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Bacon's original career plan, following leaving home at the age of 16, was to become an interior decorator and furniture designer. But he turned to painting, creating his early art in the cubist style. But by 1932 he had moved to a form of surrealism that was partly influenced by Pablo Picasso's works from 1925 to 1928. Two of Bacon's gouaches of this period are "Composition (Figure)" and "Composition (Figures)", both completed in 1933 and displayed at Bacon's first solo show, "Paintings by Francis Bacon" in 1934 at the Transition gallery in London.
The mid nineteen forties were the years when Bacon would create his masterpieces, "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion" (1944) and "Painting" (1946). From around 1945, Bacon became obsessed with the human figure and began to paint it, distorting its form horribly and placing it in strangely bizarre and revolting imagery. It symbolized anguish and a refusal to accept the common perception.
The 1950s saw Bacon approach the human figure more directly, working on images from photos by Eadweard Muybridge or from newspaper clippings. He would combine photographs of humans and animals in motion by Muybridge with borrowings from paintings from the recognised masters. A classic example is the series of paintings by Bacon that was inspired by Spanish painter Diego Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X, and included an inspiration from a close-up shot of the wounded nurse depicted in "The Battleship Potemkin", a film by Sergei Eisenstein. The result was named "Study after Velzquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X" (1953).
Throughout the major part of Bacon's career, the major theme of his paintings was isolation of man that led to anguish. This was generally depicted by a male figure in a dark, claustrophobic room or interior. The deformations used by Bacon betrayed every hint of tension. Bacon was also an improviser and employed unconventional and unique painting techniques, such as the use of rags, twirls of dust and his bare hands, apart from the paint and the brush.
Galleries and museums such as the Marlborough Gallery in New York and the Museum of Modern Art, New York conducted retrospective exhibitions of Bacon's work.
Francis Bacon died of asthma-induced heart failure on April 28, 1992 in Madrid.
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