Francis Bacon
English, born Ireland, 1909–1992
Figure with Meat
INV-4884
Francis Bacon
English, born Ireland, 1909–19921954
Figure with Meat
Francis Bacon English, born Ireland, 1909–1992 →contemporarypaintingmodern and contemporary art
Date
1954
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
Without frame: 129.9 × 121.9 cm (51 3/16 × 48 in.); 129.9 × 122 cm (51 1/8 × 48 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Harriott A. Fox Fund
Permeated by anguished visions of humanity, Francis Bacon’s paintings embody the existential ethos of the postwar era. In his powerful, nihilistic works, tormented and deformed figures become players in dark, unresolved dramas. Bacon often referred in his paintings to the history of art, interpreting borrowed images through his own bleak mentality. Figure with Meat is part of a now-famous series he devoted to Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (c. 1650; Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome). Here he transformed the Spanish Baroque artist’s iconic portrayal of papal authority into a nightmarish image, in which the blurred figure of the pope, seen as if through a veil, seems trapped in a glass-box torture chamber, his mouth open in a silent scream. Instead of the noble drapery that frames Velázquez’s pope, Bacon is flanked by two sides of beef, quoting the work of seventeenth-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn and twentieth-century Russian artist Chaim Soutine, both of whom painted brutal and haunting images of raw meat. Framed by the carcass, Bacon’s pope can be seen alternately as a depraved butcher, or as much a victim as the slaughtered animal hanging behind him.
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