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?
Promiscuous, with an insatiable sexual appetite, a hedonistic liquor-laced lifestyle, and controversial relationships with his 14 children, Freud is immortalised in the minds of many as a narcissistic reprobate.
But his relationship with his eldest daughter Annie, is the most spotlit and problematic of all. Freud painted Annie nude, for the first time, at the awkward age of 14. Criticised extensively for doing this, he later abandoned her and her younger sister Annabel.
After years of painful separation, Freud salvaged his tortured relationship with Annie, by requesting to paint her again. This time, when pregnant, and in an even more intimate pose than before; unfortunately, their relationship never fully recovered.
