The Independent Group Take on Francis Bacon

Abstract

This article takes its cue from Lawrence Alloway's comment that ‘Pop Art begins in London about 1949 with work by Francis Bacon’. It assembles documentary and visual evidence to support the argument that, notwithstanding the usual view that the older artist epitomized an aesthetic that the Independent Group was reacting against, Bacon’s art served in reality as a key inspiration and point of reference for Alloway’s criticism, and for the work of Independent Group practitioners, notably Richard Hamilton as he crystallized his artistic idiom in the mid-1950s.