ABSTRACT
In retrospect, the fact that the artist's style changed radically in old age does not seem in the least surprising — difficult though it was for some admirers at the time to come to terms with apparently bloodless Bacon. His whole drive as a painter had been towards condensation, his ultimate ambition being to produce the one image which would sum up and supersede all the others. Patently, it had taken longer to accord this status to Bacon, the painter of screaming heads and flayed bodies, the atheist and homosexual who scorned public honours. But the desire to do so appeared to be the more powerful for coming so late in his life. In the extensive coverage the artist and his exhibition received in the press, the description of Bacon as 'the greatest living painter' was too handy not to be used time and again, and it proved to be an epithet that stuck.
