Self-Preoccupied and Revelatory, Francis Bacon Faced Middle England with a Sensibility It Could Barely Tolerate. This Is Raw, Embarrassing, Nihilistic

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Francis Bacon was sui generis. He didn't even have precursors in the Borgesian sense of the word - meaning precursors who were "created" by him, whose work is amended and endowed with previously unperceived meaning because of what it has inadvertently engendered. He does not cause us to scrutinise Velazquez in a new light because the gap between Bacon and Velazquez is chasmic. Bacon didn't steal the way great artists are supposed to. He took and joyrode and trashed. He was indifferent to the status of his sources: they might be works of the first magnitude, such as Velazquez's Pope Innocent X, or they might be medical illustrations. They were reduced to mere catalysts.

Nor did Bacon have successors. There was no school of Bacon. He fomented no fashion, suffered no disciples, occasioned no print other than his own, went against the grain. He was a figurative dissenter at the height of his powers during the hegemony of abstraction (which he regarded, scornfully, as mere pattern-making). He was just about inimitable.