フランシス・ベーコン

Francis Bacon reinvented himself as a painter in his late twenties, after years adrift in London's underground and continental Europe. His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, a work of such bleak power that it secured his reputation as one of the century's most important artists. Working with distorted, screaming figures isolated in geometric spaces—drawn from medical photographs of open mouths and Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin—Bacon created paintings that revealed anxiety at the core of human existence.