FRANCIS BACON §He kept in his studio a photographic still of the scene, showing a close-up of the nurse's head screaming in panic and terror and with broken pince-nez spectacles hanging from her blood-stained face.

1. °POSTIL
A BRIEF "DESCRIPTION" ON THE FRANCIS BACON'S-"SCREAM"-.
-“FRACIS BACON'S SCREAM”-
***The inspiration for the recurring motif of screaming mouths in many Bacons of the
late 1940s and early 1950s was drawn from a number of sources, including medical text
books and photographic stills of the nurse in the Odessa Steps scene in Sergei
Eisenstein's silent The Battleship Potemkin , 1925 .
>>>Bacon saw the film in 1935, and viewed it frequently thereafter.
§He kept in his studio a photographic still of the scene, showing a close-up of the
nurse's head screaming in panic and terror and with broken pince-nez spectacles
hanging from her blood-stained face.
-He referred to the image throughout his career, using it as a source of inspiration.
°Bacon described the screaming mouth as a catalyst for his work, and incorporated
the shape of the mouth when painting the Chimera.
*Bacon's finding of the theme is examined in one of his first surviving works,
Abstraction from the Human Form.
>By the early 1950s it became an obsessive concern, to the point, according to art
critic and Bacon biographer "it would be no exaggeration to say that, if one could
really explain the origins and implications of this scream, one would be far closer
to understanding the whole art of Francis Bacon."
C.M.R.