Two Old Masters and a Young Genius: The Creativity of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Jean-Michel Basquiat

Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Jean-Michel Basquiat were key figures in the resurgence of expressive figurative painting in the late twentieth century. All three made personal visual art, drawing their subjects from among the people and things they cared most about. Yet they worked in very different ways, toward very different goals. This paper considers how their differing motivations and methods resulted in radically differing life cycles of creativity, measured both by auction market outcomes and by the judgments of art scholars. The experimental art of Bacon and Freud developed gradually and produced masterpieces late in their long lives, whereas the conceptual Basquiat made his most innovative art well before his premature death.