Francis Bacon’s art has been leaving audiences curious and revolted since his early success in the 1940s. But the ‘imagination material’, the complex and existential literature and philosophy that inspired his work has often been ignored from his biography. Ben Ware argues that the decay and extinction of his work bleeds into a philosophical view we have overlooked and which heightens his genius.

Encountering Francis Bacon’s art is a troubling experience. What are we to make of the mutilated faces, the bulging and contorted bodies, and the large fields of colour which enframe the figures? The paintings are clearly important – each exhibiting a certain sublime aura – but how should we read them?

Bacon is certainly not an ‘abstract’ painter, as some critics have argued. Indeed, Bacon himself hated abstraction, describing a room of Rothko’s at the Tate as ‘depressing’ and ‘the most dreary paintings that have ever been made’. He is, as he says in numerous interviews, a ‘figurative painter’. But at the same time, he clearly breaks with conventional figuration, elevating the figure to a new level of disconcerting prominence, depicting the human body in a permanent state of discomfort or agony.