For the opening of a 1977 show in Paris, so many people showed up that the police had to close off the street. While “nothing would induce me to buy one of Bacon’s paintings,” he wrote, “a representative collection that did not contain one would lack one of the most definite and articulate statements made by contemporary art.” In fact, curators and collectors were not initially eager to buy: how could you hang something so unpleasant on your wall? Bacon caught on in France faster than he did in England or the United States, but eventually he caught on everywhere. Yet the ganglia were interesting, Lewis found: “Bacon is one of the most powerful artists in Europe today.” Likewise, the critic of the Sunday Times. They told their readers that if they went they would see “a tardily evolved creature which had slithered out from below a large stone that had been in a noisome cellar for a century or two.” Wyndham Lewis described “shouting creatures in glass cases, . . .

The critics had a field day at this exhibition. Bacon included that picture in his first major one-man show, in 1949, in London. The mouth is open, screaming, and the teeth are a mess. In his “Head I” (1947-48), now in the Metropolitan Museum, in New York, we see a head sliced off just below the nose.

When Bacon saw Old Master paintings of the Crucifixion-he especially loved Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, with Jesus almost rotting on the Cross-they lined up in his mind with the meat and the screams.Īll of this went into Bacon’s work.

In his studio, he kept a still of the Odessa Steps massacre from Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”: an old woman, gashed in the face by one of the imperial soldiers, screams violently, her shattered pince-nez hanging from her eyes and blood coursing down her cheek. The moment that the mouth showed its insides most unashamedly, Bacon realized, was when it screamed.

Angels Fallen by Francis Smith