The twentieth century produced few artists as visceral, uncompromising, and psychologically penetrating as Francis Bacon. Born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents, Bacon’s early life was marked by displacement, the looming shadow of civil unrest in Ireland, and a fraught relationship with a tyrannical father who could not abide his son’s emerging homosexuality. These formative years, characterized by a sense of exile and the chronic ailment of severe asthma, instilled in Bacon a profound awareness of the fragility of the human body and the omnipresence of violence. He drifted through the bohemian underbellies of London, Berlin, and Paris during the interwar years, absorbing the excesses of the era and the creeping dread of a continent on the brink of catastrophe. It was in Paris, upon seeing an exhibition of Picasso, that Bacon decided that art was his vocation, though he would destroy much of his early work in a pursuit of a singular, devastating aesthetic.
Bacon emerged as a dominant force in the post-war art world, rejecting the popular trend toward total abstraction in favor of a new, horrifyingly raw figuration. His paintings—often featuring screaming popes, twisted carcasses, and distorted portraits of friends—were not intended to tell a story but to assault the nervous system directly. He sought to trap the "fact" of the subject, peeling away the veneer of civilization to reveal the animalistic nature of humanity. His life was as chaotic as his canvases, marked by heavy drinking, gambling, and intense, often tragic relationships, most notably with George Dyer, whose suicide on the eve of Bacon's major retrospective in Paris haunted the artist’s later work. Bacon’s philosophy was one of "exhilarated despair," a belief that in a godless universe, the only purpose was to live intensely and to create images that unlocked the valves of feeling.
His legacy is that of a painter who refused to look away from the horror of existence. While his contemporaries sought purity in minimalism or irony in pop art, Bacon looked at the human meat and saw beauty in the decay and violence. He challenged the viewer to confront their own mortality, turning the act of painting into a tightrope walk between chance and control. His work remains a testament to the power of the image to bypass the brain and hit the gut, proving that even in the modern age, the human figure remains the most potent vessel for expressing the tragedy and ecstasy of life.
50 Popular Quotes from Francis Bacon
The Nervous System and the Violence of Paint
"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."
This statement serves as a manifesto for Bacon's entire artistic output, suggesting that clarity is the enemy of profound art. He believed that if a painting explains itself too readily, it loses its power to captivate the viewer's imagination and subconscious. By deepening the mystery, the artist forces the audience to engage with the work on a primal level, seeking answers that the canvas refuses to provide. It is in this space of ambiguity and confusion that the true emotional resonance of the artwork lives.
"I want to hit the nervous system and the emotions."
Bacon was not interested in intellectualizing art or creating narratives that required deciphering through logic. His goal was an immediate, visceral impact that bypassed the cognitive brain and struck the viewer's sensory receptors directly. This approach aligns with his desire to create images that feel like physical blows or shocks. It emphasizes the physiological reaction to visual stimuli over the contemplative appreciation of aesthetics.
"Texture is not an aesthetic consideration, it is a weapon."
For many artists, texture is a way to create depth or realism, but for Bacon, the materiality of the paint was a tool of aggression. He used thick impasto, sand, and dust to create surfaces that felt raw and abrasive, mirroring the psychological intensity of his subjects. The texture acts as a disruption, preventing the eye from sliding easily over the surface and forcing a confrontation with the material reality of the image. It transforms the painting from a window into a world into an object that asserts its own violent presence.
"I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail leaving its trail of the human presence."
This evocative metaphor captures Bacon's desire to record the essence of life rather than a mere likeness. He wanted the paint to embody the sticky, messy, and transient nature of human existence, much like the slime trail of a snail. It suggests that art should be a residue of life, a physical evidence of existence that remains after the subject has moved on. The quote highlights his obsession with the organic and the biological aspects of humanity.
"We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream, and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death."
Here, Bacon connects the primal trauma of birth with the overarching existential dread that defines the human condition. The scream is the fundamental reaction to the brutality of existence, a sound that echoes throughout his most famous paintings of popes and furies. Love is depicted not as a salvation, but as a flimsy barrier, a temporary distraction from the inevitable terror of mortality. It is a profoundly nihilistic yet poetic view of human emotional attachments.
"The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness."
Bacon demystifies the act of creation by breaking it down into these volatile components, rejecting the idea of pure inspiration. He acknowledges that while skill and culture provide the foundation, it is the "feverishness"—a state of heightened, almost manic energy—that drives the work. This fever allows the artist to transcend their training and access something deeper and more dangerous. It portrays the studio not as a place of quiet reflection, but as a crucible of intense psychological pressure.
"I believe in a deeply ordered chaos."
This paradox lies at the heart of Bacon's compositional style, where wild, gestural brushstrokes are often contained within geometric cages or pristine backgrounds. He recognized that for the chaos of the paint to register effectively, it needed a structure to push against. Without order, the chaos becomes messy and unintelligible; with order, the chaos becomes a focused force. This reflects his worldview where the randomness of life is framed by the rigid inevitability of death.
"Real imagination is technical imagination."
Bacon argues that imagination is not just about dreaming up fantastic subjects, but about reinventing the technique of painting itself. To imagine a new image, one must imagine a new way of applying paint to canvas to bring that image into reality. It grounds the concept of creativity in the physical act of making, rather than in abstract thought. This perspective elevates the craft of painting to the same level as the conceptual vision.
"Painting is the pattern of one's own nervous system being projected on canvas."
He viewed his art as a direct transfer of his internal biological and psychological state onto the external world. The canvas becomes a mirror not of the face, but of the neural pathways and emotional shocks of the artist. This implies that every painting is, in essence, a self-portrait of the artist's sensory experience. It erases the boundary between the creator and the creation.
"I want to do a very specific thing, and the only way I can do it is by not doing it."
This quote speaks to the role of the accidental and the non-rational in his workflow. Bacon found that trying too hard to illustrate a specific image often killed its vitality. By letting go of conscious control—"not doing it"—he allowed the paint to settle into forms that were more accurate to his vision than his conscious mind could devise. It is a surrender to the medium to achieve a higher truth.
The Flesh, Meat, and Mortality
"We are meat, we are potential carcasses."
This is perhaps Bacon's most famous philosophical assertion, stripping humanity of its spiritual pretensions and reducing it to biology. When he looked at a person, he saw the vulnerability of the flesh and the inevitability of decay, much like a butcher views an animal. This perspective was not meant to be derogatory, but rather a factual observation of our material nature. It connects human suffering to the universal suffering of all living creatures.
"If I go into a butcher shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal."
Bacon felt a profound kinship with animals led to slaughter, viewing the distinction between human and animal as fundamentally arbitrary. This quote underscores his sense of living on borrowed time and the randomness of survival. It reflects the trauma of living through two world wars, where human life was treated with the same disregard as livestock. It is a statement of empathy derived from horror.
"Flesh and meat are life! If I paint red meat as I paint bodies it is just because I find it very beautiful."
Contrary to those who found his meat paintings repulsive, Bacon found a rich, vibrant beauty in the colors and textures of raw flesh. He saw meat not as dead matter, but as the very stuff of life, vibrant and essential. This aesthetic appreciation of gore challenges conventional notions of beauty in art. It demands that the viewer look past the macabre association to see the vitality of the color and form.
"I have always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion."
Bacon linked the religious iconography of the Crucifixion not to divinity, but to the physical act of butchery. He stripped the cross of its theological redemption and presented it as a site of supreme bodily trauma. This association elevates the slaughter of animals to a tragic, quasi-religious event while simultaneously bringing the divine down to the level of the abattoir. It suggests that pain is the universal connector.
"Man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason."
This captures Bacon's existentialist worldview, heavily influenced by the loss of religious faith in the 20th century. He believed that consciousness is a biological accident with no higher purpose, leaving humanity to invent its own distractions. The "game" refers to life itself, which must be played with intensity despite its ultimate meaninglessness. It is a call to embrace the absurdity of existence.
"I think of life as meaning nothing, but we give it a meaning during our existence."
Expanding on his nihilism, Bacon acknowledges the human capacity to create subjective meaning in a void. While the universe offers no answers, the individual can construct a framework of drives, desires, and creations to sustain them. This is an empowering form of pessimism, granting the individual total freedom to define their own reality. It rejects destiny in favor of immediate experience.
"Death is the shadow of life, and the more one pulls away from it, the more it pursues."
Bacon implies that the attempt to deny death only grants it more power over one's life. His work confronts death head-on, refusing to sanitize or hide the inevitable end. By embracing the shadow, one can perhaps live more fully in the light of the present moment. It suggests that awareness of mortality is the sharpest spur to vitality.
"I've always thought of friendship as where two people really tear each other apart."
For Bacon, relationships were not about comfort but about intensity and friction. He believed that true intimacy involved a psychological dismantling of the other, a raw exposure of flaws and fears. This destructive element of friendship mirrors the violence in his paintings. It suggests that love and aggression are inextricably linked in the human experience.
"I am optimistic about nothing."
This stark declaration rejects the comfort of hope, which Bacon viewed as a delusion that distracts from the reality of the now. To be without optimism is not necessarily to be depressed, but to be free from the anxiety of the future. It allows one to focus entirely on the immediate sensation of living. It is a philosophy of radical presence.
"You can't be in love with someone you don't want to tear apart."
Revisiting the theme of violent intimacy, Bacon suggests that passion contains an inherent desire to consume or destroy the object of affection. This cannibalistic view of love speaks to the overwhelming nature of desire that seeks to merge completely with another. It reflects the tumultuous relationships in his own life, particularly with Peter Lacy and George Dyer. It frames love as a battlefield of egos and bodies.
Chance, Accident, and the Creative Act
"In my case all painting... is an accident."
Bacon often claimed that his best images arose not from planning, but from the unpredictable interaction of paint and canvas. He would throw paint, use rags, or scrub the surface, allowing chance to dictate the formation of the image. This method bypasses the censorship of the rational mind. It posits that the accident is the only way to access a truth deeper than conscious intent.
"I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance."
This describes the central tension in his work: the desire for the final product to look inevitable and structured, despite being born of chaos. He sought a "lucid accident," where the random mark miraculously coalesces into a precise form. This requires the artist to be hyper-alert, ready to recognize and seize the moment when the accident succeeds. It is a collaboration between the artist's will and the physics of the material.
"If you can talk about it, why paint it?"
Bacon believed that painting occupied a realm of experience that language could not reach. If a concept could be adequately expressed in words, there was no need to create an image for it. Painting, for him, was about expressing the ineffable sensations of the body and the psyche. This quote defends the autonomy of visual art against literary interpretation.
"The moment you know what to do, you're making an illustration."
He distinguished sharply between "art" and "illustration," viewing the latter as a mechanical execution of a preconceived idea. True art requires a journey into the unknown, where the artist does not know the destination until they arrive. Knowing exactly what to do implies a lack of risk and discovery. It champions the process of struggle over the ease of execution.
"I think that man is obsessed with himself."
Bacon saw art as a symptom of humanity's unending narcissism and self-obsession. We paint ourselves, write about ourselves, and look at ourselves because we are trapped within our own consciousness. His portraits are explorations of this isolation, showing the subject locked within the cage of their own being. It suggests that all art is ultimately an investigation of the self.
"I don't think people are born artists; I think they are born with a sensibility."
He rejected the myth of the born genius, arguing instead that certain people possess a heightened sensitivity to the world. Whether this sensibility manifests as art depends on life circumstances, discipline, and the need to express that sensitivity. It democratizes the potential for art while highlighting the burden of possessing such a raw nervous system. It frames art as a reaction to life rather than a divine gift.
"One has to be disciplined in one's daily life in order to be violent in one's work."
Despite his reputation for hedonism, Bacon maintained a rigorous work schedule, painting every morning. He understood that the chaotic energy required for his paintings needed a foundation of routine and sobriety (at least during working hours). The violence on the canvas was a controlled explosion, not a messy outburst. This highlights the professional dedication behind the bohemian persona.
"I feel that I have no message to give."
Bacon consistently denied that his work contained moral, political, or social messages. He insisted that he was simply recording his own perceptions and sensations. This refusal of "meaning" forces the viewer to confront the image without the safety net of an intellectual explanation. It strips the art down to its barest existential impact.
"Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what we call fact, what we know of our existence."
He believed that the role of art was to distill the chaotic data of reality into a potent, concentrated form. It is not about copying reality, but about reinventing it to make it more real than the thing itself. This concentration intensifies the viewer's experience of the subject. It turns the "fact" of existence into an undeniable force.
"The abstract expressionists... they are all about the beauty of the paint. I am about the beauty of the subject."
Bacon distinguished himself from his American contemporaries by insisting on the retention of the figure. While he loved the materiality of paint, he believed it had to be anchored to a subject to have real power. Pure abstraction was, to him, merely decoration; the figure provided the necessary emotional stakes. It validates his commitment to the human form in an age of abstraction.
Portraiture and the Distortion of Reality
"I would like to paint the smile, but I can't."
This admits a limitation in his ability to capture joy or lightness; his psyche was tuned to the grimace and the scream. It also references the difficulty of capturing fleeting expressions without them becoming caricatures. The smile is a social mask, whereas Bacon was interested in what lay beneath. It acknowledges the dark filter through which he viewed the world.
"I distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion, it comes back to a recording of the appearance."
Bacon argued that a literal photograph often fails to capture the true presence of a person. By distorting the features—smearing the face, twisting the body—he felt he could capture the dynamic energy and personality of the subject more accurately. The distortion is not a lie, but a method of revealing a deeper truth. It is realism achieved through surrealism.
"I hate my own face, and I've done self-portraits because people have been dying around me like flies and I've had nobody else to paint."
This pragmatic and somewhat morbid explanation for his many self-portraits reveals his isolation. As his circle of friends diminished through death and suicide, he turned to the only subject always available: himself. It also reveals a self-loathing that translates into the brutal way he manipulated his own image on canvas. It is painting born of necessity and loneliness.
"The sitter is someone who is there to be destroyed."
In Bacon's view, painting a portrait was an aggressive act that required dismantling the sitter's vanity and social defenses. He preferred working from photographs to avoid the inhibition of having the person present, allowing him to "destroy" their likeness freely. This destruction was necessary to rebuild them as a piece of art. It emphasizes the dominance of the artist's vision over the subject's identity.
"I think that photographs are very much better than the people themselves."
Bacon amassed a chaotic studio floor covered in torn, paint-splattered photographs. He preferred these static, manipulatable images to living models because they were fixed "facts" that he could alter without resistance. The photograph served as a trigger for his imagination, whereas the living person was a distraction. It highlights his modern approach to source material.
"Every time I paint a portrait, I lose a friend."
This witty yet sad observation reflects the reaction of his sitters to his grotesque depictions of them. Few people wished to see themselves reduced to meat or twisted into screams, regardless of the artistic merit. It underscores the gap between how people see themselves and how Bacon saw them. It is the cost of his uncompromising honesty.
"I am not an Expressionist. I am not trying to express anything. I am trying to remake the image."
Bacon rejected the label of Expressionism, which implies an outpouring of the artist's internal emotion. He saw his task as more objective: the technical reconstruction of reality. He wasn't trying to say "I am sad," but rather "This is what a face looks like when it dissolves." It shifts the focus from the artist's feelings to the image's autonomy.
"What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance."
Repeating this sentiment emphasizes his central artistic paradox: extreme distortion leading to extreme realism. He believed that a straight copy of a face was dead, but a distorted one vibrated with life. The violence done to the form is what resurrects the presence of the person. It is a quest for the "living" image.
"There is an area of the nervous system to which the texture of paint communicates more violently than anything else."
Bacon believed that the physical quality of paint had a direct line to the human sensorium. The way paint clots, smears, and runs mimics fluids of the body, creating an unconscious recognition in the viewer. This communication is pre-verbal and immediate. It relies on the biological empathy of the viewer.
"Images also breed other images in me."
This speaks to the generative nature of his visual memory. One image—a mouth from a medical textbook, a frame from a movie—would spark a chain reaction leading to a painting. His mind was a visual library where disparate images mated to create new monsters. It describes creativity as a process of synthesis and mutation.
Life, Despair, and the Void
"We are born and we die, but in between we give this meaningless existence a meaning by our drives."
Bacon viewed human drives—sex, hunger, creation—as the engines that keep us moving through the void. These drives do not possess inherent meaning, but they generate the friction of life. By surrendering to these drives, one creates a personal purpose. It is a biological justification for living.
"I am a very optimistic person... about nothing."
This variation of his famous quote clarifies his temperament. He was not a dour man socially; he was charming, generous, and lively. His "optimism about nothing" meant he enjoyed the spectacle of life without expecting it to lead anywhere. It is a celebration of the moment for the moment's sake.
"I think art is an obsession with life and after all, as we are human beings, our greatest obsession is with ourselves."
Bacon brings art back to the fundamental narcissism of the species. We create art to prove we exist, to analyze our condition, and to leave a mark. It frames art not as a luxury, but as a necessary function of human self-awareness. It validates the introspection inherent in his work.
"To me, the mystery of painting today is how can appearance be made. I know it can be illustrated, I know it can be photographed. But how can this thing be made so that you catch the mystery of appearance within the mystery of the making?"
This complex thought summarizes his technical struggle. In an age of photography, mere likeness is cheap. The challenge is to capture the "aura" or "mystery" of a subject through the alchemy of paint. It demands that the painting process itself be magical and transformative.
"Man is an accident, he is a completely futile being."
Reiterating his atheistic stance, Bacon liberates humanity from the burden of destiny. If we are accidents, we are free from the judgment of gods. However, we are also stripped of the comfort of an afterlife. It leaves us alone with our futility, which Bacon found strangely exhilarating.
"I have no religious feelings, but I have a strong religious sense."
This distinction is crucial; he rejected dogma and deities but understood the power of ritual, sacrifice, and awe. His paintings often use the visual language of religion (triptychs, crucifixions) to convey secular horror. He usurped the machinery of the church to worship the reality of the flesh. It is a secular spirituality of suffering.
"The void is the only thing that is real."
For Bacon, the background of his paintings—often flat, stark colors—represented the void that surrounds all life. The figure struggles against this emptiness. It suggests that existence is a temporary aberration in an eternal nothingness. It is the ultimate statement of his nihilistic cosmology.
"I want to make the image of the wound more real than the wound itself."
Bacon sought a hyper-reality where the painted representation of pain evoked a stronger reaction than the physical reality. Art allows for a concentration of sensation that reality often dilutes with distractions. By isolating the "wound," he forces the viewer to feel it in its totality. It is the power of art to distill experience.
"Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends."
While this is a common toast, Bacon used it frequently, and it reflects his wit and the dualities of his social life. It mixes the high life (champagne) with the brutality (pain) that permeates his work. It characterizes the sharp, often dangerous edge of his social circle in Soho. It is a moment of levity in a life of intensity.
"I am just trying to make images as accurately off my nervous system as I can. I don't even know what half of them mean. I'm not saying anything."
This final disclaimer serves as a shield against over-analysis. Bacon insists that his work is a physiological discharge rather than an intellectual puzzle. He invites the viewer to stop thinking and start feeling. It returns the power of interpretation entirely to the observer.
The Legacy of the Scream
Francis Bacon remains a titan of modern art because he dared to paint the unpaintable: the sensation of existence itself. His legacy is not just in the high auction prices his triptychs command, but in the way he fundamentally altered the trajectory of figurative painting. At a time when the art world declared the painted figure dead, Bacon resurrected it as a site of trauma, ecstasy, and undeniable fact. He stripped away the comforting narratives of religion and history, leaving us with the raw meat of humanity, screaming into the void.
His influence extends beyond painting into cinema, literature, and philosophy. Directors like David Lynch and Ridley Scott have cited his lighting and spatial distortion as key influences, while his worldview resonates with the existentialist thinkers of his age. Bacon taught us that to look at a painting is not a passive act of enjoyment, but an active confrontation with reality. He showed that within the grotesque, there is a terrible beauty, and within the silence of a canvas, there can be a scream that echoes forever. In a world that often seeks to sanitize reality, Bacon’s work remains a necessary, brutal reminder of what it means to be a physical being in a godless universe.
We invite you to share your thoughts on Francis Bacon’s work. Do you find his paintings repulsively violent or beautifully honest? Which quote resonates most with your view of the world? Please leave your comments below to join the discussion.
Recommendations
If you found the raw intensity and existential depth of Francis Bacon compelling, we recommend exploring these similar figures on Quotyzen.com:
1. Lucian Freud: A close friend and rival of Bacon, Freud also dedicated his life to the figurative examination of the human body. His approach was more analytical and less distorted, but equally obsessed with the "flesh" and the psychological weight of the sitter.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche: The German philosopher whose proclamation that "God is dead" lays the foundation for Bacon’s worldview. Nietzsche’s ideas on affirming life despite its suffering and the concept of the tragic hero deeply align with Bacon’s philosophy of "exhilarated despair."
3. Pablo Picasso: The artist who first inspired Bacon to paint. Picasso’s deconstruction of the human form and his relentless reinvention of style provided the blueprint for Bacon’s own distortions. Exploring Picasso helps understand the lineage of Bacon’s visual language.