20th Century Surrealism was the improbable machine poised to interrogate our collective trauma amid widespread postwar discontent. While neither explicitly political or conspicuously personal, no other work exemplifies Surrealism’s punch-drunk flirtation with altered states and existential angst as does Francis Bacon’s Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953).

 

Bacon’s painting is a grim reinterpretation of Diego Velázquez's classical portrait of Pope Giovanni Battista Pamphilj, Portrait of Innocent X (1650). Rebuking the pious formality of Velázquez's original depiction, Bacon consigns his pontiff to an inverted reality where, disabused of grace and horrified by its own existence, the solitary figure emits a silent, perpetual scream.