The lost archives of francis bacon: When painting becomes a scream

This gesture—taking, crumpling, repainting—sums up the mystery of Bacon’s lost archives. For decades, it was believed that this artist, who claimed never to sketch, worked in pure spontaneity, like a medium possessed by his visions. Yet when curators at Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery opened the forgotten boxes from his studio in 1998, they uncovered a very different story: hundreds of annotated photographs, pages torn from anatomy books, sketches scribbled on the backs of envelopes, and above all, a manic obsession with documentation. Bacon did not paint the invisible. He hunted it down, captured it, then warped it until it became unbearable.

01The studio as an image-crushing machine

Picture a ten-square-meter space cluttered with reproductions of Velázquez, photographs of bodies deformed by illness, newspaper clippings of sordid crimes, and portraits of his lovers taken by photographer John Deakin. The walls of the Reece Mews studio—now reconstructed at the Hugh Lane Gallery—still bear the scars of this compulsive accumulation: layers of overlapping paint, fingerprints, splatters that map out the secret cartography of his creative process.

What strikes first is the organized chaos. Bacon was not a methodical collector but an image predator. He cut, pasted, crumpled, then discarded. Photographs of his intimates—George Dyer, Henrietta Moraes, Lucien Freud—were often mistreated before becoming raw material for his canvases. In the archives, one finds prints of Dyer with his face slashed by pencil marks, as if Bacon had wanted to erase his lover’s features even before painting them. This preemptive violence speaks volumes about his relationship with his models: he did not seek to represent them but to dissolve them into his own anguish.

The curators also uncovered unexpected images: pages torn from medical textbooks showing decomposing organs, photographs of bullfights where the animals’ bodies seem to merge with the dust, and even 1950s pornographic shots where the models’ poses evoke less desire than suffering. Bacon did not collect beauty. He tracked flesh in its most vulnerable states—sick, aging, dying.

02The pope who screamed into the void

Among the most unsettling discoveries in the archives is a series of photographs of Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Bacon owned several versions, some annotated in his hand, others torn and reassembled. What fascinated him was not the original’s majesty but its potential for distortion. In a letter to his friend, the critic David Sylvester, he wrote: “I want the pope to scream, but not like in a horror film. I want him to scream like a man who realizes he is trapped in his own body.”

This obsession with the scream—found throughout his work, from Three Studies for a Crucifixion to the Black Triptychs—was not mere provocation. Bacon sought to capture that precise moment when language collapses, when thought reduces to pure physical reaction. His figures do not speak. They howl, moan, or remain silent, mouths agape as if to swallow the void around them.

The archives reveal that this scream was not spontaneous. It was constructed, prepared, almost calculated. For Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Bacon layered multiple images: the original portrait, of course, but also a still of a screaming nurse from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and a medical photograph of a jaw deformed by a tumor. The result is not a copy but a monstrous hybrid—a pope who is no longer a symbol of power but a creature trapped in its own flesh.

03The technique of the perfect crime

Bacon had a very particular way of working with paint. He never began with a pencil sketch but with a stain, a splatter, or a mark left by a paint-soaked rag. Then he scraped, rubbed, erased until a form emerged—often against his will.

This technique, which he called “the perfect crime,” was a way of evading control. Bacon did not want to master the paint. He wanted it to surprise him, even betray him. In the archives, one finds abandoned canvases where, beneath layers of paint, half-erased faces and distorted bodies seem to struggle not to disappear entirely.

His use of materials was equally subversive. He mixed oil paint with Ripolin, a cheap industrial paint, to achieve harsher textures. Sometimes he added sand or dust to give his canvases a gritty, almost organic feel. And he used unexpected tools: his fingers, of course, but also sponges, toothbrushes, and even scraps of fabric that he rubbed against the canvas to create blurring effects.

This approach to material was revolutionary for its time. While abstract painters like Pollock or Rothko sought to transcend matter, Bacon wanted to make it palpable, almost tactile. His canvases are not windows onto another world. They are aggressive surfaces that resist the gaze, that push back against the viewer.

04The ghosts of Reece Mews

Bacon’s studio was haunted—not by spirits, but by the memories of those he had loved and lost. George Dyer, his lover and model, died by suicide in 1971 in a Paris hotel room, two days before a major Bacon retrospective at the Grand Palais. The archives reveal that the artist kept Dyer’s clothes in his studio for years, as if trying to preserve some trace of his presence.

This obsession with disappearance surfaces in his Black Triptychs, painted after Dyer’s death. In these works, the figures seem to dissolve into darkness, as if fading from memory. Bacon did not seek to represent death. He wanted to capture that precise moment when a memory blurs, when a face’s contours soften, when all that remains is the emotion, not the person.

The archives also contain unsettling clues about how Bacon worked with his models. In a series of photographs taken by John Deakin, one sees Henrietta Moraes, one of his muses, posing nude in his studio. What stands out is how Bacon annotated these prints: he drew lines across Moraes’s body, as if dissecting it, and scribbled notes on areas to distort. He was not preparing a portrait. He was performing an autopsy.

05The last painting, or the art of disappearing

In 1991, a year before his death, Bacon painted Study of a Bull. The canvas shows a massive, almost shapeless animal whose body seems to merge with the black background. Some critics saw a metaphor for aging, for decomposition. Others, a representation of brute, almost fascist power.

But the archives tell another story. Beneath the layers of paint, conservators found traces of a self-portrait. Bacon had begun by painting himself, then covered his face in black, as if to erase it. The bull was not a metaphor. It was a way of vanishing.

This obsession with erasure had been present from the start of his career. Bacon destroyed as much as he created. He tore canvases, scraped away faces, covered entire compositions in black paint. In the archives, one finds unfinished works where, beneath the layers, forms seem to struggle not to disappear.

Perhaps this is the true mystery of Bacon’s lost archives: they do not just reveal how he worked but how he wanted to be forgotten. His canvases are not monuments. They are traces, scars, proof that something—or someone—existed, then vanished.

06What remains when everything has burned

Today, Bacon’s archives are scattered between Dublin, London, and New York. Some have been digitized; others remain inaccessible, hidden in private collections. But what strikes one when consulting them is their fragmentary nature. Bacon did not leave behind a coherent body of work but a series of traces, scribbles, failed attempts.

Perhaps that is why his work continues to fascinate. In a world where everything is archived, digitized, preserved, Bacon chose to burn his own traces. He did not want to leave a linear history but a series of unanswered questions.

What if Bacon’s true work was not in his paintings but in these archives? What if the real mystery was not what he painted but what he chose to destroy?

In the Reece Mews studio, a paint stain on the wall still draws the eye. No one knows what it represents. Perhaps a face. Perhaps nothing. But it is there, like an echo of all the images Bacon created, then erased.

And that, perhaps, is the ultimate lesson of his lost archives: art is not what we keep. It is what resists being forgotten.