The Art and Relationship of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon

Feature image: Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon photographed by Harry Diamond via National Portrait Gallery

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Few relationships in modern art were as intense, productive, or ultimately combustible as the bond between Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. Together, they defined the raw, visceral energy of postwar British painting, one through psychological precision, the other through brutal distortion. Their friendship, rich in admiration and rivalry, shaped each man’s work and reputation. But like many great artistic partnerships, it couldn’t withstand the weight of ego and time.

Freud and Bacon met in the early 1940s through mutual friends in London’s bohemian Soho circles. Freud, then in his twenties, was sharp, charming, and driven by an obsession with precision. Bacon, a decade older, was already making waves for his disturbing, contorted figures and unflinching use of paint. The two were drawn together by a shared disregard for conventional aesthetics and a commitment to art as a means of expressing the body’s raw, vulnerable truth.

Freud later described Bacon’s work as having “the most powerful impact on me.” Bacon, in turn, praised Freud’s ability to "penetrate beneath the surface.” What began as artistic respect quickly deepened into a profound and complicated friendship.

At first glance, their styles couldn’t be more different. Bacon’s canvases are chaotic and nightmarish, his subjects often screaming or twisted into grotesque forms. Freud’s portraits, by contrast, are painstakingly built up over months, with the paint thick and sculptural; his sitters are rendered with forensic intensity.

But beneath the surface, their approaches intersected. Both were obsessed with the body, its decay, weight, and presence. Both rejected abstraction in favor of figuration, even as the art world moved in the opposite direction. And both treated paint as a medium of truth-telling, no matter how brutal the truth.

They were also each other's most honest critics. Freud reportedly repainted his works in response to Bacon’s critiques. Bacon once said that Freud was “an extraordinary artist, but a terrible bore.” Their dynamic was one of constant tension, admiration laced with contempt.

By the 1950s and 60s, Freud and Bacon were inseparable. They met almost daily, sharing long boozy lunches at The Colony Room, the infamous artists’ club in Soho. Their conversations were razor-sharp, cutting, and full of gossip, with each man needing to be the wittiest voice in the room.

This closeness extended to their work. Freud painted Bacon in 1952, in a small, tightly rendered portrait that hangs today in Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery. Bacon painted Freud multiple times throughout the 1960s and 70s, notably in Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), a triptych that shattered auction records when it sold for $142 million in 2013.

Their friendship was also riddled with jealousy and control. Freud’s inner circle described how Bacon resented Freud’s growing popularity, while Freud bristled at being treated like a pupil. According to biographer Daniel Farson, Bacon hated it when Freud missed their regular lunches. Freud, in turn, was famously possessive, cutting off friends or lovers who got too close to Bacon.

By the late 1970s, the cracks in their friendship had deepened into a chasm. The precise cause of their falling out remains unclear; some cite a romantic rivalry, while others point to a heated disagreement over a painting. What is known is that the rupture was permanent. Freud never spoke to Bacon again. When Bacon died in 1992, Freud did not attend the funeral.

Despite the silence, Freud continued to live in Bacon’s shadow in some ways. He refused to hang Bacon’s portrait of him in his home, claiming he didn’t want to be stared at by someone who no longer cared for him. He also expressed frustration with the market’s obsession with Bacon’s theatrical flair over his own slow, steady mastery.

Yet Bacon’s absence left a noticeable gap in Freud’s life and art. Many of his most penetrating portraits from the 1990s and 2000s are quieter, more introspective, and less socially fueled. Bacon, for his part, painted Freud repeatedly after their split, often with a sense of violent longing.

The Freud-Bacon friendship lives on not just in stories, but in paint. Their works are now seen as two poles of the same postwar artistic impulse: the desire to render the human condition in all its flawed, fleshy truth. Without each other, their work might not have developed the same urgency.

Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud stands as one of the great portraits of the 20th century, less a likeness than a psychological battlefield. Freud’s earlier Portrait of Francis Bacon is comparatively restrained, capturing the seated painter mid-thought. Together, they show two artists using portraiture not just to depict others, but to wrestle with their own demons, jealousies, and affections.

The relationship between Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon is a portrait of intensity. creative, personal, and often cruel. It’s the story of how two brilliant minds found reflection in each other, only to shatter that mirror in the end. But their influence on one another, and on the course of modern painting, remains undeniable. Their friendship may have ended in silence, but their canvases never stopped talking to one another.

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