Study of a Head

A scream rips through the darkness in Francis Bacon's "Study of a Head," painted in 1952. A pale man tilts his face upward, mouth stretched wide in what looks like pure terror, his features smeared and blurred against a background of pitch black. Faint yellow lines box him in like an invisible cage, a trick Bacon returned to again and again to pin his figures in place. The suit and tie he wears only make things more disturbing, as if an ordinary man in a business meeting suddenly cracked apart.

Bacon was born in Ireland and worked in Britain, going on to become one of the twentieth century's boldest and most disturbing painters. The open, howling mouth obsessed him for years, an idea he pulled partly from a screaming nurse in the silent film "Battleship Potemkin" and partly from the papal portraits of Diego Velázquez. He was never interested in telling a neat story. Instead he chased raw emotion, the kind of fear and pain that sits too deep for words. The painting stays uncomfortable on purpose, and that unforgettable face seems to keep crying out even once you have moved on.