HEAD, 1949

  • Head, 1949, is one of the earliest works from Francis Bacon’s renowned Head Series, a group of paintings that marked...

    Head, 1949

    Oil on canvas 81 x 60cm 

    ©The Estate of Francis Bacon, Image reproduced for educational purposes only. 

    Head, 1949, is one of the earliest works from Francis Bacon’s renowned Head Series, a group of paintings that marked the solidification of his post-war style. In this painting, the human form emerges from darkness, its features only partially defined, dissolving into shadow and movement. The figure’s face is obscured, the mouth slightly open, as if caught mid-breath or mid-scream, a moment of tension between visibility and erasure.
     
    Painted in the aftermath of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Head shows Bacon refining his focus from mythological imagery to the human presence itself. The background is stark, the palette subdued, and the light clinical, heightening the sense of exposure and fragility.

  • “Painting is the most direct way of bringing back the fact of a human being.”

     

    --Francis Bacon

    Here, Bacon began his lifelong pursuit of depicting not likeness, but sensation. The figure is less a person than an embodiment of vulnerability, a shadow of consciousness hovering in space. Head, 1949 stands as an early declaration of the themes that would define his career: the distortion of flesh, the tension between control and chaos, and the fragile boundary between life and decay.