That reputation was to be reinforced time and again by the screaming popes, butchered carcasses and distorted portraits that Mr. Bacon turned out over the next four and a half decades. Critics noted his links with, among other things, the Surrealist art of Picasso and with German Expressionism. Detractors -- and there were always many of them, especially in the United States, where he seemed so out of step with the Abstract Expressionists of his generation -- dismissed his art as sensationalistic and slick. Museums around the world bought his work, but private collectors were often loath to decorate their homes with it. The former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once called him "that man who paints those dreadful pictures."

But Mr. Bacon maintained that he was simply a realist and did not aim to shock. "You can't be more horrific than life itself," he was fond of saying.

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Francis Bacon (original) (raw)


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