Francis Bacon
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Francis Bacon: Study for Portrait IV
The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center located on the Vassar College campus provides an eclectic mixture of artwork from around the world in different time periods. The permanent collections range from the medieval renaissance period to the 19th and 20th Century timeframe, including pieces from such noted artists as Pablo Picasso. The paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures collectively form a gallery that highlights antiques to modern artwork, along with a guided tour from students that provides an education beyond that of self-exploration.
While touring the Vassar art gallery, I found myself captivated by many of the pieces that were discussed. One piece in particular created by Francis Bacon entitled Study for Portrait IV caught my interest because of the attention to "unfinished details." I felt at though this painting was the only piece of art in the gallery that was not perfectly finished, in fact, I thought that its imperfections and flaws made it more perfect. Through the tour discussion and my own research, I discovered that Francis Bacon was known for his distorted painting of people. This particular piece belongs to a sequence of paintings in Bacon's Papal Portraits.
The series completed in 1953 with eight study portraits of a disfigured man designed to be recognized at Pope Innocent X. It is said that these paintings were influenced by Diego Velzquez's portraits of a corrupt pope who took on the name Innocent...