Francis Bacon And Nazi Propaganda

"In this ... approach to Bacon's work, Martin Hammer presents [him] as a painter of 'modern life', concerned to distil the feelings, sensations and memories associated with living through the rise of Fascism in the 1930s, the Second World War, the revelations of the Holocaust, and then the early Cold War and post-Colonial struggles. Hammer supports his argument with extensive evidence of Bacon's use of pre-war Nazi propaganda photography as a springboard for his paintings, examining some of Bacon's best-known and most compelling works, including the pope pictures and the Crucifixion triptychs [Hammer] ... reveals how the artist appropriated and transformed challenging photographic sources, from German publications as well as magazines like Picture Post. At the same time, Bacon's pictorial project is understood in the context of contemporary writers and thinkers, such as W. H. Auden, [Bertolt] Brecht, and Hannah Arendt, who likewise reflected on the deeper psychological significance of traumatic events. His work is set against the evolving backdrop of an initial impulse after 1945 to bury wartime memories and the gradual resurgence of interest, associated with a new focus on the Hol