Francis Bacon, Three Studies of Portraits, Isabel Rawsthorne, 1966. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Copyright 2006 The Estate of Francis Bacon / ARS, New York / DACS, London

MILWAUKEE, WI.- During the 1950s, painter Francis Bacon began to formulate the iconography of his dark and troubled world in paint. The exhibition, Francis Bacon in the 1950s , opening at the Milwaukee Art Museum, January 27–April 15, 2007, features nearly fifty paintings from the period in which Bacon was at the height of his creative powers. In this intensely fertile time, many of Bacon's themes—screaming popes, howling dogs, and haunting figures trapped in tortured isolation—began to materialize as the man himself was becoming one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century.  (courtesy www.Artdaily.org)