title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: In 1993, the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) achieved United Nations consultative status. NAMBLA's membership in ILGA drew heavy criticism and caused the suspension of ILGA. Many gay organizations called for the ILGA to dissolve ties with NAMBLA. Republican Senator Jesse Helms proposed a bill to withhold in UN contributions until U.S. President Bill Clinton could certify that no UN agency grants any official status to organizations that condoned pedophilia. The bill was unanimously approved by Congress and signed into law by Clinton in April 1994.


title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: In 1994, ILGA expelled NAMBLA— the first U.S.-based organization to be a member—as well as Vereniging Martijn and Project Truth, because they were judged to be "groups whose predominant aim is to support or promote pedophilia". Although ILGA removed NAMBLA, the UN reversed its decision to grant ILGA special consultative status. Repeated attempts by ILGA to regain special status with the UN succeeded in 2006.


title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: Partially in response to the NAMBLA situation, Gregory King of the Human Rights Campaign later said, "NAMBLA is not a gay organization ... they are not part of our community and we thoroughly reject their efforts to insinuate that pedophilia is an issue related to gay and lesbian civil rights". NAMBLA said, "man/boy love is by definition homosexual", that "the Western homosexual tradition from Socrates to Wilde to Gide ... [and] many non Western homo sexualities from New Guinea and Persia to the Zulu and the Japanese" were formed by pederasty, that "man/boy lovers are part of the gay movement and central to gay history and culture", and that "homosexuals denying that it is 'not gay' to be attracted to adolescent boys are just as ludicrous as heterosexuals saying it's 'not heterosexual' to be attracted to adolescent girls".


title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: In 2000, a Boston couple, Robert and Barbara Curley, sued NAMBLA for the wrongful death of their son. According to the suit, defendants Charles Jaynes and Salvatore Sicari, who were convicted of murdering the Curleys' son Jeffrey, "stalked ... tortured, murdered and mutilated [his] body on or about October 1, 1997. Upon information and belief immediately prior to said acts, Charles Jaynes accessed NAMBLA's website at the Boston Public Library." The lawsuit said, "NAMBLA serves as a conduit for an underground network of pedophiles in the United States who use their NAMBLA association and contacts therein and the Internet to obtain and promote pedophile activity". Jaynes wrote in his diary, "This was a turning point in discovery of myself ... NAMBLA's "Bulletin" helped me to become aware of my own sexuality and acceptance of it ... ".


title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: Citing cases in which NAMBLA members were convicted of sexual offenses against children, Larry Frisoli, the attorney representing the Curleys, said the organization is a "training ground" for adults who wish to seduce children, in which men exchange strategies to find and groom child sex partners. Frisoli also said NAMBLA has sold on its website "The Rape and Escape Manual", which gave details about the avoidance of capture and prosecution. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stepped in to defend NAMBLA as a free speech matter; it won a dismissal because NAMBLA is organized as an unincorporated association rather than a corporation. John Reinstein, director of the ACLU Massachusetts, said although NAMBLA "may extol conduct which is currently illegal", there was nothing on its website that "advocated or incited the commission of any illegal acts, including murder or rape".


title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: A NAMBLA founder said the case would "break our backs, even if we win, which we will". Media reports from 2006 said that for practical purposes the group no longer exists and that it consists only of a website maintained by a few enthusiasts. The Curleys continued the suit as a wrongful death action against individual NAMBLA members, some of whom were active in the group's leadership. Targets of the wrongful death suits included NAMBLA co-founder David Thorstad. The lawsuit was dropped in April 2008 after a judge ruled that a key witness was not competent to testify.


title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: Allen Ginsberg, poet and father of the Beat Generation, was an affiliated member of NAMBLA. Claiming to have joined the organization "in defense of free speech", Ginsberg said: "Attacks on NAMBLA stink of politics, witchhunting for profit, humorlessness, vanity, anger and ignorance ... I'm a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too—everybody does, who has a little humanity". He appeared in "", produced and directed by Adi Sideman, a documentary in which members of NAMBLA gave interviews and presented defenses of the organization.


title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: Pat Califia argued that politics played an important role in the gay community's rejection of NAMBLA. Califia has since withdrawn much of his earlier support for the association while still maintaining that discussing an issue does not constitute criminal activity.


title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: Camille Paglia, feminist academic and social critic, signed a manifesto supporting the group in 1993. In 1994, Paglia supported lowering the legal age of consent to fourteen. She noted in a 1995 interview with pro-pedophile activist Bill Andriette "I fail to see what is wrong with erotic fondling with any age." In a 1997 "Salon" column, Paglia expressed the view that male pedophilia correlates with the heights of a civilization, stating "I have repeatedly protested the lynch-mob hysteria that dogs the issue of man-boy love. In "Sexual Personae", I argued that male pedophilia is intricately intertwined with the cardinal moments of Western civilization." Paglia noted in several interviews, as well as "Sexual Personae", that she supports the legalization of certain forms of child pornography. She later had a change of heart on the matter. In an interview for Radio New Zealand's "Saturday Morning" show, conducted on April 28, 2018, by Kim Hill, Paglia was asked, "Are you a libertarian on the issue of pedophilia?", to which she replied, "In terms of the present day, I think it's absolutely impossible to think we could reproduce the Athenian code of pedophilia, of boy-love, that was central to culture at that time. ... We must protect children, and I feel that very very strongly. The age of consent for sexual interactions between a boy and an older man is obviously disputed, at what point that should be. I used to think that fourteen (the way it is in some places in the world) was adequate. I no longer think that. I think young people need greater protection than that. ... This is one of those areas that we must confine to the realm of imagination and the history of the arts."


title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: In an 2017 protest at Columbia University against Mike Cernovich, an unidentified individual raised a pro-pedophilia banner showing logos from NAMBLA and some leftist organizations (all denying knowledge of any such cooperation). Fact-checking organizations consider this a false flag operation as alt-right personalities were quick to repost the photo without caveat and because NAMBLA has largely ceased operation by 2016. A similar 4chan hoax in 2018 connects NAMBLA with TED, following a controversial TEDx (unvetted by the TED organization) presentation referring to pedophilia as an "unchangeable sexual orientation".


title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: The first documented opposition to NAMBLA from LGBT organizations occurred at the conference that organized the first gay march on Washington in 1979. In 1980, a group called the Lesbian Caucus distributed a flyer urging women to split from the annual New York City Gay Pride March, because according to the group, the organizing committee had been dominated by NAMBLA and its supporters. The next year, after some lesbians threatened to picket, the Cornell University group Gay People at Cornell (Gay PAC) rescinded its invitation to NAMBLA co-founder David Thorstad to be the keynote speaker at the annual May Gay Festival. In the following years, gay rights groups tried to block NAMBLA's participation in gay pride parades, prompting leading gay rights figure Harry Hay to wear a sign proclaiming "NAMBLA walks with me" as he participated in a 1986 gay pride march in Los Angeles.


title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: By the mid-1980s, NAMBLA was virtually alone in its positions and found itself politically isolated. Support for "groups perceived as being on the fringe of the gay community," such as NAMBLA, vanished in the process.


title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: In 1994, Stonewall 25, a New York LGBT rights group, voted to ban NAMBLA from its international march on the United Nations in June of that year. The same year, NAMBLA was again banned from the march commemorating Stonewall. Instead, members of NAMBLA and the Gay Liberation Front formed their own competing march called "The Spirit of Stonewall". The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) adopted a document called "Position Statement Regarding NAMBLA", which said GLAAD "deplores the North American Man Boy Love Association's (NAMBLA) goals, which include advocacy for sex between adult men and boys and the removal of legal protections for children. These goals constitute a form of child abuse and are repugnant to GLAAD." Also in 1994, the Board of Directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) adopted a resolution on NAMBLA that said, "NGLTF condemns all abuse of minors, both sexual and any other kind, perpetrated by adults. Accordingly, NGLTF condemns the organizational goals of NAMBLA and any other such organization."


title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: In April 2013, the hacktivist group Anonymous prevented NAMBLA's website from being accessed as part of an operation dubbed "Operation Alice Day". The timing of the attack coincided with Alice Day, a Pedophilia Pride Day celebrated by a small group of pedophiles and their supporters on April 25.


title: North American Man/Boy Love Association

text: In 2000 in New York a teacher was fired for association with NAMBLA. There were no complaints about his conduct in class or court charges.


title: Boston Massacre

text: The Boston Massacre (known in Great Britain as the Incident on King Street) was a confrontation in Boston on March 5, 1770, in which a group of nine British soldiers shot five people out of a crowd of three or four hundred who were harassing them verbally and throwing various projectiles. The event was heavily publicized as "a massacre" by leading Patriots such as Paul Revere and Samuel Adams. British troops had been stationed in the Province of Massachusetts Bay since 1768 in order to support crown-appointed officials and to enforce unpopular Parliamentary legislation.


title: Boston Massacre

text: Amid tense relations between the civilians and the soldiers, a mob formed around a British sentry and verbally abused him. He was eventually supported by seven additional soldiers, led by Captain Thomas Preston, who were hit by clubs, stones, and snowballs. Eventually, one soldier fired, prompting the others to fire without an order by Preston. The gunfire instantly killed three people and wounded eight others, two of whom later died of their wounds.


title: Boston Massacre

text: The crowd eventually dispersed after Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson promised an inquiry, but they re-formed the next day, prompting the withdrawal of the troops to Castle Island. Eight soldiers, one officer, and four civilians were arrested and charged with murder, and they were defended by future U.S. President John Adams. Six of the soldiers were acquitted; the other two were convicted of manslaughter and given reduced sentences. The two found guilty of manslaughter were sentenced to branding on their hand.


title: Boston Massacre

text: Depictions, reports, and propaganda about the event heightened tensions throughout the Thirteen Colonies, notably the colored engraving produced by Paul Revere.


title: Boston Massacre

text: Boston was the capital of the Province of Massachusetts Bay and an important shipping town, and it was also a center of resistance to unpopular acts of taxation by the British Parliament in the 1760s. In 1768, the Townshend Acts were enacted in the Thirteen Colonies putting tariffs on a variety of common items that were manufactured in Britain and imported in the colonies. Colonists objected that the Acts were a violation of the natural, charter, and constitutional rights of British subjects in the colonies. The Massachusetts House of Representatives began a campaign against the Acts by sending a petition to King George III asking for the repeal of the Townshend Revenue Act. The House also sent the Massachusetts Circular Letter to other colonial assemblies, asking them to join the resistance movement, and called for a boycott of merchants importing the affected goods.


title: Boston Massacre

text: Lord Hillsborough had recently been appointed to the newly created office of Colonial Secretary, and he was alarmed by the actions of the Massachusetts House. In April 1768, he sent a letter to the colonial governors in America instructing them to dissolve any colonial assemblies that responded to the Massachusetts Circular Letter. He also ordered Massachusetts Governor Francis Bernard to direct the Massachusetts House to rescind the letter. The house refused to comply.


title: Boston Massacre

text: Boston's chief customs officer Charles Paxton wrote to Hillsborough for military support because "the Government is as much in the hands of the people as it was in the time of the Stamp Act." Commodore Samuel Hood responded by sending the 50-gun warship , which arrived in Boston Harbor in May 1768. On June 10, 1768, customs officials seized "Liberty", a sloop owned by leading Boston merchant John Hancock, on allegations that the ship had been involved in smuggling. Bostonians were already angry because the captain of "Romney" had been impressing local sailors; they began to riot, and customs officials fled to Castle William for protection.


title: Boston Massacre

text: Given the unstable state of affairs in Massachusetts, Hillsborough instructed General Thomas Gage, Commander-in-Chief, North America, to send "such Force as You shall think necessary to Boston", and the first of four British Army regiments began disembarking in Boston on October 1, 1768. Two regiments were removed from Boston in 1769, but the 14th and the 29th Regiments of Foot remained.


title: Boston Massacre

text: The "Journal of Occurrences" were an anonymous series of newspaper articles which chronicled the clashes between civilians and soldiers in Boston, feeding tensions with its sometimes exaggerated accounts, but those tensions rose markedly after Christopher Seider, "a young lad about eleven Years of Age", was killed by a customs employee on February 22, 1770. Seider's death was covered in the "Boston Gazette", and his funeral was described as one of the largest of the time in Boston. The killing and subsequent media coverage inflamed tensions, with groups of colonists looking for soldiers to harass, and soldiers also looking for confrontation.


title: Boston Massacre

text: On the evening of March 5, Private Hugh White stood on guard duty outside the Boston Custom House on King Street (today known as State Street). A wigmaker's apprentice, approximately 13 years old, named Edward Garrick called out to Captain-Lieutenant John Goldfinch, accusing him of refusing to pay a bill due to Garrick's master. Goldfinch had settled the account the previous day, and ignored the insult. Private White called out to Garrick that he should be more respectful of the officer, and the two men exchanged insults. Garrick then started poking Goldfinch in the chest with his finger; White left his post, challenged the boy, and struck him on the side of the head with his musket. Garrick cried out in pain, and his companion Bartholomew Broaders began to argue with White, which attracted a larger crowd. Henry Knox was a 19-year old bookseller who later served as a general in the revolution; he came upon the scene and warned White that, "if he fired, he must die for it."


title: Boston Massacre

text: As the evening progressed, the crowd around Private White grew larger and more boisterous. Church bells were rung, which usually signified a fire, bringing more people out. More than 50 Bostonians pressed around White, led by a mixed-race former slave named Crispus Attucks, throwing objects at the sentry and challenging him to fire his weapon. White had taken up a somewhat safer position on the steps of the Custom House, and he sought assistance. Runners alerted Captain Thomas Preston, the officer of the watch at the nearby barracks. According to his report, Preston dispatched a non-commissioned officer and six privates from the grenadier company of the 29th Regiment of Foot to relieve White with fixed bayonets. The soldiers were Corporal William Wemms and Privates Hugh Montgomery, John Carroll, William McCauley, William Warren, and Matthew Kilroy, accompanied by Preston. They pushed their way through the crowd. Henry Knox took Preston by the coat and told him, "For God's sake, take care of your men. If they fire, you must die." Captain Preston responded "I am aware of it." When they reached Private White on the custom house stairs, the soldiers loaded their muskets and arrayed themselves in a semicircular formation. Preston shouted at the crowd, estimated between 300 and 400, to disperse.


title: Boston Massacre

text: The crowd continued to press around the soldiers, taunting them by yelling "Fire!", by spitting at them, and by throwing snowballs and other small objects. Innkeeper Richard Palmes was carrying a cudgel, and he came up to Preston and asked if the soldiers' weapons were loaded. Preston assured him that they were, but that they would not fire unless he ordered it; he later stated in his deposition that he was unlikely to do so, since he was standing in front of them. A thrown object then struck Private Montgomery, knocking him down and causing him to drop his musket. He recovered his weapon and angrily shouted "Damn you, fire!", then discharged it into the crowd although no command was given. Palmes swung his cudgel first at Montgomery, hitting his arm, and then at Preston. He narrowly missed Preston's head, striking him on the arm instead.


title: Boston Massacre

text: There was a pause of uncertain length (eyewitness estimates ranged from several seconds to two minutes), after which the soldiers fired into the crowd. It was not a disciplined volley, since Preston gave no orders to fire; the soldiers fired a ragged series of shots which hit 11 men. Three Americans died instantly: rope maker Samuel Gray, mariner James Caldwell, and Crispus Attucks. Samuel Maverick, a 17-year old apprentice ivory turner, was struck by a ricocheting musket ball at the back of the crowd and died early the next morning. Irish immigrant Patrick Carr was shot in the abdomen, an inevitably fatal wound at that time, and died two weeks later. Apprentice Christopher Monk was seriously wounded; he was crippled and died in 1780, purportedly due to the injuries that he had sustained in the attack a decade earlier.


title: Boston Massacre

text: The crowd moved away from the immediate area of the custom house but continued to grow in nearby streets. Captain Preston immediately called out most of the 29th Regiment, which adopted defensive positions in front of the state house. Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson was summoned to the scene and was forced by the movement of the crowd into the council chamber of the state house. From its balcony, he was able to minimally restore order, promising that there would be a fair inquiry into the shootings if the crowd dispersed.


title: Boston Massacre

text: Hutchinson immediately began investigating the affair, and Preston and the eight soldiers were arrested by the next morning. Boston's selectmen then asked him to order the troops to move from the city out to Castle William on Castle Island, while colonists held a town meeting at Faneuil Hall to discuss the affair. The governor's council was initially opposed to ordering the troop withdrawal, and Hutchinson explained he did not have the authority to "order" the troops to move. Lieutenant Colonel William Dalrymple was the commander of the troops, and he did not offer to move them. The town meeting became more restive when it learned of this; the council changed its position and unanimously ("under duress", according to Hutchinson's report) agreed to request the troops' removal. Secretary of State Andrew Oliver reported that, had the troops not been removed, "they would probably be destroyed by the people—should it be called rebellion, should it incur the loss of our charter, or be the consequence what it would." The 14th was transferred to Castle Island without incident about a week later, with the 29th following shortly after, leaving the governor without effective means to police the town. The first four victims were buried with ceremony on March 8 in the Granary Burying Ground, one of Boston's oldest burial grounds. Patrick Carr, the fifth and final victim, died on March 14 and was buried with them on March 17.


title: Boston Massacre

text: On March 27, the eight soldiers, Captain Preston, and four civilians were indicted for murder; the civilians were in the Customs House and were alleged to have fired shots. Bostonians continued to be hostile to the troops and their dependents. General Gage was convinced that the troops were doing more harm than good, so he ordered the 29th Regiment out of the province in May. Governor Hutchinson took advantage of the on-going high tensions to orchestrate delays of the trials until later in the year.


title: Boston Massacre

text: In the days and weeks following the incident, a propaganda battle was waged between Boston's Patriots and Loyalists. Both sides published pamphlets that told strikingly different stories, which were principally published in London in a bid to influence opinion there. The "Boston Gazette" version of events, for example, characterized the massacre as part of an ongoing scheme to "quell a Spirit of Liberty", and harped on the negative consequences of quartering troops in the city.


title: Boston Massacre

text: Henry Pelham was an engraver and half-brother of celebrated portrait painter John Singleton Copley, and he depicted the event in an engraving. Silversmith and engraver Paul Revere closely copied the image and is often credited as its originator. The engraving contained several inflammatory details. Captain Preston is shown ordering his men to fire, and a musket is seen shooting out of the window of the customs office, which is labeled "Butcher's Hall". Artist Christian Remick hand-colored some prints. Some copies of the print show a man with two chest wounds and a somewhat darker face, matching descriptions of Attucks; others show no black victim. The image was published in the "Boston Gazette" and circulated widely, and it became an effective anti-British editorial. The image of bright red "lobster backs" and wounded men with red blood was hung in farmhouses throughout New England.


title: Boston Massacre

text: Anonymous pamphlets were published describing the event from significantly different perspectives. "A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre" was published under the auspices of the Boston town meeting, principally written by James Bowdoin, a member of the governor's council and a vocal opponent of British colonial policy, along with Samuel Pemberton and Joseph Warren. It described the shooting and other lesser incidents that took place in the days before as unprovoked attacks on peaceful, law-abiding inhabitants and, according to historian Neal Langley York, was probably the most influential description of the event. The account which it provided was drawn from more than 90 depositions taken after the event, and it included accusations that the soldiers sent by Captain Preston had been deployed with the intention of causing harm. In the interest of minimizing impact on the jury pool, city leaders held back local distribution of the pamphlet, but they sent copies to other colonies and to London, where they knew that depositions were headed which Governor Hutchinson had collected. A second pamphlet entitled "Additional Observations" on the "Short Narrative" furthered the attack on crown officials by complaining that customs officials were abandoning their posts under the pretense that it was too dangerous for them to do their duties; one customs official had left Boston to carry Hutchinson's gathered depositions to London.


title: Boston Massacre

text: Hutchinson's depositions were eventually published in a pamphlet entitled "A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance in Boston", drawn mainly from the depositions of soldiers. Its account of affairs sought to blame Bostonians for denying the validity of Parliamentary laws. It also blamed the city's citizens for the lawlessness preceding the event, and claimed that they set up an ambush of the soldiers. As it was not published until well after the first pamphlet had arrived in London, it had a much smaller impact on the public debate there.


title: Boston Massacre

text: The government was determined to give the soldiers a fair trial so that there could be no grounds for retaliation from the British and so that moderates would not be alienated from the Patriot cause. Several lawyers refused to defend Preston due to their Loyalist leanings, so he sent a request to John Adams, pleading for him to work on the case. Adams was already a leading Patriot and was contemplating a run for public office, but he agreed to help in the interest of ensuring a fair trial. He was joined by Josiah Quincy II after Quincy was assured that the Sons of Liberty would not oppose his appointment, and by Loyalist Robert Auchmuty. They were assisted by Sampson Salter Blowers, whose chief duty was to investigate the jury pool, and by Paul Revere, who drew a detailed map of the bodies to be used in the trial. Massachusetts Solicitor General Samuel Quincy and private attorney Robert Treat Paine were hired by the town of Boston to handle the prosecution. Preston was tried separately in late October 1770. He was acquitted after the jury was convinced that he had not ordered the troops to fire.


title: Boston Massacre

text: The trial of the eight soldiers opened on November 27, 1770. Adams told the jury to look beyond the fact that the soldiers were British. He referred to the crowd that had provoked the soldiers as "a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish Jack Tarrs" (sailors). He then stated, "And why we should scruple to call such a set of people a mob, I can't conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them. The sun is not about to stand still or go out, nor the rivers to dry up because there was a mob in Boston on the 5th of March that attacked a party of soldiers."


title: Boston Massacre

text: Adams also described the former slave Crispus Attucks, saying "his very look was enough to terrify any person" and that "with one hand [he] took hold of a bayonet, and with the other knocked the man down." However, two witnesses contradict this statement, testifying that Attucks was away from the soldiers when they began firing, too far away to take hold of a bayonet. Adams stated that it was Attucks' behavior that, "in all probability, the dreadful carnage of that night is chiefly to be ascribed." He argued that the soldiers had the legal right to fight back against the mob and so were innocent. If they were provoked but not endangered, he argued, they were at most guilty of manslaughter. Farah Peterson, of "The American Scholar", states that Adams' speeches during the trial show that his strategy "was to convince the jury that his clients had only killed a black man and his cronies, and that they didn't deserve to hang for it."


title: Boston Massacre

text: The jury agreed with Adams' arguments and acquitted six of the soldiers after 2 hours of deliberation. Two of the soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter because there was overwhelming evidence that they had fired directly into the crowd. The jury's decisions suggest that they believed that the soldiers had felt threatened by the crowd but should have delayed firing. The convicted soldiers were granted reduced sentences by pleading benefit of clergy, which reduced their punishment from a death sentence to branding of the thumb in open court.


title: Boston Massacre

text: Patrick Carr's deathbed account of the event also played a role in exonerating the eight defendants of murder charges. The testimony of John Jeffries is reprinted below:


title: Boston Massacre

text: Justices Edmund Trowbridge and Peter Oliver instructed the jury, and Oliver specifically addressed Carr's testimony: "this Carr was not upon oath, it is true, but you will determine whether a man just stepping into eternity is not to be believed, especially in favor of a set of men by whom he had lost his life". Carr's testimony is one of the earliest recorded uses of the dying declaration exception to the inadmissibility of hearsay evidence in United States legal code.


title: Boston Massacre

text: The four civilians were tried on December 13. The principal prosecution witness was a servant of one of the accused who made claims that were easily rebutted by defense witnesses. They were all acquitted, and the servant was eventually convicted of perjury, whipped, and banished from the province.


title: Boston Massacre

text: The Boston Massacre is considered one of the most significant events that turned colonial sentiment against King George III and British Parliamentary authority. John Adams wrote that the "foundation of American independence was laid" on March 5, 1770, and Samuel Adams and other Patriots used annual commemorations (Massacre Day) to encourage public sentiment toward independence. Christopher Monk was the boy who was wounded in the attack and died in 1780, and his memory was honored as a reminder of British hostility.


title: Boston Massacre

text: Later events such as the Gaspee Affair and the Boston Tea Party further illustrated the crumbling relationship between Britain and its colonies. Five years passed between the massacre and outright war, and Neil York suggests that there is only a tenuous connection between the two. It is widely perceived as a significant event leading to the violent rebellion that followed. Howard Zinn argues that Boston was full of "class anger". He reports that the "Boston Gazette" published in 1763 that "a few persons in power" were promoting political projects "for keeping the people poor in order to make them humble."


title: Boston Massacre

text: The massacre was remembered in 1858 in a celebration organized by William Cooper Nell, a black abolitionist who saw the death of Crispus Attucks as an opportunity to demonstrate the role of African Americans in the Revolutionary War. Artwork was produced commemorating the massacre, changing the color of a victim's skin to black to emphasize Attucks' death. In 1888, the Boston Massacre Monument was erected on the Boston Common in memory of the men killed in the massacre, and the five victims were reinterred in a prominent grave in the Granary Burying Ground.


title: Boston Massacre

text: The massacre is reenacted annually on March 5 under the auspices of the Bostonian Society. The Old State House, the massacre site, and the Granary Burying Ground are part of Boston's Freedom Trail, connecting sites important in the city's history.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The FN Five-seven (stylized as Five-seveN) is a semi-automatic pistol designed and manufactured by FN Herstal in Belgium. The pistol is named for its 5.7×28mm (.224 in) bullet diameter, and the trademark capitalization style is intended to emphasize the manufacturer's initials—"FN".


title: FN Five-seven

text: The Five-seven pistol was developed in conjunction with the FN P90 personal defense weapon and the FN 5.7×28mm cartridge. The P90 was introduced in 1990, and the Five-seven was introduced in 1998 as a pistol using the same 5.7×28mm ammunition. Developed as a companion pistol to the P90, the Five-seven shares many of its design features: it is a lightweight polymer-based weapon with a relatively large magazine capacity, ambidextrous controls, low recoil, and the ability to penetrate body armor when using certain cartridge types.


title: FN Five-seven

text: Sales of the Five-seven were originally restricted by FN to military and law enforcement customers, but since 2004, the pistol has also been offered to civilian shooters for personal protection, target shooting, and similar uses. Although offered only with sporting ammunition, the Five-seven's introduction to civilian shooters was met with vocal opposition from gun control organizations such as the Brady Campaign, and the pistol has been subject to ongoing controversy in the United States.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The Five-seven is currently in service with military and police forces in over 40 nations, including Canada, France, Greece, India, Poland, Spain, and the United States. In the United States, the Five-seven is in use with numerous law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Secret Service. In the years since the pistol's introduction to the civilian market in the United States, it has also become increasingly popular with civilian shooters.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The Five-seven pistol and its 5.7×28mm ammunition were developed by FN Herstal in response to NATO requests for a replacement for the 9×19mm Parabellum cartridge and associated pistols and submachine guns. NATO called for two types of weapons chambered for a new cartridge—one a shoulder-fired weapon, and the other a handheld weapon. According to NATO, these new weapons, termed personal defense weapons (PDWs), were to provide "personal protection in last-resort situations when the user is directly endangered by the enemy [...]." In 1989, NATO published document "D/296", outlining a number of preliminary specifications for these weapons:


title: FN Five-seven

text: FN Herstal was the first small arms manufacturer to respond to NATO's requirement; FN started by developing a shoulder-fired personal defense weapon, the FN P90, along with a small caliber, high velocity 5.7×28mm cartridge type. The original 5.7×28mm cartridge, called the "SS90", went into production with the P90 in 1990. This cartridge type was discontinued in 1993, and replaced with the 5.7×28mm "SS190", which used a heavier and slightly shorter projectile weighing 2.0 g (31 grains). The reduced length of the SS190 projectile allowed it to be used more conveniently in the Five-seven, which was under development at that time.


title: FN Five-seven

text: In 1993, Jean-Louis Gathoye of FN filed a United States patent application for a delayed blowback operating system intended for the Five-seven pistol, and "U.S. Patent 5,347,912" ("Elements for decelerating the recoil of the moving parts of a firearm") was received the following year. In 1995, FN officially announced development of the Five-seven pistol, and a prototype of the pistol was publicly displayed the following year. With some improvements, a double-action only model of the pistol went into production in 1998, and a single-action model called the "Five-seven Tactical" was then introduced shortly afterward. The Five-seven first entered service in May 2000, when the Cypriot National Guard () purchased 250 pistols for their special forces group.


title: FN Five-seven

text: In 2002 and 2003, NATO conducted a series of tests with the intention of standardizing a PDW cartridge as a replacement for the 9×19mm Parabellum cartridge. The tests compared the relative merits of the FN 5.7×28mm cartridge and the HK 4.6×30mm cartridge, which was created by German small arms manufacturer Heckler & Koch as a competitor to the 5.7×28mm. The results of the NATO tests were analyzed by a group formed of experts from Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and the group's conclusion was that the 5.7×28mm was "undoubtedly" the more efficient cartridge.


title: FN Five-seven

text: However, the German delegation and others rejected the NATO recommendation that 5.7×28mm should be standardized, halting the standardization process indefinitely. As a result, both the 4.6×30mm and 5.7×28mm cartridges (and the associated weapons) have been independently adopted by various NATO countries, according to preference; the Five-seven pistol is currently in service with military and police forces in over 40 nations throughout the world.


title: FN Five-seven

text: At first, sales of the Five-seven pistol were restricted by FN to military and law enforcement customers, but in 2004 the new "Five-seven IOM" model was introduced and offered to civilian shooters for use with 5.7×28mm sporting ammunition. The IOM model incorporated several modifications to the weapon's design, such as the addition of an M1913 accessory rail, a magazine safety mechanism, and fully adjustable sights.


title: FN Five-seven

text: Further development of the Five-seven pistol led to the introduction of the "Five-seven USG" model, which was approved by the ATF as a sporting firearm in 2004. The USG model incorporates a conventionally shaped square trigger guard, a reversible magazine release, and other minor changes.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The "Five-seven MK2" was introduced in 2013, replacing the USG model. The MK2 model has cocking serrations on the front of the slide, all black controls, and slightly different iron sights.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The "Five-seven MK3 MRD" was introduced at Eurosatory in 2022, introducing a threaded barrel, making it possible to use a silencer, a new texture pattern on the grip and deeper slide serrations. The MRD variant is available only to the government and law enforcement, with a civilian version scheduled for a later release.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The Five-seven is a semi-automatic delayed blowback pistol chambered for FN's 5.7×28mm ammunition. The pistol has a concealed hammer. Polymer materials are used extensively in the pistol's design, and even the steel slide is encased in a polymer shell. This provides reduced weight and greater resistance to corrosion. The slide's polymer shell gives the pistol the appearance of being constructed entirely of polymers, but the slide interior, barrel, trigger, springs, pins, and similar parts are all steel. However, the pistol is unusually lightweight, weighing only 744 g (1.6 lb) with a loaded 20-round magazine.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The Five-seven is a full-size pistol, having an overall length of , a height of , and a max width of . It has the same grip angle as the distinguished Browning Hi-Power and M1911 pistols. Despite the considerable length of the pistol's 5.7×28mm ammunition, the grip is not particularly unwieldy—the distance from the trigger to the back of the grip measures , which is identical to a U.S. Military issue M9 pistol chambered in 9×19mm Parabellum. The Five-seven barrel is cold hammer-forged and chrome-lined, with a total length of and a rifled length of . The barrel has eight rifling grooves with a right-hand twist rate of 1:231 mm (1:9.1 in), and it weighs . The small caliber gives the barrel a


title: FN Five-seven

text: length in calibers of more than 20, 58% more than a comparable 9x19 barrel. It has a stated service life of 20,000 rounds and the Five-seven is noted for being very accurate.


title: FN Five-seven

text: Current models of the Five-seven are single-action, having a short and light trigger pull of 20 to 30 N (4.4 to 6.6 lb""). They have a Picatinny rail for mounting accessories, and a magazine safety mechanism that prevents the pistol from firing without a magazine inserted. The grip texture on current pistols is extensively checkered for a superior hold, and each side of the slide has a series of narrow ridges at the rear to aid grasping. The trigger and trigger guard surfaces also have grooves to reduce finger slip, and the trigger guard is elongated to ease firing while wearing gloves. The Five-seven is currently offered in two different frame finishes (standard black or flat dark earth), and two different iron sight systems (adjustable sights or low profile fixed sights).


title: FN Five-seven

text: Particularly significant to the design of the Five-seven pistol is the small caliber, high velocity bottlenecked cartridge it uses. The 5.7×28mm cartridge was created by FN Herstal in response to NATO requests for a replacement for the 9×19mm Parabellum cartridge, which is commonly used in pistols and submachine guns. The 5.7×28mm cartridge weighs 6.0 g (93 grains)—significantly lighter than the average 9×19mm Parabellum cartridge (M882 NATO total cartridge weight of 12 grams (180 grains)) —making extra ammunition less burdensome, or allowing more ammunition to be carried for the same weight. Since the 5.7×28mm cartridge also has a relatively small diameter, an unusually high number of cartridges can be contained in a magazine. The cartridge has a loud report and produces considerable muzzle flash, but it has roughly 30 percent less recoil than the 9×19mm cartridge, improving controllability. Due to its high velocity, the 5.7×28mm also exhibits an exceptionally flat trajectory.


title: FN Five-seven

text: One of the design intents for the standard 5.7×28mm cartridge type, the "SS190", was that it would have the ability to penetrate Kevlar protective vests—such as the NATO CRISAT vest—that will stop conventional pistol bullets. Fired from the Five-seven, the 5.7×28mm SS190 has a muzzle velocity of roughly 650 m/s (2,130 ft/s) and is capable of penetrating the CRISAT vest at a range of , or 48 layers of Kevlar material (roughly equivalent to two stacked Level II Kevlar vest panels) at a range of . It is also capable of penetrating a PASGT vest at a range of or a PASGT helmet at a range of . FN states an effective range of and a maximum range of for the 5.7×28mm cartridge when fired from the Five-seven pistol.


title: FN Five-seven

text: In testing conducted by Passaic County, New Jersey Sheriff's Department, the 5.7×28mm SS190 penetrated to a depth of in bare ballistic gelatin, and a depth of in gelatin protected with a Kevlar vest. In testing, the SS190 and similar 5.7×28mm projectiles consistently turn base over point ("tumble") as they pass through ballistic gelatin and other media, using the 21.6-mm (.85 in) projectile length to create a larger wound cavity. However, some are skeptical of the bullet's terminal performance, and it is a subject of debate among civilian shooters in the United States.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The 5.7×28mm projectile potentially poses less risk of collateral damage than conventional pistol bullets, because the projectile design limits overpenetration, as well as risk of ricochet. The lightweight projectile also poses less risk of collateral damage in the event of a miss, because it loses much of its kinetic energy after traveling only , whereas a conventional pistol bullet such as the 9×19mm retains significant energy beyond . This range exceeds the engagement distances expected for the 5.7×28mm cartridge's intended applications, so the cartridge's limited energy at long range is not considered to be disadvantageous. Since the 5.7×28mm SS190 projectile does not rely on fragmentation or the expansion of a hollow-point bullet, the cartridge and pistol are considered suitable for military use under the Hague Convention of 1899, which prohibits the use of expanding bullets in warfare.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The Five-seven pistol feeds from detachable box magazines, but it is unconventional in that it feeds cartridges into the chamber without the use of a barrel feed ramp, having a beveled chamber only—the pistol's feeding is inherently reliable because of its use of bottlenecked cartridges. The pistol is supplied with 20-round magazines as standard, or 10-round magazines for jurisdictions with a high-capacity magazine ban. The Five-seven will also accept an aftermarket extended 30-round magazine, which protrudes an additional from the base of the pistol. With an additional cartridge in the chamber, the Five-seven pistol has a total capacity of 11, 21, or 31 rounds depending on which magazine type is used. Magazine pouches for the Five-seven magazine are available from various manufacturers.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The Five-seven's magazine can be disassembled for cleaning or lubrication by removing the polymer floorplate. The magazine body is constructed of polymer, with steel inserts at the feed lips. Unlike a conventional pistol magazine, it feeds from double-stack staggered-feed magazine, with a follower that has the same appearance as that of an M16 rifle's magazine, and which is loaded in the same manner: by pushing cartridges straight down into the magazine, rather than pushing them down and back. This setup makes it very easy to load individual cartridges into the magazine. The magazine floorplate has a slight finger spur, and four holes in the left side of the magazine body allow a convenient estimate of the amount of remaining ammunition.


title: FN Five-seven

text: All controls (excluding the trigger) on the Five-seven USG and earlier models are grey polymer, in contrast to the black polymer frame and slide cover. Similarly, all of the controls on the Five-seven FDE and Five-seven ODG models are black polymer, in contrast to the flat dark earth and olive drab polymer frames. A takedown lever is located at the front on the left side of the weapon's frame, and a slide release is located at the rear on the left side of the frame; these controls are protected from accidental movements by slight projections in the frame contour. A chamber indicator, in the form of a pin inside a tiny hole, is provided on the left side of the slide. When a round has been chambered, this pin will protrude , which is sufficient to provide both visible and tactile indication of the chamber's status.


title: FN Five-seven

text: Current models of the Five-seven have an ambidextrous manual safety device, which is located in an unconventional position: one control is found on each side of the frame above the trigger guard, where it is reachable with the trigger finger or support hand thumb. A red dot is visible here when the safety is deactivated and the pistol is ready to fire; when the safety is moved to the raised position, it is activated and the red dot is no longer visible. The pistol's push-button magazine release, located on the left side of the frame where the trigger guard intersects with the grip, is square-shaped and reversible for left-handed shooters.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The Five-seven can be disassembled quickly and easily, by using the left hand to retract and hold the slide rearwards, while simultaneously using the left-hand thumb to push and hold the takedown lever rearwards. When the slide is released, it moves forward freely and the complete slide assembly can be disengaged from the frame, whereupon the barrel (and captured recoil spring) can be removed from the slide. This level of disassembly is sufficient to perform thorough cleaning of the pistol, and FNH USA recommends no further disassembly except by an authorized armorer, FN Herstal, or FNH USA. Reassembly of the pistol is done in the reverse order, except no use of the disassembly lever is necessary.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The Five-seven has a sight radius of ; the pistol is currently offered with either adjustable sights or fixed sights. The "three-dot" type adjustable sights consist of a 2.9-mm (0.12 in) square notch rear and a 3.6-mm (0.14 in) blade front, which has a height of . The sights are targeted at , but can be adjusted for either windage or elevation. The "three-dot" type C-More fixed sights, which are offered as a low profile alternative to the adjustable sights, can only be adjusted for windage. The fixed sights are targeted at using SS195LF ammunition, and are available with or without tritium-illuminated inserts ("night sights") to aid use of the pistol in dim lighting.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The Five-seven is supplied with a lockable hard case, a locking device and keys, a magazine release reversal tool, a sight adjustment tool (not included with the fixed sights model), a cleaning kit, an owner's manual, and three 20-round magazines (or three 10-round magazines, where restricted by law).


title: FN Five-seven

text: The Five-seven can be used in conjunction with a wide range of firearm accessories; holsters are offered by various manufacturers, and the pistol's MIL-STD-1913 ("Picatinny") accessory rail will accept tactical lights or laser aiming devices. With the use of an extended, threaded barrel, the pistol can also be fitted with various sound suppressors developed by Advanced Armament Corporation, Gemtech, Silencerco, and other manufacturers. The Gemtech "SFN-57", which was developed in 1998 specifically for use with the Five-seven, is a matte black aluminum suppressor with a length of , a diameter of , and a weight of . Israeli manufacturer FAB Defense offers a complete PDW conversion kit for the Five-seven, designated the "KPOS G2 FN 5.7", that allows the pistol to be reconfigured into a shoulder-fired personal defense weapon, and CornerShot offers a weapon system compatible with the Five-seven that allows the shooter to aim and fire around corners without being exposed.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The Five-seven pistol and 5.7×28mm ammunition were originally restricted by FN to military and law enforcement customers, but in 2004 the new "Five-seven IOM" model was introduced, and offered to civilian shooters for use with 5.7×28mm SS192 ammunition. FNH USA has marketed the Five-seven to civilian shooters as a pistol suitable for personal protection, target shooting, and similar uses, but the Five-seven's introduction to civilian shooters was strongly opposed by U.S. gun control organizations such as the Brady Campaign; by the end of 2004, sales of the Five-seven pistol had increased dramatically.


title: FN Five-seven

text: In early 2005, the pistol was subject to controversy in the United States after the Brady Campaign stated that commercially available 5.7×28mm SS192 ammunition penetrated a Level IIA Kevlar vest in testing. The National Rifle Association (NRA) shortly countered the Brady Campaign's claim by stating that the gun control group may not have adhered to standard testing procedures, and that FN offers armor-piercing varieties of the 5.7×28mm cartridge only to military and law enforcement customers. Varieties offered to civilians are classified by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) as not armor-piercing, and it was stated that the SS192 and SS196 cartridge variations were unable to penetrate various types of Kevlar vests in tests conducted by FNH USA.


title: FN Five-seven

text: Michael D. Barnes, then-president of the Brady Campaign, responded to the NRA's statements on the Five-seven by challenging NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre to be shot with the pistol while wearing a Kevlar vest. The NRA again responded to the Brady Campaign's statements, saying that "Barnes demonstrated his group's complete and utter disregard for gun safety and its flaming zeal to further restrict the rights of law-abiding gun owners." In the same year, two pieces of legislation were introduced in the United States Congress, specifically targeting the Five-seven pistol and 5.7×28mm ammunition for a federal ban: the "H.R. 1136: PLEA Act" was introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), and the "S. 527: PLEA Act" was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ); neither bill proceeded to a vote by the House or Senate.


title: FN Five-seven

text: In March 2007, legislation was again introduced in the United States Congress by Rep. Engel, under the new designation "H.R. 1784: PLEA Act". Once again, the bill failed to proceed to a vote. In the following years, the Five-seven was subject to further controversy due to reports of the pistol's use by drug cartels in the Mexican Drug War. In the United States, the Five-seven has been used once to shoot and kill a police officer, causing the line of duty death of Wisconsin State Patrol Trooper Trevor Casper. Various news sources such as "The Boston Globe" and "La Jornada" also report incidents in which the pistol was used to shoot and kill police officers or civilians in Mexico. According to the ATF, the Five-seven is one of the weapons favored by drug cartels in the Mexican Drug War, and a smuggled Five-seven pistol can sell for up to 66,000 pesos (US$5,000) in Mexico. From Mexico, the pistols have been smuggled into other South American countries; in a July 2010 drive-by shooting in Envigado, Colombia, two cartel gunmen armed with Five-seven pistols opened fire on a group of bystanders outside a nightclub, leaving 9 people dead and 10 wounded.


title: FN Five-seven

text: In November 2009, the Five-seven again became subject to controversy in the United States, following the shooting at Fort Hood military base, in Texas. A U.S. Army psychiatrist, Major Nidal Hasan, opened fire on fellow soldiers with a Five-seven pistol, killing 13 people and wounding 29 in the worst shooting ever to take place on an American military base. Shortly after the shooting, FNH USA responded with a fact sheet dismissing allegations about the nature of the pistol, stating that it is only offered to civilians with sporting ammunition. Later in the month, a number of gun control organizations such as the Brady Campaign wrote a collaborative letter to U.S. President Barack Obama, citing the weapon's use by the Fort Hood shooter and Mexican drug cartels, and calling on him to ban importation of the Five-seven pistol and 5.7×28mm ammunition. In July 2010, legislation was introduced in the United States Congress by Rep. Engel, for a third time, under the new designation "H.R. 6030: PLEA Act". Like its previous incarnations, the "H.R. 6030" bill failed to proceed to a vote by either the House of Representatives or Senate.


title: FN Five-seven

text: The first military organization to adopt the Five-seven was the Cypriot National Guard (Greek: "Εθνική Φρουρά"), which purchased 250 pistols in May 2000 for its special forces group. By 2009, the Five-seven was in service with military and police forces in over 40 nations throughout the world.


title: FN Five-seven

text: In the United States, the Five-seven (as of 2010) is used by over 300 law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Secret Service. Military and law enforcement organizations using the Five-seven include:


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures. Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to render "the brutality of fact." He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Bacon said that he saw images "in series", and his work, which numbers in the region of 590 extant paintings along with many others he destroyed, typically focused on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats. His output can be broadly described as sequences or variations on single motifs; including the 1930s Picasso-influenced bio-morphs and Furies, the 1940s male heads isolated in rooms or geometric structures, the 1950s "screaming popes," the mid-to-late 1950s animals and lone figures, the early 1960s crucifixions, the mid-to-late 1960s portraits of friends, the 1970s self-portraits, and the cooler, more technical 1980s paintings.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Bacon did not begin to paint until his late twenties, having drifted in the late 1920s and early 1930s as an interior decorator, bon vivant and gambler. He said that his artistic career was delayed because he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his interest. His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion", which sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition. From the mid-1960s he mainly produced portraits of friends and drinking companions, either as single, diptych or triptych panels. Following the suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971 (memorialised in his "Black Triptychs", and a number of posthumous portraits) his art became more sombre, inward-looking and preoccupied with the passage of time and death. The climax of his later period is marked by the masterpieces "Study for Self-Portrait" (1982) and "Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych, 1985–86".


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Despite his existentialist and bleak outlook, Bacon was charismatic, articulate and well-read. A "bon vivant", he spent his middle age eating, drinking and gambling in London's Soho with like-minded friends including Lucian Freud (although they fell out in the mid-1970s, for reasons neither ever explained), John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes, Daniel Farson, Tom Baker and Jeffrey Bernard. After Dyer's suicide he largely distanced himself from this circle, and while still socially active and his passion for gambling and drinking continued, he settled into a platonic and somewhat fatherly relationship with his eventual heir, John Edwards.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Since his death, Bacon's reputation has grown steadily, and his work is among the most acclaimed, expensive and sought-after on the art market. In the late 1990s a number of major works, previously assumed destroyed, including early 1950s pope paintings and 1960s portraits, re-emerged to set record prices at auction.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Francis Bacon was born on 28 October 1909 in 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, Ireland. At that time, all of Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom. His father, army Captain Anthony Edward Mortimer Bacon, known as Eddy, was born in Adelaide, South Australia, to an English father and an Australian mother. Eddy was a veteran of the Boer War, a racehorse trainer, and grandson of Major-General Anthony Bacon, who claimed descent from Sir Nicholas Bacon, elder half-brother of The 1st Viscount St Albans (better known to history as Sir Francis Bacon), the Elizabethan statesman, philosopher and essayist. Bacon's mother, Christina Winifred Firth, known as Winnie, was heiress to a Sheffield steel business and coal mine. Bacon had an older brother, Harley, two younger sisters, Ianthe and Winifred, and a younger brother, Edward. Bacon was raised by the family nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, from Cornwall, known as 'Nanny Lightfoot', a maternal figure who remained close to him until her death. During the early 1940s, he rented the ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, John Everett Millais's old studio, and Nanny Lightfoot helped him install an illicit roulette wheel there, organised by Bacon and his friends.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: The family moved house often, moving between Ireland and England several times, leading to a sense of displacement which remained with Bacon throughout his life. The family lived in Cannycourt House in County Kildare from 1911, later moving to Westbourne Terrace in London, close to where Bacon's father worked at the Territorial Force Records Office. They returned to Ireland after the First World War. Bacon lived with his maternal grandmother and step-grandfather, Winifred and Kerry Supple, at Farmleigh, Abbeyleix, County Laois, although the rest of the family again moved to Straffan Lodge near Naas, County Kildare.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Bacon was shy as a child, and enjoyed dressing up. This, and his effeminate manner, angered his father. A story emerged in 1992 of his father having had Bacon horsewhipped by their grooms.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: In 1924, shortly after the establishment of the Irish Free State, his parents moved to Gloucestershire, first to Prescott House in Gotherington, then Linton Hall near the border with Herefordshire. At a fancy-dress party at the Firth family home, Cavendish Hall in Suffolk, Bacon dressed as a flapper with an Eton crop, beaded dress, lipstick, high heels, and a long cigarette holder. In 1926, the family moved back to Straffan Lodge. His sister, Ianthe, twelve years his junior, recalled that Bacon made drawings of ladies with cloche hats and long cigarette holders. Later that year, Bacon was thrown out of Straffan Lodge following an incident in which his father found him admiring himself in front of a large mirror wearing his mother's underwear.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Bacon spent the latter half of 1926 in London, on an allowance of £3 a week from his mother's trust fund, reading Nietzsche. Although poor (£5 was then the average weekly wage), Bacon found that by avoiding rent and engaging in petty theft, he could survive. To supplement his income, he briefly tried his hand at domestic service, but although he enjoyed cooking, he became bored and resigned. He was sacked from a telephone-answering position at a shop selling women's clothes in Poland Street, Soho, after writing a poison pen letter to the owner. Bacon found himself drifting through London's homosexual underworld, aware that he was able to attract a certain type of rich man, something he was quick to take advantage of, having developed a taste for good food and wine. One was a relative of Winnie Harcourt-Smith, another breeder of racehorses, who was renowned for his manliness. Bacon claimed his father had asked this "uncle" to take him 'in-hand' and 'make a man of him'. Bacon had a difficult relationship with his father, once admitting to being sexually attracted to him.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: In 1927 Bacon moved to Berlin, where he first saw Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin", both later to be influences on his work. He spent two months in Berlin, though Harcourt-Smith left after one – "He soon got tired of me, of course, and went off with a woman ... I didn't really know what to do, so I hung on for a while." Bacon then spent the next year-and-a-half in Paris. He met Yvonne Bocquentin, pianist and connoisseur, at the opening of an exhibition. Aware of his own need to learn French, Bacon lived for three months with Madame Bocquentin and her family at their house near Chantilly. He travelled into Paris to visit the city's art galleries. At the Château de Chantilly (Musée Condé) he saw Nicolas Poussin's "Massacre of the Innocents", a painting which he often referred to in his later work.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Bacon moved to London in the winter of 1928/29, to work as an interior designer. He took a studio at 17 Queensberry Mews West, South Kensington, sharing the upper floor with Eric Allden – his first collector – and his childhood nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. In 1929, he met Eric Hall, his patron and lover in an often torturous and abusive relationship. Bacon left the Queensberry Mews West studio in 1931 and had no settled space for some years. He probably shared a studio with Roy De Maistre, circa 1931/32 in Chelsea.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: The 1933 "Crucifixion" was his first painting to attract public attention, and was in part based on Pablo Picasso's "The Three Dancers" of 1925. It was not well received; disillusioned, he abandoned painting for nearly a decade, and suppressed his earlier works. He visited Paris in 1935 where he bought a secondhand book on anatomical diseases of the mouth containing high quality hand-coloured plates of both open mouths and oral interiors, which haunted and obsessed him for the remainder of his life. These and the scene with the nurse screaming on the Odessa steps from the "Battleship Potemkin" later became recurrent parts of Bacon's iconography, with the angularity of Eisenstein's images often combined with the thick red palette of his recently purchased medical tome.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: In the winter of 1935–36, Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, making a first selection for the "International Surrealist Exhibition", visited his studio at 71 Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea saw "three or four large canvases including one with a grandfather clock", but found his work "insufficiently surreal to be included in the show". Bacon claimed Penrose told him "Mr. Bacon, don't you realise a lot has happened in painting since the Impressionists?" In 1936 or 1937 Bacon moved from 71 Royal Hospital Road to the top floor of 1 Glebe Place, Chelsea, which Eric Hall had rented. The following year, Patrick White moved to the top two floors of the building where De Maistre had his studio, on Eccleston Street and commissioned from Bacon, by now a friend, a writing desk (with wide drawers and a red linoleum top). Expressing one of his basic concerns from the late 1930s, Bacon said that his artistic career was delayed because he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his interest.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: In January 1937, at Thomas Agnew and Sons, 43 Old Bond Street, London, Bacon exhibited in a group show, "Young British Painters", which included Graham Sutherland and Roy De Maistre. Eric Hall organised the show. He showed four works: "Figures in a Garden" (1936); "Abstraction", "Abstraction from the Human Form" (known from magazine photographs) and "Seated Figure" (also lost). These paintings prefigure "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion" (1944) in alternatively representing a tripod structure ("Abstraction"), bared teeth ("Abstraction from the Human Form"), and both being biomorphic in form.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: On 1 June 1940, Bacon's father died. Bacon was named sole Trustee/Executor of his father's will, which requested the funeral be as "private and simple as possible". Unfit for active wartime service, Bacon volunteered for civil defence and worked full-time in the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) rescue service; the fine dust of bombed London worsened his asthma and he was discharged. At the height of the Blitz, Eric Hall rented a cottage for Bacon and himself at Bedales Lodge in Steep, near Petersfield, Hampshire. "Figure Getting Out of a Car" (ca. 1939/1940) was painted here but is known only from an early 1946 photograph taken by Peter Rose Pulham. The photograph was taken shortly before the canvas was painted over by Bacon and retitled "Landscape with Car". An ancestor to the biomorphic form of the central panel of "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion" (1944), the composition was suggested by a photograph of Hitler getting out of a car at one of the Nuremberg rallies. Bacon claims to have "copied the car and not much else".


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Bacon and Hall in 1943 took the ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, formerly the house and studio of John Everett Millais. High-vaulted and north-lit, its roof was recently bombed – Bacon was able to adapt a large old billiard room at the back as his studio. Lightfoot, lacking an alternative location, slept on the kitchen table. They held illicit roulette parties, organised by Bacon with the assistance of Hall.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: By 1944 Bacon had gained confidence and moved toward developing his unique signature style. His "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion" had summarised themes explored in his earlier paintings, including his examination of Picasso's biomorphs, his interpretations of the Crucifixion, and the Greek Furies. It is generally considered his first mature piece; he regarded his works before the triptych as irrelevant. The painting caused a sensation when exhibited in 1945 and established him as a foremost post-war painter. Remarking on the cultural significance of "Three Studies", John Russell observed in 1971 that "there was painting in England before the Three Studies, and painting after them, and no one ... can confuse the two."


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: "Painting (1946)" was shown in several group shows including in the British section of "Exposition internationale d'art moderne" (18 November – 28 December 1946) at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, for which Bacon travelled to Paris. Within a fortnight of the sale of "Painting (1946)" to the Hanover Gallery Bacon used the proceeds to decamp from London to Monte Carlo. After staying at a succession of hotels and flats, including the Hôtel de Ré, Bacon settled in a large villa, La Frontalière, in the hills above the town. Hall and Lightfoot would come to stay. Bacon spent much of the next few years in Monte Carlo apart from short visits to London. From Monte Carlo, Bacon wrote to Sutherland and Erica Brausen. His letters to Brausen show he painted there, but no paintings are known to survive. Bacon said he became "obsessed" with the Casino de Monte Carlo, where he would "spend whole days". Falling in debt from gambling here, he was unable to afford a new canvas. This compelled him to paint on the raw, unprimed side of his previous work, a practice he kept throughout his life.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: In 1948, "Painting (1946)" sold to Alfred Barr for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York for £240. Bacon wrote to Sutherland asking that he apply fixative to the patches of pastel on "Painting (1946)" before it was shipped to New York. (The work is now too fragile to be moved from MoMA for exhibition elsewhere.) At least one visit to Paris in 1946 brought Bacon into more immediate contact with French postwar painting and with Left Bank ideas such as Existentialism. He had, by this time, embarked on his lifelong friendship with Isabel Rawsthorne, a painter closely involved with Giacometti and the Left Bank set. They shared many interests, including ethnography and classical literature.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: In 1947, Sutherland introduced Bacon to Brausen, who represented Bacon for twelve years. Despite this, Bacon did not mount a one-man show in Brausen's Hanover Gallery until 1949. Bacon returned to London and Cromwell Place late in 1948.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: The following year Bacon exhibited his "Heads" series, most notable for "Head VI", Bacon's first surviving engagement with Velázquez's "Portrait of Pope Innocent X" (three 'popes' were painted in Monte Carlo in 1946 but were destroyed). He kept an extensive inventory of images for source material, but preferred not to confront the major works in person; he viewed "Portrait of Innocent X" only once, much later in his life.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Bacon's main haunt was The Colony Room, a private drinking club at 41 Dean Street in Soho, known as "Muriel's" after Muriel Belcher, its proprietor. Belcher had run the Music-box club in Leicester Square during the war, and secured a 3 – 11pm drinking license for the Colony Room bar as a private-members club. Bacon was an early member, joining the day after its opening in 1948. He was 'adopted' by Belcher as a 'daughter', and allowed free drinks and £10 a week to bring in friends and rich patrons. In 1948 he met John Minton, a regular at Muriel's, as were the painters Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Patrick Swift and the "Vogue" photographer John Deakin.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: In 1950, Bacon met the art critic David Sylvester, then best known for his writing on Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti. Sylvester had admired and written about Bacon since 1948. Bacon's artistic inclinations in the 1950s moved towards his abstracted figures which were typically isolated in geometrical cage-like spaces, and set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon said that he saw images "in series", and his work typically focused more on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats. Although his decisions might have been driven by the fact that in the 1950s he tended to produce group works for specific showings, usually leaving things until the last minute, there is significant development in his aesthetic choices during this period which influenced his preference for the represented content in his paintings.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Bacon was impressed by Goya, African landscapes and wildlife, and took photographs in Kruger National Park. On his return journey he spent a few days in Cairo, and wrote to Erica Brausen of his intent to visit Karnak and Luxor, and then travel via Alexandria to Marseilles. The visit confirmed his belief in the supremacy of Egyptian art, embodied by the Sphinx. He returned in early 1951.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: On 30 April 1951, Jessie Lightfoot, his childhood nanny, died at Cromwell Place; Bacon was gambling in Nice when he learned of her death. She had been his closest companion, joining him in London on his return from Paris, and lived with him and Eric Alden at Queensberry Mews West, and later with Eric Hall near Petersfield, in Monte Carlo and at Cromwell Place. Stricken, Bacon sold the 7 Cromwell Place apartment.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: In 1958 he aligned with the Marlborough Fine Art gallery, who remained as his sole dealer until 1992. In return for a 10-year contract, Marlborough advanced him money against current and future paintings, with the price of each determined by its size. A painting measuring 20 inches by 24 inches was valued at £165 ($462), while one of 65 inches by 78 inches was valued at £420 ($1,176); these were sizes Bacon favoured. According to the contract, the painter would try to supply the gallery with £3,500 ($9,800) worth of pictures each year.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Bacon met George Dyer in 1963 at a pub, although a much-repeated myth claims they met when Dyer burgled Bacon's flat. Dyer was about 30 years old, from London's East End. He came from a family steeped in crime, and had till then spent his life drifting between theft and prison. Bacon's earlier relationships had been with older and tumultuous men. His first lover, Peter Lacy, tore up Bacon's paintings, beat him in drunken rages, at times leaving him on streets half-conscious. Bacon was now the dominating personality, attracted to Dyer's vulnerability and trusting nature. Dyer was impressed by Bacon's self-confidence and success, and Bacon acted as a protector and father figure to the insecure younger man.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Dyer was, like Bacon, a borderline alcoholic and similarly took obsessive care with his appearance. Pale-faced and a chain-smoker, Dyer typically confronted his daily hangovers by drinking again. His compact and athletic build belied a docile and inwardly tortured personality, although the art critic Michael Peppiatt describes him as having the air of a man who could "land a decisive punch". Their behaviours eventually overwhelmed their affair, and by 1970 Bacon was merely providing Dyer with enough money to stay more or less permanently drunk.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: As Bacon's work moved from the extreme subject matter of his early paintings to portraits of friends in the mid-1960s, Dyer became a dominating presence. Bacon's paintings emphasise Dyer's physicality, yet are uncharacteristically tender. More than any other of Bacon's close friends, Dyer came to feel inseparable from his portraits. The paintings gave him stature, a "raison d'etre", and offered meaning to what Bacon described as Dyer's "brief interlude between life and death". Many critics have described Dyer's portraits as favourites, including Michel Leiris and Lawrence Gowing. Yet as Dyer's novelty diminished within Bacon's circle of sophisticated intellectuals, Dyer became increasingly bitter and ill at ease. Although Dyer welcomed the attention the paintings brought him, he did not pretend to understand or even like them. "All that money an' I fink they're reely 'orrible," he observed with choked pride.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Dyer abandoned crime but descended into alcoholism. Bacon's money attracted hangers-on for benders around London's Soho. Withdrawn and reserved when sober, Dyer was highly animated and aggressive when drunk, and often attempted to "pull a Bacon" by buying large rounds and paying for expensive dinners for his wide circle. Dyer's erratic behaviour inevitably wore thin with his cronies, with Bacon, and with Bacon's friends. Most of Bacon's art world associates regarded Dyer as a nuisance – an intrusion into the world of high culture to which "their" Bacon belonged. Dyer reacted by becoming increasingly needy and dependent. By 1971, he was drinking alone and only in occasional contact with his former lover.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: In October 1971, Dyer joined Bacon in Paris for the opening of Bacon's retrospective at the "Grand Palais". The show was the high point of Bacon's career to date, and he was now described as Britain's "greatest living painter". Dyer was a desperate man, and although he was "allowed" to attend, he was well aware that he was slipping out of the picture. To draw Bacon's attention, he planted cannabis in his flat and phoned the police, and attempted suicide on a number of occasions. On the eve of the Paris exhibition, Bacon and Dyer shared a hotel room, but Bacon was forced to escape in disgust to the room of gallery employee Terry Danziger-Miles, as Dyer was entertaining an Arab rent boy with "smelly feet". When Bacon returned to his room the next morning, 24 October, together with Danziger-Miles and Valerie Beston, they discovered Dyer in the bathroom dead, seated on the toilet. With the agreement of the hotel manager, the party agreed not to announce the death for two days.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Bacon spent the following day surrounded by people eager to meet him. In mid-evening of the following day he was "informed" that Dyer had taken an overdose of barbiturates and was dead. Bacon continued with the retrospective and displayed powers of self-control "to which few of us could aspire", according to Russell. Bacon was deeply affected by the loss of Dyer, and had recently lost four other friends and his nanny. From this point, death haunted his life and work. Though outwardly stoic at the time, he was inwardly broken. He did not express his feelings to critics, but later admitted to friends that "daemons, disaster and loss" now stalked him as if his own version of the Eumenides (Greek for The Furies). Bacon spent the remainder of his stay in Paris attending to promotional activities and funeral arrangements. He returned to London later that week to comfort Dyer's family.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: During the funeral many of Dyer's friends, including hardened East-End criminals, broke down in tears. As the coffin was lowered into the grave one friend was overcome and screamed "you bloody fool!" Bacon remained stoic during the proceedings, but in the following months suffered an emotional and physical breakdown. Deeply affected, over the following two years he painted a number of single canvas portraits of Dyer, and the three highly regarded "Black Triptychs", each of which details moments immediately before and after Dyer's suicide.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: While on holiday, Bacon was admitted to the private Clinica Ruber, Madrid in 1992, where he was cared for by the Handmaids of Maria. His chronic asthma, which had plagued him all his life, had developed into a more severe respiratory condition and he could not talk or breathe very well.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: He died of a heart attack on 28 April 1992. He bequeathed his estate (then valued at £11 million) to his heir and sole legatee John Edwards; in 1998, at Edwards' request, Brian Clarke, a friend of Bacon and Edwards, was installed as sole executor of the estate by the High Court, following the Court's severing of all ties between Bacon's former gallery, Marlborough Fine Art, and his estate. In 1998 the director of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin secured Edwards' and Clarke's donation of the contents of Bacon's studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington. The contents of his studio were surveyed, moved, and reconstructed in the gallery.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: The imagery of the crucifixion weighs heavily in the work of Francis Bacon. Critic John Russell wrote that the crucifixion in Bacon's work is a "generic name for an environment in which bodily harm is done to one or more persons and one or more other persons gather to watch". Bacon admitted that he saw the scene as "a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation". He believed the imagery of the crucifixion allowed him to examine "certain areas of human behaviour" in a unique way, as the armature of the theme had been accumulated by so many old masters.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Though he came to painting relatively late in life – he did not begin to paint seriously until his late 30s – crucifixion scenes can be found in his earliest works. In 1933, his patron Eric Hall commissioned a series of three paintings based on the subject. The early paintings were influenced by such old masters as Matthias Grünewald, Diego Velázquez and Rembrandt, but also by Picasso's late 1920s/early 1930s biomorphs and the early work of the Surrealists.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Bacon's series of Popes, largely quoting Velázquez's famous portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650, Galeria Doria Pamphili, Rome) are striking images which further develop motifs already found in his earlier works, like the "Study for Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion", such as the screaming open mouth. The figures of the popes, pictorially isolated by partly curved parallel lines indicating psychological forces and symbolising inner energy like strength of feeling, are alienated from their original representation and, stripped of their representation of power to allegories of suffering humanity.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Many of Bacon's paintings are "inhabited" by reclining figures. Single, or, as in triptychs, repeated with variations, they can be commented by symbolic indexes (like circular arrows as signs for rotation), turning painted images to blueprints for moving images of the type of contemporary GIFs. The composition of especially the nude figures is influenced by the sculptural work of Michelangelo. The multi-phasing of his rendition of the figures, which often is also applied to the sitters in the portraits, is also a reference to Eadweard Muybridge's chronophotography.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: The inspiration for the recurring motif of screaming mouths in many Bacons of the late 1940s and early 1950s was drawn from a number of sources, including medical text books, the works of Matthias Grünewald and photographic stills of the nurse in the Odessa Steps scene in Eisenstein's 1925 silent film "Battleship Potemkin". Bacon saw the film in 1935, and viewed it frequently thereafter. He kept in his studio a photographic still of the scene, showing a close-up of the nurse's head screaming in panic and terror and with broken pince-nez spectacles hanging from her blood-stained face. He referred to the image throughout his career, using it as a source of inspiration.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: Bacon described the screaming mouth as a catalyst for his work, and incorporated its shape when painting the chimera. His use of the motif can be seen in one of his first surviving works, "Abstraction from the Human Form". By the early 1950s it became an obsessive concern, to the point, according to art critic and Bacon biographer Michael Peppiatt, "it would be no exaggeration to say that, if one could really explain the origins and implications of this scream, one would be far closer to understanding the whole art of Francis Bacon."


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: In 1999, England's High Court ruled that Marlborough Fine Art had to be replaced by a new independent representative for the Bacon estate. The estate moved its business to Faggionato Fine Arts in Europe and Tony Shafrazi in New York. That same year, the estate sued Marlborough UK and Marlborough International, Vaduz, charging them with wrongfully exploiting Bacon in a relationship that was "manifestly disadvantageous" to him, until his death in 1992, and to his estate. The suit alleged Marlborough in London grossly underpaid Bacon for his works and resold them through its Liechtenstein branch at much higher prices, contending that Marlborough never supplied a complete accounting of Bacon's works, and failed to account for up to 33 of his paintings. The litigation was settled out of court in early 2002, following Edwards' diagnosis of lung cancer, with both sides paying their own costs. During the legal process, an undisclosed number of Bacon's paintings were recovered from Marlborough, and "vast quantities of correspondence and documents relating to Bacon's life were handed over by the gallery". In 2003, the estate was handed to a four-person trust based in Jersey.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: In August 1998, Bacon's sole heir John Edwards and the artist Brian Clarke, sole executor of Bacon's estate, donated the contents of Bacon's studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. The studio at 7 Reece Mews had remained largely untouched since Bacon's death in 1992, and the decision was taken to preserve it for posterity. A team of archaeologists, art historians, conservators and curators oversaw the wholesale relocation of the studio to Dublin. The locations of over 7,000 items were mapped, survey and elevation drawings made, the items packed and catalogued, and the studio was rebuilt, including the original doors, floor, walls and ceiling. At the time, Edwards commented about the decision to send the entire studio to Ireland: "a little corner of South Kensington moved to his birthplace. Thousands of papers, books, photos, rotted curtains – all in Dublin. I think it would have made him roar with laughter...". In 2001 the relocated studio was opened to the public, with a fully comprehensive database, the first computerised record of the entire contents of an artist's studio. Every item in the studio has a database entry. Each entry consists of an image and a factual account of an object. The database has entries on approximately 570 books and catalogues, 1,500 photographs, 100 slashed canvases, 1,300 leaves torn from books, 2,000 artist's materials and 70 drawings. Other categories include Bacon's correspondence, magazines, newspapers and vinyl records.


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: In an interview to BBC News, when the decision to move Bacon's London Studio to Ireland was announced, Clarke commented the following about all controversies over the donation of the studio: "Bacon once said that he'd never come back to Dublin until he was dead, (...) I think frankly if he were here today to see what happened, I think he'd be touched but I think he'd probably roar with laughter as well". To "The Irish Times" he also commented about the Bacon's Studio removal to Ireland: "And it's very appropriate. I'm convinced Francis would have loved it. After all, he was born here, and he said once that he couldn't come back until he was dead – the fuss would be too much."


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: The Popes and large triptychs, in their time, commanded the highest prices at auction. By 1989 Bacon was the most expensive living artist after one of his triptychs sold at Sotheby's for over $6 million. In 2007, actress Sophia Loren consigned "Study for Portrait II" (1956) from the estate of her late husband Carlo Ponti at Christie's. It was auctioned for the then record price of £14.2 million ($27.5 million).


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: In 2008, the "Triptych, 1976", sold at Sotheby's for €55.465 million ($86.28 million), then a record for a work by Bacon and the highest price paid for a postwar work of art at auction up to 2008. In 2013, "Three Studies of Lucian Freud" sold at Christie's New York for $142.4 million, surpassing both "Triptych" and "1976" in auctioned value, and more importantly claiming the record for highest auction price of a work of art at that time, a title previously held by the fourth version of Edvard Munch's "Scream" and now held by Leonardo da Vinci's ""Salvator Mundi"".


title: Francis Bacon (artist)

text: A first, incomplete catalogue raisonné was compiled by curator Ronald Alley in 1964. In 2016, a five-volume "Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné", documenting 584 paintings by Bacon, was released by Martin Harrison and others.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: Truth or Dare, also known as Blumhouse's Truth or Dare, is a 2018 American supernatural horror film directed and co-written (alongside Michael Reisz, Jillian Jacobs, and Chris Roach) by Jeff Wadlow. The film stars Lucy Hale, Tyler Posey, Violett Beane, Hayden Szeto, Sophia Taylor Ali, and Landon Liboiron as a group of college students who play a game of truth or dare while on vacation in Mexico, only to realize it has deadly consequences if they don't follow through on their obligations. Jason Blum produced through his Blumhouse Productions banner, and Universal Pictures distributed the film.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: Released in theaters on Friday, April 13, 2018, the film received mostly negative reviews from critics, who said it was "neither inventive nor scary enough to set itself apart from the decades of dreary slashers that came before it." Regardless, the film was a box office success, grossing $95 million worldwide against its $3.5 million production budget.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: Olivia Barron is a college senior who is seen by others as a good girl who always puts others' needs before her own. During her last spring break, although she initially plans to build houses with Habitat for Humanity, her best friend Markie Cameron convinces her to come to Mexico with their friends instead. At a bar, Olivia meets a man named Carter who invites them to go drinking at an abandoned church. There, Carter suggests they play truth or dare. During the game, their friend Tyson Curran reveals that Olivia has a secret crush on Lucas Moreno, Markie's boyfriend, which she denies. Carter admits that he tricked them into playing a supernatural version of the game and warns them to do whatever the game asks or they will be killed.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: Back at school, Olivia sees hallucinations calling on her to pick truth or dare. She picks ""truth"" and blurts out that Markie has been serially unfaithful to Lucas. The friends learn that Ronnie, another friend, was forced to kill himself after failing to complete a "dare". Lucas picks ""truth"" and admits that he has always had feelings for Olivia. Markie is forced to break Olivia's hand while their closeted friend Brad Chang is forced to admit to his father that he is gay.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: Tyson remains in disbelief of the reality of the game’s consequences. He is then killed when he lies during his turn. The group discovers a story online about a woman named Giselle Hammond who lit a woman on fire in Mexico while playing truth or dare. They arrange a meeting with her through social media. Giselle reveals that her friends were playing the game in that same church. One friend, Sam Meehan, got drunk and began trashing the place. When they got home, the game somehow continued and only she and Carter survived. Carter was "dared" to involve more players in the game to give themselves more time before it became their turn again. Giselle reveals that she has been "dared" to kill Olivia and tries to shoot her, but her friend Penelope Amari dives in front and is killed instead. Having failed her dare, Giselle is forced to kill herself.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: Olivia is "dared" to sleep with Lucas. While they have sex, Lucas is forced to admit that while he cares about her, he is still in love with Markie. Olivia and Lucas drive to Tijuana and meet Inez Reyes, a former nun at the church who cannot speak. By writing on paper, Inez tells them how she summoned an ancient demon named Calux who possessed the game of "Truth or Dare" to save herself from a sadistic priest. However, Calux kept the game going and killed all her friends. She trapped Calux with a ritual involving cutting off her tongue and sealing it in a pot. The group realize Sam must have broken the pot and released Calux, and to trap him, they need to find Sam.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: Brad is "dared" to threaten his father with a gun. As he does so, he is shot and killed by an approaching officer. Olivia learns that Carter and Sam are the same person. She is "dared" to speak the truth and tells Markie that the night Markie's father killed himself, he had sexually assaulted Olivia and she had told him that Markie would be better off if he was dead. Though at first angry and hurt, Markie, after contemplating suicide with her father's handgun, forgives her friend, and tells her it is not her fault as her father had tried to kill himself before.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: Olivia, Markie, and Lucas find Sam and force him back to the ruins of the church. As Sam goes through the ritual to trap Calux, Lucas is "dared" to kill either Olivia or Markie. When he refuses, Calux possesses him and forces him to kill himself after killing Sam so that the latter cannot complete the ritual. When Markie's turn comes, Olivia tells her to choose dare, then refuse to complete it. Calux possesses Markie, at which point Olivia forces Calux into the game by asking him to pick truth or dare. The demon is forced to tell the "truth" that there is no way they can make it out of the game alive because Sam is dead. They'll die unless they add more people to delay their next turn.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: Olivia uploads a YouTube video, in which she briefly warns viewers about the game and its rules. She then asks "Truth or Dare," involving whoever hears the phrase into the game, delaying her and Markie's next turn for the time being.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: Initially, director Jeff Wadlow explained that he was hired to direct the film after spitballing an opening scene based on the film's title in his initial meetings with Blumhouse. Subsequently, he joined with his friend Chris Roach, and his wife, Jill Jacobs, and started thinking of ideas to approach the final concept.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: Principal photography on the film began on June 7, 2017, and wrapped on July 12, 2017, in Los Angeles.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: The film was initially set for release on April 27, 2018. But in January 2018, the date was moved up two weeks and premiered on April 13, 2018. The official trailer for the film was released on January 3, 2018.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: "Truth or Dare" grossed $41.4 million in the United States and Canada, and $53.9 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $95.3 million, against a production budget of $3.5 million.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: In the United States and Canada, the film was released alongside "Rampage" and "", as well as the wide expansion of "Isle of Dogs", and was projected to gross $12–15 million from 3,029 theaters in its opening weekend. The film made $8.3 million on its first day (including $750,000 from Thursday night previews), $6.8 million on Saturday and a total of $18.7 million over the weekend, finishing third behind "Rampage" ($35.7 million) and fellow horror film "A Quiet Place" ($32.6 million). It fell to 58% in its second weekend, grossing $7.8 million and finishing fifth. The film continued to hold well in its third weekend, dropping 58% again to $3.3 million, finishing in seventh place.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of based on reviews, and an average rating of . The website's critical consensus reads, ""Truth or Dare" slick presentation isn't enough to make this mediocre horror outing much more frightening than an average round of the real-life game." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 35 out of 100, based on 33 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: Simon Abrams of "RogerEbert.com" gave the film two stars out of four and wrote that "director Jeff Wadlow and his three credited co-writers don't go far enough towards either of their film's primary impulses—humanizing their immature subjects and/or making them die amusingly sadistic deaths." "Variety"s Owen Gleiberman called it a "scare-free horror film" and wrote, "The movie isn't scary, it isn't gripping, it isn't fun, and it isn't fueled by any sort of clever compulsion. It's just a strangely arduous exercise that feels increasingly frantic and arbitrary as it goes along." Edward Porter of "The Times" gave the film 1/5 stars, saying that it was "not so much a horror show as a soap opera with a high mortality rate."


title: Truth or Dare (2018 film)

text: Simran Hans of "The Observer" gave the film 2/5 stars, writing: "This tepid teen horror from Blumhouse Productions is a disappointing backwards stumble for the indie company, given its recent track record of cheap but effective genre thrills such as "Split" and "Happy Death Day" (as well as the considerably higher profile "Get Out")." Robbie Collin of "The Daily Telegraph" also gave the film 2/5 stars, describing it as "the kind of film that must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but its initially appealing premise... quickly falls to pieces under its own self-generated confusions." Geoffrey Macnab of "The Independent" also gave the film 2/5 stars, writing: "A few moments of ingenuity aside, "Truth or Dare" is lacklustre filmmaking. Its premise is so contrived that any attempts at stirring up dread or suspense are stifled at the outset."