The Crucible of New York: Francis Bacon and the 1950s The decade of the 1950s witnessed a seismic shift in the landscape of Western art, largely spearheaded by a group of American painters who rejected the established norms of European tradition and forged their own path—a path that would ultimately define Abstract Expressionism. Among these figures, Francis Bacon stands as a towering, often unsettling, presence, his work embodying a visceral intensity rarely matched by his contemporaries. Born in Dublin in 1906, Bacon’s early life was marked by tragedy – the loss of his father at a young ag…