Lucian was stunned by the truth of Bacon’s raw fleshy brushwork. Lucian Freud: Painted Life, BBC
‘They’re baying their anger, their pain, their distrust of life.’ Francis Bacon: A Brush With Violence, Michael Peppiatt, friend & biographer, BBC 2017
‘It taps into something in your unconscious which is dark and exciting.’ ibid. Damien Hirst
‘My father and mother were disgusted with me.’ ibid. Bacon
‘The Tate retrospective in 1962 was I think very important to him.’ ibid. friend
Interviews with Francis Bacon. ibid. David Sylvester
‘He had to devote himself completely to it.’ ibid. Terence Stamp
‘Like a bomb exploding in reverse, thoughts, ideas, fragments of images, shards of memory, like shrapnel, all come back to me and are forced back out in a cruel pastiche of experience.’ Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon 1998 starring Derek Jacobi & Daniel Craig & Tilda Swinton & Anne Lambton & Adrian Scarborough & Karl Johnson & Annabel Brooks & Richard Newbould & Ariel de Ravenel et al, director John Maybury
‘George, we all have nightmares. They can’t be as horrific as life.’ ibid. Bacon
‘We’re all in our own private, personal prison.’ ibid.
‘Eat your heart out, Anthony Blunt.’ ibid.
Francis Bacon: Britain’s best-known artist of frightful horrors … He was always completely outside the official modern art story. Matthew Collings, This is Modern Art II: Shock! Horror! Channel 4 1999
He’s just goes straight for it – the big hits one after another. ibid.
Francis Bacon: he chews up the face. Face of Britain by Simon Schama IV, BBC 2015