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Poster for Francis Bacon and the Brutality of Fact

Francis Bacon and the Brutality of Fact

1987 · Film · documentary · 58 min

Directed by Michael Blackwood

Documentary

In his London studio, Francis Bacon discusses his work and approach with David Sylvester. His representations of the human figure in portraits and triptychs link him to the distorted realism of Van Gogh and Picasso, who also portrayed the intensity of life that Bacon calls “the brutality of fact.”

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1 comment on Hacker News

  1. PositivefatherwaveletFeb 15, 2026

    I like the analogy but I think you are underestimating how much random knob twiddling there is in all art.

    Francis Bacon and The Brutality of Fact is a wonderful documentary that goes over this. Bacon's process was that he painted every day for a long time, kept the stuff he liked and destroyed the crap. You are just not seeing the bad random knob twiddling he did.

    Picasso is even better. Picasso had some 100,000 works. If you look at a book that really gets deep to the more obscure stuff, so much of Picasso is half finished random knob twiddling garbage. Stuff that would be hard to guess is even by Picasso. There is this myth of the genius artist with all the great works being this translation of the fully formed vision to the medium.

    In contrast, even the best music from musical programming languages is not that great. The actual good stuff is so very thin because it is just so much effort involved in the creation.

    I would take the analogy further that vibe coding in the long run probably develops into the modern DAW while writing c by hand is like playing Paganini on the violin. Seeing someone playing Paganini in person makes it laughable that the DAW can replace a human playing the violin at a high level. The problem though is the DAW over time changes music itself and people's relation to music to the point it makes playing Paganini in person on the violin a very niche art form with almost no audience.

    I read the argument on here ad nauseam about how playing the violin won't be replaced and that argument is not wrong. It is just completely missing the forest for the trees.