Francis Bacon

Elizabeth Springer Wrigley, 81, former director of the Francis Bacon Library in Claremont. An authority on Bacon, Wrigley also served as president of the Francis Bacon Foundation, which was set up by art collectors Walter Conrad Arensberg and Louise Stevens Arensberg in 1938. The Arensbergs had the largest and one of the best collections on Bacon, an English lawyer, philosopher and statesman who died in 1626.

After dinner in private houses, Princess Margaret likes to sing Cole Porter. As sister of the most powerful monarch in the world, she can generally hold guests captive to her lack of ability. One night, though, at a fancy ball given by Ann, Lady Rothermere (later Mrs. Ian Fleming), the princess began the familiar lyrics of "Let's Do It," when the cheering of Queen Elizabeth's subjects was drowned out by the sound of booing rumbling like thunder from the back of the ballroom.

Francis Bacon was inarguably the greatest British figurative painter of the 20th Century, one of those typical stand-alone artists that England produces--Gainsborough, Turner, Blake. He died of a heart attack Tuesday in a Madrid hospital while vacationing in Spain. He was 82. He burst insidiously on the world in the mid-1950s with strange paintings like "Study After Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X."

Francis Bacon, widely regarded as Britain's greatest contemporary painter, died of a heart attack in a Madrid hospital Tuesday. Bacon, who had suffered from asthma, became ill while visiting friends in Spain. The 82-year-old painter was highly controversial in traditional artistic circles, since his powerful canvases, executed with splashing brush strokes, were often concerned with the themes of sex, suffering and death. Many regarded his paintings as obscene.

In the mid-1950s, a UCLA exhibition included a new British artist--Francis Bacon. He was represented by "Study After Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X." Awed faculty dragged their budding-genius students down to have a look. It wasn't surprising that the kids had never seen anything quite like it, but neither had grizzled art teachers, who had seen a good bit. The sinister, crafty Pope was pictured suddenly screaming.

His canvases, worth millions each, hang in frames of burnished gold. They smell of blood and vomit. He is, as he set out to be, England's greatest painter. He drinks the best champagne, competes with the old masters--and works in utter squalor. His stroke is magisterial. The howling beings he conjures--their faces smeared, their bodies flayed--writhe within their cages like men turned into meat.

An exhibition of new work by Jim Farrington centers on a sequence of paintings titled "Head Looking Up." The series' title pretty much sums up the work. Viewed in a tilted back position, the eyes in a human head take on the appearance of menacing slits; the cheeks, chin and forehead become unrecognizable planes, and the nostrils blossom into great gaping holes.