Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon Paintings: The eight most scandalous
The explosive synergy between Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud has made their unconventional 'bromance' one of the most critiqued of all twentieth-century relationships.
Innovative talents working in Post-War London, Bacon and Freud spearheaded a movement championing figurative representation when abstraction was the pervading fashion.
While their painterly style differs dramatically, their obsession with visceral, raw image-making that distorted the human form unites them as one in the popular imagination.
Ahead of the Freud and Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain, we round up the eight most controversial Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon paintings.
Friends, rivals, and finally enemies: it's Bacon vs Freud. Who wins?
Francis Bacon's Two Figures is raw, erotically charged, and utterly compelling. Blurring the two human forms to an unsettling effect with his striated lines, Bacon's portrait is as much an exercise in depicting carnal desire as it is romantic love.
Renowned for his grotesque images of popes, crucifixions, friends and family, Bacon's Two Figures comes as no surprise. With a sombre palette, a blacked-out background and unidentifiable figures, this nude scene is among his most sinister. Looking at this work, it becomes quite clear why abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning referred to Bacon as the 20th century's 'most important painter of the disquieting human figure'.
