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Father figure, drag queen or distillation of Nazi iconography? New Phaidon Focus book reveals the theories behind
Francis Bacon's obsessive reworking of the papal theme in his most famous Velasquez-inspired paintings
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Diego Velazquez Pope Innocent X 1650. Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pop Innocent X 1953 © The Estate of Francis
Bacon. All rights reserved.
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Follow @Phaidon Kiefer's studio as part of a sneak preview from a Phaidon Focus Francis Bacon
book we're publishing on the acclaimed German artist. Today our
RELATED Phaidon Focus is on a series of Francis Bacon's most famous Hardback | English
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paintings inspired by Velasquez's Pope Innocent X portrait. Scholars
have pored over the paintings and the possible inspirations behind
them ever since Bacon painted them in the 1950s. Look Inside

Bacon worked on his pope paintings, variations on Velázquez’s

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magnificent portrait of Pope Innocent X, for over twenty years. He
was already exploring the idea while in the South of France in late
1946. The first surviving version (Head VI) dates from late 1949, and
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he finally stopped in the mid-1960s. Subsequently, Bacon announced
that he thought the works ‘silly’ and wished he had never done them.
He acquired endless reproductions of the Velázquez painting from
books, but famously did not see the original when he visited Rome in
late 1954.
Clearly Bacon was not just producing homages to a picture he loved.
Artists have always made copies as creative exercises, and Bacon
may have been particularly inspired by the example of Vincent van

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The truth behind Francis Bacon's 'screaming' popes | Art | Agenda | Phaidon http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2013/february/08/the-truth-behin...

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Gogh (1853–1890), who made many transformations of pictures that
he especially admired by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), Jean-
Print this page François Millet (1814–1875) and others. Bacon’s popes depart even
further from their source, often replacing the pontiff’s head with the
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equally recognisable screaming face of the wounded nurse mown
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down by the soldiers’ gunfire in the Odessa steps sequence of
Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin.
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A·A David Smith Robert Rauschenberg

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Jackson Pollock Jasper Johns

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Study after Velazquez 1950 © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved
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self-assurance projected by Velázquez. The screaming mouth, Show Media

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capsule of the human individual’, to cite the evocative phrase used by
the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872),
one of Bacon’s favourite books.

The papal theme may have had a more contemporary resonance for
Bacon, given that he embarked on his variations in 1946 immediately
after the completion of Painting, with its dense references to Nazi
iconography. He may have been attracted to the Velázquez picture
as an iconic distillation of power, which made it such a vivid precursor

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The truth behind Francis Bacon's 'screaming' popes | Art | Agenda | Phaidon http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2013/february/08/the-truth-behin...

to Fascist propaganda photography. In later works in the series,

Bacon inserted references to photographs of the then pontiff, Pope
Pius XII, a controversial figure who was thought by some to have
appeased the Nazis. A photograph of Pius on his throne, being
carried from St Peter’s, appears in one of Sam Hunter’s 1950 studio
montages, and was clearly the basis for some of the subsequent
pope pictures.

Pope 1 - Study after Pope Innocent X by Velazquez 1951 © The Estate of Francis Bacon.
All rights reserved

Bacon’s obsessive reworking of the papal theme suggests that it may

have possessed further significance and perhaps psychological
charge for the artist in relation to his sexuality. It has been remarked
that the Pope in official garb is in a sense the ultimate drag queen, or
less literally that depictions of the Holy Father, known in Italy as ‘il
Papa’, may encapsulate Bacon’s traumatic feelings about his own
father. The latter was a conventional, inflexible military man to whom
the teenage Bacon had felt sexually attracted, as he recalled many
years later, but who brutally admonished and rejected him when he
discovered his son’s homosexual inclinations. Such speculations
about the possible ‘subconscious’ content of the pope pictures
involve perhaps a rather crude application of the methods of
Freudian psychoanalysis. Once again it is neither altogether possible
nor helpful to pin Bacon down.

The Phaidon Focus series is designed as a lively, authorititive and

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The truth behind Francis Bacon's 'screaming' popes | Art | Agenda | Phaidon http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2013/february/08/the-truth-behin...

accessible introduction to the work of the artists featured in the

(initial) six-strong series (Kim, the editor, is already hard at work on
the next instalment). As the title suggests, each features special
Focus sections that explore specific and important themes, series,
pieces or events in each artist's career, so whether you're new to the
artist or you already know a bit you'll come away enlightened and, we
hope, nourished. Take a look at the series in the store.

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7 Comments Sort by Oldest

Annie Plumb
he the Pope day.
Like · Reply · Feb 11, 2013 7:35am

Carolina Vásquez Araya

Este artículo cuenta la historia detrás del retrato de Inocencio X
pintado por Francis Bacon. Fascinante obsesión la de Bacon por
más de 20 años.
Like · Reply · Apr 2, 2013 9:34am

Antony George
Screaming is the only possible silence...
Like · Reply · May 26, 2013 6:35pm

Penelope Dallis ·
Owner/Creative Director at Penelope Dallis Gallerie
About Nazi and fathers.
Like · Reply · 1 · Sep 18, 2013 3:07am

Allan Porto
nice
Like · Reply · Feb 26, 2014 1:36pm

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