Hysteria

Francis Bacon
The Logic of Sensation
Gilles Deleuze
 Francis Bacon renown world artist that mixed the
surrealism with expressionism to that portrayed the
human from a primal, brutal and traumatizing
perspective, a raw introspection through human
fears, anxiety and mess “Francis Bacon's painting is
of a very special violence. Bacon, to be sure, often
traffics in the violence of a depicted scene:
spectacles of horror, crucifixions, prostheses and
mutilations, monsters.”(Deleuze, 2003,p.x)
Study for the Nurse in the Film
'Battleship Potemkin’
Francis Bacon, 1957
 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
Francis Bacon 1944

He used the elements of surrealism in his works, movement characterized by a

complete freedom of expression in arts, the artist is totally free from the society to
exteriorize his inner self to the world, showing the suppressed emotions. Also
Bacon was part of the expressionist movement influenced by the post-war era,
showing the anxiety of the people and their loss of meaning and spirituality.
 Bacon is giving in some pictures animal
forms to humans, because he is giving both
of them the same characteristics, that when
a human is suffering he is becoming an
animal, a piece of meat. He Identifies
himself as the butcher and the subjects his
carcass to open and dissect.

"Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef"

Francis Bacon, 1954
 Francis Bacon is isolating his subjects in cages or
freezing them in different positions using
abstraction to escape the imposed fidelity in
representation, and to reach a pure form of
emotion. He wants to capture the natural
emotion an to escape the reality to reach a
higher plane that can be only accesed by true
freedom of soul “"I wanted to paint the scream
more than the horror.“ Francis Bacon. On first
sight you will be repulsed by the grotesque and
have the instinct to stop looking, but on a
carefoul analysis the painter is showing to the
Seated Figure viewer the unedited and uncut side of life.
1961
Francis Bacon
 Also an early artisit similar in thematic
with Bacon was Francisco Goya. Both
illustrate the antithesis of the states of
mind, states of being, Life and Death, Joy
and Sadness, Holy and Unholy. They
don’t want the viewer to be given the
direct meaning of the painting, but
rather to make him wonder why it is like
that, in the case of Goya his Dark
Paintings were not even made for public,
but only personal use, being made on his
house walls, while he was losing his
sanity, so we can speak that we have the
same ”naive” purity that Vincent Van
Gogh had, but on a different spectrum
and message transmited. Is it that only Francis Bacon
mad can make a pure form of art, Study after Velazquez’s Two Monks
forgetting the norms of society in the Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1821-23
process? 1953 Francisco de Goya