While Bacon thrived in social environments and routinely hosted wild parties in his tornado of a studio, he also valued alone time. During these quiet moments, he found that he could sit with his emotions, letting them percolate and strengthen before channeling them through paint. “I find that if I am on my own, I can allow the paint to dictate to me,” he told Sylvester. “That is the reason I like being alone—left with my own despair of being able to do anything at all on the canvas.”

Nicolas Poussin Sergei Eisenstein It was during periods of solitude that he fused his favorite reference materials with the feelings that churned in his own mind. The pain of the subjects inMassacre of the Innocents (ca. 1625–32), and of the screaming, bloodied woman in1925 film Battleship Potemkin, mingled with and calcified Bacon’s own agonies (including the deaths of ill-fated lovers and rejection by his own family). It was this potent mix that he expressed on canvas, especially in his harrowing paintings of screaming popes.

“I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs,” Bacon told art critic John Gruen, for the 1991 book The Artist Observed: 28 Interviews With Contemporary Artists. “The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.”



