"Bacon started working with this imagery, looking at the true nature of the regime that had emerged. He used it to explore the instinctive, savage, bestial nature that was dominating everyone's lives," Hammer said.
"There was a horrified fascination with the image of Hitler and the Nazi leadership," he added, in particular a "screaming orator-like figure with a military helmet," an image from Three Studies, which "clearly sets up the Nazi leadership as these grotesque creatures. You get a sense of his horrified reaction to this culture."
Bacon's chronic asthma exempted him from military service during World War Two, and he spent the early war years in Hampshire, and later in London during the Blitz.
Hammer believes Bacon's work shows elements of fascist imagery until well into the 1960s, when he shifted his focus away from extreme imagery and onto portraits of close friends.
On the subject of why fascist elements have remained unnoticed for so long, and why the artist himself never spoke of his precoccupation with Nazi imagery, Hammer claims he "wasn't asked about it. Interviewers either didn't recognise it or thought it shouldn't be talked about."
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