Francis Bacon’s art, much like the creative enterprise of fellow twentieth-century geniuses Picasso, Duchamp, Pollock or Warhol, speaks powerfully of a period that underwent extraordinary social, political and cultural change. Bacon, much like Picasso, depicted the magnitude of such change by focusing primarily on the human body. The human body; the sheer corporeality of it becomes, for Bacon, his chosen vessel with which he can both explore and expose this period of monumental change; a change at once physical, sexual, experiential and psychological. The status of the body becomes the agent of Bacon’s understanding of material change: often isolated in an existential funk, delineated by coarsely lined cages and set against flat, often nondescript backgrounds of solid color, vigorously pushing both the crude cage and its dynamically-executed sitter out of the pictorial space; always confronting and challenging the viewer in the process.