Francis Bacon at London's Tate Gallery

Study from the Human Body, 1949
Oil on canvas
After the butchery of World War II, Bacon was one of the artists, along with Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet and a few others, who found a way to make the painted human figure plausible again by subjecting it to extreme pressure. The soft tissue of Bacon's boiling men and women is usually wrenched, smeared and vaporized by their own drives and desires, and by whatever it is they do to one another. But in 1949 he made this almost tender picture of a man seen from behind, stepping through an enigmatic curtain.

• Francis Bacon: Tragic Genius