painting. He was a self-taught painter under the tutelage of the Australian painter Roy de Meester, and his formal work began around 1944. After the Second World War, as a result of the long experience of suffering images of the people in the European war, some grotesque, spasmodic and horrific figures appeared in his works. They are either distorted mental personalities or single figures long imprisoned in gloomy cells. Most of the material comes from photographs, or borrows from a character shot in a film, or wittily mimics the image of an art master's work, and then alienates or tragedies it to highlight the character's mental breakdown. This one, "Exercise for a Portrait of Pope Innocent X," painted in 1953,

is a work borrowed from the Spanish painter Velázquez's portrait and distorted. Bacon painted a number of variations on the famous painting to deliberately make Pope Innocent X appear comical. In this painting, the Pope, seated in his golden chair, seems to be so lonely that he is stretching his neck out and screaming at the top of his lungs with his mouth wide open in order to vent his frustration. The artist himself says that he is trying to visualize a certain emotion. The hysterical nature of the feelings of Bacon's portrait is also shown by the flowing oil brushstrokes, i.e., by the addition of a waterfall-like screen. The Pope is fenced in front of the exhibition grounds. His rough handling confuses and disturbs the viewer. Especially his most representative oil painting, "Head Surrounded by Slices of Beef,"

And it makes people feel more confused and uneasy, and it is also an exercise based on the Pope of Velázquez. It was painted in 1954. The painting's symmetrical composition resembles an obscure ancient coat of arms. Two large, bloody pieces of flesh are placed to the left and right of the portrait. The viewer perceives in the colors of these two bloody slices of slaughtered beef the same bloody and horrible image of the sinister Pope in Velázquez's writing. In this painting, not only does it embody the kind of shouting that characterized the previous painting, but it is also filled with a sense of wrath and excitement. The loneliness, anger and even frenzy of the image are more intense. That is why the English critics, while recognizing his originality, also pointed out its unattractive nature. Bacon often utilized the image of Innocent X as a historical figure, not for some historical meaning, but purely out of the allegorical technique of mental disturbance. Exercise for a Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 152.5 × 118 cm, is in a private collection in New York (Corter Burden). Head Surrounded by Slices of Beef, 129 × 122 cm, is in the collection of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (gift of the Harold A. Fuchs Foundation).

Bacon's robust human bodies were modeled on his lover George

A man covered in blood lies on a bed. The clamped parts of a slaughtered animal. A man sitting in a chair smoking hard ...... When we are viewing Francis Bacon's work, it is as if we are walking through a looming building. A man with a twisted body curled up in his seat. A man holding a razor. ...... What is the significance of the images and events we see in the paintings?

What is the meaning symbolized about the images we see? The images in the paintings are so indifferent to the existence or situation of other people. When we look at these pictures, are we thinking the same thing? From a photograph of the artist himself, we find that the artist with his sleeves rolled up and arms exposed is almost as similar as the people he creates in his paintings. A woman creeps along the track like a child. According to the French magazine Connaissance des Arts of 1971, Francis Bacon can already be ranked among the ten most important painters of today.

A naked man sits in a chair with ragged newspapers piled at his feet. A man with his eyes staring straight through blank curtains, or a man in an undershirt reclining on a dirty red sofa ...... Bacon's work is full of people in motion, and their movements and postures are tinged with a feeling of pain. No one has ever painted like this before, and it is clear that such a visual experience has something to do with the real world in which we live, and what that has to do with it can be explored on the basis of the following facts:

1. Francis Bacon is the only British painter of this century who has had an international reputation and has been influential.

2. His style of painting is very consistent and has not changed much from the early days to the recent past. The artist has a very clear and definite world view.

3. Bacon had excellent painting skills and was a master. No one who recognizes the difficulties of portrait painting will fail to be impressed by the way Bacon handled and expressed himself in oils. Behind this rare perfection was his unparalleled perseverance and thorough knowledge of his chosen medium.

4. Criticism of Bacon's work is full of extraordinary essays. Well-known art critics such as David Sylvester, Michel Leiris and Lawrence Gowing have written excellent essays on the inner meaning of Bacon's work. By 'internal' I mean the meanings that are dominated by the conditions he sets in his works.

Bacon's works are based on the theme of the 'human body'. The human body is often depicted as twisted and distorted, yet the clothes and scenery around people are normal and undistorted. You only have to compare the raincoats and the bodies covered under them, the arms and umbrellas, the puffs of smoke and the mouths. According to the artist's own explanation, the distortion of the face and body is a treatment that evolved from the development of the special effect of "direct impact on the nervous system". He repeatedly refers to the nervous system of both the painter and the viewer, and claims that the nervous system is independent and not under the jurisdiction of the brain. As for the kind of realistic portraits that are appreciated by the brain, Bacon considered them illustrative and tedious.

-I always expect to do as much as I can to lay the facts directly and unadorned before the eyes of the world, and yet one often finds it horribly appalling when the truth is laid bare.

In order to achieve such a direct and nerve-wracking effect, Bacon relied heavily on the random creation of what he himself called 'the accident'. "In my experience, I feel that anything I have not loved has almost always come from the accidental results of the work."

The "accident" that occurs in his paintings is when he makes "unintentional spills" on the canvas, and his "intuition" develops images in those spills. The images developed are concrete to the nervous system, but at the same time they are imaginative.

-We always want something to be as realistic as possible, but at the same time we want it to be suggestive or mysterious rather than simply illustrative, and isn't that what art is all about?

For Bacon, the subject of 'mystery' was often the human body, and everything else in his paintings (chairs, shoes, blinds, light switches, newspapers) were just illustrations.

- What I want to do is distort the outside of things, but underneath the distortion present things as they really are.

We now explain this process by the observation that the body's appearance is subjected to accidental traces of 'unintentional spilling', and that this distorted image enters directly into the viewer's or painter's nervous system, which rediscovers the body's image under the addition.

In addition to the traces of accidental creation, there are sometimes deliberate traces on a body or on a mattress. Often what is easily seen is a bit of bodily fluid - like blood, semen or feces. When the event occurs, the stains on the surface of the canvas look like stains on the surface that actually touched the body.

About painting, Bacon often used the double-meaning words chance, rawness, and marks, so much so that even his own name seemed to become a byword for passion, an experience traced back to his nascent self-consciousness. In Bacon's world there is little choice and no way out. Nor was there a sense of time or a sense of change. When he began to paint, Bacon often drew on photographs to visualize. Photographs record a moment in time. In the process of painting, Bacon searches for the accident that turns a moment into eternity. In life, it is often the moments of substantial pain that can banish previous and subsequent moments. Pain may become the ideal to which Bacon passionately aspires. Yet the content of his paintings, including their appeal, has nothing to do with pain, and as always, passion is easily dispersed, while real meaning has to be found elsewhere.

Bacon's work is said to be an expression of the extreme pain and loneliness of the Western male mind. His forms are isolated in glass boxes, in ranges of pure color, in nameless rooms, or even just in themselves. Their isolation does not prevent them from being watched. (One group of triptychs reveals this sign, where each form is alone, yet visible to others.) Though the forms are alone, they have no privacy at all. The marks they carry, their pain, appear to be the result of self-mutilation. A very special kind of self-mutilation is not by the individual but by the race of mankind, for in this cosmic situation of isolation the distinction between individual and race becomes meaningless.

In fact, comparisons of Bacon's art with Goya or the early Sergey Eisenstein are inappropriate, but with Walt Disney's work, the art of Bacon's masters, the art of his masters, is not. In fact, Bacon's art is not aptly compared to Goya or the early Sergey Eisenstein, but it is a consistent follower of Walt Disney. Both men's detached behavior suggests something about our society, though in different ways to persuade the viewer to accept it. Disney makes detached behavior look funny and emotional, and therefore acceptable. Bacon's interpretation, as mentioned, is to make such behavior so bad that it is pointless to suggest rejection or hope for either. The surprising similarity in the work of the two men - the way the limbs are contorted, all the contours of the body, the correlation of background forms, the use of simple suits, the posture of the hands, the range of colors used, etc. - is that both men share the same complementary attitudes toward the same crises.

Disney's world also flaunts arrogant violence, often with predictable catastrophes of enormous proportions. The characters have human and nervous reactions, but they lack heart. If we only read and believe the subtitle's explanations - and nothing more - Disney's movies might be as shocking as Bacon's paintings.

It is generally accepted that Bacon's paintings are devoid of any critique, that they have nothing to say about any experience of actual loneliness, about physical or mental suffering or metaphysical skepticism, or about social relations, bureaucracy, industrial society, or the history of the twentieth century. To comment on these things, one must be conscious. Bacon's paintings show that 'detachment' evokes a desire for absolute form - unconsciously. Bacon's work is not an expression but a confirmation of this constant truth.