Study of a HeadAI

Few images grab you quite like this one. Francis Bacon painted "Study of a Head" in 1952, and it shows a man mid-scream, his mouth wide open, his face pale and smeared against a wall of total darkness. Thin yellow lines form a kind of cage or box around him, a device Bacon used often to trap his figures in space. The man wears a suit and tie, which makes the horror feel even stranger, as if he is some respectable businessman caught in a moment of complete breakdown.

Bacon was an Irish-born British painter who became one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, known for his raw, unsettling portraits of the human figure. He was fascinated by the screaming mouth, an image he borrowed partly from a famous shot in the silent film "Battleship Potemkin" and partly from old paintings of popes by Diego Velázquez. Rather than telling you a clear story, Bacon wanted to capture pure feeling, the kind of raw fear and anguish that words cannot reach. The result is a painting that is hard to look at and harder to forget, a face that seems to cry out across the room long after you have walked away.