Study for Figure IV

Resembling a surrealist stage set for hell’s waiting room, Study for Figure IV radiates a powerful disquiet. Lines of charcoal-black and ember-red mark out a forbidding interior space, where a suited male figure sits cross-legged on a green couch. The subject’s right arm, a jagged crescent of white paint, is raised in an ambiguous gesture – he could be affecting weariness, wiping sweat from his brow or peering into the distance. His chalky face, blurred but for a set of bared teeth, hints at aggression as well as angst.

Bacon, who had no formal art training, tried his hand at furniture and interior design before finding success as a painter in the 1940s. He went on to become one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, producing idiosyncratic portraits and figurative works whose radically distorted shapes and distressed poses call to mind states of inner turmoil. In creating a new visual language with which to articulate feelings of alienation and anxiety, trauma and terror, Bacon imbued the human form with what he termed ‘my kind of … exhilarated despair’

Tony Magnusson, Curator of European Art, 2016–18