Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon was a figurative painter. His artwork is known for its bold, austere, graphic and often beautiful yet tortured imagery. Abstract figures often appear isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon had begun painting by his early 20s, yet he worked only sporadically and without commitment during the late 1920s and early 1930s, when he worked as an interior decorator and designer of furniture and rugs. He later admitted that his career was delayed because he had spent so long looking for a subject that would sustain his interest.

His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, and it was this work and his heads and figures of the late 1940s through to the early 1960s that sealed his reputation as a notably bleak, world famous, chronicler of the human condition. (Source)