Screaming Man

Many years ago during the early 1970thies I was a young fashion designer,and I use to often go to Christies auction room in South Kensington- London to view the weekly sale of paintings.I liked collecting Art.As It was even then not easy to find parking space in this part of London so I started parking in Reece Mews

Second or third time when I did this a grumpy looking male came out and told me I cant park there in front of his house,but after couple of minutes of conversation he reluctantly allowed me to leave the car there.

He invited me in and I realized its an artist studio and he introduced himself as Francis Bacon,there where paints and paintings everywhere I loved the smell of it all,one can tell this was pure passion and Love of Art.

Then few weeks later he came to my store in Kensington market and bought a black leather jacket. and as I liked jazz and would go to Ronnie Scotts club in Soho and Francis was often there, we had few drinks occasionaly.Eventually I ended up buying several paintings from him.

The painting

Francis Bacon’s "screaming man" imagery, most famously the Screaming Pope series (starting with Head VI, 1949, and Study after Velázquez, 1953), reimagines Diego Velázquez’s 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X. Bacon transforms the original's quiet authority into a tortured, isolated figure, often trapped in a cage-like structure, expressing raw, existential agony and postwar angst.

The figures are often housed in dark, geometric, cage-like structures, emphasizing isolation and a "Kafkaesque nightmare of incarceration.

These paintings, with their blurred, vertical-lined, and distorted faces, are considered iconic depictions of the human condition and psychological anguish