Ten-year project to detail every work the artist produced will be published in April on the anniversary of his death

More than 100 Francis Bacon paintings are to be revealed for the first time with the completion of a 10-year project to publish a catalogue of every work he made.

They include the first in one of his best known and provocative series of paintings, the Screaming Popes, a previously unknown work discovered buried in a private Italian collection.

The Francis Bacon estate has now completed the artist’s catalogue raisonné and will publish it next spring to coincide with the anniversary of his death in April 1992.

Bacon destroyed many of his paintings and only about half of the 584 that survive are accessible or in circulation.

“The stuff that has been written about Bacon, some good and much of it less good, is based on about a third of his work,” said the art historian Martin Harrison, who has spent the last decade attempting to track down every work.

“Irrespective of the care taken in documenting his extant oeuvre, the great revelation of the new catalogue raisonné will be that, for the first time, Bacon’s entire output can be seen and assessed. It will, we believe, have a profound effect on the perception of his paintings.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Detail from Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror, 1968. Photograph: © The Estate of Francis Bacon

Finding the first Screaming Pope was particularly exciting, Harrison said. The series was inspired by Bacon’s obsession with Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, painted in the 17th century. He reworked the theme in the 1960s and 70s, and the results are seen as some of the most potent expressions of postwar horror at what mankind is capable of.

The first Screaming Pope has until now been identified as Head VI from 1949, but Harrison said he had found an earlier work stored in a warehouse.

“It is not an amazingly great painting but it is amazingly important historically,” he said.

Bacon lived life to the extreme, and it has been convincingly argued that his best art stemmed from the sadomasochistic relationships he had with other men. The great love of his life was Peter Lacy, a former Battle of Britain pilot who was also sadistic, violent and a raging alcoholic.

The catalogue will reveal that there is less sex in Bacon’s surviving paintings than might be imagined. “There are only 11 paintings in his whole oeuvre where men are having sex and that is compared, for example, to 17 female nudes,” Harrison said.

The catalogue replaces one from Bacon’s mid-career, published in 1964 by the Tate’s director at the time, John Rothenstein, and its deputy keeper, Ronald Alley. It contains only 27 paintings in colour and was difficult to publish because Bacon was so difficult and uncooperative.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Detail from Study for Portrait of Van Gogh IV, 1957. Photograph: Photo © Tate, London © The Estate of Francis Bacon

“They had the singular difficulty of having Bacon alive, I didn’t suffer from that,” Harrison said.

The project involved many tipoffs and false trails, and took Harrison across Europe and to the US, Australia and Japan. “It has taken more than 10 years, so in terms of time it has been a huge undertaking and the last year has been more huge than it might be as I’ve had no sleep.

“I was always a kind of boring researcher person. Somewhere I have a notebook I kept when I was nine. I used to go into the Coventry and Warwickshire collections and study the nomenclature of Warwickshire placenames. That’s pretty nerdy. There is obviously an impulse in me to record arcane things.”

Bacon works attract some of the highest prices at auction. A triptych, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, set a world record in 2013 when it sold for £89.3m.

The Bacon we know, however, is based on a core of around 180 paintings. There are many more that hang in private collections, owned by people who have little interest in selling or lending.

“Many of the owners to this day are really private,” said Harrison. “I kind of got access because I’m doing the catalogue raisonné and they thought ‘oh there’s this weird, boring bloke coming.’”

Harrison said he was undeniably excited about being the first art historian to have set eyes on some of the Bacons. If he had to choose a favourite, he said, it would be the 1964 Landscape in Malabata, once owned by Roald Dahl, as it was the first one he saw as a student.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Detail from Landscape near Malabata, 1963. Photograph: © The Estate of Francis Bacon

“I didn’t understand it. I had never heard of Francis Bacon and I was absolutely riveted. I can remember to this day thinking he was a genius. I had never seen anything like and the colours just amazed me.”

Heni Publishing will release the catalogue on 28 April in five cloth-bound volumes, three with the paintings and two with an introduction and bibliography. Printed in Italy it will cost £1,000.