ABSTRACT
Francis Bacon was a great admirer of Van Gogh. Bacon was still at the very beginning of his artistic career; he himself said that it began around 1943-1944, even though he had begun to paint before then. The image that emerges from the raw material, from its primary substance, maintains an organic link to that umbilicus of dreams and sensations that tie it indefinitely to the unknown and prevent it from being a mere reproduction of an internal or external image, the clear-cut divide between inside and outside having lost all relevance. In Bacon's oeuvre, there is a movement from meat to flesh, from flesh to spirit—and perhaps even to the Holy Spirit. The calm lucidity of that statement, which expresses a fundamental distortion of the libido, evokes in us, of course, the torsions and distortions inflicted on bodies and faces in Bacon's paintings.
