“He quite liked stark, tragic stories because he thought of his life as quite a stark, tragic story,” Mr. Peppiatt said. “He looked for other people who’d also looked down into the darkness.”

Bataille’s writings helped open Bacon to his sexuality; Nietzsche gave him a path to existential meaning without religious conviction; and Aeschylus gave Bacon a grand way to conceive of his own personal tragedies, which included the death of his partner of about eight years, George Dyer, of a drug and alcohol overdose.

Aeschylus, in particular, had a special place in Bacon’s life. No writer, he believed, captured tragedy quite as he did. In 1985, he told an interviewer on British television that a phrase from the Greek playwright, “The reek of human blood smiles out at me,” evoked in him “the most exciting images.”

Bacon’s “Second Version of Triptych 1944,” from 1988 — a triptych of disembodied mouths and sets of ghoulish teeth that’s on show at the Pompidou — combined Bacon’s love for Aeschylus’ violent phrase with the sexual frankness of Bataille’s writings. Mr. Ottinger said this painting was, like so many of the works in the exhibition, an indirect investigation of Bacon’s personal demons: in this case, his sexuality and Dyer’s death .