Francis Bacon Archive, Tate Britain, London

Abstract

Francis Bacon: The archive center at Tate Britain holds many treasures private and public correspondence, interviews and photos of past British artists and others. Francis Bacon is probably one of the best known and most notorious of the British artists of the last century. His image, as seen generally via black-and-white photos, is by and large represented as angst-ridden poses, intense stare, wrinkled brow. The private photos represented in this article negate that stereotype, and have never before been published. Banished from his Roman Catholic Irish upper-middle-class family because of his homosexuality, Bacon was a self-taught artist, using art as a vehicle for his anxieties and as an expression of his level of belief in the power of art to change the way we see the world.