Francis Bacon-Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X

Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
Date: 1953
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 153 cm × 118 cm (60 in × 46 in)
Collection: Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa

This work is one of a series of over 45 variants of the Velázquez’s 'Portrait of Pope Innocent X' of 1650. Francis Bacon painted them throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. The piece  contains strong influences from art and photography. Bacon stated that he revisited the subject of Popes as "an excuse to use these colours, and you can't give ordinary clothes that purple colour without getting into a sort of false fauve manner" and that he was fascinated by the seemingly "isolated position" of the Pope in Velázquez’s portrait. This painting is commonly referred to as 'The Screaming Pope' and is considered to be Bacon’s masterpiece. It was described by Gilles Deleuze as an example of creative re-interpretation of the classical. Bacon never saw Velázquez’s original painting and so had to work from reproductions. He also used other photographic sources inspire his 1953 version. His inspiration to create these variations on a past work was likely Picasso as Bacon held him in very high regard; "Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint". Picasso had reinterpreted works by Grünewald, Delacroix, Manet, Gauguin and Velázquez himself.

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter  who became famous for his bold, raw, graphic style and distorted images of people. He specialised in abstract portraits and isolated figures with grotesquely distorted faces and twisted body parts. Margaret Thatcher once described him as "that man who paints those dreadful paintings". At 16 he was kicked out of his family and arrived in London. A year later a Picasso exhibition in Paris inspired him to take up painting although he didn't commit himself to it until his mid-30s. His breakthrough came in 1944 with his triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion which affirmed his reputation as "a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition". Some key features of his work include male heads isolated in rooms (1940s), screaming popes (early 1950s), animals and isolated figures trapped in glass or steel geometrical cages (mid to late 1950s) and modern variations of the crucifixion (early 1960s). From the mid-1960s to early 1970s Bacon mainly produced portraits of friends. His work then began to focus on portraits of his lover George Dyer. Following Dyer's suicide in 1971 Bacon became very depressed and his work became more personal and took on a morbid tone.

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• Figures in a Landscape
• Date: 1956
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions:150 x 107.5 cm
• Collection: Birmingham Museums Trust

Ivor Abrahams-The Conqueror Worm

The Conqueror Worm 

From E.A. Poe: Tales and Poems 

Date: 1976 

Medium: Screenprint on paper 

Dimensions: 257 x 175 mm 

Collection: Tate 

This piece is part of a collection of 20 prints on paper inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Abrahams was commissioned by New York City gallery owner Bernard Jacobson in late 1973 to illustrate a volume of selected tales and poems by Poe. The book was published as a fine press limited, signed, and numbered edition of 500 copies. Each contained sixteen illustrations and four loose prints. Abrahams had admired Poe's work since he was a teenager and created the prints in response to Poe's definition of art as "the reproduction of what the senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul". He worked form the three-volume Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe and illustrated stories or poems which he felt he could "put an image to".

The Conqueror Worm is a poem about human mortality and the inevitability of death. Abrahams captures this morbid theme through his use of colour and tone. Mottled antique yellowish brown tones are used on the ornate framing of the theatre which represents how decadence deteriorates over time and gives the piece an air of tragedy. Cold grey tones are layered to create the folds of curtains and the illusion of depth and connate with the theme of pessimism and death.

Ivor Abrahams

Ivor Abrahams is an English artist who specialises in printmaking and and sculpture. He was born in Wigan, Lancashire in 1935 and  studied at St Martin’s School of Art (1952-1953) and at Camberwell School of Art (1954-1957).

No title
From 15 Lithographs by Ivor Abrahams to Edmund Burke
Date: 1978
Medium: Lithograph on paper
Dimensions: 260 x 400 mm
Collection: Tate

The Valley of Unrest

From E.A. Poe: Tales and Poems

Date: 1976

Medium: Screenprint on paper

Dimensions: 246 x 200 mm

Collection: Tate

No title
From 15 Lithographs by Ivor Abrahams to Edmund Burke
Date: 1978
Medium: Lithograph on paper
Dimensions: 415 x 315 mm
Collection: Tate












Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ivor-abrahams-622