In one of his last interviews, the Irish painter Francis Bacon declared: “I have never considered my works as being disturbing”. Perhaps no, but the truth is that Bacon's figures -including his self-portraits- have caused all but indifference. Maximum exponent - along with Lucian Freud- of the “School of London”, Bacon's style refuses all the canons of the previous Painting, not only those related to beauty, but it is also rebelled against the dominant abstract expressionism of his time. He admired Picasso, “Picasso was the first person to produce figurative paintings which overturned the rules of appearance; he suggested appearance without using the usual codes, without respecting the representational truth of form, but using a breath of irrationality instead, to make representation stronger and more direct; so that form could pass directly from the eye to the stomach without going through the brain…” There is something “goyesque” -something from the Goya of the “disasters” and the “black paintings”- in Bacon's self-portraits, as in many of his most controversial paintings, like the portraits of Popes or the studies about the figure of his friend Georges Dyer.

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