Born in Ireland in 1909, Francis Bacon spent his formative years in a nation wracked by the Sinn Fein uprising, an event that haunted him long after his family moved to England. He never trained formally as a painter but began to pursue art in London in the late 1920s, eventually
"De Kooning is probably the most libidinal painter America has ever had." So says art critic Robert Hughes, and when we look at de Kooning's paintings, the way he immersed himself in the female form in his famous "Women" series from the 50s, and the way the body -- admittedly in pieces, but the sensu