Change in Homosexuality

     Francis Bacon moved out of his parents house when he was 17, and spent eight weeks directly after in Berlin.  This just so happened to be during 1927, a time that homosexuality was a very open practice.  Directly after this wild eight weeks of his life, he went to Paris for the next year and a half where he discovered his true interest in art, he spent his time going to galleries and viewing paintings of all sorts.  Bacon then decided to go back to London and for the next two to three years tried his hand at becoming an interior decorator, while at the same time experimenting with water color and drawings.  Between 1950 and 1951 Bacon held two exhibitions in his own studio.  He made his furniture in an art deco style, this time in Bacon's life was very short lived, however, it did find its way back into his art, showing up in his paintings.*


     It was at this time that Francis started representing homosexuality, which at this time was a very dangerous thing to do, due to the fact that it had not been made legal Britain.  Bacon was the first to not only use it in his art, but to make it very obvious in his paintings.  He showed an almost obsession with the human form, more specifically the male human form.  They started out at first as a more innocent, or innocuous, such as Study from the Human Body (1949).  Over time they became more and more evident to be screaming homosexual, such as Two Figures in the Grass (1954).**  It wasn't that he didn't ever use the female form, but when he did Bacon "was more concerned with capturing the individual essences of female sitters."  When a female showed up in his paintings he wasn't concerned with the nude form, but instead focused mostly on the head-and-neck or kept the figure fully clothed.


*Ronald Alley. "Bacon, Francis." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed April 28, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T005594

**Arya, Rina. "Constructions of Homosexuality in the Art of Francis Bacon." Journal For Cultural Research 16, no. 1 (January 2012): 43-61. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed April 28, 2014).