Seeing the story of one’s time: appropriations from Nazi photography in the work of Francis Bacon

By analysing a wide range of specific examples, this article seeks to demonstrate that Nazi propaganda photographs were a recurrent point of reference and departure for many of the paintings Francis Bacon produced during the war years and then over the next decade and beyond. The authors consider how his appropriations and transformations of such political imagery intersected with his equally continuous allusions to themes from Christ's Passion and Greek Tragedy. The argument opens up fresh intellectual contexts for Bacon, and reinforces other kinds of evidence that in his art he was motivated to represent the psychological tenor of modern history, with its dialectic of ritual and violence, rather than a more universal notion of the human condition.