FRANCIS BACON
& 20th CENTURY CRISES OF FAITH, IDENTITY & ETHICS
Iain McKillop
[Abbreviations used for quotations & references in the text:
AS. Andrew Sinclair: Francis Bacon: His Life & Violent Times. London. Sinclair-Stevenson. 1993
F. Daniel Farson: The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. London: Century. 1993
H. Martin Hammer: Francis Bacon. London: Phaidon. 2013
P. Michael Peppiatt: Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 1996
P.M. Michael Peppiatt: Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir. London: Bloomsbury. 2015
S. David Sylvester: Interviews with Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson. 1975
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“We come from nothing and go into nothing, and in this brief interlude we might try to give existence a direction through our drives. But there is nothing… Nada… A game played out for no reason.” [Francis Bacon quoted Peppiatt p.221]
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“ He took the Crucifixion, stripped it of all its Christian implications, and invested it instead with the universal beastliness of man and abattoir running with blood, deafened with screams. As a portrait painter he was not the friend with insight, but the harsh interrogator, the man outside the ring of light with lash and electrodes close at hand. His prisoners, presidents, popes and old friends squirmed.
He used the ideas of the trap, the cell, the cage, the X-ray and the heavy fall of light to imprison and torment his subjects to distil the violence, and to assault complacent senses with graceless nakedness on the lavatory pan and vomit in the wash-basin...
Bacon took the vile, sexually and politically obscene, and shudderingly visceral, and lifted them with paint so that we might contemplate ferociously profane images of cruelty and despair, and see in them an inheritance from the great Renaissance themes of religious and temporal power.
Titian, Rembrandt and Velazquez might not have cared for Bacon’s work but they would have recognised kinship in his astonishing mastery of paint and the profound pessimistic atheism of his images. He was the perfect mirror of the spirit of our age.” [Brian Sewell obituary of Francis Bacon. quoted AS.p.314].
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When the Protestant Christian art-historian Hans Rookmaaker’s critique of Modernism Modern Art and the Death of a Culture was first published 1970, one of Francis Bacon’s studies of the screaming pope, based on Velazquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X [1650] was chosen for its cover. It must have seemed an ideal image to represent the 20th Century crisis of faith, the decline of the power and influence of the Church, and the international insecurity about the value of human identity internationally in the post-war decades. Yet the power of the images and the beauty of colour in Bacon’s works contain more positive values, which balance his often negative expressions about the nature and meaninglessness of the human condition.
Bacon defended his images by claiming “You can’t be more horrific than life itself!” [AS.p.299]. Many of his works were designed to shock or be deliberately iconoclastic, in order to engage people’s sensations, attract attention and present the horrors of life, some of which he experienced. Bacon claimed “Things are not shocking if they have not been put into memorable form” [P.p.305]. The horrors of the massacre on the Odessa Steps were made more shocking in film by Eisenstein’s use of the detail of the nurse’s screaming face and the child falling down the stairway in its pram. Bacon was creating similar emphases through his screaming faces and Crucifixion paintings. He was intensely serious about his work. But one should not discount the probability that some of his images also amused him. Bacon had a strong, though at times waspish, sense of humour. Some of those represented in his portraits and knew in his clubs may have shared that amusement, as there was cutting humour in some circles in which he moved. They would also have also been amused by people’s negative reactions, though cutting early criticism led him to destroy some of his early exhibited work.
Though I have quoted Bacon extensively in this study, one has to be careful in interpreting his words. He often said things for effect, to shock, in humour, or to test those to whom he was talking. His character, like most of us, was complex and contained many contradictions, which will be partly discussed later. Yet one cannot always be certain that he was being honest in his statements about his indifference to the meaninglessness of life, death and art. He was a man of innumerable contradictions, as are many of us. Bacon was probably even more critical of his work than his detractors. Interestingly, though the seminal series of popes painted between 1950 and 1953 are key works in his oeuvre, Bacon later disowned those works. He did not do so based on their subject-matter but because he was certain that he could have painted them better [F.p.214 & 226].
At several times in his career and since Francis Bacon’s work has been criticised on moral grounds more than aesthetic ones. Paul Johnson’s disparaging criticism after Bacon’s death sums up the assessment of some, though he criticised on both aesthetic and moral grounds:
“He could not draw. His ability to paint was limited and the way he laid the pigment on the canvas was often barbarous. He had no ideas, other than one or two morbid fancies arising from his homosexuality, chaotic way of life, and Irish fear of death. What he did have was a gimmick, something resembling an advertising designer’s logo, In his case it was a knack of portraying the human face or body not so much twisted as smeared out of shape. It was enough. Such a logo could easily be dressed up by the scriptwriter of the industry into an image of ‘our despairing century’; it fitted his favourite words: ‘disquieting’ and ‘disturbing’ [quoted F.p.217].
It is far too simplistic to dismiss Bacon’s work as violent, ugly (which it is certainly not), sadomasochistic, or the fantasy and biographical reflections of a homosexual artist. When criticised by the critic Richard Dorment in the Daily Telegraph of 3rd February 1980 as painting something “more deliberate, more chosen and more willed than despair. Something vicious and purely evil,” referring to Bacon’s 1988 version of Triptych 1944], the painter responded “I thought they were rather nice myself.” [F.p.133].
Christians are taught “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” [Philippians 4:8 - N.R.S.V.]. That does not mean that it is dangerous or corrupting to study Francis Bacon, since he explores realities of the damaged world and damaged human beings which Christ’s Gospel seeks to understand, in order to heal. But when questioned about why he used Christian imagery or references in the titles of his work, Bacon would frequently remark that he intended no religious meaning or message; he was merely attempting to ‘excite’ himself, stimulate the senses, or was reflecting his general view of the nature of humanity. The crucifixion was “a marvellous armature on which to hang all kinds of thoughts and feelings” [S.p.44]. He would add that he was expressing his own private feelings and sensations, using the Crucifixion as “almost nearer to a self-portrait” [P.p.99].
Bacon is one of the greatest artists to express the horrors which are part of everyday life in an aggressive yet seductive world. He depicts the sort of world where more recently Putin caused horrors in Ukraine, where murderers like the Cray brothers who Bacon encountered himself, Moira Hindley, Ian Brady, Fred West and Lucy Letby destroy the innocent; where politicians lie or go to war to maintain power and expand their influence. This is the sort of world that needs to be helped limping towards the better world that Jesus of Nazareth called ‘The Kingdom of God’. Francis felt no such hope, and it not he world that formed Francis Bacon and which he reflected in his paintings.
Bacon explained to David Sylvester in 1979: “I think of myself as a maker of images. The image matters more than the beauty of the paint.” [H.p.11]. Yet the visual attraction of the images is a significant part of the meaning or significance of the pictures. Bacon recognised that it can take significant time to assess the ultimate value of an artist’s work: “No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because it takes at least seventy-five to a hundred years before the thing starts to sort itself out from the theories that have been formed about it.” [H.p.140]
Francis Bacon, alongside Henry Moore or Lucien Freud, is one of only a handful of important British artists of the mid-20th Century whose standing and standard of work could be called truly international. He was celebrated by several critics and art-historians during his late career as ‘the greatest British artist since Turner’. Such a comparison may be undeserved, yet even Sir Kenneth Clark, the relatively conservative Director of the National Gallery recognised him early as a ‘genius’ [P.p.113]. By comparison the work of his friends Graham Sutherland and even Lucien Freud now seem insular and conservative and his early mentor Roy de Maistre’s cubistic style seems extremely derivative. De Maistre had encouraged him by sharing an early exhibition with him and Jean Shepeard as early as 1930. [P.p.20]. Bacon’s quality and uniqueness of work is comparable to great European modern masters or a few American masters like Rothko, though Bacon claimed to find Rothko’s work depressing [AS.p.251]. Although Francis Bacon became famous from his first exhibition at the Tate Gallery onward, he played with his success rather than taking it seriously. He seemed indifferent to his fortune late in life and throughout his life had held very few possessions, even getting rid of personal paintings that other artists and friends gave him. He recognised the limitations and fluctuations of taste in the art-market and the shallow sycophancy of some who lauded and promoted him [P.p.200]. He remarked humorously that he considered that his work ‘should go either in the National Gallery or the dustbin.’ [P.p.232].
Though he worked on several paintings that include religious subject-matter, Bacon could not be considered as a ‘religious artist’ in any conventional use of the term ‘religious’. In interviews with the artist, David Sylvester repeatedly tried to pin Francis down over his thoughts about religion in his works, and Bacon most often deflected his comments. Of the Pope pictures, Bacon claimed: “it doesn’t come from anything to do with religion; it comes from an obsession with the photographs that I know of Velazquez. Pope Innocent X.” [S.p.24]. But Bacon must have been being partly disingenuous, as what the Pope stood for is important to the image. On the other extreme, Bacon’s one-time agent Helen Lessore wrote in her memoir Partial Testament: “the truth is that Bacon’s works are great religious paintings. The very agony of his unbelief becomes so acute that, by the intensity of its involvement with the final questions, the negative becomes as religious as the positive.” [quoted F.p.134]. This is over-the-top critique and shows the shallow philosophy of some critics and modern-art promoters, who play with metaphors to make themselves or the art seem cleverer or more profound than it is. Bacon positively claimed to have no belief in God: “I’ve always been an optimist, even if I don’t believe in anything... When we’re dead we’re no good. When I’m dead, put me in a plastic bag and throw me in the gutter... Faith is a fantasy... religion is a way of disciplining people. Governments use religion to control the people.” [F.p.134].
The French critic Pierre Schneider went similarly over-the-top in his adoption of religious parallels and symbolism by comparing Bacon’s work to the double nature of Christ ‘unmixable and inseparable’... ‘his fascination with the Crucifixion may well be attributed to the fact that Christianity’s central mystery provides the pattern for the mystery in painting: reality must allow itself to be put to death by paint in order to be resurrected as image...Tertullian called this period (those glacial three days before the Resurrection) ‘refigerium interim’. No artist has given us a grander vision of this ghastly moment of suspension, which is the Christian legacy to our post-Christian age.” [The Times 7 Nov.1971 cf. AS.p.223-4 for a longer quotation]. It is likely that Bacon would have laughed at this, saying that it said more about the critic than his own work. Of the few critics who he believed understood him, he relied much upon David Sylvester and Michel Leiris, and even Leiris over-interpreted him, though he recognised the ‘realism’ rather than romanticism or expressionism in Francis’ work.
However, Bacon’s expressive style should not be dismissed as resulting primarily from his atheism. Graham Sutherland, whose crucifixions are almost as violent as those of Bacon, was a committed Roman Catholic convert. In many ways Francis Bacon reflects the attitude to religion of many in the mid-20th Century, particularly in the post-war years and more-so today, when belief and trust in God declined significantly, and consequently church attendance. Despite promotion of many esoteric religious or quasi-religious experiences and redefinitions of ‘spirituality’ at different times in the last 70 years, this decline in commitment to faith has increased. Partly through not meeting the challenges with a sufficiently convincing apologetic, the Christian Church throughout western society has declined in influence, attractiveness and conviction. Bacon was not helped in his attitude to religion by the Christian contacts who should have been witnessing to him: For a short while his childhood education was entrusted to a local clergyman, who Bacon remembered as having been more interested in horses than educating him [P.p.18]. He spent a very short time at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, a religious foundation, but felt that he didn’t fit in, yet he began to explore his sexuality in relationships there. [P.p.19-20]. The closest he came to living with someone with faith was Eric Hall, who was himself driven by contradictions and not at peace, though committed to Francis.
The 20th Century witnessed a negative reaction to the possibility that traditional religions contain truths. Many concluded that reason dismisses the idea of God and an afterlife. I personally believe strongly that Christianity, as described in the Gospels as being taught by Jesus of Nazareth contains intensely practical truth. However, a growing, popular lack of trust in the Bible, the integrity of churches and their leaders, and inadequate promotion of practical, authentic Christianity with integrity has brought about the largely secular society which surrounds us today. Bacon worked in a period that was at the heart of that decline. Recognition that the Church of the time condemned the homosexuality (as did the majority of popular society generally) cannot have endeared him to faith, since he knew that his sexuality was an essential and unchangeable part of his nature. Nor could he have recognised the truths within faith when he had seen first-hand the violence bigotry and hypocrisy pursued by groups espousing faith in his birthplace in Ireland. Rejection and fear of persecution and prosecution brought about a ghettoising of minority groups, like Bacon’s circle, into closed sets and clubs which flourished in a semi-underground form in areas like Soho, Chelsea or South Kensington where he lived. Sodomy was still punishable by life imprisonment up to 1967. Bacon admitted that he felt an outsider in his social class [P.p.3]. He and his group developed different attitudes to life in order to survive, some of which are reflected in Bacon’s subject-matter, imagery and statements.
Religion is concerned with the response of human beings to issues beyond themselves. Conventional faiths are often based on trust in divine powers or superstitious fear of God or the gods. More recently, a prevailing attitude of self-centredness has developed, in which the individual and their immediate circle are considered of primary importance. The sense of responsibility towards a higher truth or care for others in the world has declined for a large number of reasons, as has trust in one’s neighbour, Financial inequity, insecurity, vulnerability, and in more recent decades the crisis in climate change, immigration and the rise of popular media have fuelled a further emphasis on individualism. Many focus on self-promotion through the internet, becoming an ‘influencer’, asserting the rights of individuals or minority groups, changes in attitudes to morality, an even greater growth in capitalism and insistence on the importance of one’s own identity to the exclusion of spiritual or shared responsibilities.
Bacon’s paintings, perhaps more than any other great modern painter, make visual the change in attitude to faith and the human condition, which developed from the middle of the 20th Century and has expanded further today. One has to look primarily to film or literature to find similar expression: Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin [1925, Strike [19], the works of Bertolucci, The Deerhunter, Birdy, Apocalypse Now, Dr. Strangelove, Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, , Fowles’ The Collector and Patrick White’s novel The Vivisector. (White was an early friend of Bacon’s in London, as the lover of Bacon’s artistic mentor Roy de Maistre; he bought some of Bacon’s early furniture.) Francis also developed friendships with the American authors William Burroughs and Allan Ginsberg in the 1950s and 60s. He not only reflects this social, ethical and religious change, but in some ways he documented it, without intentionally making political statements.
Bacon’s dark subjects and the distorted figures and physiognomy of his portraits suggest that behind and within the human condition, even aspects of everyday life, are pain, psychological damage or vicious impulses and darkness. Artists had expressed this before, particularly Expressionists like Kirchner or Otto Dix and some of Picasso’s most expressive works in his bullfights, Guernica and interpretation of Grünewald’s Crucifixion in the Isenheim Altarpiece. Bacon owned a painting by Walter Sickert, whose works seem more emotionally detached but illustrate threats to human life, in imagery around rape and the stories of Jack the Ripper. While such artists worked on many different subjects and themes, Francis Bacon made the pain and disintegration of the human condition the primary subject of almost his entire oeuvre, even his portraits. His attitude to the pain in the Isenheim altarpiece is significant: “I’ve never known why my paintings are thought of as horrible. I’m always labelled with horror, but I never think about horror. Pleasure is such a diverse thing. And horror is too. Can you call the famous Isenheim altar a horror piece? It’s one of the greatest paintings of the Crucifixion, with the body studied with thorns like nails, but oddly enough of the form is so grand it takes away from the horror. But that is grand horror in the sense that it is so vitalising, isn’t it? Isn’t that how people come out of the great tragedies of Greece, the Agamemnon? People come out as though purged into happiness, into a fuller reality of existence.” [quoted P.p.272]. He seemed here to be making cathartic claims for his work. One is confronted by the anguish and recognises it, in order to be able to continue with life day-by-day without too many longings.
Bacon had visited Berlin and Paris in his early 20s, where he came into contact with the developments of modernist art. His early works in design in the late 1920s experimented with abstracting forms. Then Picasso’s anamorphic drawings around 1927 [S.p.8] influenced Bacon’s earliest images of the crucifixion in the early 1930s. However the main development of his visual language for expressing his feelings about the human condition flourished in the bleak, damaged post-war world and represented his personal reaction and the fear and disgust of many to the horrors of the human psychology that could lead to the atrocities of war and genocide. His work no-doubt also reflects other contemporary pressures: the aftermath of the Holocaust, threats of the Cold-War, the atomic bomb, the war in Vietnam, political and religious turmoil in his native Ireland etc. as well as changing attitudes to morality and sexuality.
His attitude to life and art seems to have been fairly utilitarian rather than spiritual. Shortly before his death he told Daniel Farson: “When we’re dead we’re no good. We’re finished. When I go, I hope to drop dead working... Otherwise I’d commit suicide” [F.p.1] “Existence is in a way so banal, you might as well try to make a kind of grandeur out of it.” [F.p.10]. He claimed “Man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without purpose, other than of his own choosing.” [F,p.247].
Francis was not precious about his work, often destroying pieces though perhaps not as many as nine-tenths of his oeuvre, as he claimed in the Associated-Rediffusion T.V. documentary ‘The Art Game’ on 27th August 1958. He had exacting expectations and a lack of patience with his artistic projects, so reacted against them when they were not working. He refused many honours offered him, including a proposed knighthood and the Order of Merit. Farson claims “His view of life could hardly be harsher. He did not believe in God, morality, in love or worldly success – only in, as he put it, ‘the sensation of the moment’ locked into her strange masturbatory fantasies. Bacon, above all, conveyed 20th Century man in his various states of loneliness” [F.p.11]. But there were also contradictions in Francis’ character: He was a loner, yet good company, enjoying life, warm and genial but could be cutting; pessimistic in his philosophy yet optimistic in his own lifestyle, petulant, with a quick temper which damaged people emotionally and aggressive in his sexuality, yet generous and loyal in friendships,. He could be vain and arrogant, yet was also modest, shy and reticent in other company. He gave the impression that he was ready for fun [P.p.280], yet was fascinated by injuries, disease, accidents and death. Peppiatt, who knew him well, claimed that “he exuded self-confidence and purpose”, yet recognised in him “extreme inner conflict”. [M.P.p.x]. He was obviously more sensitive than he admitted, yet got himself into situations where he was frequently beaten up in London, Paris and Tangier by both thugs and brutal or dishonest pick-ups. Peppiatt describes the damage Francis endured: “I have seen him barely able to walk or turn his head, presumably because he’d had himself so badly beaten up by passing lovers, without ever complaining or explaining, and I know he had stitches taken out without anaesthetic.” [M.P.p.271-2]. There were extrovert aspects of his personality, yet he has been described as introverted both in his personal life and as an artist [F.p.133]. He said “If you really love life, you’re walking in the shadow of death all the time... Death is the shadow of life, and the more one is obsessed with life, the more one is obsessed with death. I’m greedy for life and I’m greedy as an artist.” [F.p.12]. His Self-Portrait with a Wrist-Watch may symbolise the concept of time ticking away while the artist is slumped over it [AS.p.237].
Despite this fascination with death, regularly talking about it in relation to life and art, Bacon reacted violently when he met the Daily Telegraph correspondent Lewis Jones, who had been assigned to write his obituary [F.p.186]. One would have thought that his normal reaction could have been to laugh it off, but there does seem to have been an element of fear or superstition in his nihilism. He did not have any initial qualms about having his life-mask taken, though he found this difficult because of his asthma. (He owned a copy of that of William Blake. [AS.p.309]. Afterwards seemed slightly superstitious or self-conscious about the decision to allow one to be made of himself. He was also superstitious about numbers [P.M.p.245]. He said: “I myself want to go on living as long as I can. After all, there’s nothing else. You can only go on living from moment to moment. You can’t even prepare for death because it’s nothing... There it is; we just go on living, even though we know something terrible will happen.” [P.p.252]. He told Richard Cork: “I hate the thought of death: I hate the thought of it all coming to an end.” [AS.p.309]. But (in criticism of Henry Moore) he was also very critical of elderly artists who tried to perpetuate themselves and their art by creating ‘foundations’, which he called “a profound vanity” [AS.p.309].
SOME BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND
Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 into an upper-middle-class family in fairly salubrious background. His parents, whose relationship was itself described as ‘unaffectionate’, were both English Protestants, with no Irish blood. His mother was the heiress of a steel manufacturer. His father, from a military family tradition, claimed important ancestry [P.p.22], and attempted to run the household on military lines [P.p.6]. He was a relatively unsuccessful racehorse trainer, having formerly been a Major in the British Army. He was more affectionate towards Francis’ younger brother Edward, who died from Tuberculosis in 1927. The father certainly did not appreciate Francis’ weakness, or later accept his desire to become an artist.
Due to this British and military background, family life felt regularly under threat of attack from Sinn Fein during the political violence, attacks and assassinations in Ireland in the struggle for an independent Irish state. Francis claimed that between the threats in Ireland and the bombs in London he was brought up “to think of violence” [F.p.15]. In his childhood Francis moved regularly between Ireland and England; he spent most of the Great War in London though he stayed for a while with his grandmother in Farmleigh house, near Abbeleix Co. Kildare, where they felt under constant threat from the IRA {P.p10]. Her second husband was sadistic, often torturing cats and throwing them to his hounds, which may have helped traumatise the young Francis. Bacon had an asthma attack on being forced to fox-hunt, which at least modified the bullying. At Farmleigh, the painter also remembered hearing the screams of Irish prisoners being tortured nearby by British soldiers.
Francis first sexual experiences in his early teens came from abuse by his father’s grooms and stable lads, who were mostly Catholic and who had been encouraged to horse-whip him at his father’s instigation to make him less of a ‘sissy’. [F.p.16-17; S.p.17]. He admitted that as well as humiliating him, he had discovered eroticism in the whipping and abuse. He felt a lack of support and understanding from both his parents, and his father became even more aggressive when he caught his son trying on his mother’s underwear at about the age of 15-16. Thrown out of his home, he moved to London in 1926 with a weekly allowance of £3 paid by his mother, though she had rarely shown emotion towards him. His relationship with her improved later in life after his father’s death and her remarriage and move to South Africa. He later claimed that his life in Ireland hardened him and had taught him “a touch of arrogance and healthy scorn for convention and religion, tempered by a sympathy for the eccentric minority...” [F.p.18]. Bacon was to move restlessly for much of the rest of his career, with no permanent bases, which may account for some of the restless movement in his paintings and subjects, and his attitudes and friendships. It is interesting that, though he talked in general terms about his family to David Sylvester, he often discouraged friends and critics from looking into his background.
Francis began life in London free from his father’s dominance and censure, His allowance was just enough to live on, but he turned to minor theft, short-term jobs, and as a rent-boy to finance himself. In the spring of1927 he was encouraged by his father to travel to Berlin with Harcourt-Smith, a relative of his mother’s, ostensibly to toughen and ‘make-a-man-of his son’. Harcourt-Smith had a reputation as a virile man, so it was believed that he would show ‘a manly example’. Far from this, he soon turned to abusing Francis sexually, and made the most of all the liberality and indulgence of the city. [P.p.27]. His ‘uncle’ soon abandoned him in Berlin, going off with some women, while Bacon stayed on for two months in which he spoke of ‘exploring his sensuality and the variety of ways he could indulge it.’ [P.p.30]. The life, cabarets, brothels and art of the waning years of Weimar Berlin introduced Francis to the freedom with which homosexuality was treated in this very different culture to that which had formed him so far. Male homosexuality was still illegal in Berlin as it was in Britain, yet there were 170 male brothels under police control in the German capital. [P.p.29]. Bacon said later: “There was something so extraordinarily open about the whole place. You had this feeling that sexually you could get absolutely anything you wanted. I’d never seen anything like it, of course, having been brought up in Ireland, and it excited me enormously. I felt, well, now I can just drift and follow my instincts. And I remember these streets of clubs where people stood in the front of the entrance miming the perversions that were going on inside. That was very interesting.” [P.p.29]. With such formative, indiscriminating influences on an insecure, abandoned young man of 16, it is understandable that Bacon developed as he did.
‘Drifting’ from one experience to another seems to have been a characteristic of Bacon’s life, but in some it may be reflected in the subject-matter of his art also. He said: “After all, life itself is nothing but a series of sensations. We just drift from moment to moment. My whole life has been like that, you know, drifting from bar to bar, person to person, instant to instant. And I think particularly when you’re very young and very shy, with all that talent welling up inside you, it’s what you have to do. You have to drift until you find yourself. Simply drift and see...” [M.P.p.10].
Alone, Bacon then left for Paris in 1927. The life of the city awakened his interests further to a lack of convention. Yet it was the art that in spired him more than liberality of lifestyle. In Berlin he had discovered the work of the Neue Sachlichkeit artists at the Galerie Nierendorf. (Otto Dix’s images of amputees were to particularly inspire him later). Bauhaus design also soon influenced him as a designer. Beside this he had previously had very little contact with art, so in Paris his discovery of the developments in modernist art excited him. Thankfully, in Paris he found greater personal support The young man was taken under the wing of Yvonne Bocquentin, a pianist and art connoisseur, who offered him a room in her home in Chantilly, taught him French and introduced him to Parisian culture. He was influenced particularly by over 100 Picasso drawings exhibited at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery in the autumn of 1927. In Paris he was also introduced to works by the Surrealists and their manifestos, and he saw exhibitions by De Chirico and Soutine in the summer of 1928. Either in Paris, or earlier in Berlin, he had seen the films by Eisenstein and Buñuel which would later influence his painted themes: Battleship Potemkin, Un Chien Andalou, and L’Age d’Or. [P.p.39]. These started him on the path to becoming a modern artist or designer himself. Beginning to conquer his social shyness, he moved on his own to Montparnasse, a centre for artistic creativity. He rented a room in the Hotel Delambre, where many foreign intellectuals stayed. [P.p.34-35]. It was also in Paris that Bacon began to develop his ideas of becoming a furniture designer, but he kept his own attempts at art in Paris secret [P.p.42]. He still had his mother’s allowance, but still needed extra finance to support himself so relied on people he picked up, under the influence of a new friend, a young male prostitute.
Returning to London in late 1928, still only at the age of just 19 years, Bacon rented rooms in South Kensington then Chelsea. He soon became part of the homosexual undercurrent of society. He preferred the clubs and pubs where groups gathered to the more dangerous and anonymous meeting-places like cottaging in public toilets and Turkish baths, which were more susceptible to police raids. Homosexual activity was still illegal, repressed and also dangerous, as thugs and groups of soldiers and sailors regularly beat up those they denounced as ‘queers’ on the streets, in alleys, or public toilets. We cannot be sure of the veracity of all his tales, as Bacon embellished his reputation as a ‘bad-boy in later years. But he was certainly vulnerable and received a large amount of abuse and violence. He knew how to behave well socially in cultured circles, from his family upbringing and from Chantilly, but he also encountered the rough life of the city.
Later in his career, during the war, underworld life flourished during the Blitz, when sexual conventions became much looser and casual sex was easier. An attitude of ‘if you are going to die, you might as well enjoy yourself doing what you like’ developed. After the war Bacon’s life among the Soho bars and clubs continued to flourish. He especially frequented the Colony Room, opened in 1968, run by Muriel Belcher, of which he was a founding member. Many of those who were to become called by R.B. Kitaj ‘The London School’ met there. It was here that he first met John Deakin whose photography studio was in Shaftesbury Avenue, nearby, and who was more extrovertly sociable than Francis. His photographs were to become a major source of Bacon’s imagery. There was a lot of backbiting and cruel humour among the Colony Room set, some of which may be reflected in Bacon’s distorted imagery. Bacon also frequented The Gargoyle Club where the varied clientele included many of the London intelligentsia who were often full of argument and controversies. The Kismet attracted a more openly homosexual crowd, and less frequently Francis was to be found at The Caves de France, two doors away from the Colony Room. At the height of his career, after hours of painting, then eating in restaurants with friends, Bacon spent much of the remainder of his evenings getting drunk at the clubs, sometimes then returning to the studio to continue painting.
BACON’S EARLY ARTISTIC CAREER
Bacon developed as designer then as an artist without college training or any practice in academic drawing, which partly accounts for the looseness of his figurative work. He began in furniture and interior design for a few years from 1929, in a converted garage-studio in South Kensington. He later disparaged his designs as a pastiche of contemporary French design, Bauhaus, Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier and Picasso. Nevertheless, due to his social contacts, his work was soon featured in The Studio magazine of August 1930, which promoted his name. His rugs, influenced by Picasso, Marion Dorn and McKnight Kauffer, were made at the Royal Wilton factory. He advanced quickly because he was a good promoter of his work, advertising exaggeratedly on his ‘experience’ in Berlin and Paris and throwing parties in his studio to sell his designs. He also found patrons quickly, partly because he was attractive. The homosexual Catholic Australian artist Roy de Maistre, who also occasionally designed furniture befriended him and promoted him, bringing him several commissions, as did de Maistre’s partner the novelist Patrick White. Bacon was later to dismiss this start as a designer, since he felt it distracted from his reputation as a painter, but the modernist designs are present in the compositions, structures, colour-planes and furnishings of his paintings.
De Maistre encouraged Francis’ painting and included him in his 1930 exhibition with Jean Shepeard. Bacon abandoned design in 1933 to concentrate on painting and had his first one-man show in 1934 at the Transition Gallery. Friends like Roy de Maistre, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and the writers Douglas Cooper and Patrick White, made up for his lack of formal art training. (The artist’s work and methods described in Patrick White’s visceral novel The Vivisector are closely reminiscent of Bacon’s animal paintings. Sidney Nolan believed that the novel was painted about him, as it was dedicated to him and his wife, but its protagonist’s works, as described, far more closely resemble those of Francis.) De Maistre became like a father-figure to the young painter, though at 35 he was just 15 years older than Bacon. Perhaps he recognised Bacon had an unconventional education background, similar to his own [P.p.49]. There is unconfirmed speculation over whether theirs became a sexual relationship. De Maistre was a Catholic convert who worked on many commissions for churches, including studies of Stations of the Cross in 1932 (proposed designs for Westminster Cathedral). Roy’s studio was a converted café near Victoria Station, which was a meeting-place for several modernist artists and writers. Bacon probably first met Moore, Sutherland and Douglas Cooper there. [P.p.49]. De Maistre was influential on Bacon’s early artistic development. He painted 10 interiors of Bacon’s studio, so probably taught and encouraged Francis as he worked. The rare earliest surviving art by Francis is Cubist in style, learning from, though dissimilar to much of Roy de Maistre’s art. Roy produced several modernist crucifixion images, which have occasionally been describes as ‘sadomasochistic’, but they pale by comparison to Bacon or even Sutherland’s Crucifixions. His raw way of depicting one of the most common subjects in the history of art almost certainly strongly influenced Bacon’s early crucifixion imagery. Graham Sutherland painted his Crucifixion images for the St. Matthew’s Northampton commission later in 1946, so both De Maistre and Bacon were probably influences on Sutherland, as well as Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece on which it was largely based. De Maistre also had a strong influence in pathology, which would parallel Bacon’s interest [P.p.52].
Some of Francis’ early work, like the 1933 Crucifixion, explored surrealism, but his submission was rejected from the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition as ‘not sufficiently surreal’. This is ironic since the exhibition was being organised by Henry Moore, Paul Nash and Herbert Read, none of whose ideas and images were more surreal than those of Bacon. Crucifixion was nevertheless chosen to be published by Herbert Read in his 1933 ‘Art Now’ and exhibited at the Meyer Gallery in a mixed show. Francis held an unsuccessful one man show the following year (1934) in the basement of Sutherland House, (the home of his admirer Arundell Clarke). Afterwards in frustration Bacon destroyed much of the work, though he later regretted having destroyed Wound for a Crucifixion, a prefiguration of his Three Figures for the Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion [1944]. He was included in the 1937 Young British Painters exhibition at Thomas Agnew and Sons, organized by Robert Wellington of the Zwemmer Gallery, and Bacon’s wealthy patron and soon lover Eric Hall. The exhibition was an attempt to raise interest in creating a permanent gallery for contemporary painters and sculptors. Francis’ friends Roy De Maistre, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore were also involved, as were Victor Pasmore, Robert Medley, Ivon Hitchens, John Piper, Julian Trevelyan and Ceri Richards. Though the exhibition was relatively unsuccessful and his work was attacked by critics, Francis found himself mixing with key figures in the rise of Modern British Art. Among Bacon’s works shown were paintings of screaming mouths, which prefigured the paintings of heads of the popes and the Battleship Potemkin nanny.
Bacon was exempted from National Service during the war because of his asthma, but he was not chosen as a war artist. He experienced horrors during the Blitz while living in Chelsea or from his studio in South Kensington. He saw first-hand the destruction of his environment and the deaths of several of his neighbours in the bombings. He volunteered for a short time as an air-raid warden and had helped to pull mangled bodies from wreckage, but was forced to give this up as it exacerbated his asthma. During this time his friendship developed with Graham Sutherland and his wife, while Sutherland was experimenting with surreal and expressionist work as a war artist. In the war years new friendships also grew with Lucien Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne and other artists and socialites linked to the collector Peter Watson.
Francis’ new work, influenced by the war was shown in a group exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in April 1945, just a month before the end of the war. It included the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion and Painting, which cemented his reputation and set him on the process of developing themes that concentrated on the human condition that would develop throughout his career. The sale of Painting, first to the Hanover Gallery, then the Museum of Modern Art, New York, financed a temporary move to the south of France, escaping the depressive atmosphere of post-war London, but increasing his involvement in gambling in Monte Carlo etc. On his return he worked on the theme of Heads for a one-man exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in 1949, which included his first screaming head of a pope. From this series onward his use of photographic sources for his work developed. His figures often used Edweard Muybridge’s photographic images of figures and animals in motion as reference points
THE AIMS OF THE ARTIST
Of finding things that were worth painting about Francis said: “I think those things are very difficult... So much has already been done, and then photography has cancelled out so many other possibilities. When I started I needed extreme subject matter. And then I found my subjects through my life and through the friends I came to have. I mean, one’s work is really a kind of diary or an autobiography... (my paintings are) about myself, my thoughts, feelings and what is called the ‘moeurs’ of my times. But then I think I go deeper than my times. That may be a profoundly vain thing to say, but I often feel in my work that I’m close to the ancient world. I think you can convey all sorts of things about yourself, or about anything really, in painting. I think it’s more difficult in words... It’s like confession. Or psychoanalysis...” [M.P.p.90]
When asked whether his paintings were primarily about love or sex, Bacon responded: “Well, I don’t actually think they’re about anything... I’m just trying to make my thoughts and sensations about life come back at me with greater intensity. The paintings are about my life, and of course sex is part of that. I suppose I would like ot make images that bring you closer to what being human is actually like. But you know, painting’s become so impossible now. One can just try and make things a bit more precise. What else is there to do with life but try to make yourself a bit more clear?... Perhaps I never shall (be able to make it work). But I always hope for this great wave of instinct with which I might really be able to change and renew everything.”... “There’s no saying whether I’ve been able to change anything at all obviously... But I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of making images - with the idea of finding something which will make my own visual experience come back to me more violently. You see, for me, painting has always been a way in which I’ve tried to excite myself; make my own sensations remain with more poignancy... if the image is going to be any good nowadays, it has to go much deeper than simply recording appearances. Somehow you have to try to get the paint down in such a curious way that it comes back on to the nervous system more exactly and more profoundly. If this image is going to be worth making at all, you see, it has to unlock sensation at a deeper level, it has to go in at an instinctive level. Otherwise a photograph can do the whole thing mush better.” [M.P.p.149].
As he adapted images from photography and film, Bacon’s imagery reflects increasing awareness of human aggression and wrong, driven by various media. His own turbulent life included threats to him due to his sexuality, the practice of which was still illegal in Britain throughout his formative years right up to 1967. He was damaged by masochism, insecure relationships, addiction to alcohol and gambling, of which the latter often left him in debt. Gambling at the time was also illegal in London, so its underground nature may have excited and stimulated Bacon in the same way as did his sexual fantasies. He seems to have been stimulated by taking risks, which permeated his relationships, sexual promiscuity, gambling, drinking, early theft, moving home, travelling to Tangier etc. as well as the controversial subjects and methods he used in his art. Rather than keeping to traditions in his subjects, painting techniques as well as his lifestyle, Bacon asserted: “You have to break technique, break tradition to do something really new. You always go back into tradition, but you have to break it and reinvent it first.” [P.p.282]. His mixing the dust of the studio with his paint or setting the dust on the surface, may have had a symbolic content as well as creating texture. Whereas many artists aim to protect wet surface of paintings from dust, Bacon valued it for its additions to the work. We all return to dust, yet it has helped build up his art Of tradition, he taught: “Young artists today think that choosing a new medium is the answer, but it usually just turns out to be a substitute for creation rather than the thing itself. Everyone wants something new, including me, but of course it won’t be new unless you have the compost of the past as well. The past nourishes you, and denying that source of nourishment is like cutting off one’s arm to make the other better. I’ve never felt the need to reject the past. I feel I relate to tradition very strongly.
But I won’t ever know whether I’m really any good, because it takes such a long time for things to fall into place. And there’s no point in worrying about what you feel you ought to be doing in terms of the historical evolution of art either. You can only do what your impulses demand, and that doesn’t mean I see myself as the last of the line. The possibilities of oil painting are only just beginning to be exploited: the potential is enormous.” [AS.p.216-7]. This would seem to contradict Bacon’s negative statements about the meaninglessness and banality of art and progress. It is a very optimistic call for advance in the arts and the value of creativity.
The intensity of emotion or trauma in Bacon’s background is largely the context which influenced the sensations in his work. He may have claimed that his background hardened him, and he often quoted Nietzsche’s claim that “What does not destroy is makes us strong” [P.M.p.xii], yet he remained sensitive. However, the majority of Bacon’s work does not comment on specific situations. Occasionally he refers to particular events, as in his triptych after the suicide of his lover In Memory of George Dyer [1971]. Even his portraits go beyond the specifics of the individual subject. He recognised that there were autobiographical associations in his art but most often his imagery reflects a general response to negative aspects of life, the human condition and the disintegration of modern society. He spoke of wanting to make his subjects ‘as anonymous as possible... people can read what they like into them”... “I don’t want the work to be hazy, but I work in a kind of haze of sensations and feelings and ideas that come to me and that I try to crystalize.” [H.p.10].
Despite not wanting to be ‘illustrative’, he showed his ideas through the situations that he painted. In his expression of the hopelessness of aspects the human situation, he was close to the expression of Existential writers like Sartre, Camus, Kafka, Beckett or Genet , and with similar uncomfortable intensity T.S. Eliot and Harold Pinter. There is a marked similarity between the relationship between figures in Francis’ paintings to the strained and sometimes violent relationships between people in Beckett and Pinter’s plays, especially The Caretaker and The Birthday Party, or Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, Sweeny Agonistes, the bleakness of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, or the Wasteland. Visual influences and artistic ideas came similarly through Giacometti, Picasso or Soutine, whose work developed and flourished in the post-war years, as well as Roy de Maistre in London. The long periods spent in Paris, especially towards the end of his life, possible reinforced this philosophical approach to his work..
Bacon was fascinated by psychology, though not as an academic study but more through interest in what made people behave as they did. The portraits of Nazis and Fascists on his studio walls encouraged him to consider what distorted the human mind to perpetrate atrocities. His interest in psychology reflected a growing 20th Century belief that human beings were not necessarily the pinnacle of creation and that we are basically still controlled by animal instincts. Surely, then, he believed, we are just animals ourselves, or more debased than animals. Talking to Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show he said: “We are born and we die and there’s nothing else. We’re just part of animal life.” [F.p.265]. This is one reason why he painted animals and disabled children, and why many of his figures and faces display animal characteristics. The Existentialists whose work Bacon followed from his early life in Paris, believed that the ideas of social progress and the values of religion and traditional ethics were a myth and no longer valid. The horrors of war, they believed, demonstrated that humans were essentially still driven by primitive instincts. Some of his paintings of animals, such as rabid or snarling dogs suggest this. “I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during our own existence. We create certain attitudes which give it meaning while we exist, though they themselves are meaningless really.” These ideas parallel one of Bacon’s favourite poems: The Circus Animal’s Desertion by W.B. Yeats, in which the poet bewailed and questioned the validity and significance of his past work, particularly that which had caused damage to others, or encouraged some to negative actions or thoughts.
Meaninglessness, Bacon concluded, also pertained to much art: “art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself.” [S.p.29]. He frequently talked about the games we play to overcome a sense of futility or nihilism. He even claimed that he was “just playing with paint, not giving a message.” [AS.p.230]. But this is obviously untrue and a sad statement from someone who was using his art as a serious way of making the viewer think. It may have been made as a provocative exaggeration. Artists and writers throughout human society have attempted to use their work to advance and enhance human lives and minds. Classical writers like Aeschylus, who Bacon admired and read as a source for his work, wrote of strong, emotive subjects to evoke positive, empathetic or cathartic responses in their audience, not primarily to bewail the human condition. Francis was fascinated by Egyptian art and culture because he believed that the Egyptians were trying to defeat death because believed in an after-world, which he did not. [F.248-9]. He claimed: “Life is so meaningless; we might as well make ourselves extraordinary.” [P.p.199]. In many of his paintings he transformed ordinary people from ordinary photographs into heroic figures with strong senses. However, later in his career, Bacon claimed that he did not need to shock so much: “When I was young I needed extreme subject matter for my paintings. Then as I grew older I began to find my subject-matter in my own life.” [P.p207]. This was said of a time when his relationship with George Dyer was relatively stable and the portraits of George dominated his oeuvre. He felt that he no longer needed subjects from Christianity, Classical literature or ancient myths; he had real life to reference and paint [P.p.213].
Bacon wore his learning lightly, perhaps because he was aware that his educational background did not match that of many of his contemporaries in the art, literary and gallery world. He was not aiming to be literary or overtly display his intellect in his work. He describes, even as a young man, being fascinated by the imagery in classical literature, especially the plays: “They are superbly visual. I feel myself very close to the world of Greek tragedy... often, in my painting, I have this sensation of following a long call from antiquity.” [P.M.p.47]. He was well-read and articulate, and could sound erudite in discussion, (especially loquacious when well-lubricated,) but Francis distrusted the intellectualisation of artistic and literary circles, claiming (if somewhat disingenuously) that “it is better just to paint and see what occurs” [F.p.84]. He knew the works of Shakespeare, Freud, Nietzsche, Proust, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Samuel Beckett as well as the classical myths, Greek tragedy etc. Despite his lack of formal education as a child, he seems to have had a clever mind; he learned languages easily and read avidly. The circles in which Francis moved from his stay in Chantilly onward, introduced him to art and art theory, literature, philosophy and psychology. He discussed such matters in the circles of Sonia Orwell, John Rothenstein, John Russell, David Sylvester, William Boroughs, Alan Ginsberg, Michel Leiris etc. But one wonders how much time or interest he had in personally or thoroughly analysing what he was reading on an intellectual level. This was an age when many in artistic circles rivalled each other to quote philosophers, erudite literary writers and fine art influences. Yet Bacon seems to have sought and taken in ideas as a practical background to his work and personal philosophy rather than aiming for exhaustive understanding or knowledge itself. It was mostly Bacon’s Marlborough Gallery promoters who added the seemingly intellectual titles to his works, which he preferred to call ‘Study’, ‘Painting’ or ‘Triptych’. (It is just as well that they did, otherwise it would be even harder to distinguish pieces by their titles in his prolific oeuvre. References to the Oresteia or Sweeny Agonistes etc. added to the sense that there was profundity within the work. I do not mean to use this term to disparage Bacon’s painting, as I admire it, but there is a large amount of ‘shallow profundity’ in the intellectualisation of modern art by curators, critics and some artists themselves. Bacon’s interviews with David Sylvester break through this and show the artist as a man working to express ideas verbally and visually, without the need to intellectualise in the manner of his curators and those who sought to explain and promote his art.
On a purely practical level, how much time did Bacon have for depth in his reading? He led a busy social life in the clubs, bars and in relationships, was frequently drunk and spent long hours in his studio painting. He spoke of finding it hard to sleep and relied on pills to help him do so [P.p.220], so he may have read mostly at night, when one is not always as alert intellectually, We know that he also painted at night. So he possibly only took in the basics of some of the books he read, especially if befuddled by drink or drugs. However, the extensive time spent at the easel wrestling with what one is trying to express in one’s painting is often a time for profound philosophical, ontological speculation, experimentation with ideas, concepts and consideration of alternatives. It is in the process of creating and painting a work, or considering it afterwards, that one mostly begins to understand its significance and potential meanings. Probably he made the connections with psychology, philosophies and literature as he worked through the pictures. He was certainly adamant that he was never ‘illustrating’ the subjects that he was painting. He usedthe term ‘illustration’ as a disparaging word. To create illustrative art seemed too shallow a practice and concept for what he considered the deeper aims of Fine Art. His works were expressions and visualisations of ideas not ‘illustrations’, though he was also keen to stress that he was a ‘realist’ not an ‘expressionist’. “After all, I’ve got nothing to express, but a realist... in attempting in paintings to convey as intensely as possible the reality or the facts of life.” [P.M.p.362].
Bacon often claimed that if you could explain what you are doing and talk about its meaning, there would be no need to paint it. In the Associated-Rediffusion T.V. documentary ‘The Art Game’ on 27th August 1958 he recalled “I think Anna Pavlova was right when somebody asked her what she meant when she was dancing the Dying Swan and she said ‘Well, if I could tell you I wouldn’t dance.’” This attitude is very different from much contemporary art, where creators and curators are encouraged to intellectualise in words what they have created in their medium. Neither was Bacon worried if people didn’t understand his paintings: “I don’t think you can be interested in whether people understand your paintings or not. It’s only due to your own nervous system that you can paint at all... how can I draw one more veil away from life and present what is called the living sensation more nearly in the nervous system and more violently?” [T.V. documentary ‘The Art Game’ 1958]. This is rather different from the aim of religious paintings, which aim not just at the artist’s self-expression but to create a sensation that encourages the viewer to engage meaningfully and spiritually with their subject matter in ways that focus their faith.
The texture in Bacon’s paintings reflected his belief that mark and texture can affect our senses and nervous system: a belief also shared and explored in the early works of American Abstract Expressionists like Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning. Textural expression and the effects of colour, mark and form, he believed, could communicate more effectively than even narrative or illustrative elements of a painting. On the canvas he combined flat painting, sometimes of thin washes using large amounts of turpentine, with more impasto marks, dry scumbling, mixing of dust with the paint, sometimes directly squeezing paint from the tube onto the canvas or the controlled splashing of paint. Around 1947 he found that un-primed canvas surfaces helped him create the textures he desires. He later had his canvases stretched back-to-front, already primed but not sized. He used the stubbly texture of the canvas to create the effect of stubble on a face and also explained to John Richardson that he smeared Max-Factor pancake make-up one his face to practice effects. {F.p.85]. Many materials were employed to create his textures: paint soaked socks, even the ribbing of cashmere sweaters.
Technically the backgrounds of his larger works reflect the colour-fields of Abstract Expressionist artists, particularly Mark Rothko, suggesting heightened emotion through colour. (However he claimed that he found purely abstract action painting boring and unchallenging [Associated-Rediffusion T.V. documentary ‘The Art Game’ on 27th August 1958]). In Bacon’s compositions, the flat fields of paint contrast strongly with the heightened texture of other more expressive, sometimes visceral brushwork. While Bacon’s largest paintings are compositionally very strong, his work on them was often instinctive, as was so much of his image-making. He painted relatively fast, aiming at an ‘impression of freedom and spontaneity’, but this intuitive approach also led him to destroy many of his canvases by slashing them, when he considered that they were not working. He slashed them to pieces more fully, when it became apparent, at the height of his career, that some of these abandoned or binned works had reached the market. Sometimes he would completely rework compositions from the initial sketches by trial and error, with a rigorous discipline.
He told Sylvester that he destroyed so much work rather than working into it “because sometimes it disappears completely and the canvas becomes completely clogged... too much paint and one can’t go on.” [S.p.18]. He claimed “One‘s always hoping to paint one picture which will annihilate all the other ones, to concentrate everything into one painting.” Presumably this did not negate the validity of his other works, rather is shows his intention to achieve a strong overall statement about his subject. While he claimed that art like life was meaningless, his exacting standards show that he valued greatly his means of expression and their results. The overworking that damaged some of his images, as with the violent imagery in some, seems part of Bacon’s obsession with creating intensity of sensation. He spoke of his striving for “a greater intensity” [S.p.90]. I wonder whether this search for intensity in his art derives partly from his sense that he had been hardened psychologically by his background? He appears to have sought greater intensity in his violent sexual relationships to enhance his sensations.
Bacon often creates a sense of special depth in his compositions through grids or lines of perspective, and what he sometimes called ‘space-frames’. Some critics over-literally interpret the curved walls behind some of his images as memories of the last of his family homes in Ireland, Farmleigh near Abbeyleix, Co. Kildare, a large country house which was later destroyed by fire. The backgrounds more generally are spaces or stages in or against which the incidents and images take place. They create colour-fields where the particular hues are chosen to intensify emotion. The ‘space-frames’ work within the colour to create transparent boxes within which his figures exist, sometimes within which they seem trapped. Bacon admitted to John Russell that he was sensitive to enclosed interior spaces. [AS.p.240]. Yet his chaotic studio space as seen in so many photographs and as reconstructed in the Hugh Lane Gallery feels intensely claustrophobic. This claustrophobia, imprisonment or sense of being trapped is especially apparent in his series of paintings of screaming Popes, figures wrestling on a bed (Two Figures [1953], Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus [1981], and portraits like Three Studies of Lucien Freud [1969]. Bacon spoke practically of the painted space-frames: “I cut down the scale of the canvas by drawing in these rectangles which concentrate the image down. Just to see it better.” He disclaimed the idea that they had illustrative intentions. [S.p.23]. Yet of his paintings of men apparently trapped in rooms, he said: “Most of these pictures were done of somebody who was always in a state of unease, and whether that has been conveyed through these picture I don’t know. But I suppose, in attempting to trap this image, that as this man was very neurotic and almost hysterical, this may come across in my paintings.” [S.p.48].
It is fascinating that paintings which often express such horrific subjects can be, at the same time, made visually beautiful and attract one’s admiration. The question of whether beauty is purely aesthetic, or needs to include ethical considerations regarding its subject-matter is complex and may depend on the ideas of the individual viewer. Bacon’s colours and textures and compositions are beautiful; his subjects are often disturbing and reflect human violence. But these subjects are also ‘real’; Bacon was painting about issues in the real world that he experienced around him. Should they be called ‘ugly’ on those grounds? Art critics of the 19th Century criticised Courbet, Whistler and Impressionists etc. as ‘ugly’ yet we now accept and recognise the beauty of such realism.
Bacon’s work reflects the many paradoxes in human life, which Bacon experienced and often talked about. In his interviews with David Sylvester, especially we find references to balancing ‘being optimistic yet totally without hope’, painting by ‘chance and spontaneity, with order and precision’... ‘figurative art and abstraction’, ‘structured spontaneity’... ‘both death and life being exciting and attractive’... ‘gilded squalor’ etc.. After his death Helen Lessore remembered “There was not a day when he did not think about death, but by temperament he was an optimist” [quoted F.p.96]. He claimed to have premonitions of his own death [P.p.231] but he spoke about these many years before he actually died. Of the people in his life, several of whom had committed suicide, and of artists, he said “(Annihilation) follows them round like their shadow and I think is one of the reasons why artists are so conscious of the vulnerability and nothingness of life. “ [AS.p.231]. In his last recorded interview with David Sylvester, Bacon said that most people are “so attached to their egos that they’d probably rather have torment than annihilation... if I were in hell I would always feel that I had the chance to escape”. [Sylvester revised ed. interviews 1993 p.200]. But he had also claimed that “Hell is here and now!” [AS. P.167]. Life in this world is not simplistic, easy or always beautiful: Bacon was being realistic in visualising its paradoxes. He liked to quote T.S. Eliot’s lines in Sweeny Agonistes:
“Birth, Copulation and Death.
That’s all the facts when you come down to brass tacks.
Birth, copulation and death” …
Bacon made a similar proposal that was partly nihilistic, partly optimistic: “Here’s to everything you want! What more can I offer you? After all, life itself is such a charade, there’s no reason why one shouldn’t try to achieve everything one wants. Very few people find their real instincts. Every now and then there’s an artist who does and who makes something new and actually thickens the texture of life. But that’s very rare. Most people just wait for something to happen to them. You have to be really free to find yourself in that way, without any moral or religious constraints. After all, life is nothing but a series of sensations, so one may as well try and make oneself extraordinary, extraordinary and brilliant, even if it means becoming a brilliant fool like me and having the kind of disastrous life that I have had. There it is, I myself have always known that life was absurd, even when I was young – though I was never young in the sense of being innocent. … There it is, I don’t believe in anything, but I’m always glad to wake up in the morning. It doesn’t depress me. I’m never depressed. My basic nervous system is filled with this optimism. It’s mad, I know, because it’s optimism about nothing. I think of life as meaning less yet it excites me. I always think that something marvellous is about to happen.” [P.p.222].
Francis was in fact depressed at several points in his life and career, yet the paradox, or perhaps irony, is that out of his negative outlook on the meaninglessness of life, he created so many strikingly arresting images, some of which could be called ‘beautiful’. Their values and focus are added to by his choice of simple, unmoulded traditionally gilded frames, by his regular framer Alfred Hecht. These enhance his large canvases of challenging, sometimes relatively ugly subject-matter, helping to give emphasis to the qualities of the paint, colour, composition and idea or concept.
BACON’S CRUCIFIXIONS
Peppiatt described Bacon’s expressive aim in painting so many images around the subject of the Crucifixion as portraying ‘A wound at the core of being’ [P.p.99]. Francis also claimed that they were more like self-portraits than religious pictures [S.p.44]. Bacon never claimed to be personally identifying with Christ in the Crucifixions, though Peppiatt suggests that he might, in the same way that he was haunted by the tragic figure of the Oresteia later in his career [P.p.274] . He was generally using the theme as “a marvellous armature one which to hang all kinds of thoughts and sensations.” [P.p.99; S.p.44]. He was never drawn into explaining the images; rather he pointed to the subject as a complex symbol representing the pain, sense of abandonment, loneliness and betrayal often felt by humanity, and the violence of life itself. The closest Bacon came to explaining his Crucifixions was in an interview with Sylvester: “You may say it’s a curious thing for a non-religious person to take the Crucifixion, but I don’t think that it has anything to do with it. The great Crucifixions that one knows of - one doesn’t know whether they were painted by men who had religious beliefs.,,, (It may be that they were painted as part of Christian culture and were made for believers (affirming Sylvester’s proposal) ... It may be unsatisfactory, but I haven’t found another subject so far that has been as helpful for covering certain areas of human feeling and behaviour.” [S.p.44]. Interestingly, though Francis talked of ‘horror’ with regard to his Crucifixion paintings, he actually regarded the crucified figure as “poignant” rather than horrific. [S.p.83]. He said that he painted the subject, “not because he believed, but as a myth which made him feel many things” [AS.p.146].
When comparing the Crucifixion to the depths of catharsis in Greek tragedy, which is also referred to in some painting titles, Bacon admitted that: “I think Greek mythology is even further from us than Christianity… one of the things about the Crucifixion is the very fact that the central figure of Christ is raised into a very pronounced and isolated position, which gives it, from a formal point of view, greater possibilities than having the different figures placed on the same level. The alteration of level is, from my point of view, very important.” [S.p.46]. I don’t sense that he was just referring merely to the formal compositional qualities in a painting here, but to the possibility of focusing the attention on the figure and he ideas that he hung on this ‘armature’, rather as Francis used space-frames to create focus. Bacon’s crucified figures are rarely set above other figures in his compositions, but as in the 1992 and 1965 triptychs, the crucified one is definitely the most dominant figure through the prominence and gore that makes one focus upon it. Yet the Crucifixions are not about Christ in any way referring to the absolving of sin or their representation of the love or forgiveness of God. Nor are they intended for devotional contemplation. They show the victim as a suffering, tortured human or as dead meat, the victim of human violence. Brian Sewell’s astute critique of the Crucifixions claimed: “He took the Crucifixion, stripped it of all its Christian implications, and invested it instead with the universal beastliness of man and abattoir running with blood, deafened with screams.”. [AS.p.314].
Bacon’s early use of the triptych format is fascinating. Triptychs are still largely though not universally associated with religious images, particularly altarpieces. The subject-matter of Bacon’s triptychs, even his ‘Crucifixion’ images could hardly be termed ‘religious’. Yet by using the triptych format Bacon focuses the viewer’s attention and thoughts on the significance of his subjects more intensely than one single image might do. They do not always provide a narrative link between the panels. Most of the connections need to be made in the mind of the viewer.
Bacon was fascinated by images of the crucifixion from early in his career. Patrick White had supported him by buying one of his earliest paintings of the Crucifixion [AS.p.149]. He spoke of the crucifixion as “a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation.” [S.p.44; P.p.99]. The artist used the theme to express aspects of the human condition rather than with religious significance: “You might say it is almost nearer to a self-portrait. You are working on all sorts of very private feelings about behaviour and the way life is.”
It is recorded that in the late 1930s he had a large mural in his bedroom of a crucified nailed arm with a small part of a torso. He created a significant number of paintings related to the subject, including a large number in 1933 which he later destroyed. Among the most significant are:
Crucifixion [1933 Murderme Collection, London]
Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifix [1944 Tate Gallery, London]
Painting [1946 Museum of Modern Art, New York]
Fragment of a Crucifixion [1950 Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven]
Three Studies for a Crucifixion triptych [1962 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York]]
Crucifixion triptych [1965 Bayerische Staatsgemälesammlungen Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich]
Crucifixion [1933 Murderme Collection, London] is the closest that Francis came to abstract surrealism under the influence of Picasso’s surreal work around 1927, which Bacon had seen in Paris [S.p.8]. It is only one of many studies of the Crucifixion, which Bacon painted during this year, probably under the influence of Roy de Maistre, though in a very different style from his mentor. Here, the crucified figure is more like a stick man or X-Ray scumbled in white against a monochromatic dark background. Though not explained, the dark background is reminiscent of the ‘darkness covering the earth’ at Jesus’ crucifixion. Another linear figure in white seems to be reaching out to touch or embrace the figure on the cross. This may be a character such as Mary Magdalene or a soldier piercing the crucified figure with a spear, but Bacon avoids obvious narrative content or explanation. White may be spurting from the side of the figure or the shape may suggest the crucified figure’s stretched lungs reaching to breathe. (Bacon would have recognised this difficulty due to his chronic asthma.) Beneath, three curved white marks suggest the ribs of the crucified. Whereas later Bacon associated the crucified figure with people and life generally, rather than painting an image of the crucified Jesus, this early work may have been more specifically illustrative of the Christian story, following the example of the Roaman Catholic de Maistre..
There is a similarity between this abstraction and Giacometti’s linear drawings, as well as his early surreal sculpture of the ribs of Woman With Her Throat Cut [1932] of which Bacon may have seen a recent image. Both even have very small heads, as do some of Picasso’s figures in the drawings that Francis had seen in Paris. It is unclear whether the two lines and marks stretching down from the figure are blood pouring from the body or legs and pierced feet. Herbert Read promoted Bacon by publishing this picture in Art Now opposite Picasso’s Bather of 1929. This was a key advance for an emerging artist. The choice of comparison was rather strange, as the approach to the human figure in each is very different. Sir Michael Sadler, Master of University College, Oxford, further encouraged Bacon by buying two of his crucifixion paintings and commissioned work from the young painter, particularly a portrait based on an X-ray of his skull [P.p.65]. These contacts and critical acclaim helped to build the social standing and artistic position of Francis in the world of contemporary art.
Wound for a Crucifixion [1933] was destroyed by Bacon alongside other exhibited works, in a fit of pique after the bad critical reaction to his unsuccessful one man show in the basement of Sutherland House in 1934. Two people had wanted to buy the ‘Wound’ – Eric Alden and Diana Watson, who were both to become patrons of the young artist. [P.p.67]. He later regretted having destroyed it, as it prefigured his Three Figures for the Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944. This may be the picture referred to by Molly Craven a neighbouring tenant to Francis in Chelsea, as being in Bacon’s bedroom: “a vast mural of a crucified arm... enough, I felt to induce a fever” which she thought was based on Dürer’s Crucifixion, but she may have meant ‘Grünewald’: “The whole was an enormous left arm with the nails in it, and just a hint of torso, pointing towards the window. The body was virtually cut off by the chimneypiece. A tortured bedroom if ever there was one!” [F.p.37]. Bacon himself described it as “a very beautiful wound in an abstract shape, moulded on a sculptor’s armature.” [P.p.67].
Crucifixion [1933] The third and last of the major Crucifixion paintings of 1933 is in strong colour and with massive forms. The Tau, or T-shaped cross has a bestial shape on it, imprisoned in a special cage. It resembles a figure only in the ways that the surreal ‘Three Figures for the Base of a Crucifixion’ do. A dog-like beast reaches over the cross-beam, like a figure lowering the crucified in paintings of the Deposition from the Cross. It seemsto represent a threat lowering overhumanity. In the background are shapes reminiscent of Giacometti.
Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifix [1944] The original title of this seminal piece was ‘Figures at the Foot of the Cross’. [P.p.87]. The panels are painted on sundeala board, a fibre-board which was used by both de Maistre and Sutherland at the time, suggesting their influence on the young painter. As with his 1933 Crucifixion and Painting 1946, Bacon used a combination of oil paint and pastel. They represent figures that seem an amalgam of Picasso’s surreal period and a hybrid between the human and the animal. From the little of Bacon’s earliest work that survives in photographic records, it seems that these paintings continued his fascination with crucifixion imagery from early in his career, despite describing himself as an avowed atheist. This differs from the earlier Crucifixions painted in 1933, in that it represents the reactions of others to the suffering. It is possible that Bacon intended to create a larger piece to go above them, or that they themselves were studies for just one piece rather than a triptych [P.p.86 &92]. He suggested this later when reworking the images on a larger scale.
Picasso too had been fascinated by the Crucifixion, despite not being religious, creating many studies based on Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. Only one painting survives but Bacon had seen over a hundred of the drawings on exhibition in the Paul Rosenberg Gallery, Paris in 1927/8. Memories of these influenced the distortion in Bacon’s works, as did Picasso’s Guernica [1937],which Bacon saw when the Spanish Civil War painting and other studies and related pictures like ‘The Dream and Lie of Franco’ were exhibited in the New Burlington Galleries, London in October 1938. The exhibition then transferred to the Whitechapel Gallery. [P.p.86]. Herbert Read’s ecstatic contemporary article on Guernica as ‘the modern Calvary’ is quoted in Peppiatt [P.p.88 cf. London Bulletin no. 6 October 1938 for full text]. Read enthused: “It is painted, not with the same kind, but with the same degree of fervour that inspired Grünewald and the Master of the Avignon Pieta, Van Eyck and Bellini.”... Picasso is more universal.. infused with the intensest passion that a great work of art, transcending all schools and categories, is born and being born, lives immortally.” One can imagine that Bacon was seeking something similarly universal when he talked of longing to paint one day the perfect picture that would sensitise the nervous system.
The distortion of the human figure in Francis’ paintings was influenced by more than this violent distortion in Picasso’s work in the decade from 1929. Source material also included photographs of the human body and wild animals. The left hand creature is based on imagery from a book on spiritualism and ectoplasm. The bandages on the central figure have their roots in a reproduction of Grünewald’s Mocking of Christ , as does the snarling mouth [1503-5 Alte Pinakothek, Munich]. Bacon made this far more sinister: the forms have been called a ‘penis dentatus’ by some critics [P.p.86] and recall some of the teeth in faces in a few of Picasso’s more violent images.
Though the figures at the base of the Crucifixion are anonymous, Bacon spoke of them as having been influenced by the classical idea of the Furies (Eumenides) in Greek Tragedy, who also appear at the windows in T.S. Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party, which Bacon had seen at the Westminster Theatre in March 1939. These were mythic figures unleashed to exact revenge on those who commit the most horrific crimes. In an interview in 1964 he claimed that he was visited frequently by the furies and that the Oresteia ‘bred images’ in him. [P.p.91]. In a later letter of 9th January 1959 Bacon described the works as: “sketches for the Eumenides which I intended to use as the base of a large Crucifixion, which I may still do.” [P.p.92]. Bacon would say later in his life with reference to sense of guilt, especially after George Dyer’s death “Furies often visit me.” [P.p.269]. He would represent them again in his Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus [1981 left panel], Triptych [1976 central panel] and the second version of Three Figures for a Crucifixion, which he gave to the Tate. The strange crucified form in his painting Fragment of a Crucifixion [1950 Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven] almost looks like a fury itself, being based on a famous photograph of a barn owl flying towards the camera. There it feels as though the crucified one is flying out to torment the persecuting viewer or artist.
In talking of the triptych, Bacon said that ideally he would have surmounted it with a Crucifixion to represent our human capacity for barbarous cruelty. He never explained why he did not complete the project. Perhaps the horror of these figures was enough. While the panels, like most of Bacon’s work, do not contain a specific narrative, the anguish of the figures is apparent. The flame-like orange background could have been influenced by the flames of the Blitz and anguish at the mangled, destroyed bodies which Bacon helped to clear from bombed buildings. Bacon had already used this orange on two other works. Roy de Maistre had done much experimentation with music and colour, including sensual responses and emotive connections to particular colour, so Bacon’s choice of background may have been linked to these. Later in his career Francis was very particular about the expressiveness and symbolic qualities of the colours which he chose for each work.
The tide of war was turning in 1944, with destructive violence being exacted on the Nazis as they exacted horrors on Europe and Britain and the allies responded. The three figures seem to be both victims and aggressive. Their screams have been interpreted as expressing both anguish and horror, as well as being the bestial shouts of those promoting aggression. On his studio wall Bacon had photographs of Hitler and Goering shouting encouragement to their troupes at rallies. The style of the painting was influenced by Picasso’s studies of Grunewald’s Crucifixion, and of course Guernica, but Francis rendered similar horrors of war more organically. His figures and faces are more metamorphic in their distortions. His use of colour, took the monochrome of Picasso’s images a step further. Picasso’s large scale canvas was not yet practical for Bacon as a young emerging artist. He would rival it in the drama and grandeur of Francis’ large mature triptychs later in his life. From his contact with Surrealist art, film and manifestos in Paris, Bacon had learned the value of shocking people to be noticed as an artist. It was not good enough to just make something that was ‘new’.
Even at this early stage in his career, Bacon claimed later that he did not begin with a drawing, very unlike Picasso. He claimed that he started with a loaded 1 inch brush. Yet the images are so assured that it is likely that he had produced initial sketches in the design process.
Painting 1946 [Museum of Modern Art, New York]
Due to the positive reception of Three Figures for the Base of a Crucifixion, the work influenced the immediate development of Bacon’s art. His Painting 1946 has a background of flesh-colour pink blinds, against which is a large splayed eviscerated carcass of beef. The subject must have been influenced by Bacon’s admiration of the textured carcass paintings of Chaim Soutine [c1925]. For Soutine, meat was as important a symbol as it became for Francis. This canvas is among the closest that Bacon’s work came to the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images found in Surrealism. He claimed that it had been painted by improvisation, rather like the imagery created by automatism, without conscious control. Bacon sometimes exaggerated such claims for effect. In the post-war years he told Farson in relation to portraiture, as well as this paining ‘that drink and its after-effects forced him to concentrate on his painting, and that at times it gave him ‘a sort of freedom’. Working at great speed he attacked the canvas.... “My ideal would really be just to pick up a handful of paint and throw it at the canvas and hope that the portrait was there”’ [F.p.82]. “You find that the mark you make suggests another mark from which you can develop, and sometimes when I’ve been working I’ve been so sick of it that I just take the brush and put marks all over it, thinking it’s not going to work at all, and then suddenly out of the chaos comes the possibility of making an image that I hadn’t thought of before.” [F.p.83]
Bacon admitted to David Sylvester that the imagery in Painting 1946 developed relatively accidentally. He claimed (perhaps disingenuously) to have started trying to paint a gorilla in a cornfield, then a bird alighting in a field “It may have been bound up in some way with the three forms that had gone before, but suddenly the lines that I’d drawn suggested something totally different, and out of this suggestion grew the picture. I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another.” [S.p.11]. Here the image is almost like the irrational juxtaposition of imagery in a bad dream or the montaged elements of a film by Buñuel or Eisenstein. The combined images include the carcass, bones, other pieces of carcass displayed on a circular metal frame. In front of the crucified carcass is the figure of a suited man with a yellow flower in the shadow of a black umbrella. Far from being detached emotionally, his face appears to be in a rictus grin. This figure is ominous; only the bottom of his face is seen, its eyes and nose being lost in blackness. He has been associated by critics with a dictator or Nietzsche’s idea of a dominant malicious leader and Bacon’s fascination with photographs of Hitler in front of the imperial eagle symbol used by the Nazis. The drawn blinds hanging in the background perhaps refer to the blinds in photographs of Hitler’s bunker. Here the carcass suggests destruction of life rather than victory, perhaps reflecting the recent uncovering of the horrors of the death camps in the spring of 1945 after the end of World War II. The shape of the umbrella and the amorphous, seemingly charred seated figure of the man, may also relate to the news of the horrific destruction caused by the atomic bomb, the mushroom cloud of which may be reflected in the form of the open umbrella.
The pink colour of the background seems almost innocuous. It may be linked to the colour of flesh or with the pink panels of the walls of Albert Speer’s Mosaic Room in Berlin’s New Reich Chancellery. What looks almost like a patterned carpet as a floor also resembles the panels of coloured marble in the Chancellery’s Mosaic Room. The painting obviously meant a lot to Bacon, as he repeated it in a second version 25 years later in 1971. There the background is a more strident Chrome Yellow and the floor a greeny-grey. The man’s body is more clearly delineated. He wears a brown coat beneath a brown umbrella and his crossed legs and buttocks appear to be bare, though with laced boots. This later canvas, given to the Tate Gallery, lacks some of the immediacy and conviction of the original.
Painting 1946 is more experimental than many of Bacon’s earlier works. It employs a combination of paint and pastel, with a surface that was considered technically relatively unstable. So it travel infrequently, remaining in the Modern Art Gallery in New York, for which it was bought two years after it was created. It was purchased initially by Erica Brausen of the Redfern Gallery, then the Hannover Gallery, for £200 (then a generous sum for a still relatively new artist to the scene). She was to become Bacon’s first dealer, and passed it on to the Museum of Modern Art, New York for £240. It is said that by the time Bacon saw the painting again, decades after it had been purchased for America, the background pink had altered to a hue and tone that Bacon considered disagreeable. He apparently asked to be allowed to repaint this, but the curators wisely refused.
Because of the materials combined in its making, the work was considered in too unstable a condition to travel from America to Bacon’s important retrospective at the Tate Gallery. Francis’ disappointment led to his decision to repaint the image for his Grand Palais exhibition in Paris, in case the Museum of Modern Art would again refuse. But by that time MoMA had the work restored and the combination of unstable materials stabilised.
Fragment of a Crucifixion [1950 Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven]
This is one of Bacon’s strangest creatures; it is more like a small flying or splayed, distorted animal with a screaming human mouth, short impotent legs and visible genitals, in form similar to the open heart in Catholic images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Although it is one of his strangest crucifixions, it is closest to the imagery of traditional Christian crucifixion paintings. Above, a dog-like creature reaches over the transom bar of the cross. It is in the position of the figure reaching over the cross in Deposition pictures. It is painted on the raw brown of canvas, with spontaneously- drawn graffiti-like marks on either side of the cross.
This image feels to be the work most influenced by Giacometti. Bacon claimed to dislike it later, as he felt it was too much like “traditional story-telling” [AS.p.145]. But again he may have been disingenuous in his statement, as the imagery is more surreal than any common narrative.
Farson claims that in an interview, Sir Basil Spence told him that in 1951, he had considered Bacon for designing the altar tapestry in Coventry Cathedral, rather than Graham Sutherland. [F.p.134]. If this is true, I expect that Bacon would have refused the commission. However, it is fascinating to speculate what the painter, as a committed atheist, might have designed. Although Sutherland’s tapestry was, and still is, controversial, Bacon’s choice of imagery would undoubtedly have been more-so.
Three Studies for a Crucifixion triptych [1962 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York]
The 1962 and 1965 triptychs of the Crucifixion are among the most narrative of Bacon’s works apart from the tragic triptych after the death of George Dyer. The 1962 triptych, painted against a rich crimson and scarlet background is the most visceral and blood-like. (Bacon often spoke of his love of the colour of congealing blood.) It was painted specifically for inclusion in the major retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery in that year, developing from the three smaller panels on the same subject [1944] owned by the Tate. It was the first of a large number of triptychs on which Bacon worked during the rest of his career.
Bacon said “I worked on them (the individual canvases of the triptych) separately and gradually, as I finished them, worked on the three across the room together. It was a thing that I did in about a fortnight, when I was in a bad mood of drinking, and I did it under tremendous hangovers and drink; I sometimes hardly knew what I was doing. And it’s one of the only pictures I’ve been able to do under drink. I think perhaps the drink helped me to be a bit freer... in the end you could call it despair. Because it is really comes out of an absolute feeling of it’s impossible to do these things, so I might as well do anything. And out of this anything, one sees what happens/” [S.p.11].
Francis was no-doubt over-exaggerating his dependence on drink throughout the painting of the project, but whatever was driving him, he certainly created powerful images. The crucified figure is in the right-hand panel, hanging downward, like a carcass of meat, and more like a deposition than the carcass in Painting [1946]. (It is unlikely that Bacon was intending any conscious or subconscious reference here to Jewish kosher aversion to pork or unceremoniously slaughtered meat, and almost certainly not intending any ironic association with his surname, as some have joked). The figure was partly influenced by Cimabue’s Crucifixion, irrevocably damaged in the floods of Florence in1966. Francis admired the great painting and gave his prize-money of that year towards its restoration and the Florence Appeal. Bacon described the sinuous curvature of Christ’s body in Cimabue’s work as like ‘a worm crawling down the cross... I did try to make something of the feeling which I’ve sometimes had from the picture of this image just moving, undulating down the cross” [S.p.14]. In Francis’ painting the arms are a circle of bones and the rib-cage is open. The idea of presenting the crucified body upside-down may have been suggested by photographs of the great crucifix hanging damaged in a tree outside Florence after the flood, but it has also been suggested that it could have been influenced by photographs of Mussolini’s hanging corpse. One leg-bone appears to be sawn-through. The mouth is open and screaming, while a bulbous pillow like lump of fat seems to have emptied from the torso. Bacon used the later idea to represent life seeping form figures like coloured shadows. Beneath the figure is a black silhouette, which looks rather like a dog, but could be the shadow of the crucified, the shadow of life pouring from him, a mourning woman looking on, or in the case of the abattoir, the slaughterer:
Speaking in the context of these 60s Crucifixion triptychs, with their strong emphasis on the bones and ripped flesh of the carcass Bacon said: “There is this great beauty of the colour of meat... of course we are meat, we are partial carcasses. If I go into a butchers shop I always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal. But using the meat in that particular way (in the Crucifixions) is possibly the way one might use the spine, because we are constantly seeing images of the human body through X-ray photographs and that obviously does alter the way one might use the human body.” [S.p.46].... they (his Crucifixions) certainly have always emphasised the horror side of it. But I don’t feel this particularly in my work. I have never tried to be horrific. One only has to have observed things to know the undercurrents to realise that anything that I have been able to do hasn’t stressed that side of life. When you go into a butcher’s shop and see how beautiful meat can be and then you think about it, you can think of the whole horror of life – of one thing living off another.” [S.p.48]
He told Sylvester in relation to this triptych: “I’ve always been moved by pictures of slaughter-houses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the crucifixion. There’ve been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animal just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death. We don’t know of course, but it appears by these photographs that they’re so aware of what is going to happen to them, they do everything to escape. I think these pictures were very much based on that kind of thing, which to me is very, very near the whole thing of the Crucifixion. I know for religious people, for Christians, the Crucifixion has a totally different significance. But as a non-believer, it was just an act of man’s behaviour, a way of behaviour to one another.” [S.p.23]. For a Christian believer, this perspective can also be a moving and meaningful interpretation. In some ways, what the hardened soldiers were doing to Jesus’ body, and what was in the minds of those were crucifying him and demanding crucifixion, may not have been too far from Bacon’s perception. From that perspective, as well as that of a humanitarian activist, Christ’s words ‘Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing!” [Lk.23:34] make sense.
The central panel continues the image of horror. The figure lying on a striped mattress and white pillow, on an iron-framed bed looks rather like an horrifically mutilated victim of Jack the Ripper. Blood splatters the mattress, pillow and the three black blinds that have been drawn down in the room. While legs, feet, buttocks and head are distinguishable, they are badly distorted. The head seems to have been caved-in, around the teeth-filled mouth and some of the innards of the body may be strewn on the mattress. There are resonances with Sickert’s paintings of women as victims. This figure could be either male or female. The flayed and crucified figure could be waiting to be laid to rest in the tomb.
In the left-hand panel, two male figures watch the spectacle, their view looking directly outward towards the spectator, drawing us into the scene, as figures do in conventional religious paintings of the crucifixion. One wears a suit, perhaps representing a pot-bellied figure of authority, arms behind his back, unaffected by the horror. The other, who is bald, bandaged, or wearing a turban, is dressed entirely in black apart from a collar, resembling ermine. He points towards the scenes in the other two panels. He looks more pointedly at the viewer as though justifying what has been done. Before him is a large dark panel or opening. Neither of these figures seem perturbed. Two, sawn half-carcases rest on a table at the front of the image, almost as though they are the legs of the crucified, or the distorted image of a skull in the foreground of Holbein’s The Ambassadors [National Gallery, London].
One traditionally reads most western triptych paintings from left to right. But the narrative this triptych may be intended to be read from right to left. The crucified figure is taken down from the cross, laid to rest in the tomb, and the on-looking black figure could be sealing the tomb aware of the third crucified man or drawing our attention to the blackness, bleakness and horrors of the human condition.
Bacon obviously realised the importance of these images, since they are painted with such care and detail of texture. Far from being as spontaneous as the imagery suggested, they are precisely outlined and carefully in-filled with paint. This would seem to deny the possibility that the work was created in a drunken state.
Crucifixion triptych [1965 Bayerische Staatsgemälesammlungen Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich]
Francis returned to the subject in 1965 in preparing new, impressive images for his prestigious Grand Palais, Paris exhibition to be held 6 years later in 1971. The scene here is not necessarily religious, though its narrative seems to be similar to that of the 1962 triptych. Here the crucified figure is in the central panel. Rather than having his arms free, his forearms have been strapped down to the base of the cross, rather like photographs of men strapped into the electric-chair in American executions or Nazi tortures. The battered figure wears a rosette on his chest like butchered prize-winning beef. The main figure in the left-hand panel is similar to the raped figure on the bed in the central panel of the 1962 triptych, but is even more dismembered, resembling a skull on a pile of body-parts, with other innerds spilling onto the mattress, which here is on the floor rather than on a bed-frame. A semi-naked woman figure is in the room, standing almost like a prostitute awaiting trade. It has been suggested that she represents Mary Magdalene, falsely associated in some historic traditions with having been a former prostitute. She stands, lost, in front of a large black void, which may represent her despair and lack of hope. The right hand panel is stranger. The two on-looking men have here become straw-hatted gentlemen at a bar, who might equally be watching or scoring a cricket-match, rather that witnessing a crucifixion. The appear unmoved by the horrific scene before them. Further to the foreground, though ignored by them is a bound contrapposto figure, who may be intended to be equivalent to the mocked and whipped Christ in the biblical narrative. He is based on Michelangelo nudes, yet controversially wears a swastika armband as in an earlier Crucifixion. He is almost in the position of George Dyer on the stool or toilet in his other triptychs. There may be social content in this triptych, implying that some are affected by the horrors of the human condition, while some remain oblivious or unemotional about it. Uncomfortably the naked figures in both the right and left hand panels incorporate Nazi swastika armbands, suggesting rather distastefully, a link between the persecuted figures, Christ, and the Jewish Holocaust. Bacon discussed this with David Sylvester and admitted that in hindsight it was ‘a stupid thing to do’. He claimed that he had wanted to break the visual continuity of the arm and add strong colour to it, and that this was done entirely for aesthetic reasons, to make the figure and composition work formally. He denied intending specific Nazi associations [S.p.65]. But Bacon was fascinated by the horrors engendered by Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels, pinning photographs of them among so many other atrocities on his studio wall and considering what influenced their brutality and how they were allowed to get away with it for so long.
It has been claimed that “Bacon’s Crucifixions are dominated by the smells of the slaughterhouse. There is no way out and no redemption only horror, pain and dead meat” [P.p.225]. But this in not fully true; they carry far more serious psychological and humanitarian intentions. In a way Bacon was pandering to his ‘bad-boy’ image when he allowed Deakin to photograph him in Smithfield Market, flanked by two sides of beef [P.p224]. His imagery was not just trying to shock sensibilities by adopting such a key religious subject, so significant in the history of art and culture, to a carcass of meat. He was using that shock to focus people’s thoughts on the human condition.
Francis’s Crucifixion paintings are not blasphemous, degrading or nihilistic about the subject-matter. They are hardly more visceral than Grünewald or Otto Dix’s representations of the subject. They represent ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ (and animals), and are secular not religious subjects. Soldiers in war and forensic scientists witness far worse. What is wonderful in the paintings is that Bacon was able to make such striking even beautiful images out of the statement that human beings have butchered a world through advancing themselves above the image of God or any sense of right, truth, justice and care of one’s neighbour.
THE SCREAMING POPES
Soon after the Three Figures for the Base of a Crucifixion, Bacon began to work on a series of heads, which included his first head of a screaming pope. These were exhibited at the Hannover Gallery from 8th Nov. to 10th Dec. 1949. Bacon gave no explanation of the reason for this series or the meanings behind the pictures. A review in Time magazine quotes him as saying: “They are just an attempt to make a certain type of feeling visual... Painting is the pattern of one’s nervous system being projected onto the canvas”. Of the head of the pope (Head VI) he continued “One of the problems is to paint like Velazquez but with the texture of hippopotamus skin” [21 Nov.1949]. The meaning of this reference to hippopotamus is unclear and was also never explained. As the term ‘the hide of a rhinoceros’ sounds similar, he may be referring to the hardening of human beings as a result of the pressures or horrors of life. Perhaps he felt that the Church was hardened or immune to the damage that he considered it had done to humanity, and saw the Pope as a symbol of this. The main focus of the picture is a stretched screaming mouth above vestmented shoulders in front of a blind with a pull-cord. It has been suggested that the blind refers to Hitler’s bunker blinds, which were represented in Painting 1946. The painter seems to have been trying to create the sense of shock that he himself felt on first sight of horrific magazine photographs of atrocities. With its iconoclastic ecclesiastical imagery, Head VI was the image that created the greatest shock and confusion in visitors to the exhibition, but it was praised by Wyndham Lewis in a review in the Spectator [12 May1949].
The theme of the Popes preoccupied Bacon through 1950 and he returned to it sporadically over the next 10 years. He wrote of them at the time: “It is thrilling to paint from a picture which really excites you. I’m sick to death of everything I’ve done in the past, but continue to think like a child or a fool that I’m on the edge of doing a good painting.” [P.p.125]. David Sylvester speculated that the image of the Pope (‘Il Papa’) might have been connected subconsciously with Bacon’s feeling about his own father’s authoritarian dominance. As his background was Protestant, it seems unlikely, as Bacon claimed that he had never thought of the subject in that way [S.p.71]. The papal figure may have attracted him more because it was a sign of the ultimate traditional authority-figure, whose religion and political and social dominance was no longer secure. In the 20th Century the papal pomp and authority was already dissolving amid the disbelief and distrust of authoritarian regimes in modern post-war society. The changing position of the Pope may also have appealed to Bacon’s own sense of isolation in which self-protection had become so necessary.
Francis claimed in an interview that he had nothing against Popes, but he “wanted an excuse to use those colours, and you can’t give ordinary clothes that colour without getting into a sort of false Fauve manner.” [1962 Tate Gallery retrospective catalogue p.29]. This claim may be considered slightly disingenuous, as there were obviously reasons other than formal ones for choosing such a distinguished and significant subject. For example, Bacon sold Sylvester: “It is true, of course, that the Pope is unique. He is put in a unique position by being the Pope, and therefore, like in certain great tragedies, he’s as though raised onto a dais on which the grandeur of this image can be displayed to the world.” [S.p.26]. One of the tragedies against which the Pope might be screaming could be the fact that he was representing a faith and a power in which many in the world could no longer believe. Bacon also spoke of the difference between painting such a portrait in the past and the present: “Even when Velazquez was painting (and Rembrandt), in a particular way they were still , whatever their attitude to life, slightly conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities, which man now, you could say, has had completely cancelled out of him.” [S.p.29].
In some of the paintings the folds of curtains behind the pope extend over his face and body, as if forming the bars of a cage or a veil. These may suggest that the former powers of the papacy, as well as religion itself, are now imprisoned, or create their own prison.
Bacon later stated that regretted having made the works, though it was not because he regretted the theme. He claimed that his regret was that he wished that he could have done them better. He admired Velazquez’ technique, style and the power of the master’s image so greatly that he felt that he had been ‘stupid’ to use it in the way that he had. Surprisingly, however, when Bacon had the opportunity to view the original Velazquez painting himself on a visit to Italy for the Venice Biennale, where he was exhibiting with Lucien Freud and Ben Nicholson, he avoided travelling to do so. He may have claimed that the painting was “one of the greatest portraits that have ever been made.” [S.p.24], and admitted to becoming ‘obsessed by it’ [S.p.37], but he only worked from postcards and reproductions of the paintings and never actually saw the original. This may have stemmed from a similar source to his shyness with people. Perhaps he was awed at Velazquez’ genius, which he admired in the worked in the National Gallery, and felt that he would be intimidated or disappointed by the original. Peppiatt believes that he also may have held a superstition about a direct confrontation with the picture. But it is just as likely, that Francis might have been frightened that he could be disappointed by the painting if he saw the original of something that had obsessed him for years. When in Rome, instead of visiting the Palazzo Doria Pamphilij, where the painting hung, he admitted to having spent hours walking around St. Peter’s - a rather strange pursuit for someone who claimed not to believe in religion and said that he “loathed churches” S.p.38].
Bacon amalgamated Diego Velazquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X [Doria Pamphilij Gallery, Rome, 1650] with a scream in one of the most famous stills from Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin [1925] - the old nurse shot through her eye and screaming. Francis kept various reproductions of both images on his studio wall for years. During his early visits to Paris, Bacon had been impressed by the strong imagery of Eisenstein’s radical films. Battleship Potemkin and Strike both contained strong images of butchery. Eisenstein’s theories of the expressive possibilities of montage published in The Film Sense [1943] influenced Bacon’s own attitude to the powerful juxtaposition of fragmentary imagery in his paintings. As with Painting 1946, Bacon was not making primarily narrative paintings, but creating the expressive equivalent of montaged imagery. An exception is Triptych 1973, painted after George Dyer’s death, of which Bacon told a Times reporter in 1985: “I suppose in so far as my pictures are ever any kind of illustration, this comes as close as any to a kind of narrative.” [quoted F.p.187]
The screaming face remained a theme in Bacon’s oeuvre for over half of his career. Some critics associate it with Francis’ lifelong asthma, but this seems anachronistic and too literal. Bacon himself talked of using the mouth as an expressive theme, rather as Monet had been fascinated by sunsets [S.p.72]. Painting is essentially a silent medium, yet the screaming / crying / calling / roaring / shouting / yawning or laughing mouths in Bacon’s work give a sense of the dimension of sound, vocal expression and movement to ta physically static, silent image. In the 1958 T.V. documentary ‘The Art Game’, when the interviewer claimed that people found his work shocking, the artist replied: “I think that sometimes I have used subject-matter which people think is sensational because one of the things I have wanted to do was to record the human cry... and if I could do it... it would of course be sensational... (That cry is) the whole coagulation of pain, despair... Happiness and love is a wonderful thing to paint also – I always hope I will be able to do that too... it’s only the reverse side of the shadow.” He said of his paintings of men screaming: “I wanted to paint the scream more than the horror. I think if I had really thought about what causes somebody to scream, I would have made the scream that I tried to paint more successful... because I should in a sense have been more conscious of the horror that produced the scream. In fact they were too abstract.” [S.p.49].
As well as the Eisenstein photograph of the dying, screaming nurse, Bacon used photographs of mouths from other photographic sources including fine art images of classical heads of maenads and the agonised shouts of Laocoȍn and his sons, or paintings of the execution of martyrs. An iconic scream that Francis remembered form his youth was that of a mother in Massacre of the Innocents by Nicholas Poussin, which Bacon knew from his visits to the Musée Condé in Chantilly. Another regular source for his screaming mouths was a book of hand-coloured plates of diseases of the mouth, which he had bought on his first stay in Paris and which he claimed obsessed him [S.p.35]. This was a major inspiration and source for his ‘Heads’ series of 1949, of which Head VI represented the Pope.
Bacon also used a copy of the semi-Surrealist magazine Document [1930], which included photographs of mouths by Jacques-Andre Boiffard, illustrating an article by its editor Georges Bataille on the links between animal and human expression, which was close to Bacon’s ideas: “... human life is still bestially concentrated in the mouth: fury, makes men grind their teeth, terror and atrocious suffering transform the mouth into the organ of tearing screams. (The head, neck and mouth under tension) assumes the position it normally occupies in the constitution of animals. As if explosive impulses were to spurt directly out of the body through the mouth, in the form of screams.”
Bacon worked on his series of paintings of the Pope, often screaming, over more than twenty years. He was already working on ideas for the images in 1946 when painting in the South of France. He began them almost immediately after the completion of Painting 1946 in which the human figure is juxtaposed against a carcass of beef, in which the human condition seems to be regarded as more bestial than spiritual. He is reported as stating that whenever he passed a butcher’s shop or abattoir he was surprised to think that he was not represented there, rather than animals [S.p.46]
Bacon destroyed a number of his papal images. His first surviving version of the Pope was Head VI [late 1949 Arts Council of Great Britain collection]. Here the Pope may be experiencing similar existential anguish to the artist. He is also recognising many of the horrors of the world that ordinary people, including believers, experienced. It is uncertain whether Bacon was making specific reference to the contemporary criticism which Pope Pius XII was receiving over his failure to stand up against the Nazis and Italian Fascists during his reign. He had been informed of horrors being inflicted in concentration camps and other atrocities. Yet he opted for appeasement and acquiesce to the rise and power of the Nazis, rather than standing up to their atrocities and using his powers and influence to work against them. It is obvious from Francis obsession with the image that the papal paintings were painted with serious intentions. He continued producing related images through to the mid-1960s, though he later dismissed the works as ‘silly’, saying that he regretted painting them [S.p.37]. Bacon produced several works based on different artists who he admired, including Van Gogh, Delacroix and Millet. But in the papal heads seem to have become closer to his heart. Their meaning seems to be as much about the power and religious associations of the subject as the strength and artistic qualities of the image.
Velazquez’ portrait appears to express the power and confidence of the sitter. He is enthroned, like an icon of power, rather like the fascist imagery in the background of Painting 1946. While Velazquez’ imagery suggests propaganda of papal importance, Bacon subverts it. This suggests to some critics the connection with the criticism of Pope Pius XII, as the theme was being painted at a time when the criticism of Pius XII was at its height and the role and relevance of the Catholic Church and its proclamations were being questioned more than ever before. On the walls of Bacon’s studio the artist hung a photograph of Pius XII being carried aloft from St. Peters in Rome above the heads of the crowd on a ‘sedia gestatoria’. By contrast to this demonstration of power, Bacon’s Popes appear to represent the existential human agony of feeling isolated and alone, vulnerable, with a loss of faith and trust in the divine as well as his own Church institution. Frustration with faith was a feature of the growing atheism or agnosticism which grew in Western society in the post-war years and continues today. In most of Bacon’s papal paintings, the Pope is contained within a transparent frame, which is almost like a psychological as well as temporal and spatial prison. These may be related to a description which Bacon read in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy [1872] about people “enclosed within the wretched glass capsule of the human condition.” Bacon’s Popes are far from being Nietzsche’s ‘Superman’ leaders: they seem trapped within the imitations of their own symbolic image and role.
The scream of the Pope is in several ways parallel to the screaming face of the nurse gunned-down by soldiers on the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin. Both are witnessing a changing world where human priorities were altering, powers and positions were changing, and traditions, accepted norms and ways of life were recognised as no longer sufficient for the needs of the majority of human beings. In 1957 Bacon produced a painting of the nurse [Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main], though he represented her naked, seated against a green background. She too is being destroyed by the institution which should be protecting the people. Here, as in many of his male figures, she seems to represent the confusion and terror of the human race in the face of changing understandings of life – a symbol of the disillusionment with ideas and ideals, which Bacon also felt.
Bacon seems to have been fascinated by the scream as a subject. It may also relate to Edvard Munch’s famous painting in which a screaming figure was juxtaposed to a sunset that Munch said appeared as ‘a scream emanating from and expanding through the whole of nature’. Bacon’s painting The Chimpanzee [1955 Staatsgalerie Stuttgart] expresses a similar scream behind bars. In relating back to the face of a mother in Nicholas Poussin’s canvas of The Massacre of the Innocents, 1630 in the Château de Chantilly, Bacon may also have been considering links between faith and violence, which were so apparent in his native Ireland. [S.p.35]. The Poussin was the first image that Bacon, who had not been brought up with art, remembered having had a strong early effect on him. It is possible that the horror on the mother’s face as she attempted to save her son, affected him subconsciously, by comparison to his own mother’s coldness towards him. He called the image “probably the best human cry in painting” [S.p.34].
The Study after Velazquez [Private Collection 1950] includes a strongly striped background based on photographs of Albert Speer’s settings for Hitler’s 1936 (1937?) Nuremberg Rally. Speer’s ‘Cathedral of Light’ included a huge battery of searchlights directed vertically to create a form of Aurora Borealis effect or pillars of a Valhalla of light reaching into the heavens. Bacon may have made connections with the drapery folds behind the Pope, to tight prison bars that subvert his position of radiance and authoritarian dominance. Radiating from the figure at the base of the picture are grey lines that may represent reflection of the light, but appear more like straps tying down and restraining the papal figure in physical or psychological bondage. They might suggest the straps on an Electric Chair, also represented in one of Bacon’s Crucifixion triptychs. These lines are more subtly present in Study after Velazquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X [1953 Des Moines Art Centre]. The rails around the Chrome-Yellow throne certainly resemble those on an electric chair. These amalgamations of the spiritual & political powers of the Pope with the Fascist aspirations of the Nazi regime were never precisely interpreted by Bacon. He claimed to journalist Neville Wallis that his motives for the images were ‘purely aesthetic’. But in the perspective of Bacon’s other subject-matter this professed disinterestedness in the subject seems unconvincing. He later claimed “I’m just trying to make images as accurately of my nervous system as I can. I don’t even know what half of them mean. I’m not trying to say anything” [S.p.43 & 82]. It seems obvious that Bacon was deliberately creating ambiguous images without making deliberate social, political or religious statements. If we read religious, philosophical, symbolic or biographical meanings into his work, he would claim that these are our subjective interpretations, not any didactic message intended by the artist.
The paintings of the Pope may also be associated with Bacon’s homosexuality. He knew that the Roman Catholic Church, which he had encountered in his background of early years in Dublin, was opposed to his sexuality, as was the Protestant Church, most other churches at the time and much of British society. His own father, as a military man, was similarly inflexible in his attitudes, who punished and rejected Francis when he discovered his homosexuality. The screaming pope may even be interpreted as shouting orders or expressing disgust dictatorially. Some critics have speculated that subconsciously or consciously Bacon may have associated images of the Pope with the dictatorial attitudes of his own father, for whom he also later admitted to feeling a sexual attraction, though he disliked him [S.p.71]. Some apparently find vestments and religious power erotic. But there is little of attraction in Bacon’s images of the tormented Pope, other than the visual attractiveness of the image.
Despite all these potential interpretations of the papal images we must remember that Bacon refused to specifically describe or define the meanings of his paintings. He left the interpretation to the viewer, who may bring many possible interpretations to the image from personal existential angst to religious beliefs. A major incentive behind them may even have primarily been that to create such a dramatic and shocking image of a person who was still an iconic figure in world society, would shock and draw attention to the artist’s works. It certainly did.
After a period of dearth in the 1950s, Bacon’s creativity revived and among many new themes and triptychs, in the early 1960s, Bacon revived an interest in religious imagery. He returned to occasional images of the Popes. His later dislike of the paintings of popes was particularly from a technical critique, as he told Peter Beard:
“I really don’t like those popes. I think it’s an aesthetic thing really - I just don’t like the form. I think I could have done it so much better.” [quoted F.p.214 & 226]. Yet no artist is ever truly satisfied with their work and Francis was looking back on work done before he had reached his maturity. He was criticising the works in the light of his later ideas, understanding of art and technical development. It is clear from the fame that these works still maintain, that the paintings of Popes were very significant in his career and his expansion of ideas and techniques. Nevertheless, he still spoke of the Pope pictures as “a great failure. I was hypnotised at the time by the sheer beauty. They were too obvious, and too cheap.” [AS.p.128].
I find it hard to agree that they were “too obvious, too cheap” at the time. They were brash and attracted attention, but Bacon was being innovative and critical of society even a decade before ‘Beyond the Fringe’, ‘That Was The Week That Was’ and other critiques of the religious and political status quo. His was among the first 20th Century British art to challenge accepted norms and institutions in the ways that Hogarth and political cartoonists had done, but in the realm of Fine Art, and at the level of academic History Painting.
STUDIES OF VAN GOGH ON THE ROAD TO TARASCON
In my personal opinion, Bacon’s variations on images of Van Gogh are not among his greatest works, but they are nevertheless extremely significant. They were produced mostly from 1956 to 1957, in a spate of painting at a time when Bacon was seeking new directions. Previously, Vincent had been the subject of one of his ‘Heads’ painted in 1951. Many of the Vincent pictures were still wet when hung at the Hannover Gallery exhibition in March 1957, and two arrived after the opening, This gives the impression that he may have worked on some in desperation to have enough images for the show. Among his most expressionist work, the methods and compositions of some do not seem to have been considered as profoundly as many of his other compositions. Yet they influenced the use of a brighter colour palette in his subsequent painting and his use of expressive, though later more considered, brush-marks. They seem experimental and not always fully resolved, as pieces through which he was trying to find new ways of working. Francis used the freshness of Vincent’s approach to paint and also Soutine, who Bacon admired, and de Kooning, who was currently in fashion, but about whose work Francis later expressed greater ambivalence.
In the images of Vincent, Bacon dealt with the identity of ‘the artist’ more specifically than in many of his other works. He seems to have identified with Vincent, as he did with Rimbaud and Lautréamont, as original outsiders. All Bacon’s paintings could be regarded as the artist confronting his subjects, but by painting Van Gogh in a number of pictures, produced quickly for exhibition in 1957, he was considering the nature of an artist in the world and his role as an experiencer and observer of his environment. Technically, their painting style is closer to Vincent’s expressive overall brushwork than any of Bacon’s other pictures, perhaps because he was reflecting Van Gogh’s own method of expression of the forces in the world, as expounded in Vincent’s letters, which Bacon re-read regularly.
Bacon didn’t fully explain his fascination with Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon [1888], which had been destroyed in the bombing of the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Magdeburg, during World War II. It was certainly not among Van Gogh’s greatest works. It may have fascinated him because it had been destroyed by war. Yet also, more than Vincent’s other self-portraits, it showed the artist standing in context of the world which he was trying to capture in his art, rather than looking at himself in a mirror. Picasso represented himself in scenes in his many pictures of the artist with his model in his studio, but it is not something Francis tried in his own self-portraits, other than a few where he represents himself as part of a group. The fact that Vincent’s painting was famous for having been destroyed may also have inspired Bacon’s sense of the irony and ultimate meaninglessness of what Frances called “the game of making art”. He called the Road to Tarascon self-portrait “the phantom of the road”. [P.p.168] .
Vincent has been described as a ‘tortured soul’. Bacon didn’t admit to being that himself; rather he often claimed to be ‘optimistic’. But there is no doubt that there were tortured elements of his personality and life. He did admit that he felt isolated as an artist [AS.p.274]. Vincent had called himself “a loner upon earth”, and Farson definitely recognised loneliness in Bacon, even in busy social situations. Bacon read Van Gogh’s letters avidly, keeping them by his bedside [P.p.168]. One cannot read these without in many ways identifying as well as empathising with the artist.
We cannot be sure in what ways Francis identified with Vincent. He certainly recognised a similar search for realism rather than illustrative naturalism in his work. He said of Vincent: “You know, for me, Van Gogh got very close to the real thing about art when he said something like, I can’t remember the right words: “What I do may be a lie, but it conveys reality more accurately.” That’s a very complex thing. After all, it’s not so-called ‘realist’ painters who manage to convey reality best.” [P.M.p.164]. Bacon took this idea further “Well, art itself is artifice. It’s an illusion, and if an image is going to work it has to be reinvented artificially. I mean, think of Van Gogh. You’ve never actually seen a boot or a starry night like that, have you? ... But reality has to be reinvented to convey the intensity of the real.” [P.M.p.164]. This ‘reinvention to convey the intensity of the real’ is at the heart of Francis’ work as well as that of Van Gogh and many of the artists who Bacon admired.
Sadly, partly because of his homosexuality, Bacon also felt that he needed to developed artificiality in his own life. But in the ethos of the clubs and circles that he frequented, that artificiality often seems to have become a caricature of himself, who was actually more sensitive than his drinking, waspish comments and the violence of his art made him seem. He confessed to Peppiatt: “I’m probably the most artificial man you’ve ever met” [P.M.p.173]. “I’ve had a disastrous life, but actually it has become more various than my paintings. It’s gone deeper than what are called the ‘moeurs’ of my times. I think I’m unique. Everyone is unique of course, it’s just that I have been able to work a bit on my uniqueness. I’ve tried to make myself profoundly artificial” [P.M.p.181]. And in a sad period of reflection he admitted: “I’ve tried in different ways to remake myself over the years. Of course it hasn’t really worked. But there it is. Nothing has ever really worked out for me.” [M.P.p.95]. Part of his admiration for Van Gogh may have been that in Vincent’s letters he recognised a man who was ‘profoundly real’ and had expressed that reality so movingly in both his paintings and writings.
Vincent was, or regarded himself as, an outsider in society, creating work that visually and emotively interpreted his own inner feelings and responses to the outside world. He was aware that his art was not yet understood or appreciated, but believed that the time would come when his realism would be recognised. Bacon considered himself an outsider from his family in a similar way to Vincent, as he had not lived up to their expectations of him. Bacon’s expression of his sexuality was very different from that of Vincent, but he saw himself as an outsider in being homosexual, and was similarly frustrated in relationships and unhappy in love, though Bacon indulged his sexuality more than Vincent was able to do. The idea of Van God being “the ultimate outsider” [P.p.169] probably appealed to the romantic side of Francis. Bacon would have read in Vincent’s letters the artist’s feelings, spiritual understandings and expressive and artistic ideas. Vincent, like Bacon, drew beauty and creativity from his frustrations, sensations and longings, yet all these moved them both towards their own destruction in different ways. Francis had recognised a similar self-destructiveness in the talents and obsessions of Peter Lacy. Vincent’s letters also record his struggle with the Christian faith of his youth, missionary activity and his family’s theological tradition. When Vincent wrote “for me the God of the clergymen is dead”, however, he meant something very different from Bacon or Nietzsche’s pronouncements on the ‘banality’ and ‘impossibility’ of faith in the 20th Century. Vincent never personally renounced belief in God, just the limited type of God that his tradition had promoted.
In his portraits of Van Gogh, Bacon interpreted in his own style the free, expressive brushwork and vitality of Vincent’s painting, as well as the use of strong, expressive colour. This is especially shown in Study for Portrait of Van Gogh III [Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington 1957], one of his most scribbly paintings. Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V [also in Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington 1957] is by contrast a slimmed down simplified composition, with strong lines of perspective and colour fields in the background that seem similar to Diebenkorn’s later Ocean Park Series [painted between 1966 and 1988].
American Abstract Expressionism was coming into fashion in Europe, through its promotion by American institutions. It developed some similar ideas to those of Bacon, but Francis claimed not to have been attracted to what he regarded as ‘decorative’ and ‘chancy’ art, which he considered was not balanced by ordered discipline of composition. (He seems to be talking particularly of artists like De Kooning here, rather than Mark Rothko or Barnet Newman.) Francis’s figurative work owed more to the disciplined expressive art of Rodin, Courbet and a strong admiration for Michelangelo [S.p.114] and Degas, whose clarity of drawing was far stronger than the spontaneity and lack of precision of Bacon’s own drawing and anatomy. Bacon claimed “I learned grandeur of form from Michelangelo, and the voluptuous male nude… and I learned positions from Muybridge.” {AS.p.126]. Surprisingly, Francis told Peppiatt that he found and loved the voluptuousness in Michelangelo’s drawings more than his sculptures. [P.M.p.164]: (Bacon certainly represented Vincent with greater ‘grandeur of form’ and scale than in Vincent’s much smaller self-portraits and the figure dominated by the landscape in the Road to Tarascon.) Francis had admired Degas’ drawing in an exhibition of his drawn monotypes and drawings in the Lefevre Gallery, London in spring 1958 and believed them to be greater than his oil paintings {P.M.p.164]. Bacon spoke of his own spontaneity as sometimes even throwing paint on the canvas without knowing what would happen. But he stressed “I really like highly disciplined painting. I don’t use highly disciplined methods of constructing it. I think the only thing is that my paint looks immediate.” [S.p.92]. This is far from the experimental, intuitive expressiveness of Francis’ Van Gogh paintings, but perhaps he needed to go through this phase to free his techniques and use of colour as well as to discover what was important to him about composition and subject-matter.
Interviewed by Sylvester, he likened his idea of ‘the creative accident’ to his love of gambling [S.p.51-53]. This parallel was probably slightly tongue-in-cheek, as his later art was quite calculated, as may have been his gambling at times when he was not drunk or distracted. Of what he called “the creative accident... splashing the stuff down and see how it lands” [F.p.8 & 9], he told Sylvester: “I foresee it in my mind, I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it... It is not an accident because it becomes a selective process which part of this accident one chooses to preserve. One is attempting of course to keep the vitality of the accident and yet preserve a continuity.” [S.p.17]. He further explained his process of the more ordered throwing and scrubbing with paint to Sylvester [S.p.90-94]. Without the freedom of the Van Gogh portraits, Francins might have taken longer to discover the value of the ‘creative accident’.
In the early 1960s, by contrast to the news fashion for Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Bacon’s figurative work appeared to some to be outmoded as a form of Modern Art, though he painted with renewed vigour and confidence. His late work was more carefully controlled, as he told Richard Cork in 1991 “I never think of my work as convulsive... I love very ordered work.” [quoted F.p.9 & S.p.56]. By contrast he also said of his 1962 Crucifixion: “I did (it) when I was on drink for about a fortnight. Sometimes it loosens you, but again I think it also dulls other areas. It leaves you freer, but on the other hand it dulls your final judgement of what you hold. I don’t actually believe that drink and drugs help me.” [S.p.54].
It is clear from this that Bacon’s painting is not as unreasoned as he sometimes claimed. He came to his canvas with an initial idea, however vague, and, as most artists, modified and changed it as it developed, sometimes reaching a very different conclusion to that with which he began.
PORTRAITS
Bacon’s portraits of friends have often been criticised for making people appear ugly or deformed. Surprisingly, for a time it became ‘chic’ to have your portrait painted by Francis [P.M.p.368]. But though he had a nihilistic attitude towards human value and lack of confidence in human identity, this was not his main aim in his portraits. He claimed of his portraiture: “Nowadays you need to reinvent the way you communicate facts.” [P.M.p.345]. “I am only trying to deform into truth... After all, photography has done so much so how are you to make a portrait nowadays unless you can bring what’s called the facts of someone’s appearance more directly and more violently back onto the nervous system? You have to deform appearance into image.” [M.P.p.87].
Sometimes he expressed both love and hostility towards the subjects of his portraits [AS.p.204]. This may reflect Francis’s relationships generally, as he was both a generous and committed friend to many, yet could quickly take offence, make cruel, stinging remarks, and break friendships which had lasted for years. The portraits may be distorted, yet when one compares photographs of his sitters to many of their portraits, Francis managed to capture recognisable elements of their nature or character and features, without precise representation of their physiognomy. Bacon told Sylvester: “There is no point in doing a portrait of somebody if you’re not going to make it look like them.” [AS.p.230]. In the academic hierarchy of the arts, Bacon believed that portraiture should replace history painting as the summit of achievement. [P.p.208]. The portraiture which he intended to create was that which explored the subject beyond its surface. As History Painting was once considered deeply philosophical, representing and exploring the roots of culture, Francis felt that his type of portraiture coulod examine the true reality of people.
In discussing his portraiture Bacon claimed: “We nearly always live through screens - a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps from time to time I have been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.” “All I want to do is distort the reality of the human figure into reality.” [F.p.135]. He explained further: “If you think of a portrait, you may at one time have put the mouth somewhere, but you suddenly see through this graph that the mouth should go right across the face... one wants the thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than the simple illustration of the object that you set out to do... facts (and) appearances are ambiguous, and therefore this way of recording form is nearer to the fact by its ambiguity of recording,” [S.p.56]. He likened some of Rembrandt’s late, most free self-portraits to this process [S.p.68], recognising that expressive marks can be more ‘real’ than photographic naturalism. He admired Monet’s late work because he had taken art beyond naturalism: “I think he became really extraordinary towards the end of his life/ He’s given the whole thing (the Waterlilies in the Tuileries) an extraordinary tension by taking it as far has he can into abstraction without losing the specific image. There are only a few great works like this where technique and subject matter are so closely interlocked that you can’t separate one from the other... I often come down here to look at the technique in them.” [P.M.p.163]. We see in this some of the motivation in Bacon’s own works, where figures become abstracted in order to express emotion and vigour without losing the imagery of the subject-matter.
Bacon talked of his portraying ‘emanations from people… fat leaving its ghost”.[AS.p.231]. This is what he was trying to hunt down or explore in his portrait images. Sometimes he represented it physically by the black or coloured shadowed shapes oozing from below some of his figures. By ‘emanations’, he did not mean the spiritualism which was rife in cultured circles in the first half of the 20th Century, but the true nature of his subjects, which might be found in exploring their bone-structure in the case of Leiris or Isabel Rawsthorne, or what made them beautiful or handsome, as in his portrait of Peter Bears or John Edwards.
Bacon developed portraiture as an important part of his oeuvre in the period of renewed creativity in the early 1960s. He learned from Picasso that the portrait can distort the features. He claimed that with the advent of photography “photography has totally altered (figurative painting)... I think Velazquez believed he was recording he court at that time and certain people at that time. But a really good artist today would be forced to make a game of the same situation. He knows that that particular thing could be recorded on film, so this side of the activity has been taken over by something else and all that he is involved with is making the sensibility open up through the image.” [S.p.28 & Catalogue artist’s statement Granville Gallery, New York 1963].
For Bacon more than Picasso, the distortions of physiognomy explore the psychology and presence of the sitter as much as, if not more than their facial features. He suggests particular aspects of human psychology as well as reflecting his own mood and feelings about the sitter. Significantly, he claimed that he believed homosexuals to really ‘look’ at people more precisely and observantly than others, because they are so obsessed by watching the body. [quoted P.p.208]. This may say more about his personal, acute awareness and observati0on of those around him than being a general psychological truth about homosexuals.)
Unlike most portraiture, which is done with the sitter posing before the artist, interestingly, Bacon claimed in 1966 that he preferred painting portraits from a series of photographs and from memory, rather than from life [S.p.38]. He said that he found people’s presence in the room ‘inhibiting’, though admitted that this may have been more a result of his “own neurotic sense”. He certainly preferred to paint alone and rarely allowed anyone to watch his painting process. He commissioned his Colony Room friend, John Deakin, who had been a photographer for Vogue, to develop multiple shots of his intended sitters in various poses, from different angles and positions, with different gestures and in varied locations, both interiors and exteriors. Usually Bacon told Deakin the positions he wanted his sitters to adopt, before the photography session. He did not copy the photographs, but used them repeatedly as sources of reference or triggers for the imagination, apparently sometimes folding, ripping, amalgamating and montaging them to form his painted and distorted compositions of the sitter. Later in life Bacon distanced himself from the role of Deakin in the development of his work [F.p.168]. After Deakin’s death, John Edwards took over the role of photographer for the artist’s subjects.
One would think that a photograph would limit the material from which the artist was able to drawfor a portrait, but for Bacon it was just a starting-point. He often transformed relatively simple, clear photographic images dramatically to make powerful presences. Sometimes he translated relatively ordinary looking characters into figures who feel like great heroes or victims in classical literature, myths and Greek tragedies. Of the process, he said: “Through the photographic image I find myself beginning to wander into the image and unlock what I think of as its reality more than I can by looking at it. And photographs are not only points of reference; they are often triggers of ideas.” [S.p.30]. When Sylvester asked him “Are you saying that painting is almost a way of bringing something back, that the process of painting is almost like the process of recalling?” Bacon agreed: “I am saying it. And I think that the methods by which this is done are so artificial that the model before you, in my case, inhibits the artificiality by which the thing can be made.” [S.p.40]
He often exaggerated the body language in the pose which he asked his photographer to record. He admitted that he was particularly inhibited by the idea of having people he knew posing for him: “They inhibit me because if I like them, I don’t want to practise before them the injury that I do to them in my work. I would rather practise the injury in private by which I think I can record the fact of them more clearly.” [S.p.41] “Wilde said: ‘you kill the thing you love’... I don’t know. Whether the distortions which I think sometimes bring the image over more violently are damage is a very questionable idea. I don’t think it is damage. You may say it’s damaging if you take it on the level of illustration. But not if you take it on the level of what I think of as art. One brings the sensation and the feeling of life over the only way one can. I don’t say it’s a good way, but one brings it over at the most acute point one can.” [S.p.42]. We certainly know that some of the subjects of Bacon’s portraits felt disturbed by what he had created. He destroyed a portrait of Cecil Beaton having seen his reaction, even though Bacon believe that it was one of the best portraits he had ever produced [P.p;183-4; AS.p.198-9]. Peppiatt gives a wonderful description of Henrietta Moraes: “She stood up with remarkable resilience to the experience of being flayed into a Bacon portrait.” [P.p.209].
With commissioned portraits, like his other works, Bacon’s exacting standards of himself and his art meant that he even destroyed portraits that had been commissioned, and which the sitter was happy with, abandoning the commission. He spoke of “the possibility of an extraordinary irrational remaking of the positive image that you long to make. And this is the obsession: how like can I make this thing in the most irrational way? So that you’re not only remaking the look of the image, you’re remaking all the areas of feeling which you yourself have apprehensions of. You want to open as many levels of feeling if possible, which cannot be done in ... pure illustration, in purely figurative terms.” He then qualified this by showing how Velazquez and Rembrandt had dealt with the problem of portraiture in different ways [S.p.28].
Bacon repeatedly painted certain friends, particularly Muriel Belcher from the Colony Room, the drinking club that he frequented in Soho and other drinking friends like Henrietta Moraes, and the artists Lucien Freud and Isabella Rawsthorne. His own self-portraits sometimes recall Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray, seemingly reflecting the inner life and activities of a man who on the outside remained attractive. The portraits, however, do not always suggest the inner thoughts of his individual sitters as much as Bacon’s own response to them. They record the effect or sensation of the presence of someone, which is only part of their nature. He was interested in the ‘particular’ person [S.p.26], yet surprisingly felt he could reach it through working from photographs of them rather than being present with them in the studio. This reticence with sitters may be partly because of his shyness, feeling intimidated in their presence, or being uncomfortable as he considered people’s possible reactions to his work while he was painting. But he also did not want them to be put off by his rather chaotic working methods, distorting by experimentation and often making slow progress, despite painting fluently and fast. Presumably his self-portraits were different, worked from mirrors rather than photographs, but we cannot be certain, as Francis was reticent in talking about his painting process, and rarely allowed anyone ot watch him at work.
In his interviews with Davis Sylvester, Bacon said of his portraits: “The living quality is what you have to get. In painting a portrait the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person... The sitter is someone of flesh and blood and what has to be caught is their emanation. I’m not talking in a spiritual way... that is the last thing I believe in. But there are always emanations from people whoever they are, though some people are stronger than others.” Although Bacon frequently claimed that humans are a meaningless accident, his words here, and the portraits themselves, show that he personally really valued many of those he painted.
His triptych Three Studies of Lucien Freud [1969 Private Collection], is among 25 portraits that Francis did of his fellow artist. The panels show Freud enclosed within a tight perspective frame, very similar to the frame around Peter Dyer in the triptych Three Studies of the Male Back [1970 Kunsthaus, Zurich]. However, the images of Freud show him sitting inside the frame, with only one leg reaching out of the base. By contrast Dyer sits outside the frame with just one foot reaching into it and his face reflected in a mirror inside the frame. In the Triptych of Portraits of John Edwards the frame is almost identical to that around Lucien Freud, but the effect is made much more peaceful by the sensitive beauty or ‘serenity’ [P.M.p.367] of his portrayal of Edwards. Whether this difference is intentionally significant, we cannot be sure, since Bacon would have been silent on such explanations, but the position of the frame does seem important to whatever meaning Bacon was exploring in the characters of the two sitters.
Giacometti used similar frames in his drawings to focus the attention on the figure within the space of the composition. Bacon particularly admired Giacometti’s ability “to take human appearance to the edge of dissolution by reducing it to its essence” [quoted P.p.206]. Francis was doing something similar in his explorations of physiognomy and the human form. He used a very different style and had rather different aims, but the idea of infiltrating the image and the person without illustrating surface reality is very similar. In 1985 he spoke of creating images which were “a concentration of reality and a shorthand of sensation… to abbreviate into intensity.” {AS.p.269.]
Bacon managed to represent the strength of his sitters’ images even more than their character in portraits of Isabella Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes especially. He was also projecting his own ideas, perceptions and psychological ideas onto the figures he was representing. His late portraits of John Edwards, Bacon’s young East End companion later in his life, appear to lack the violent energy of, for example, the paintings in memory of his former lover George Dyer. They are far more peaceful, appreciative and less distorted. Bacon had toll Stephen Spender that there were certain friends “who were far too beautiful for him to distort.” [AS.p.168]. Edwards was more self-reliant than Dyer and his relationship with Bacon was more about companionship than drunkenness, dependency or confrontation.
Francis’ two late portraits of his older Parisian literary friend Michel Leiris seem extremely penetrating in their psychological insight, as well as exploring the writer’s physiognomy. He wrote: “I am always hoping to deform people into appearance... for instance, I think that, of those two paintings of Michel Leiris, the one I did which is less literally like him, is in fact more poignantly like him.” In them Bacon controlled the distortion masterfully to create a sense that the face is being seen from several perspectives simultaneously, with more love and valuing of the subject than Picasso’s cubist portraits. Picasso may have begun the concept of representing features from different angles in one image, but Pablo imposed his style upon the subject. Bacon, by comparison, allowed the nature of the subject to direct his representation.
Leiris’ wife ran the prestigious Galerie Kahnweiler in Paris, which added to the prestige of Francis’ friendship with the couple. Bacon particularly valued the judgement of both on his work as well as admiring Michel for his writing. He was thrilled that Leiris was chosen to write the text for his Grand Palais retrospective exhibition. He especially thanked Michel for not labelling him an ‘expressionist’, as so many critics did, but as a ‘realiste’. [P.p262]. This was too easy and misleading a term; the painter felt he was exploring the inner reality of his subjects far more than the Expressionists or Abstract Expressionist had done. His portraits of Leiris demonstrate Bacon’s care for, and appreciation of the writer; they are painted with intense scrutiny of his features, but with love. This valuing of his subject again belies Francis’ statements that human beings are no more than animals or meat.
TRIPTYCHS
Bacon worked on a number of important triptychs from 1944 to 1965. The triptych form has particular religious associations, and psychologically enhances a sense of the power and significance of the subject and imagery. It is not just associated in Christian iconography with the Holy Trinity, but from a wider perspective, it develops the idea that there may be narrative links between the panels and leads the viewer to compare andassociate their imagery. Bacon claimed that the frame of each panel acted rather like the ‘space-frames’ in his paintings: “They isolate one from another. And they cut off the story between one and another. It helps to avoid story-telling...” [S.p.23]. He discussed his use of the triptych more fully in S.p.84-86.
Bacon used the triptych format in several of his Crucifixion projects, but he also used it for other significant themes. Subjects of other triptychs include: T.S. Eliot’s Poem Sweeney Agonistes and The Oresteia of Aeschylus [Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo], though, as discussed previously, Bacon did not give them these titles himself. He said of the Sweeney Agonistes Triptych that the gallery labelled it after mentioned that he happened to be reading T.S. Eliot and was personally unhappy with the titling [F.p.5]. The works do not ‘illustrate’ the literature; rather they reflect his reading and thoughts around the painting.
His 1976 work, just entitled Triptych, incorporated aspects of the Oresteia but he also suggested that it included other literary influences such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Michel Leiris’ Frêle Bruit (the 4th volume of his friend’s autobiographical work). Bacon read broadly, and there are often made literary associations in his work and his conversations. But he avoided explaining his imagery, preferring the viewer to interact with and interpret the paintings themselves. Triptych [1976] appears to be one of his most complex works, bringing together many seemingly random elements in the composition of each panel. Combining imagery in the triptychs recalls his surreal interest in montage from early works like Painting [1946], but perhaps here the montaged forms suggest more narrative intent. In the central panel two black birds, resembling the Furies, seem to be threatening a central seated naked figure. They may be augurs of death, as on the figure’s lap is a reflective platter or round mirror, reflecting an ugly head and spine. This may be suggestive of an offering. In the foreground are a chalice and ripped fragments of paper, which also litter the floor of the other panels of the triptych. The left and right panels seem to represent the head and shoulders of the same man, suited in grey, with a black collar. In each panel the main figure is not confined within a linear cage or space, as in even the Oresteia triptych, painted five years later. Rather, he is either reflected in a mirror, observing us through a window in the canvas or confronting us. It is almost as though he is the artist himself (though the face is too narrow to be that of Bacon, and resembles Bacon’s Irish-born Parisian compatriot Samuel Beckett as portrayed by his fellow artist Louis le Brocqy (who also lived in Paris during the time that Bacon was there [P.M.p.257]. This triptych feels like one of Bacon’s most directly confrontational images. In the left hand panel the figure reaches out towards us, almost as though he is pointing a gun at the viewer, but the impression is more like that of a painter reaching forward with his thumb to measure the proportions or reality of what is before him. Perhaps the image is a mirror on a black easel, from which the artist is imagining himself observing and painting a self-portrait. The ripped fragments at his feet may represent the floor of Bacon’s studio, roughly strewn with source material and fragments of discarded paper. If this is the case, the central panel may be suggested to contain the multifarious imagery that inhabited Bacon’s oeuvre during his career: the nude, bestial creatures, literary and media sources etc. Before the right hand figure are a smaller nude couple, appearing to wrestle in sexual union. The nude in the central panel may be one of the many canvases stacked up in Bacon’s studio. Unusually, the outer panels are not pure rectangles, but have irregular cut-in, stepped bases. This may be an intentional reference to the shaped panels of religious triptychs, which are designed to close and fold over one another as in Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece.
BACON’S HOMOSEXUAL IMAGERY
Despite huge advances in psychology and genetics, the complicated question of what influences individuals to develop as ‘straight’ or homosexual - the ‘nature vs. nurture’ debate - is still not understood. It is now widely recognised that there are a broad spectrum of sexualities, and that one’s sexuality is not a ‘choice’ or ‘evil’ as homosexuality was once condemned as being. Most reasoning people today, even in some Christian churches that once condemned it, understand and accept homosexuality as part of the true spectrum of human life. Bacon claimed many times that he knew from early on in his life that he was wholly homosexual. Yet though he expressed peace and happiness over this and no sense of sin or guilt (having moved forward from his early guilt and torment [P.p78; AS.p.273]), he also talked of his sexuality disparagingly as though it was not ‘normal’. Bacon said of himself: “Being a homosexual is a defect. It’s like losing a limb.” [P.p.17] .. “Homosexuality is more tragic and more banal than what’s called ‘normal’ life.” [P.p.220].. (By ‘banal’, I don’t think he was claiming that it was trivial or boring, but that he felt it to be a more basic drive to erotic fulfilment than the more comprehensive, fulfilling loving relationship for which he longed.) These are sad statements, though understandable, as the closely reflect the psychological understanding of homosexuality in the mid-20th Century in which he lived. It is still sadly the reaction of some churches and cultures today. Homosexuality was then considered a misplacement of affection, an illness caused by psychological damage during one’s upbringing, an evil choice, or a disorder of the mind. Peppiatt sensed that Francis felt guilt at not living up to the moral and lifestyle expectations of his family background, as well as his personal strict code of behaviour and sense of responsibility towards other. Bacon recognised that his sexuality was totally homosexual and could not have been changed. [P.p.248]. He may perhaps have felt guilt at some of his particular ways of indulging his sexual appetites, to which he was introduced at an early age in London and Berlin. He had been introduced at an young age to promiscuity and abusive relationships rather than the stable relationship to which his conversations show that his deeper longings aspired. Promiscuity was common in the gay world at the time. In some ways this was inevitable due to the social pressures on homosexuals to keep their desires hidden and repressed. The underground nature of most homosexual meeting-places at the time meant that many met anonymously and did not form lasting relationships. Open, committed, loving relationships between one man and another were far rarer before the legalisation allowing them in 1967.
For a painter who often expressed his optimism against the odds, creating such powerful art, and living such a seemingly popular social life, it is sad to read Bacon’s claim with regard to feelings and relationships: “My life has always been a disaster.” [P.p.243]. Life as a homosexual was regularly unsafe, as it still is not today in many places. Francis was frequently beaten up in London, Paris and Tangier, both by those who condemned his homosexual nature or by violent pick-ups and temporary partners. He complained that in picking up men “I usually only find brutes” [P.M.p.372]. He would often cover up his bruises and other forms of damage by pretending to have fallen. [P.p.231].
In a rare statement of honesty about his relationships, Bacons admitted to what he had longed for: “I think it would be absolutely marvellous to succumb utterly to someone… I have always longed to meet a man who was tougher and more intelligent than myself. But, unfortunately, when you get to know them, most men turn out to be terribly weak.” [P.p.217]. This was especially true in the case of two tragic relationships in his life, with Peter Lacy and George Dyer.
It is often dangerous to interpret an artist’s art primarily in the light of their biography. Rarely are Bacon’s paintings dealing solely with specific personal relationships or incidents (the paintings after George Dyer’s suicide are exceptions). But Bacon was filtering his subjects, even his crucifixions, and probably also his paintings of Van Gogh, through his own perceptions, interpretations and experiences.
Bacon admitted to having survived in his early life in London from about the age of 16 years, as a petty thief and supporting himself as what might be called a ‘rent-boy’. In his early 20s he helped to finance his life in London by advertising in The Times euphemistically as a ‘Gentleman’s Companion’. But these are not necessarily the relationships reflected in his art, as some critics have interpreted them. He claimed that his art should be ;anonymous’ as well as ‘specific’. It is too simplistic to read his life, art, sexuality or attitude to religion and morals in the light of the abuse he suffered as a child, his attraction to abusive relationships, and his addiction to getting drunk etc. These may be part of his ways of coping with his sexuality and many other problems in his life. Yet his artistic images do not necessarily reflect all his intimate personal ideas, actions or relationships. It is far too easy to imply or infer that there are direct parallels between his paintings and brutality, masochism, sadism and aggression. He primarily used his subjects to express aspects of general life as he perceived it, through images that were related to his own life and experiences he witnessed around him. The homosexual imagery and brutality in some of his work must reflect his active sexuality, but also represents areas of unfulfilled fantasy and the violent nature of the world, some of which he knew.
He had a few long-term relationships with partners, though they were all fraught with complications. Many were damaged by the promiscuous nature of the urban underground homosexual scene of which became part. With them he learned to act out sexual fantasies [P.p102] and had some lovers with a penchant for masochism and flagellation. Francis was attracted to the ‘rough trade’ side of the homosexual world, which did not encourage development of stable, lasting relationships. Interestingly, considering the way that his father and his grooms as a child had hurt him by labelling him a ‘sissy’, he also had little time for those he considered weak and could be waspishly cruel in his language and humour towards them.
There are so many possible and complex psychological triggers for homosexuality and sadomasochism, so it is only speculative to make connections. Remembering being told by his parents at an early age that he was ‘ugly’ must have had a traumatising affect upon his insecurity. He spoke in later years after Lacy and Dyer’s deaths: “I loathe this old pudding face of mine, but it’s all I’ve got to paint now.” [P.p.250]. He certainly was not ugly. When one looks at photographs of the young Francis he had cherub-like good looks which he retained into his late 50s. His mature face in 1950 was photographed by Cecil Beaton and others, and even Lucien Freud’s intensely observed portrait of Francis in the Tate Gallery is visually attractive. But our psychology does not always help us accept such realities. As a youth, his self-image was damaged by rejection from his parents, his father’s dominant aggression, fear of threats of violence from Sinn Fein in Ireland, the brutality towards him of his father’s grooms, stable-lads, sexual abuse from his uncle and other acquaintances, experiences on the streets of London and the gay underworld. These, with the violence of his experiences during the Blitz and innumerable other influences may have triggered the development of his own desires, feelings about life, and his penchant for violence as reflected in some of his paintings. He claimed that his life-experiences had hardened him. This hardening may have inured him to pain and some sensibilities, yet he was positive about how it had built up his creativity: “An artist has to go through every extreme to stretch one’s sensibility.” [P.p.279] ... “An artist’s sensibilities should always be kept stretched.” [P.M.p.247].
It is claimed that sadomasochistic acts heighten the sensations, so Bacon’s predilections may have developed as a response to lack of feeling or from his sense of rejection from the class and culture into which he was born. Peppiatt recalls that Bacon had a strong capacity to withstand physical pain, as witnessed during surgery and mental anguish [P.p.95]. Farson mentions several times that he appeared lonely, even though he was an active socialite. He must have recognised that may of his social group in the clubs were just hangers-on because of his generosity, and not committed to him. George Dyer certainly recognised this among the hangers-on in Bacon’s set. Francis used the word ‘sensations’ many times in his interviews, as well as speaking of how the act of painting violently stimulated the nervous system. So both his sexual activity and his painting may have been part of stimulating what he had claimed was a ‘defect’ within him ‘rather like having a limp.” [P.p17]. He also perhaps eroticised pain in his canvasses.
It seems wrong to try to pin-down Bacon’s psychology too precisely, as several art-historians, critics and psychologists have attempted to do in interpreting his work. Nor is it necessarily important to do so. Bacon had no time for people who interpreted his art from Freudian or other psychological perspectives, though he read and referred to Sigmund Freud often. “We are all hounding ourselves.” he claimed, in a 1983 letter to Hugh Davies, “We have been made aware of this side of ourselves by Freud.” [AS.p.254]. He liked to be in charge of the interpretation of his own art [P.p.274] and claimed not to read reviews of his work, but he was sensitive to hostility towards it. [p.p.246]. Some critics made over-the top, even laughable interpretations, such as interpreting his umbrellas as erect phalluses, etc. (though Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams does refer to this symbolism), or reading his screaming mouths as Freudian orifices [S.p.48]. Bacon claimed to believe that art can unlock “the greatest and deepest things a man can feel.” [F.p.135]. But he recognised that people’s responses to art vary enormously, as are our ideas of what we perceive as beautiful or meaningful. Bacon often covered his tracks over the meaning of his paintings by claiming that he didn’t know what they meant, He deflected both critics and his agents the Marlborough Gallery who wished to give erudite titles to his works. He tantalisingly said of some: “No-one will ever know where that one comes from!” [P.p.268]. However, he was definitely being disingenuous or playing with his audience when he claimed: “When I hear certain people talk, I always think I belong to a very ancient simplicity. I’m probably the simplest person I know... I’m simple and natural. After I’m dead, people will see how absolutely natural my distortions are.” [P.p.269].
Bacon’s early life in London brought him quickly into contact with the homosexual subculture. Although he had a small weekly allowance from his mother, it was far from sufficient so he partly financed himself through making relationships. As well as looking for sex, he seems also to have been looking for substitutes for parental support, especially those who valued him and treated him more gently. He found this in a number of relationships with older men, and friendships with a few women. Bacon’s former Nanny Jessie Lightfoot, lived with and supported him much of his life in London and he was bereft when she died in 1951, when he was away gambling in Nice. It must have been a very tolerant as well as conspiratorial relationship because she helped to select the contacts who responded to his adverts as a ‘Gentleman’s companion’ in The Times. [P.p55; M.P.p.94]. Yvonne Bocquentin, with whom he lived in Chantilly, had taken him in, almost as a surrogate mother, supported and tutored him in culture as a wandering youth in Paris. Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes and Muriel Belcher were his great friends and supporters in the club world. Sonia Orwell’s house became the nearest the mature Bacon ever came to a normal home – a refuge from his escapist rounds of bars, clubs, restaurants and casinos, and somewhere where he could have serious intellectual conversations. She also looked after him following a serious operation. [P.p.204].
Of the older men who were early supports, were the Australian painter Roy de Maistre and Roy’s lover the novelist Patrick White, who both gave early artistic, social and patronal support. Several wealthy lovers became patrons, including Eric Hall who paid for many of his bills, holidays and gambling for over 15 years. (Sadly his relationship with Bacon broke Hall’s marriage and the mental health of his son Ivan. [P.p.103]). Hall, who was nearly 20 years older, seems to have accepted or tolerated Francis’ promiscuity, but the relationship broke finally when Bacon developed a temporarily secure relationship with Peter Lacy. It was Hall who donated the 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion to the Tate Gallery in 1953. Hall made many sacrifices to support Francis, including his family, reputation and his personal religious commitment. But though Bacon was committed to him, his lifestyle had hardened and become too addicted. Eric Hall died in 1959 at the age of 68, when Bacon was 49. After Nanny Lightfoot’s death Bacon left the home he, she and Hall had occupied together and moved restlessly between various flats and short-lived relationships for several years.
Friendships were not confined to homosexuals: Graham Sutherland, John Rothenstein (Director of the Tate Gallery), Michel Leiris (an elderly Parisian writer and intellectual), all became a supportive friends. Francis portrayed Leiris especially with intense feeling. Lord Robert and Lady Lisa Sainsbury were also keen long-time supporters, friends and patrons, though his portraits of them and the other paintings that they bought from him for their collection are very far from his best works. Bacon claimed “I can’t paint for other people, I can only paint for myself.” [ AS. p.136].
Bacon made occasional visits to Morocco in the 1950s and early 1960s, since attitudes to homosexuality were more tolerated there. A strong and perhaps his most equal sexual relationship developed with the former Air Force pilot, Peter Lacy whose naked figure he painted sleeping. They had met initially in London and their relationship developed around the time that Lacy bought a house in Hurst, Berkshire before, in the mid-1950s, settling in Tangier. In North Africa Peter lost himself in the subculture, which attracted many European homosexuals as the attitude towards casual sex between men was considered less consequential and binding than between man and woman. He became a well-known socialite, playing the piano in bars, and indulging in the underground culture. As in most of Bacon’s relationships there were stormy aspects to his with Lacy. Lacy was already on a downward slide when they met as Lacy was already an alcoholic and attracted to promiscuous activities. Bacon called their relationship ‘neurotic’ [P.p.146], yet he claimed that he felt “I couldn’t live with him, and I couldn’t live without him” [P.p.151]. Despite their differences, it seemed the first semi-secure, almost-equal relationship that Francis developed with someone who was not a paternal figure. Francis was initially attracted to Peter’s looks, physical strength and seeming self-confidence, though these qualities dissolved as his alcoholism and self-destructive impulses advanced. The relationship partly harnessed Francis’ sexual excesses, though he disparaged some of Lacy’s fantasies as ‘kinky’ and recognised that as he was in his 40s he was a lot older than those youths to whom Lacy was normally attracted. Lacy’s move to Tangier was influenced by his search for relationships with younger men and boys. If the relationship between Francis and Peter had worked, it might have tamed both of them. This was the first relationship where Bacon had not been the dominant partner, as, being relatively shy, he was partly dominated by Lacy’s personality [P.p.152]. He also shared a similar intellectual and social background with his partner for the first time. Bacon claimed “I’d never really fallen in love until then, being totally, physically obsessed by someone – is like having some dreadful disease”. [cf. P.p.145 for Bacon’s longer description of his attachment to Lacy.]
The relationship developed at a time when Francis had become most creative and productive, becoming financially independent through selling his paintings regularly for reasonable prices. One wonders whether Bacon’s life might have been more stable if the relationship had lasted, though by the time they met Lacy declining due to alcoholism and his obsessive behaviour. Francis was often drunk and indulgent, but not as far gone as Peter became. The relationship had practically ended, and contact has almost ceased when Lacy died in hospital in Tangier in 1962 on the eve of Bacon’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery. Lacy is buried in the countryside which Bacon portrayed in Landscape near Malabata, Tangier [1963]. The representation of the scene is wild and rather bleak, which may reflect Bacon’s memories of the painful aspects of their relationship, as well as his grief in remembering Peter a year after his death. As with George Dyer later, after Peter’s death Francis continued to portray him several times in paintings, reconsidering and remembering him. Peppiatt believed that Francis felt a certain amount of personal guilt for Lacy’s death, but there was no way that he should have considered himself responsible. Peter was far under the control of his alcoholism and desires in his relationships and activities, which were psychologically damaged and damaging, even before they met [M.P.p.95].
Bacon’s relationship with George Dyer, which began in the following year (1963) and lasted until Dyer’s suicide in 1971, was less equal and affirming, as Frances and George had very different backgrounds and intellects. Most of his sexual relationships were unequal, apart from that with Lacy and the young Spanish 35 year old lover shortly before his death. As a banker, the Spaniard was more financially secure and charming than most of Bacon’s former lovers. Though Peppiatt later identified him in his ‘Memoir’ [P.M.p.368], the Spaniard wished to remain anonymous and to keep his homosexuality secret, so I refrain from actually naming him here. He had met Bacon in London and the affair continued for many months. Bacon had been advised by doctors that he was too unwell and vulnerable to travel to visit him in Madrid, but he seems to have hoped that renewed contact with the young Spaniard might revive his health andspirits. Sadly the journey, his illness and his asthma exacerbated his heart condition and he died on 28th April 1992 in hospital soon after arrival, at the age of 82 years.
John Edwards, another East-Ender, with whom Bacon developed a relationship relatively late in life became his sole executor and beneficiary, inheriting about £11.5 million.. Edwards has been described as illiterate, though he was more probably dyslexic. Bacon met him in 1974/1975, and the relationship developed them both. John’s family ran three East End pubs. Edwards shared superficial similarities with Dyer and Bacon was attracted to what he believed was ‘toughness, yet he had a much happier disposition than George and stood up to Francis, with a positive rapport. Edwards was far less dependent on Bacon than Dyer had been, and his relationship with the artist in his 70s was more one of a younger man with a father-figure who was physically attracted to him. Their friendship appears to have been one based on companionship rather than dominated by sex. Edwards was often at pains to play-down his homosexuality, though they did not hide their relationship physically or publicly. A greater peacefulness in the relationship seems to be reflected in Bacon’s portraits of Edwards, which feel calm and appreciative rather than voyeuristic. He portrayed John with far less distortion.
While Francis Bacon’s homosexuality was evident from early in his life some have wondered whether the distortion in Bacon’s expression of the figure reflects a discomfort with his personal identity. He remembered his parents telling him that he was ugly, which is hard to understand, as in early photographs he appears quite cherubic and maintained a youthful appearance into relative middle-age. Thankfully he found that in London some found him attractive, as his looks in Cecil Beaton’s photographs of him confirm. “I certainly had no idea who I was or what I wanted to do, or anything. My parents had told me that I looked horrible and I think I just accepted it. So I was terribly glad when people picked me up because I used to think, well, perhaps I’m not so awful looking as that after all. It just made me want all the more to get this person or that person to take a fancy to me. Of course, you’d never think it, with my looks, but for a moment I did seem to attract people. When I was very young, I suppose people thought I was pretty. For some reason. Anyway, I used to get by in that fashion, and I don’t think I was too particular about how I did it.” [P.M.p.175-6] Even in this statement later in life, Bacon betrayed that he still felt lack of content over his appearance. As a youth in the capital he was remembered as wearing excessive make-up, which may have been part of the gay subculture, but may also have been part of his attempt to improve his identity. He had been damaged by his father’s hostile reaction when his sexuality became apparent. He was regularly condemned as a ‘sissy’ and, as already mentioned, his father encouraged his grooms to flog him to harden him. Bacon later reflected to Sylvester that he eventually found erotic pleasure in this. Moving to London at the age of 16 he soon became part of the homosexual underworld, and developed gay relationships, many of which were only temporarily, as was common in repressed, secretive gay society of the time. David Hockney’s depiction of his lovers a generation later have a sensuous beauty in which one seems to recognise love or valuing of the subject, whereas most of Bacon’s images of his lovers are less attractive. Exceptions are his portraits of Peter Lacy and John Edwards. In forming himself, Hockney admired the confidence in Bacon’s expressions of homosexuality, which became an influence on the overt sexuality in Hockney’s own work.
Although Bacon acted as though he was confident with his sexuality, some of his mannerisms suggested that he was also self-conscious, especially about his jowlish appearance and short neck [F.p.50]. He was the only artist who refused to be photographed by British Vogue for their feature on ‘Painters and Pictures [P.p.145]. Bacon was certainly more confident about his sexuality than the older artist John Minton who also visited the clubs and was generous with his inherited wealth, often supplementing Bacon’s finances. Though active on the scene Minton was profoundly insecure in his homosexuality. He finally found his ideal life companion in 1957 but remained so insecure that he tragically committed suicide due to jealousy of his lover’s other friendships [F.p.192]. Both John Minton and Keith Vaughan, whose works were as openly homosexual and erotic as those of Bacon were jealous of Bacon’s ascendancy in the market as their own work declined in popularity.
Bacon’s imagery of the naked male is more distorted and often violent than the elegant lines of Hockney’s nudes. He was of an earlier generation from Hockney, when many felt greater guilt about their sexuality. Its expression remained illegal until 1967, and even after that, it remained considered immoral by many, provoking social revulsion. (Unfortunately the situation continues today, nearly 60 years later, in some cultures, some churches and some social groups, still leading to rejection, course criticism and causes of depression and suicide in those to whom homosexuality has developed naturally in their character.) The visual representation of sexuality in Bacon’s paintings sometimes reflects a similar self-revulsion and one wonders if Francis was as fully comfortable with his condition and relationships as he claimed.
It is not clear whether his antipathy about religion was caused partly by his recognition that churches, which still in the 1950s and 60s, dominated the moral opinions of society, would not accept homosexuality. It remains an irony, and in some cases bigotry, that many Church institutions remain ambivalent towards what is now recognised psychologically as a perfectly natural sexual attraction. There are a larger percentage of homosexuals in Christian congregations and among the clergy than in most other areas of society. There may be several reasons for this, yet sadly many of those homosexuals find that they need to keep their longings hidden. Fortunately in contemporary society this is less the case than when Francis Bacon was developing and maturing. Those churches which still condemn or do not accept homosexual expression definitely need to reconsider their interpretations of the very few mentions of homosexuality in the Bible. It has been demonstrated by many reputable scholarly Christian commentators that the few prohibitions against same-sex activity in scripture do not refer to the natural relationships between same-sex partners, which form stable, committed relationships today. Although stable same-sex relationships were not accepted in the ancient world as in much enlightened cultures today, most of the biblical condemnations were probably prohibiting indulgence in pagan temple prostitution or the promiscuous practices of Roman society.
For Bacon, however, society and the Church were still hostile to his form of sexuality. His art was in some ways intended as a positive provocation, not necessarily for society to change its attitudes but to shock. Among Bacon’s most provocative paintings are Two Figures [1953] and Two Figures in the Grass [1954], based on Muybridge’s iconic photographs of naked men wrestling. When shown at the Hanover Gallery the owner Erica Brausen hung them in the most inaccessible upstairs pert of her gallery, as they appeared to be Bacon’s most explicitly homosexual works. Some visitors denounced the paintings to the police, but neither the gallery nor the artist were prosecuted, as D.H. Lawrence’s works had been 30 years before. Despite their obvious connotations and context, the police inquiry concluded that they were paintings of wrestlers. When the artist spoke about them, it became apparent that rather than being intended as scandalous images of sex, they are rather sad. They partly represent Bacon’s loneliness, having lost some who he had loved. He also suggested that they contained memories of passions that could no longer be fulfilled: “It’s a very haunting subject, and I should be able to do it in a quite different way now...that I feel exorcized – although one’s never exorcized, because people say that you forget about death but you don’t. After all, I’ve had a very unfortunate life, because all the people I’ve been really fond of have died. And you don’t stop thinking about them; time doesn’t heal. But you concentrate on something that was an obsession, and what you would have put into your obsession with the physical act you put into your work. Because one of the terrible things about so-called love, certainly for an artist, I think, is the destruction.” [S.p.76]. These images, which on the surface seem so full of vigorous passion, scandalised people who still considered homosexuality as immoral in a society where homosexual sex was still illegal, yet in reality they carry the ghosts of what the artist considered lost possibilities. Francis used Muybridge’s photograph of wrestlers to recall passions and vigour that were now only in memory. He told Sylvester: “I manipulate the Muybridge bodies into the form of the bodies I have known.” [S.p.114] He reworked the wrestlers imagery regularly, as in Triptych August 1972 and Three Studies for Figures on Beds [1972] but they feel more like fantasies of sex.
Bacon’s statement “you can be optimistic and totally without hope” [S.p.80] seems to speak to Francis’ approach to his sexuality as well as life. He may not have felt guilt about a drive that he realised was natural to him, and often seemed to have self-confidence in his sexuality [P.M.p.x] but for many reasons he was not fully fulfilled or completely comfortable in it either. He claimed that, like many fellow homosexuals, he was more attracted to heterosexual men than homosexuals, especially any that behaved effeminately [P.M.p.51 & 247], which partly added to his sense of frustration with his ability to express his love. He is recorded as asking Giacometti “Do you think that it is possible for a homosexual to be a great artist?” [AS.p.189]. This may have been tongue-in-cheek or representing aspects of his self-doubt. One only needs to look at Leonardo, Michelangelo, Caravaggio and many contemporary gay artists to prove the affirmative answer. In his relationships he was longing for something like the ‘perfect image’ that he said that he longed for in producing his art. Yet through the instability of his lifestyle and that of those to whom he was attracted, relationships rarely lasted, and even when they did, as with Eric Hall, Peter Lacy, George Dyer and John Edwards, they held seeds of destruction as well as love. He was living in a world where homosexuality was not considered a normal form of sexual expression, and society’s norms and expectations almost automatically induced a sense of guilt and the feeling that he was subnormal and debased in his longings. Coupled with the damage that his family had caused to his self-image, it is no wonder that yearnings and longings, accompanied by ominous presences like the Furies / Eumenides loom over so much of his work.
Not all Bacon’s representations of the nude male or female are erotic. His figures are more representative of the sensuous nature of the naked figure being represented. Study from the Human Body [1949 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne] is relatively modest, showing the figure from behind. He used rich flesh colours with strong tints, sometimes textured with scumbled paint and heavy shadows which resemble bruises. Despite his admiration of Degas and Rodin, Bacon did not attempt anatomical correctness or naturalistic detail. Though he admired the dexterity of Degas’ drawing, his own painting of anatomy is relatively imprecise. He had not gone through any Art-School programme that included life-drawing, and rarely produced careful drawings in preparation for his canvases, preferring to work directly and instinctively on the final piece. He told Sylvester when asked “And you never work from sketches or drawings, you never do a rehearsal for the picture?”... “I often think I should, but I don’t. It’s not very helpful to my kind of painting. As the actual texture, colour, the whole way the paint moves, are so accidental, any sketches that I did beforehand could only give a kind of skeleton, possibly, of the way the thing might happen.” [S.p.21]. This was somewhat disingenuous, as many brief preliminary sketched ideas survive for his compositions and figures, often in paint, ink. Sometimes he tried to more fully work out compositions in gouache or oil on paper, then scrapped them when the painting was underway. But they are very rough and sketchy, more a means to an end. He certainly did not use drawing to work out his paintings or their details with precision. He may denied drawing because he was aware of his graphic weaknesses and often destroyed quick sketch-work. It is also possible that, being aware that Caravaggio, the greatest historic painter known for his homosexuality, had a reputation for never drawing, Francis may have been attempting to align his reputation with his. Perhaps he wanted to be regarded as the sort of artist who could produce masterpieces without needing to draw, so cultivated that impression by his statements. [P.p.225].
Bacon was representing the psychological and existential presence of the figures rather than their exact physiognomy or anatomical features. His figures were certainly never painted for primarily decorative reasons. His Female Nude [1960 Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main] based on photographs of Henrietta Moraes, is almost at the level of an erotic cartoon or graffiti, with raised arms and upwardly pointed breasts. Many of the poses he chose for his figures were exaggerated. As with his portraits, he rarely, if ever, painted people posing from life before him. Rather he almost always adapted photographs, either by John Deakin and others, or taken from books or magazines. He often reused favourite poses from Deakin’s images or Muybridge and added new faces or ideas to them. For the poses of some of his portraits of Lucian Freud and John Edwards, Francis even reused poses from Deakin’s photographs of George Dyer, montaged with photographs of the subjects’ faces.
THE TRAGIC RELATIONSHIP WITH GEORGE DYER
Bacon’s relationships were sometimes abusive and abusing. He was also subject to beatings from hostile strangers and some who he picked up on the streets. The aspects of masochism and sadism in some of his pictures may reflect violence in his own relationships. His lover from 1964 to 1971 George Dyer became a frequent sitter. Dyer was a small-time, East End petty-criminal with only basic education who Bacon sometimes claimed to have met when George was robbing his house. (Such an encounter with the criminal underworld was the fantasy of some pornographic literature and film scenarios. Actually, Bacon initially met him at the Golden Lion pub, which both frequented, and where Dyer had offered to buy drinks for him and his friends.) He regarded George as more handsome than himself, and tougher than he was, though Dyer was not as strong as Francis fantasised. (Francis himself had developed a false image of his own unattractiveness.) Obviously Francis found George sexually appealing, but Dyer was self-conscious about many things, particularly his stammer. George was regularly made aware of the difference between his background and that of Bacon and the social, cultural and arty sets to whom Francis introduced him. While Bacon was more open about his sexuality, Dyer tried to play down the homosexual connection between himself and Bacon. [P.p.211]. He felt inferior, as many in the club circles put him down and laughed at him, including Bacon himself at times. Dyer became popular among those who wanted to be introduced into Bacon’s coterie, but he soon became unhappy as he recognised the shallowness of the popularity and sycophancy. [F.p.173]. As Bacon supplied him with money, he bought multiple drinks for the groupies in order to remain popular. His own drinking became obsessive, perhaps partly to cover his sense of inadequacy in the social circles in which he moved.
The relationship with Francis was often stormy but though Bacon regularly tried to break with him he kept returning [F.p.175]. In one difficult period, after they had separated in August 1970, in revenge George informed the police that they would find cannabis in Bacon’s home. A raid led to the artist’s prosecution in October, though Bacon was acquitted on his claim that due to his chronic asthma he would not have used cannabis. The artist claimed that it must have been left by visitors, but it is possible that it had been planted by George himself. [F.p.180-1; P.M.p.177]. With his broad East-End accent and petty-criminal background, Dyer probably appealed to Bacon as a bit of ‘rough trade’. Though the artist had a far more upper-middle-class background, and Dyer was very clearly working-class, Bacon had himself lived a similarly disordered early life in the underworld subculture from the age of 16 years, and spent much time later among underground drinking and gambling clubs. (Gambling was still illegal in Britain at the time.)
Despite their often disordered relationship, Bacon made Dyer the subject of a large number of paintings during their time together, which are among Bacon’s most varied and complex studies, replete with different ideas and references. He is the subject of two great monumental triptychs in 1964 - Three Figures in a Room [Centre Pompidou, Paris] and 1970 [Three Studies of the Male Back, Kunsthaus, Zurich. Both show the figure in unconventional poses - sitting on the lavatory, reclining sensuously on a divan, posing on a high stool, shaving his chin, cleaning his feet, massaging or shaving his legs. The latter triptych seems like a variation on Degas’ paintings, pastels and mono-prints of women engaged in their toilette, such as After the Bath; Woman Drying Herself [1890-95], which was one of Bacon’s favourite pictures in the National Gallery.
Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror [1968 Museo Thysssen-Bournemisza, Madrid] represented the man who was still his primary muse and lover. Here he was painted dressed in a lounge suit, still commonly worn among young men of his class at the time. In many other portraits he was represented naked and in more intimate poses. His face is deformed and the reflection is even more fractured in the mirror. This image is hardly sensual, though it has been suggested that the splashes of white paint across the image may represent spilt semen. Dyer’s look into the mirror may be reflecting narcissistic aspects of his personality, as he explores his own image, or bacon;s admiration of him. Dyer seems isolated within the circle of the floor. The artist’s view of him here seems slightly more detached, though this may be reading biographical details into the painting of Dyer’s isolation within the relationship. Tensions in the relationship developed, particularly because Dyer felt out of place amid Bacon’s more sophisticated artistic, cultural and sometimes bitchy circle. While supportive and generous to friends, Francis himself could also be scathing and waspish in his criticism, especially when drunk. He was a liability at parties; his reactions to people and his language, even to significant figures like Princess Margaret, could be unpredictable. Dyer increasingly resorted to alcohol and drugs. He had already made at least one attempt at suicide on their visit to New York, (apparently more attempt at various times according to P.M.p.192), and Bacon was becoming frustrated with his histrionics and excessive drunkenness [P.M.p.177].
Dyer didn’t understand the attraction of Bacon’s work, but he was mesmerised by being part of his coterie and obviously committed to the artist. He was remembered as saying at a private view: “All that money and I fink they’re reely horrible!” [P.p.214]. As Bacon became lauded internationally he spent increasing time away from Dyer. Perhaps the greatest honour shown to the artist was the major retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Bacon took Dyer to Paris but an argument between them developed on the eve of the opening of the show. Francis walked out and later attended a reception before the Private View and the post-exhibition banquet. On the eve of the opening, George Dyer took a massive overdose and was found dead next morning in the bathroom of their hotel, on the toilet, covered with blood. Initially the suicide was hushed-up in order to not distract from the Private View, but the irony was not lost on many that one of the major exhibits on display was the painting of Dyer siting on a toilet in a bathroom. Over the weeks, Bacon appeared to recover relatively quickly from the tragedy, (even to some he appeared relieved of the pressures of the relationship [F.p.183]), yet it undoubtedly affected him powerfully, since he worked on a significant series of memorial triptychs representing Dyer over the next three years. Peppiatt claims the memory of George haunted Bacon for the remainder of his life [P.p.242]: He expressed guilt for many years, over not having been there to support George, though there was no way that he could have missed the final preparations for the show and George was “absolutely impossible in drink” at the time. [P.M.p.177]. He claimed after Dyer’s death that he would “never have an intimate relationship again... That side of life has been cancelled out of me now.” [P.p.253]. This did not prove to be the case, as he later took up with John Edwards, yet the late works in memory of George are among his most powerful mature works, but as Bacon said sadly, “painting him doesn’t bring him back.” [P.p.249].
In the first of these – Triptych in Memory of George Dyer [1971 Fondation Beyer, Basel] George is represented in the left hand panel as a fallen boxer and as a suited socialite in the right hand panel, seen both in a mirror and lying on the floor with black blood pouring from his head. The central panel is more ambiguous in which a dark silhouetted figure with pink, bared, muscular arms, opens a door onto a crimson staircase stretching both upward and down to a dark window with black blinds. On the floor are ripped fragments of newspaper. No explanation is given for these, but the representation of different sides of Dyer’s personality and fate is disquieting.
In the outer panels of Bacon’s second triptych – August 1972 [Tate Gallery, London] Bacon adapted Deakin’s photographs of Dyer, seated in underpants on a cane chair. Life seems to be pouring out of him in the form of pools of pink flesh. The central panel shows two more amorphous figures wrestling sexually. While they are part of each other physically, their identities are not as specific as the portraits of Dyer in the left and right panels. All the figures are set against black openings. Beneath the buff floor are triangular areas of black, perhaps representing the darkness of Dyer’s feelings and psychology, or the darkness of death into which he fell. They seem to be images of hopelessness.
The most powerful and disturbing of the Dyer triptychs is May-June 1973 [Private Collection]. This is more directly connected to Dyer’s suicide, painted about 20 months after Dyer’s death. In each panel he is viewed naked in the bathroom, viewed through a doorway. He slopes on the toilet in the left-hand panel, and appears to vomit blood into the wash-basin in the right hand panel. A white arrow drawn on the floor points to him, rather like a chalk-mark at the site of a tragedy. The central panel is a naked portrait of Dyer, in drunken despair, with his eyes closed, in the bathroom beneath a single, extinguished light-bulb. Whether this is symbolic of the extinguishing of Dyer’s life,is not explained. From him emanates a strong, black, bat-like shadow that has been interpreted by some as the angel of death. Alternatively, this could be his own shadow, the escape of his spirit, the threat of darkness upon him, the loss of his heroic identity, or several other interpretations. (Shadows are important in Bacon’s images as compositional elements, but also as reminders of the constant presence of the possibility of death. Coloured shadows seem to suggest that life is seeping out of his subjects). The walls of the room are maroon, the colour of dark, clotted blood, which Bacon claimed to live. They have the expressive feeling of the colour-fields of Rothko’s Seagram Murals in the Tate Gallery, while the floor is the mundane buff-colour of anonymous hotel carpets. The work has been related by a few critics to Ingres’ Death of Marat [1791], though Bacon never suggested such a connection. Its style is raw, with roughly applied paint, expressing the realism of the tragedy of Byer’s life and death.
BACON’S OWN DEATH AND REPUTATION IN POSTERITY
Although Francis often seemed self-confident as an older painter, who could afford to go, do, eat and drink anything he wanted, he told Peppiatt: “I want nothing, really, except not to grow old. But then I never really feel old. I always think “old” is ten years away from whatever age I am.” [P.m.p.371]. Bacon himself died in hospital in Madrid on the morning of 28April 1992 at the age of 82 from a heart attack aggravated by pneumonia and his life-long asthma. Ironically, in his last hours he was looked after by two nurses who were nuns from the order of the Servants of Mary. Far from being thought meaningless, as he claimed that his life and art to be, international obituaries praised his reflections of life and ideas in the mid to late 20th Century. David Sylvester wrote: “Since he died. I’ve not thought about him as a painter, I’ve only thought of the qualities ... his honesty with himself and about himself.” [F.p.4]. As was appropriate to his claimed philosophy, yet sadly, Bacon’s funeral was a simple 8 minute cremation with no ceremony, as he had requested, and no-one invited. A few journalists turned up and there was a single small posy on the coffin. The cremation took place at La Almudena cemetery. Ironically, his plain wooden coffin was decorated with a metal crucifix and accompanied by the music of Gregorian chant. His ashes were returned to England, with no memorial service of commemoration back in Britain. They were scattered somewhere known only to a few friends, with a tree later planted near the spot. He was not given the meaningful funeral or burial that might have been expected for an artist of his stature and prominence. Yet this end reflected his personal statements about the meaninglessness of life and art. He claimed that one would be nothing when one has died. But by contrast, his reputation grew phenomenally in the years following his death accompanied by a wealth of memoirs and retrospective exhibitions.
Late in his career Bacon had returned several times to themes and images that had been popular previously. He repeated Painting [1946] and in 1988 a second version of Triptych 1944 (Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion). The later triptych on a larger scale was also acquired by the Tate Gallery, London. Some of these later variants lack the power, conviction and spontaneity of his original sources. Nevertheless many of his later works are strong, including self-portraits and Portraits of Michel Leiris, the elderly Parisian writer and intellectual friend who wrote so meaningfully about his paintings. Two of his most abstractly painted figurative works Blood on Pavement [1988 Private Collection] and Jet of Water [1988 Private Collection], show him tackling new directions, possibilities and subjects. The latter especially makes the most of the power of seemingly ‘accidental’ marks. It forms a powerful composition, of which he expressed pride.. Blood on the Pavement returned to his obsession with the vulnerability of human beings, especially in the light of threats of violence and violent death.
Far from being as meaningless as Bacon occasionally claimed the subjects of his paintings to be, they reflect the existential need in human beings to find value. He admitted to David Sylvester: “I would like, if anything remains of mine when I’m dead, I would like the best images to remain... When I say I care, I care because – I can only talk from an absolutely personal view – I think some of the images I have made have for me got a kind of potency about them, and so, you may say, I care that these ones should remain. But if I think really logically, it’s stupid to think even that way, because I won’t know anything about it, any more than those people who fuss during their lifetime about whether their things are good, really, or bad, because they won’t ever know. Because time is the only great critic.” [S.p.88]. Bacon recognised the philosophical irony or double standard in this wish for the best work to survive. For someone who claimed that his art and life were meaningless, there would have been little reason for destroying so many works that he considered unworthy, yet he protected his reputation by slashing a huge number of canvases. (Unfortunately we also recognise that a large number of mediocre works have survived, as the finance-rather-than-quality orientated art market often tries to make money out of as much as it can.) But his statement accords with the high standards which he set for his work, even if he controlled his making process by “creative accidents.”
Bacon was so critical and negative about much of his work, that owners and galleries avoided giving him pictures back for repainting if he asked if he could improve them. He was just as likely to destroy them, as he had done with most of his earlier works and many before they left his easel. Marlborough Fine Arts would often remove finished paintings from his studio, while still wet, for safety before sale, before he could change his mind and destroy them. Looking around his 1985 retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, he is reported to have said: “If I had not had to live, I would never have let any of these out.” [P.p.309]. Such statements were part of Bacon’s regular bravado, and may be regarded as rather tongue-in-cheek. But they reflect his sense of valuing the creative process and the best art. In the choice of 108 paintings for the Grand Palais exhibition, Bacon excluded everything created before 1944, including Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion. Two-thirds of the works were from the last decade of his career to that date.
Bacon claimed that he was not so interested in promoting his own name and a reputation for posterity. He additionally claimed that he had already fulfilled this sufficiently in his surviving work. He spoke of the “stupidity... of the idea of immortality. After all, to be an artist at all is a form of vanity. And that vanity may be washed over by this rationally futile idea of immortality. It would also be vanity to suggest that what one does oneself might help to thicken life. But, of course, we do know that our lives have been thickened by great art... by the great things that a few people have left.” [S.p.89]. Bacon may not be a ‘great Master’, as Velazquez, Rembrandt, Turner or Constable undoubtedly were. Monet, who he admired, was famously described by Cézanne as ‘just an eye, but what an eye!” Nevertheless, Francis Bacon left an oeuvre that makes one think about life and philosophy perhaps even more profoundly than Rembrandt or Velazquez. Hopefully through that thinking many come to the conclusion that there is more to human life than Bacon personally concluded, and find an optimism that helps people work towards a better world than the horrors that Bacon had witnessed during his life. Our contemporary society worldwide is in a worse and more perilous state than even Francis Bacvon expereiced or conceived, so our need is for a more effective cultural counterbalance.
Interestingly, late in his interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon did not speak of his work as trying to engender a sense of social conscience or social justice, but rather emphasised how his art was expressing his own responses to life rather than encouraging change. In talking of social injustices it is clear, that though he had difficult times as a youth, he came from, lived and painted among a class which did not endure what the poor and disaffected suffered and continued to endure. Even those ‘rough trade’ characters to whom he was attracted were not among the poorest, and he lifted them financially by his generosity. Of social injustices he said: “I think it’s the texture of life. I know that you can say that all life is completely artificial, but I think that what is called social justice makes it more pointedly artificial....I’m in a way very conscious of them. But I think, as I live in a country where there has been a certain amount of wealth, it’s difficult to talk about a country where there has always been extreme poverty. And it’s quite possible that people could be helped in extremely poor countries to exist on a plane where it was possible for them to escape from their hunger and their general despair. But I’m not upset by the fact that people do suffer because I think the suffering of people and the differences between people are what have made great art, not egalitarianism." [S.p.125].
I personally find the attitude in this latter statement more uncomfortable than the moral arguments that were made by critics in the past against Bacon’s work. Here was a man who eventually made millions of pounds through his art after a struggling start. He preferred to drink champagne and fine wines, and dined in expensive restaurants. Though he lived and painted in simple squalor personally, with very few possessions, he could afford to be generous to friends. He often mentioned the degradation of the human condition, yet he did not express a strong social conscience or social or political consciousness. He seems to have remained unconcerned about wider social issues, perhaps because he considered the human situation so ‘banal’ and ‘meaningless’ that human degradation was inevitable. When he became wealthy, he also seems to have made little moral distinction over those to whom he gave money or support, or over what he was giving them money for. [P.p.201]. This may be partly due to his social background, and his isolation from the news, in which world suffering was not as vividly or widely reported as in the media today. However, he gave money generously to people who he knew who were in need and was also generous to the Florence Appeal after its devastating flood damaged so many artworks. (It may seemingly ironically the Cimabue Crucifix was the one great work which he was intent on having restored, but it shows his sensitivity to the subject and the expressiveness of the masterpiece.) Bacon’s preoccupation with art, relationships, club-life, social contacts and fine dining sheltered or isolated him from some other sufferings of the wider life of the world, which one would have thought he was representing generally in the subject-matter of his work. Perhaps he saw enough horror in his own world and could not cope with the horrors of the rest. The scream of the nurse from the Battleship Potemkin stood for much of the general suffering of humanity. In some ways Bacon was obsessed by his own sensations, not the sensations of the suffering world which he represented so viscerally. Nevertheless, his art still has far more moral content than most of the modernist art of his contemporaries.
One might speculate what images Francis might have painted in response to the threats of climate-change, Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, tragedies among the illegal immigrant boat-crossings, dishonest politicians or other contemporary horrors. But to speak into such a world is the responsibility of today’s thinkers, artists, writers and activists. If we are to try to change the world to be more like the principles which Christ defined as ‘The Kingdom of God’, and expounded in the ‘Beatitudes’ and ‘Sermon on the Mount’ I believe that it is important to represent a realistic hope and promote good without romantic idealism, as well as increasing people’s awareness of the horrors of reality and promoting ways in which they might be overcome. Bacon may have been disingenuous in saying that he didn’t try to put meaning into his paintings. There is definitely profound meaning in his work, even though much of that meaning was rooted in despair and sometimes revulsion.
There is also definitely beauty in the ways that Bacon represented what he considered the squalor of the human condition and the value of human beings with in it. Bacon’s images often drag the mind of the viewer into the gutter of life that he represented, yet he was proud that he lived a “curious kind of gilded gutter-life” himself through the indulgence that he was able to afford [P.M.p.168]. The most effective art to promote hope, (whether humanistic hope or religious trust,) is not preachy or didactic, just as Bacon’s negative art was neither preachy not didactic. The art which elevates the viewer can be positive and suggestive of the sort of qualities which enhance people’s minds, cultures and aspirations. Bacon reduced human beings to the condition of ‘animals’, though actually animals often have a higher consciousness and value that he was meaning by his use of the term. The aim of a more positive artist might be to raise human aspirations to seek fulfilment in more positive thoughts and more abundant, meaningful living. Similarly, while Francis portrayed his screaming Popes experiencing religious and existential angst, because they were no longer relevant or effective in the contemporary world, it is the role of the modern Christian to demonstrate and witness that Christ’s ways and teachings are actually extremely relevant, practical, enlivening and fulfilling in a world that is itself experiencing existential angst and fear about its ultimate ecological and moral survival. The world in which Francis Bacon developed as a man and as an artist, was one which condemned the nature which he realised was natural to him.
The social demand that his sexuality should be repressed, drove its expression underground, where he was damaged by the excesses of the underworld. Love in more peaceful and affirming relationships that might have fulfilled him emotionally was not available to him. His drinking and other excesses in his social and sexual life became unfulfilling substitutes. As he admitted, the subject-matter and style of Francis’ art was often an expression of his life and the turmoil of frustrations that he felt, though at an ‘anonymous remove from precise autobiography’, apart from certain works after George Dyer’s suicide. If Bacon had been affirmed from an early age and been socially accepted sufficiently to feel peace with his personal identity, his resultant art may not have been so powerful, since he possibly would not have needed to ‘intensify his sensations’ so extremely. Yet what he recognised as his inner creative genius might have fulfilled itself in other artistic directions: One does no need to be repressed, an outsider, or damaged psychologically to create great art.
It worries me that so many foreign cultures, churches and individual Christians today still hold narrow, outdated interpretations of the very few scripture verses about homosexuality. Many homosexuals are among those attracted to the Christian faith since, Jesus of Nazareth’s teachings about God, love acceptance and truth are so affirming. Yet bigotry and hypocrisy and narrowness among a minority of Christians and most Christian institutions still means that many of a homosexual orientation remain forced to hide or repress their true identity. Some Christians even still believe that sexuality needs to be ‘healed’ and they cause damage by offering bogus spiritual therapies which can exacerbate homosexuals’ sense of guilt when they are not healed. The institutional leaders of the Church of England claim to be having ‘conversations’ to resolve differences in attitudes in the Anglican Communion over ‘Issues of Human Sexuality’. This procrastination has been deliberately extended for far too long. It is often a pretence at ‘conversation’ by those leaders who have firm views against homosexuality and are determined that the Church will not change its official attitude. In the years that this deliberate procrastination is going on more and more people are being psychologically damaged by the Church’s lack of affirmation and have become disillusioned with this form of Church, recognising that it does not reflect the true, loving affirmation which Christ gives them. Homosexuality for many is a natural psychological part of their development. Most civilized, educated and enlightened societies now recognise this. Loving same-sex relationships are generally accepted and valued in western society. Such sexuality and its rightful expression is not regarded as the consequence of ‘sin’ or ‘sinful’.
If the contemporary Christian Church is not to continue to damage people psychologically as Francis Bacon was so badly damaged, it needs to recognise that general society (including many members of church congregations) has reached the truth far more quickly than Christian institutions have. While such a large number of Christian clergy and laity who are homosexual are expected to repress, deny or not fully express a sexuality that it a natural part of their development and identity, they will remain unfulfilled and in some cases damaged. The Church is adding to the psychological damage of many, rather than opening them up to the abundance of life that following the true teachings of Jesus Christ promised to us. Many Christian homosexuals are lonely and still resort to suicide. One wonders when, if ever, the Christian Church will turn to following and resembling its founder and not remain entrenched in following those of its leaders who are blinkered or over-hesitant. The Christian Church has always advanced through revolution, not through hesitant, prolonged procrastination. Jesus turned belief away from the ‘whitewashed tombs’ of insistence on outdated, legalistic traditions and the false interpretations of scripture by the Sadducees, Pharisees and Scribes who dominated and repressed true religion. He taught people to follow the truth that his love and trust in God revealed. Jesus showed that God accepted those who were once condemned as sinners and he directed them towards more positive paths that enabled them to find righteous, holistically fulfilled lives. We need to recognise that the active homosexual can be as holy as any other true Christians. Yet, like all people, they need to feel sufficiently affirmed, accepted and trusted before they can live and feel fully fulfilled Christ’s true followers need to lead the contemporary Church to accept contemporary truth, so that we all might live holily, spiritually free, and abundantly. A Christian aim must be to replace both ‘gilded gutter lives’ and hypocritical lives or beliefs, with ways of life and faith that are true, accepted as righteous, and able to be fulfilling.
FURTHER BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dawn Ades & Andrew Forge 1985 Francis Bacon (Exhibition Catalogue). London: Tate Gallery.
Richard Calvocoressi & Martin Hammer 2005 Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads (Exhibition Catalogue). Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland.
Barbara Dawson & Martin Harrison (eds.) 2010 Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty (Exhibition Catalogue). The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.
Daniel Farson 1993 The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. London: Century.
Mathew Gale & Chris Stephens (eds.) 2008 Francis Bacon (Exhibition Catalogue). London: Tate Gallery.
Martin Hammer 2013 Francis Bacon. London: Phaidon.
Martin Hammer 2005 Bacon and Sutherland. New Haven & London.
Michael Peppiatt 1996 Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Michael Peppiatt 2015 Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir. London: Bloomsbury.
John Russell 1993 Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson.
Andrew Sinclair 1993 Francis Bacon: His Life & Violent Times. London. Sinclair-Stevenson.
David Sylvester 1975 Interviews with Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson.
David Sylvester 1993 Interviews with Francis Bacon (Expanded Edition). London: Thames and Hudson.
David Sylvester 2000 Looking Back at Francis Bacon. London.
Ernst Van Alphen 1992 Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self. London.
& 20th CENTURY CRISES OF FAITH, IDENTITY & ETHICS
Iain McKillop
[Abbreviations used for quotations & references in the text:
AS. Andrew Sinclair: Francis Bacon: His Life & Violent Times. London. Sinclair-Stevenson. 1993
F. Daniel Farson: The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. London: Century. 1993
H. Martin Hammer: Francis Bacon. London: Phaidon. 2013
P. Michael Peppiatt: Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 1996
P.M. Michael Peppiatt: Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir. London: Bloomsbury. 2015
S. David Sylvester: Interviews with Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson. 1975
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“We come from nothing and go into nothing, and in this brief interlude we might try to give existence a direction through our drives. But there is nothing… Nada… A game played out for no reason.” [Francis Bacon quoted Peppiatt p.221]
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“ He took the Crucifixion, stripped it of all its Christian implications, and invested it instead with the universal beastliness of man and abattoir running with blood, deafened with screams. As a portrait painter he was not the friend with insight, but the harsh interrogator, the man outside the ring of light with lash and electrodes close at hand. His prisoners, presidents, popes and old friends squirmed.
He used the ideas of the trap, the cell, the cage, the X-ray and the heavy fall of light to imprison and torment his subjects to distil the violence, and to assault complacent senses with graceless nakedness on the lavatory pan and vomit in the wash-basin...
Bacon took the vile, sexually and politically obscene, and shudderingly visceral, and lifted them with paint so that we might contemplate ferociously profane images of cruelty and despair, and see in them an inheritance from the great Renaissance themes of religious and temporal power.
Titian, Rembrandt and Velazquez might not have cared for Bacon’s work but they would have recognised kinship in his astonishing mastery of paint and the profound pessimistic atheism of his images. He was the perfect mirror of the spirit of our age.” [Brian Sewell obituary of Francis Bacon. quoted AS.p.314].
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When the Protestant Christian art-historian Hans Rookmaaker’s critique of Modernism Modern Art and the Death of a Culture was first published 1970, one of Francis Bacon’s studies of the screaming pope, based on Velazquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X [1650] was chosen for its cover. It must have seemed an ideal image to represent the 20th Century crisis of faith, the decline of the power and influence of the Church, and the international insecurity about the value of human identity internationally in the post-war decades. Yet the power of the images and the beauty of colour in Bacon’s works contain more positive values, which balance his often negative expressions about the nature and meaninglessness of the human condition.
Bacon defended his images by claiming “You can’t be more horrific than life itself!” [AS.p.299]. Many of his works were designed to shock or be deliberately iconoclastic, in order to engage people’s sensations, attract attention and present the horrors of life, some of which he experienced. Bacon claimed “Things are not shocking if they have not been put into memorable form” [P.p.305]. The horrors of the massacre on the Odessa Steps were made more shocking in film by Eisenstein’s use of the detail of the nurse’s screaming face and the child falling down the stairway in its pram. Bacon was creating similar emphases through his screaming faces and Crucifixion paintings. He was intensely serious about his work. But one should not discount the probability that some of his images also amused him. Bacon had a strong, though at times waspish, sense of humour. Some of those represented in his portraits and knew in his clubs may have shared that amusement, as there was cutting humour in some circles in which he moved. They would also have also been amused by people’s negative reactions, though cutting early criticism led him to destroy some of his early exhibited work.
Though I have quoted Bacon extensively in this study, one has to be careful in interpreting his words. He often said things for effect, to shock, in humour, or to test those to whom he was talking. His character, like most of us, was complex and contained many contradictions, which will be partly discussed later. Yet one cannot always be certain that he was being honest in his statements about his indifference to the meaninglessness of life, death and art. He was a man of innumerable contradictions, as are many of us. Bacon was probably even more critical of his work than his detractors. Interestingly, though the seminal series of popes painted between 1950 and 1953 are key works in his oeuvre, Bacon later disowned those works. He did not do so based on their subject-matter but because he was certain that he could have painted them better [F.p.214 & 226].
At several times in his career and since Francis Bacon’s work has been criticised on moral grounds more than aesthetic ones. Paul Johnson’s disparaging criticism after Bacon’s death sums up the assessment of some, though he criticised on both aesthetic and moral grounds:
“He could not draw. His ability to paint was limited and the way he laid the pigment on the canvas was often barbarous. He had no ideas, other than one or two morbid fancies arising from his homosexuality, chaotic way of life, and Irish fear of death. What he did have was a gimmick, something resembling an advertising designer’s logo, In his case it was a knack of portraying the human face or body not so much twisted as smeared out of shape. It was enough. Such a logo could easily be dressed up by the scriptwriter of the industry into an image of ‘our despairing century’; it fitted his favourite words: ‘disquieting’ and ‘disturbing’ [quoted F.p.217].
It is far too simplistic to dismiss Bacon’s work as violent, ugly (which it is certainly not), sadomasochistic, or the fantasy and biographical reflections of a homosexual artist. When criticised by the critic Richard Dorment in the Daily Telegraph of 3rd February 1980 as painting something “more deliberate, more chosen and more willed than despair. Something vicious and purely evil,” referring to Bacon’s 1988 version of Triptych 1944], the painter responded “I thought they were rather nice myself.” [F.p.133].
Christians are taught “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” [Philippians 4:8 - N.R.S.V.]. That does not mean that it is dangerous or corrupting to study Francis Bacon, since he explores realities of the damaged world and damaged human beings which Christ’s Gospel seeks to understand, in order to heal. But when questioned about why he used Christian imagery or references in the titles of his work, Bacon would frequently remark that he intended no religious meaning or message; he was merely attempting to ‘excite’ himself, stimulate the senses, or was reflecting his general view of the nature of humanity. The crucifixion was “a marvellous armature on which to hang all kinds of thoughts and feelings” [S.p.44]. He would add that he was expressing his own private feelings and sensations, using the Crucifixion as “almost nearer to a self-portrait” [P.p.99].
Bacon is one of the greatest artists to express the horrors which are part of everyday life in an aggressive yet seductive world. He depicts the sort of world where more recently Putin caused horrors in Ukraine, where murderers like the Cray brothers who Bacon encountered himself, Moira Hindley, Ian Brady, Fred West and Lucy Letby destroy the innocent; where politicians lie or go to war to maintain power and expand their influence. This is the sort of world that needs to be helped limping towards the better world that Jesus of Nazareth called ‘The Kingdom of God’. Francis felt no such hope, and it not he world that formed Francis Bacon and which he reflected in his paintings.
Bacon explained to David Sylvester in 1979: “I think of myself as a maker of images. The image matters more than the beauty of the paint.” [H.p.11]. Yet the visual attraction of the images is a significant part of the meaning or significance of the pictures. Bacon recognised that it can take significant time to assess the ultimate value of an artist’s work: “No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because it takes at least seventy-five to a hundred years before the thing starts to sort itself out from the theories that have been formed about it.” [H.p.140]
Francis Bacon, alongside Henry Moore or Lucien Freud, is one of only a handful of important British artists of the mid-20th Century whose standing and standard of work could be called truly international. He was celebrated by several critics and art-historians during his late career as ‘the greatest British artist since Turner’. Such a comparison may be undeserved, yet even Sir Kenneth Clark, the relatively conservative Director of the National Gallery recognised him early as a ‘genius’ [P.p.113]. By comparison the work of his friends Graham Sutherland and even Lucien Freud now seem insular and conservative and his early mentor Roy de Maistre’s cubistic style seems extremely derivative. De Maistre had encouraged him by sharing an early exhibition with him and Jean Shepeard as early as 1930. [P.p.20]. Bacon’s quality and uniqueness of work is comparable to great European modern masters or a few American masters like Rothko, though Bacon claimed to find Rothko’s work depressing [AS.p.251]. Although Francis Bacon became famous from his first exhibition at the Tate Gallery onward, he played with his success rather than taking it seriously. He seemed indifferent to his fortune late in life and throughout his life had held very few possessions, even getting rid of personal paintings that other artists and friends gave him. He recognised the limitations and fluctuations of taste in the art-market and the shallow sycophancy of some who lauded and promoted him [P.p.200]. He remarked humorously that he considered that his work ‘should go either in the National Gallery or the dustbin.’ [P.p.232].
Though he worked on several paintings that include religious subject-matter, Bacon could not be considered as a ‘religious artist’ in any conventional use of the term ‘religious’. In interviews with the artist, David Sylvester repeatedly tried to pin Francis down over his thoughts about religion in his works, and Bacon most often deflected his comments. Of the Pope pictures, Bacon claimed: “it doesn’t come from anything to do with religion; it comes from an obsession with the photographs that I know of Velazquez. Pope Innocent X.” [S.p.24]. But Bacon must have been being partly disingenuous, as what the Pope stood for is important to the image. On the other extreme, Bacon’s one-time agent Helen Lessore wrote in her memoir Partial Testament: “the truth is that Bacon’s works are great religious paintings. The very agony of his unbelief becomes so acute that, by the intensity of its involvement with the final questions, the negative becomes as religious as the positive.” [quoted F.p.134]. This is over-the-top critique and shows the shallow philosophy of some critics and modern-art promoters, who play with metaphors to make themselves or the art seem cleverer or more profound than it is. Bacon positively claimed to have no belief in God: “I’ve always been an optimist, even if I don’t believe in anything... When we’re dead we’re no good. When I’m dead, put me in a plastic bag and throw me in the gutter... Faith is a fantasy... religion is a way of disciplining people. Governments use religion to control the people.” [F.p.134].
The French critic Pierre Schneider went similarly over-the-top in his adoption of religious parallels and symbolism by comparing Bacon’s work to the double nature of Christ ‘unmixable and inseparable’... ‘his fascination with the Crucifixion may well be attributed to the fact that Christianity’s central mystery provides the pattern for the mystery in painting: reality must allow itself to be put to death by paint in order to be resurrected as image...Tertullian called this period (those glacial three days before the Resurrection) ‘refigerium interim’. No artist has given us a grander vision of this ghastly moment of suspension, which is the Christian legacy to our post-Christian age.” [The Times 7 Nov.1971 cf. AS.p.223-4 for a longer quotation]. It is likely that Bacon would have laughed at this, saying that it said more about the critic than his own work. Of the few critics who he believed understood him, he relied much upon David Sylvester and Michel Leiris, and even Leiris over-interpreted him, though he recognised the ‘realism’ rather than romanticism or expressionism in Francis’ work.
However, Bacon’s expressive style should not be dismissed as resulting primarily from his atheism. Graham Sutherland, whose crucifixions are almost as violent as those of Bacon, was a committed Roman Catholic convert. In many ways Francis Bacon reflects the attitude to religion of many in the mid-20th Century, particularly in the post-war years and more-so today, when belief and trust in God declined significantly, and consequently church attendance. Despite promotion of many esoteric religious or quasi-religious experiences and redefinitions of ‘spirituality’ at different times in the last 70 years, this decline in commitment to faith has increased. Partly through not meeting the challenges with a sufficiently convincing apologetic, the Christian Church throughout western society has declined in influence, attractiveness and conviction. Bacon was not helped in his attitude to religion by the Christian contacts who should have been witnessing to him: For a short while his childhood education was entrusted to a local clergyman, who Bacon remembered as having been more interested in horses than educating him [P.p.18]. He spent a very short time at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, a religious foundation, but felt that he didn’t fit in, yet he began to explore his sexuality in relationships there. [P.p.19-20]. The closest he came to living with someone with faith was Eric Hall, who was himself driven by contradictions and not at peace, though committed to Francis.
The 20th Century witnessed a negative reaction to the possibility that traditional religions contain truths. Many concluded that reason dismisses the idea of God and an afterlife. I personally believe strongly that Christianity, as described in the Gospels as being taught by Jesus of Nazareth contains intensely practical truth. However, a growing, popular lack of trust in the Bible, the integrity of churches and their leaders, and inadequate promotion of practical, authentic Christianity with integrity has brought about the largely secular society which surrounds us today. Bacon worked in a period that was at the heart of that decline. Recognition that the Church of the time condemned the homosexuality (as did the majority of popular society generally) cannot have endeared him to faith, since he knew that his sexuality was an essential and unchangeable part of his nature. Nor could he have recognised the truths within faith when he had seen first-hand the violence bigotry and hypocrisy pursued by groups espousing faith in his birthplace in Ireland. Rejection and fear of persecution and prosecution brought about a ghettoising of minority groups, like Bacon’s circle, into closed sets and clubs which flourished in a semi-underground form in areas like Soho, Chelsea or South Kensington where he lived. Sodomy was still punishable by life imprisonment up to 1967. Bacon admitted that he felt an outsider in his social class [P.p.3]. He and his group developed different attitudes to life in order to survive, some of which are reflected in Bacon’s subject-matter, imagery and statements.
Religion is concerned with the response of human beings to issues beyond themselves. Conventional faiths are often based on trust in divine powers or superstitious fear of God or the gods. More recently, a prevailing attitude of self-centredness has developed, in which the individual and their immediate circle are considered of primary importance. The sense of responsibility towards a higher truth or care for others in the world has declined for a large number of reasons, as has trust in one’s neighbour, Financial inequity, insecurity, vulnerability, and in more recent decades the crisis in climate change, immigration and the rise of popular media have fuelled a further emphasis on individualism. Many focus on self-promotion through the internet, becoming an ‘influencer’, asserting the rights of individuals or minority groups, changes in attitudes to morality, an even greater growth in capitalism and insistence on the importance of one’s own identity to the exclusion of spiritual or shared responsibilities.
Bacon’s paintings, perhaps more than any other great modern painter, make visual the change in attitude to faith and the human condition, which developed from the middle of the 20th Century and has expanded further today. One has to look primarily to film or literature to find similar expression: Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin [1925, Strike [19], the works of Bertolucci, The Deerhunter, Birdy, Apocalypse Now, Dr. Strangelove, Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, , Fowles’ The Collector and Patrick White’s novel The Vivisector. (White was an early friend of Bacon’s in London, as the lover of Bacon’s artistic mentor Roy de Maistre; he bought some of Bacon’s early furniture.) Francis also developed friendships with the American authors William Burroughs and Allan Ginsberg in the 1950s and 60s. He not only reflects this social, ethical and religious change, but in some ways he documented it, without intentionally making political statements.
Bacon’s dark subjects and the distorted figures and physiognomy of his portraits suggest that behind and within the human condition, even aspects of everyday life, are pain, psychological damage or vicious impulses and darkness. Artists had expressed this before, particularly Expressionists like Kirchner or Otto Dix and some of Picasso’s most expressive works in his bullfights, Guernica and interpretation of Grünewald’s Crucifixion in the Isenheim Altarpiece. Bacon owned a painting by Walter Sickert, whose works seem more emotionally detached but illustrate threats to human life, in imagery around rape and the stories of Jack the Ripper. While such artists worked on many different subjects and themes, Francis Bacon made the pain and disintegration of the human condition the primary subject of almost his entire oeuvre, even his portraits. His attitude to the pain in the Isenheim altarpiece is significant: “I’ve never known why my paintings are thought of as horrible. I’m always labelled with horror, but I never think about horror. Pleasure is such a diverse thing. And horror is too. Can you call the famous Isenheim altar a horror piece? It’s one of the greatest paintings of the Crucifixion, with the body studied with thorns like nails, but oddly enough of the form is so grand it takes away from the horror. But that is grand horror in the sense that it is so vitalising, isn’t it? Isn’t that how people come out of the great tragedies of Greece, the Agamemnon? People come out as though purged into happiness, into a fuller reality of existence.” [quoted P.p.272]. He seemed here to be making cathartic claims for his work. One is confronted by the anguish and recognises it, in order to be able to continue with life day-by-day without too many longings.
Bacon had visited Berlin and Paris in his early 20s, where he came into contact with the developments of modernist art. His early works in design in the late 1920s experimented with abstracting forms. Then Picasso’s anamorphic drawings around 1927 [S.p.8] influenced Bacon’s earliest images of the crucifixion in the early 1930s. However the main development of his visual language for expressing his feelings about the human condition flourished in the bleak, damaged post-war world and represented his personal reaction and the fear and disgust of many to the horrors of the human psychology that could lead to the atrocities of war and genocide. His work no-doubt also reflects other contemporary pressures: the aftermath of the Holocaust, threats of the Cold-War, the atomic bomb, the war in Vietnam, political and religious turmoil in his native Ireland etc. as well as changing attitudes to morality and sexuality.
His attitude to life and art seems to have been fairly utilitarian rather than spiritual. Shortly before his death he told Daniel Farson: “When we’re dead we’re no good. We’re finished. When I go, I hope to drop dead working... Otherwise I’d commit suicide” [F.p.1] “Existence is in a way so banal, you might as well try to make a kind of grandeur out of it.” [F.p.10]. He claimed “Man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without purpose, other than of his own choosing.” [F,p.247].
Francis was not precious about his work, often destroying pieces though perhaps not as many as nine-tenths of his oeuvre, as he claimed in the Associated-Rediffusion T.V. documentary ‘The Art Game’ on 27th August 1958. He had exacting expectations and a lack of patience with his artistic projects, so reacted against them when they were not working. He refused many honours offered him, including a proposed knighthood and the Order of Merit. Farson claims “His view of life could hardly be harsher. He did not believe in God, morality, in love or worldly success – only in, as he put it, ‘the sensation of the moment’ locked into her strange masturbatory fantasies. Bacon, above all, conveyed 20th Century man in his various states of loneliness” [F.p.11]. But there were also contradictions in Francis’ character: He was a loner, yet good company, enjoying life, warm and genial but could be cutting; pessimistic in his philosophy yet optimistic in his own lifestyle, petulant, with a quick temper which damaged people emotionally and aggressive in his sexuality, yet generous and loyal in friendships,. He could be vain and arrogant, yet was also modest, shy and reticent in other company. He gave the impression that he was ready for fun [P.p.280], yet was fascinated by injuries, disease, accidents and death. Peppiatt, who knew him well, claimed that “he exuded self-confidence and purpose”, yet recognised in him “extreme inner conflict”. [M.P.p.x]. He was obviously more sensitive than he admitted, yet got himself into situations where he was frequently beaten up in London, Paris and Tangier by both thugs and brutal or dishonest pick-ups. Peppiatt describes the damage Francis endured: “I have seen him barely able to walk or turn his head, presumably because he’d had himself so badly beaten up by passing lovers, without ever complaining or explaining, and I know he had stitches taken out without anaesthetic.” [M.P.p.271-2]. There were extrovert aspects of his personality, yet he has been described as introverted both in his personal life and as an artist [F.p.133]. He said “If you really love life, you’re walking in the shadow of death all the time... Death is the shadow of life, and the more one is obsessed with life, the more one is obsessed with death. I’m greedy for life and I’m greedy as an artist.” [F.p.12]. His Self-Portrait with a Wrist-Watch may symbolise the concept of time ticking away while the artist is slumped over it [AS.p.237].
Despite this fascination with death, regularly talking about it in relation to life and art, Bacon reacted violently when he met the Daily Telegraph correspondent Lewis Jones, who had been assigned to write his obituary [F.p.186]. One would have thought that his normal reaction could have been to laugh it off, but there does seem to have been an element of fear or superstition in his nihilism. He did not have any initial qualms about having his life-mask taken, though he found this difficult because of his asthma. (He owned a copy of that of William Blake. [AS.p.309]. Afterwards seemed slightly superstitious or self-conscious about the decision to allow one to be made of himself. He was also superstitious about numbers [P.M.p.245]. He said: “I myself want to go on living as long as I can. After all, there’s nothing else. You can only go on living from moment to moment. You can’t even prepare for death because it’s nothing... There it is; we just go on living, even though we know something terrible will happen.” [P.p.252]. He told Richard Cork: “I hate the thought of death: I hate the thought of it all coming to an end.” [AS.p.309]. But (in criticism of Henry Moore) he was also very critical of elderly artists who tried to perpetuate themselves and their art by creating ‘foundations’, which he called “a profound vanity” [AS.p.309].
SOME BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND
Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 into an upper-middle-class family in fairly salubrious background. His parents, whose relationship was itself described as ‘unaffectionate’, were both English Protestants, with no Irish blood. His mother was the heiress of a steel manufacturer. His father, from a military family tradition, claimed important ancestry [P.p.22], and attempted to run the household on military lines [P.p.6]. He was a relatively unsuccessful racehorse trainer, having formerly been a Major in the British Army. He was more affectionate towards Francis’ younger brother Edward, who died from Tuberculosis in 1927. The father certainly did not appreciate Francis’ weakness, or later accept his desire to become an artist.
Due to this British and military background, family life felt regularly under threat of attack from Sinn Fein during the political violence, attacks and assassinations in Ireland in the struggle for an independent Irish state. Francis claimed that between the threats in Ireland and the bombs in London he was brought up “to think of violence” [F.p.15]. In his childhood Francis moved regularly between Ireland and England; he spent most of the Great War in London though he stayed for a while with his grandmother in Farmleigh house, near Abbeleix Co. Kildare, where they felt under constant threat from the IRA {P.p10]. Her second husband was sadistic, often torturing cats and throwing them to his hounds, which may have helped traumatise the young Francis. Bacon had an asthma attack on being forced to fox-hunt, which at least modified the bullying. At Farmleigh, the painter also remembered hearing the screams of Irish prisoners being tortured nearby by British soldiers.
Francis first sexual experiences in his early teens came from abuse by his father’s grooms and stable lads, who were mostly Catholic and who had been encouraged to horse-whip him at his father’s instigation to make him less of a ‘sissy’. [F.p.16-17; S.p.17]. He admitted that as well as humiliating him, he had discovered eroticism in the whipping and abuse. He felt a lack of support and understanding from both his parents, and his father became even more aggressive when he caught his son trying on his mother’s underwear at about the age of 15-16. Thrown out of his home, he moved to London in 1926 with a weekly allowance of £3 paid by his mother, though she had rarely shown emotion towards him. His relationship with her improved later in life after his father’s death and her remarriage and move to South Africa. He later claimed that his life in Ireland hardened him and had taught him “a touch of arrogance and healthy scorn for convention and religion, tempered by a sympathy for the eccentric minority...” [F.p.18]. Bacon was to move restlessly for much of the rest of his career, with no permanent bases, which may account for some of the restless movement in his paintings and subjects, and his attitudes and friendships. It is interesting that, though he talked in general terms about his family to David Sylvester, he often discouraged friends and critics from looking into his background.
Francis began life in London free from his father’s dominance and censure, His allowance was just enough to live on, but he turned to minor theft, short-term jobs, and as a rent-boy to finance himself. In the spring of1927 he was encouraged by his father to travel to Berlin with Harcourt-Smith, a relative of his mother’s, ostensibly to toughen and ‘make-a-man-of his son’. Harcourt-Smith had a reputation as a virile man, so it was believed that he would show ‘a manly example’. Far from this, he soon turned to abusing Francis sexually, and made the most of all the liberality and indulgence of the city. [P.p.27]. His ‘uncle’ soon abandoned him in Berlin, going off with some women, while Bacon stayed on for two months in which he spoke of ‘exploring his sensuality and the variety of ways he could indulge it.’ [P.p.30]. The life, cabarets, brothels and art of the waning years of Weimar Berlin introduced Francis to the freedom with which homosexuality was treated in this very different culture to that which had formed him so far. Male homosexuality was still illegal in Berlin as it was in Britain, yet there were 170 male brothels under police control in the German capital. [P.p.29]. Bacon said later: “There was something so extraordinarily open about the whole place. You had this feeling that sexually you could get absolutely anything you wanted. I’d never seen anything like it, of course, having been brought up in Ireland, and it excited me enormously. I felt, well, now I can just drift and follow my instincts. And I remember these streets of clubs where people stood in the front of the entrance miming the perversions that were going on inside. That was very interesting.” [P.p.29]. With such formative, indiscriminating influences on an insecure, abandoned young man of 16, it is understandable that Bacon developed as he did.
‘Drifting’ from one experience to another seems to have been a characteristic of Bacon’s life, but in some it may be reflected in the subject-matter of his art also. He said: “After all, life itself is nothing but a series of sensations. We just drift from moment to moment. My whole life has been like that, you know, drifting from bar to bar, person to person, instant to instant. And I think particularly when you’re very young and very shy, with all that talent welling up inside you, it’s what you have to do. You have to drift until you find yourself. Simply drift and see...” [M.P.p.10].
Alone, Bacon then left for Paris in 1927. The life of the city awakened his interests further to a lack of convention. Yet it was the art that in spired him more than liberality of lifestyle. In Berlin he had discovered the work of the Neue Sachlichkeit artists at the Galerie Nierendorf. (Otto Dix’s images of amputees were to particularly inspire him later). Bauhaus design also soon influenced him as a designer. Beside this he had previously had very little contact with art, so in Paris his discovery of the developments in modernist art excited him. Thankfully, in Paris he found greater personal support The young man was taken under the wing of Yvonne Bocquentin, a pianist and art connoisseur, who offered him a room in her home in Chantilly, taught him French and introduced him to Parisian culture. He was influenced particularly by over 100 Picasso drawings exhibited at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery in the autumn of 1927. In Paris he was also introduced to works by the Surrealists and their manifestos, and he saw exhibitions by De Chirico and Soutine in the summer of 1928. Either in Paris, or earlier in Berlin, he had seen the films by Eisenstein and Buñuel which would later influence his painted themes: Battleship Potemkin, Un Chien Andalou, and L’Age d’Or. [P.p.39]. These started him on the path to becoming a modern artist or designer himself. Beginning to conquer his social shyness, he moved on his own to Montparnasse, a centre for artistic creativity. He rented a room in the Hotel Delambre, where many foreign intellectuals stayed. [P.p.34-35]. It was also in Paris that Bacon began to develop his ideas of becoming a furniture designer, but he kept his own attempts at art in Paris secret [P.p.42]. He still had his mother’s allowance, but still needed extra finance to support himself so relied on people he picked up, under the influence of a new friend, a young male prostitute.
Returning to London in late 1928, still only at the age of just 19 years, Bacon rented rooms in South Kensington then Chelsea. He soon became part of the homosexual undercurrent of society. He preferred the clubs and pubs where groups gathered to the more dangerous and anonymous meeting-places like cottaging in public toilets and Turkish baths, which were more susceptible to police raids. Homosexual activity was still illegal, repressed and also dangerous, as thugs and groups of soldiers and sailors regularly beat up those they denounced as ‘queers’ on the streets, in alleys, or public toilets. We cannot be sure of the veracity of all his tales, as Bacon embellished his reputation as a ‘bad-boy in later years. But he was certainly vulnerable and received a large amount of abuse and violence. He knew how to behave well socially in cultured circles, from his family upbringing and from Chantilly, but he also encountered the rough life of the city.
Later in his career, during the war, underworld life flourished during the Blitz, when sexual conventions became much looser and casual sex was easier. An attitude of ‘if you are going to die, you might as well enjoy yourself doing what you like’ developed. After the war Bacon’s life among the Soho bars and clubs continued to flourish. He especially frequented the Colony Room, opened in 1968, run by Muriel Belcher, of which he was a founding member. Many of those who were to become called by R.B. Kitaj ‘The London School’ met there. It was here that he first met John Deakin whose photography studio was in Shaftesbury Avenue, nearby, and who was more extrovertly sociable than Francis. His photographs were to become a major source of Bacon’s imagery. There was a lot of backbiting and cruel humour among the Colony Room set, some of which may be reflected in Bacon’s distorted imagery. Bacon also frequented The Gargoyle Club where the varied clientele included many of the London intelligentsia who were often full of argument and controversies. The Kismet attracted a more openly homosexual crowd, and less frequently Francis was to be found at The Caves de France, two doors away from the Colony Room. At the height of his career, after hours of painting, then eating in restaurants with friends, Bacon spent much of the remainder of his evenings getting drunk at the clubs, sometimes then returning to the studio to continue painting.
BACON’S EARLY ARTISTIC CAREER
Bacon developed as designer then as an artist without college training or any practice in academic drawing, which partly accounts for the looseness of his figurative work. He began in furniture and interior design for a few years from 1929, in a converted garage-studio in South Kensington. He later disparaged his designs as a pastiche of contemporary French design, Bauhaus, Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier and Picasso. Nevertheless, due to his social contacts, his work was soon featured in The Studio magazine of August 1930, which promoted his name. His rugs, influenced by Picasso, Marion Dorn and McKnight Kauffer, were made at the Royal Wilton factory. He advanced quickly because he was a good promoter of his work, advertising exaggeratedly on his ‘experience’ in Berlin and Paris and throwing parties in his studio to sell his designs. He also found patrons quickly, partly because he was attractive. The homosexual Catholic Australian artist Roy de Maistre, who also occasionally designed furniture befriended him and promoted him, bringing him several commissions, as did de Maistre’s partner the novelist Patrick White. Bacon was later to dismiss this start as a designer, since he felt it distracted from his reputation as a painter, but the modernist designs are present in the compositions, structures, colour-planes and furnishings of his paintings.
De Maistre encouraged Francis’ painting and included him in his 1930 exhibition with Jean Shepeard. Bacon abandoned design in 1933 to concentrate on painting and had his first one-man show in 1934 at the Transition Gallery. Friends like Roy de Maistre, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and the writers Douglas Cooper and Patrick White, made up for his lack of formal art training. (The artist’s work and methods described in Patrick White’s visceral novel The Vivisector are closely reminiscent of Bacon’s animal paintings. Sidney Nolan believed that the novel was painted about him, as it was dedicated to him and his wife, but its protagonist’s works, as described, far more closely resemble those of Francis.) De Maistre became like a father-figure to the young painter, though at 35 he was just 15 years older than Bacon. Perhaps he recognised Bacon had an unconventional education background, similar to his own [P.p.49]. There is unconfirmed speculation over whether theirs became a sexual relationship. De Maistre was a Catholic convert who worked on many commissions for churches, including studies of Stations of the Cross in 1932 (proposed designs for Westminster Cathedral). Roy’s studio was a converted café near Victoria Station, which was a meeting-place for several modernist artists and writers. Bacon probably first met Moore, Sutherland and Douglas Cooper there. [P.p.49]. De Maistre was influential on Bacon’s early artistic development. He painted 10 interiors of Bacon’s studio, so probably taught and encouraged Francis as he worked. The rare earliest surviving art by Francis is Cubist in style, learning from, though dissimilar to much of Roy de Maistre’s art. Roy produced several modernist crucifixion images, which have occasionally been describes as ‘sadomasochistic’, but they pale by comparison to Bacon or even Sutherland’s Crucifixions. His raw way of depicting one of the most common subjects in the history of art almost certainly strongly influenced Bacon’s early crucifixion imagery. Graham Sutherland painted his Crucifixion images for the St. Matthew’s Northampton commission later in 1946, so both De Maistre and Bacon were probably influences on Sutherland, as well as Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece on which it was largely based. De Maistre also had a strong influence in pathology, which would parallel Bacon’s interest [P.p.52].
Some of Francis’ early work, like the 1933 Crucifixion, explored surrealism, but his submission was rejected from the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition as ‘not sufficiently surreal’. This is ironic since the exhibition was being organised by Henry Moore, Paul Nash and Herbert Read, none of whose ideas and images were more surreal than those of Bacon. Crucifixion was nevertheless chosen to be published by Herbert Read in his 1933 ‘Art Now’ and exhibited at the Meyer Gallery in a mixed show. Francis held an unsuccessful one man show the following year (1934) in the basement of Sutherland House, (the home of his admirer Arundell Clarke). Afterwards in frustration Bacon destroyed much of the work, though he later regretted having destroyed Wound for a Crucifixion, a prefiguration of his Three Figures for the Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion [1944]. He was included in the 1937 Young British Painters exhibition at Thomas Agnew and Sons, organized by Robert Wellington of the Zwemmer Gallery, and Bacon’s wealthy patron and soon lover Eric Hall. The exhibition was an attempt to raise interest in creating a permanent gallery for contemporary painters and sculptors. Francis’ friends Roy De Maistre, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore were also involved, as were Victor Pasmore, Robert Medley, Ivon Hitchens, John Piper, Julian Trevelyan and Ceri Richards. Though the exhibition was relatively unsuccessful and his work was attacked by critics, Francis found himself mixing with key figures in the rise of Modern British Art. Among Bacon’s works shown were paintings of screaming mouths, which prefigured the paintings of heads of the popes and the Battleship Potemkin nanny.
Bacon was exempted from National Service during the war because of his asthma, but he was not chosen as a war artist. He experienced horrors during the Blitz while living in Chelsea or from his studio in South Kensington. He saw first-hand the destruction of his environment and the deaths of several of his neighbours in the bombings. He volunteered for a short time as an air-raid warden and had helped to pull mangled bodies from wreckage, but was forced to give this up as it exacerbated his asthma. During this time his friendship developed with Graham Sutherland and his wife, while Sutherland was experimenting with surreal and expressionist work as a war artist. In the war years new friendships also grew with Lucien Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne and other artists and socialites linked to the collector Peter Watson.
Francis’ new work, influenced by the war was shown in a group exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in April 1945, just a month before the end of the war. It included the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion and Painting, which cemented his reputation and set him on the process of developing themes that concentrated on the human condition that would develop throughout his career. The sale of Painting, first to the Hanover Gallery, then the Museum of Modern Art, New York, financed a temporary move to the south of France, escaping the depressive atmosphere of post-war London, but increasing his involvement in gambling in Monte Carlo etc. On his return he worked on the theme of Heads for a one-man exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in 1949, which included his first screaming head of a pope. From this series onward his use of photographic sources for his work developed. His figures often used Edweard Muybridge’s photographic images of figures and animals in motion as reference points
THE AIMS OF THE ARTIST
Of finding things that were worth painting about Francis said: “I think those things are very difficult... So much has already been done, and then photography has cancelled out so many other possibilities. When I started I needed extreme subject matter. And then I found my subjects through my life and through the friends I came to have. I mean, one’s work is really a kind of diary or an autobiography... (my paintings are) about myself, my thoughts, feelings and what is called the ‘moeurs’ of my times. But then I think I go deeper than my times. That may be a profoundly vain thing to say, but I often feel in my work that I’m close to the ancient world. I think you can convey all sorts of things about yourself, or about anything really, in painting. I think it’s more difficult in words... It’s like confession. Or psychoanalysis...” [M.P.p.90]
When asked whether his paintings were primarily about love or sex, Bacon responded: “Well, I don’t actually think they’re about anything... I’m just trying to make my thoughts and sensations about life come back at me with greater intensity. The paintings are about my life, and of course sex is part of that. I suppose I would like ot make images that bring you closer to what being human is actually like. But you know, painting’s become so impossible now. One can just try and make things a bit more precise. What else is there to do with life but try to make yourself a bit more clear?... Perhaps I never shall (be able to make it work). But I always hope for this great wave of instinct with which I might really be able to change and renew everything.”... “There’s no saying whether I’ve been able to change anything at all obviously... But I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of making images - with the idea of finding something which will make my own visual experience come back to me more violently. You see, for me, painting has always been a way in which I’ve tried to excite myself; make my own sensations remain with more poignancy... if the image is going to be any good nowadays, it has to go much deeper than simply recording appearances. Somehow you have to try to get the paint down in such a curious way that it comes back on to the nervous system more exactly and more profoundly. If this image is going to be worth making at all, you see, it has to unlock sensation at a deeper level, it has to go in at an instinctive level. Otherwise a photograph can do the whole thing mush better.” [M.P.p.149].
As he adapted images from photography and film, Bacon’s imagery reflects increasing awareness of human aggression and wrong, driven by various media. His own turbulent life included threats to him due to his sexuality, the practice of which was still illegal in Britain throughout his formative years right up to 1967. He was damaged by masochism, insecure relationships, addiction to alcohol and gambling, of which the latter often left him in debt. Gambling at the time was also illegal in London, so its underground nature may have excited and stimulated Bacon in the same way as did his sexual fantasies. He seems to have been stimulated by taking risks, which permeated his relationships, sexual promiscuity, gambling, drinking, early theft, moving home, travelling to Tangier etc. as well as the controversial subjects and methods he used in his art. Rather than keeping to traditions in his subjects, painting techniques as well as his lifestyle, Bacon asserted: “You have to break technique, break tradition to do something really new. You always go back into tradition, but you have to break it and reinvent it first.” [P.p.282]. His mixing the dust of the studio with his paint or setting the dust on the surface, may have had a symbolic content as well as creating texture. Whereas many artists aim to protect wet surface of paintings from dust, Bacon valued it for its additions to the work. We all return to dust, yet it has helped build up his art Of tradition, he taught: “Young artists today think that choosing a new medium is the answer, but it usually just turns out to be a substitute for creation rather than the thing itself. Everyone wants something new, including me, but of course it won’t be new unless you have the compost of the past as well. The past nourishes you, and denying that source of nourishment is like cutting off one’s arm to make the other better. I’ve never felt the need to reject the past. I feel I relate to tradition very strongly.
But I won’t ever know whether I’m really any good, because it takes such a long time for things to fall into place. And there’s no point in worrying about what you feel you ought to be doing in terms of the historical evolution of art either. You can only do what your impulses demand, and that doesn’t mean I see myself as the last of the line. The possibilities of oil painting are only just beginning to be exploited: the potential is enormous.” [AS.p.216-7]. This would seem to contradict Bacon’s negative statements about the meaninglessness and banality of art and progress. It is a very optimistic call for advance in the arts and the value of creativity.
The intensity of emotion or trauma in Bacon’s background is largely the context which influenced the sensations in his work. He may have claimed that his background hardened him, and he often quoted Nietzsche’s claim that “What does not destroy is makes us strong” [P.M.p.xii], yet he remained sensitive. However, the majority of Bacon’s work does not comment on specific situations. Occasionally he refers to particular events, as in his triptych after the suicide of his lover In Memory of George Dyer [1971]. Even his portraits go beyond the specifics of the individual subject. He recognised that there were autobiographical associations in his art but most often his imagery reflects a general response to negative aspects of life, the human condition and the disintegration of modern society. He spoke of wanting to make his subjects ‘as anonymous as possible... people can read what they like into them”... “I don’t want the work to be hazy, but I work in a kind of haze of sensations and feelings and ideas that come to me and that I try to crystalize.” [H.p.10].
Despite not wanting to be ‘illustrative’, he showed his ideas through the situations that he painted. In his expression of the hopelessness of aspects the human situation, he was close to the expression of Existential writers like Sartre, Camus, Kafka, Beckett or Genet , and with similar uncomfortable intensity T.S. Eliot and Harold Pinter. There is a marked similarity between the relationship between figures in Francis’ paintings to the strained and sometimes violent relationships between people in Beckett and Pinter’s plays, especially The Caretaker and The Birthday Party, or Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, Sweeny Agonistes, the bleakness of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, or the Wasteland. Visual influences and artistic ideas came similarly through Giacometti, Picasso or Soutine, whose work developed and flourished in the post-war years, as well as Roy de Maistre in London. The long periods spent in Paris, especially towards the end of his life, possible reinforced this philosophical approach to his work..
Bacon was fascinated by psychology, though not as an academic study but more through interest in what made people behave as they did. The portraits of Nazis and Fascists on his studio walls encouraged him to consider what distorted the human mind to perpetrate atrocities. His interest in psychology reflected a growing 20th Century belief that human beings were not necessarily the pinnacle of creation and that we are basically still controlled by animal instincts. Surely, then, he believed, we are just animals ourselves, or more debased than animals. Talking to Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show he said: “We are born and we die and there’s nothing else. We’re just part of animal life.” [F.p.265]. This is one reason why he painted animals and disabled children, and why many of his figures and faces display animal characteristics. The Existentialists whose work Bacon followed from his early life in Paris, believed that the ideas of social progress and the values of religion and traditional ethics were a myth and no longer valid. The horrors of war, they believed, demonstrated that humans were essentially still driven by primitive instincts. Some of his paintings of animals, such as rabid or snarling dogs suggest this. “I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during our own existence. We create certain attitudes which give it meaning while we exist, though they themselves are meaningless really.” These ideas parallel one of Bacon’s favourite poems: The Circus Animal’s Desertion by W.B. Yeats, in which the poet bewailed and questioned the validity and significance of his past work, particularly that which had caused damage to others, or encouraged some to negative actions or thoughts.
Meaninglessness, Bacon concluded, also pertained to much art: “art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself.” [S.p.29]. He frequently talked about the games we play to overcome a sense of futility or nihilism. He even claimed that he was “just playing with paint, not giving a message.” [AS.p.230]. But this is obviously untrue and a sad statement from someone who was using his art as a serious way of making the viewer think. It may have been made as a provocative exaggeration. Artists and writers throughout human society have attempted to use their work to advance and enhance human lives and minds. Classical writers like Aeschylus, who Bacon admired and read as a source for his work, wrote of strong, emotive subjects to evoke positive, empathetic or cathartic responses in their audience, not primarily to bewail the human condition. Francis was fascinated by Egyptian art and culture because he believed that the Egyptians were trying to defeat death because believed in an after-world, which he did not. [F.248-9]. He claimed: “Life is so meaningless; we might as well make ourselves extraordinary.” [P.p.199]. In many of his paintings he transformed ordinary people from ordinary photographs into heroic figures with strong senses. However, later in his career, Bacon claimed that he did not need to shock so much: “When I was young I needed extreme subject matter for my paintings. Then as I grew older I began to find my subject-matter in my own life.” [P.p207]. This was said of a time when his relationship with George Dyer was relatively stable and the portraits of George dominated his oeuvre. He felt that he no longer needed subjects from Christianity, Classical literature or ancient myths; he had real life to reference and paint [P.p.213].
Bacon wore his learning lightly, perhaps because he was aware that his educational background did not match that of many of his contemporaries in the art, literary and gallery world. He was not aiming to be literary or overtly display his intellect in his work. He describes, even as a young man, being fascinated by the imagery in classical literature, especially the plays: “They are superbly visual. I feel myself very close to the world of Greek tragedy... often, in my painting, I have this sensation of following a long call from antiquity.” [P.M.p.47]. He was well-read and articulate, and could sound erudite in discussion, (especially loquacious when well-lubricated,) but Francis distrusted the intellectualisation of artistic and literary circles, claiming (if somewhat disingenuously) that “it is better just to paint and see what occurs” [F.p.84]. He knew the works of Shakespeare, Freud, Nietzsche, Proust, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Samuel Beckett as well as the classical myths, Greek tragedy etc. Despite his lack of formal education as a child, he seems to have had a clever mind; he learned languages easily and read avidly. The circles in which Francis moved from his stay in Chantilly onward, introduced him to art and art theory, literature, philosophy and psychology. He discussed such matters in the circles of Sonia Orwell, John Rothenstein, John Russell, David Sylvester, William Boroughs, Alan Ginsberg, Michel Leiris etc. But one wonders how much time or interest he had in personally or thoroughly analysing what he was reading on an intellectual level. This was an age when many in artistic circles rivalled each other to quote philosophers, erudite literary writers and fine art influences. Yet Bacon seems to have sought and taken in ideas as a practical background to his work and personal philosophy rather than aiming for exhaustive understanding or knowledge itself. It was mostly Bacon’s Marlborough Gallery promoters who added the seemingly intellectual titles to his works, which he preferred to call ‘Study’, ‘Painting’ or ‘Triptych’. (It is just as well that they did, otherwise it would be even harder to distinguish pieces by their titles in his prolific oeuvre. References to the Oresteia or Sweeny Agonistes etc. added to the sense that there was profundity within the work. I do not mean to use this term to disparage Bacon’s painting, as I admire it, but there is a large amount of ‘shallow profundity’ in the intellectualisation of modern art by curators, critics and some artists themselves. Bacon’s interviews with David Sylvester break through this and show the artist as a man working to express ideas verbally and visually, without the need to intellectualise in the manner of his curators and those who sought to explain and promote his art.
On a purely practical level, how much time did Bacon have for depth in his reading? He led a busy social life in the clubs, bars and in relationships, was frequently drunk and spent long hours in his studio painting. He spoke of finding it hard to sleep and relied on pills to help him do so [P.p.220], so he may have read mostly at night, when one is not always as alert intellectually, We know that he also painted at night. So he possibly only took in the basics of some of the books he read, especially if befuddled by drink or drugs. However, the extensive time spent at the easel wrestling with what one is trying to express in one’s painting is often a time for profound philosophical, ontological speculation, experimentation with ideas, concepts and consideration of alternatives. It is in the process of creating and painting a work, or considering it afterwards, that one mostly begins to understand its significance and potential meanings. Probably he made the connections with psychology, philosophies and literature as he worked through the pictures. He was certainly adamant that he was never ‘illustrating’ the subjects that he was painting. He usedthe term ‘illustration’ as a disparaging word. To create illustrative art seemed too shallow a practice and concept for what he considered the deeper aims of Fine Art. His works were expressions and visualisations of ideas not ‘illustrations’, though he was also keen to stress that he was a ‘realist’ not an ‘expressionist’. “After all, I’ve got nothing to express, but a realist... in attempting in paintings to convey as intensely as possible the reality or the facts of life.” [P.M.p.362].
Bacon often claimed that if you could explain what you are doing and talk about its meaning, there would be no need to paint it. In the Associated-Rediffusion T.V. documentary ‘The Art Game’ on 27th August 1958 he recalled “I think Anna Pavlova was right when somebody asked her what she meant when she was dancing the Dying Swan and she said ‘Well, if I could tell you I wouldn’t dance.’” This attitude is very different from much contemporary art, where creators and curators are encouraged to intellectualise in words what they have created in their medium. Neither was Bacon worried if people didn’t understand his paintings: “I don’t think you can be interested in whether people understand your paintings or not. It’s only due to your own nervous system that you can paint at all... how can I draw one more veil away from life and present what is called the living sensation more nearly in the nervous system and more violently?” [T.V. documentary ‘The Art Game’ 1958]. This is rather different from the aim of religious paintings, which aim not just at the artist’s self-expression but to create a sensation that encourages the viewer to engage meaningfully and spiritually with their subject matter in ways that focus their faith.
The texture in Bacon’s paintings reflected his belief that mark and texture can affect our senses and nervous system: a belief also shared and explored in the early works of American Abstract Expressionists like Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning. Textural expression and the effects of colour, mark and form, he believed, could communicate more effectively than even narrative or illustrative elements of a painting. On the canvas he combined flat painting, sometimes of thin washes using large amounts of turpentine, with more impasto marks, dry scumbling, mixing of dust with the paint, sometimes directly squeezing paint from the tube onto the canvas or the controlled splashing of paint. Around 1947 he found that un-primed canvas surfaces helped him create the textures he desires. He later had his canvases stretched back-to-front, already primed but not sized. He used the stubbly texture of the canvas to create the effect of stubble on a face and also explained to John Richardson that he smeared Max-Factor pancake make-up one his face to practice effects. {F.p.85]. Many materials were employed to create his textures: paint soaked socks, even the ribbing of cashmere sweaters.
Technically the backgrounds of his larger works reflect the colour-fields of Abstract Expressionist artists, particularly Mark Rothko, suggesting heightened emotion through colour. (However he claimed that he found purely abstract action painting boring and unchallenging [Associated-Rediffusion T.V. documentary ‘The Art Game’ on 27th August 1958]). In Bacon’s compositions, the flat fields of paint contrast strongly with the heightened texture of other more expressive, sometimes visceral brushwork. While Bacon’s largest paintings are compositionally very strong, his work on them was often instinctive, as was so much of his image-making. He painted relatively fast, aiming at an ‘impression of freedom and spontaneity’, but this intuitive approach also led him to destroy many of his canvases by slashing them, when he considered that they were not working. He slashed them to pieces more fully, when it became apparent, at the height of his career, that some of these abandoned or binned works had reached the market. Sometimes he would completely rework compositions from the initial sketches by trial and error, with a rigorous discipline.
He told Sylvester that he destroyed so much work rather than working into it “because sometimes it disappears completely and the canvas becomes completely clogged... too much paint and one can’t go on.” [S.p.18]. He claimed “One‘s always hoping to paint one picture which will annihilate all the other ones, to concentrate everything into one painting.” Presumably this did not negate the validity of his other works, rather is shows his intention to achieve a strong overall statement about his subject. While he claimed that art like life was meaningless, his exacting standards show that he valued greatly his means of expression and their results. The overworking that damaged some of his images, as with the violent imagery in some, seems part of Bacon’s obsession with creating intensity of sensation. He spoke of his striving for “a greater intensity” [S.p.90]. I wonder whether this search for intensity in his art derives partly from his sense that he had been hardened psychologically by his background? He appears to have sought greater intensity in his violent sexual relationships to enhance his sensations.
Bacon often creates a sense of special depth in his compositions through grids or lines of perspective, and what he sometimes called ‘space-frames’. Some critics over-literally interpret the curved walls behind some of his images as memories of the last of his family homes in Ireland, Farmleigh near Abbeyleix, Co. Kildare, a large country house which was later destroyed by fire. The backgrounds more generally are spaces or stages in or against which the incidents and images take place. They create colour-fields where the particular hues are chosen to intensify emotion. The ‘space-frames’ work within the colour to create transparent boxes within which his figures exist, sometimes within which they seem trapped. Bacon admitted to John Russell that he was sensitive to enclosed interior spaces. [AS.p.240]. Yet his chaotic studio space as seen in so many photographs and as reconstructed in the Hugh Lane Gallery feels intensely claustrophobic. This claustrophobia, imprisonment or sense of being trapped is especially apparent in his series of paintings of screaming Popes, figures wrestling on a bed (Two Figures [1953], Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus [1981], and portraits like Three Studies of Lucien Freud [1969]. Bacon spoke practically of the painted space-frames: “I cut down the scale of the canvas by drawing in these rectangles which concentrate the image down. Just to see it better.” He disclaimed the idea that they had illustrative intentions. [S.p.23]. Yet of his paintings of men apparently trapped in rooms, he said: “Most of these pictures were done of somebody who was always in a state of unease, and whether that has been conveyed through these picture I don’t know. But I suppose, in attempting to trap this image, that as this man was very neurotic and almost hysterical, this may come across in my paintings.” [S.p.48].
It is fascinating that paintings which often express such horrific subjects can be, at the same time, made visually beautiful and attract one’s admiration. The question of whether beauty is purely aesthetic, or needs to include ethical considerations regarding its subject-matter is complex and may depend on the ideas of the individual viewer. Bacon’s colours and textures and compositions are beautiful; his subjects are often disturbing and reflect human violence. But these subjects are also ‘real’; Bacon was painting about issues in the real world that he experienced around him. Should they be called ‘ugly’ on those grounds? Art critics of the 19th Century criticised Courbet, Whistler and Impressionists etc. as ‘ugly’ yet we now accept and recognise the beauty of such realism.
Bacon’s work reflects the many paradoxes in human life, which Bacon experienced and often talked about. In his interviews with David Sylvester, especially we find references to balancing ‘being optimistic yet totally without hope’, painting by ‘chance and spontaneity, with order and precision’... ‘figurative art and abstraction’, ‘structured spontaneity’... ‘both death and life being exciting and attractive’... ‘gilded squalor’ etc.. After his death Helen Lessore remembered “There was not a day when he did not think about death, but by temperament he was an optimist” [quoted F.p.96]. He claimed to have premonitions of his own death [P.p.231] but he spoke about these many years before he actually died. Of the people in his life, several of whom had committed suicide, and of artists, he said “(Annihilation) follows them round like their shadow and I think is one of the reasons why artists are so conscious of the vulnerability and nothingness of life. “ [AS.p.231]. In his last recorded interview with David Sylvester, Bacon said that most people are “so attached to their egos that they’d probably rather have torment than annihilation... if I were in hell I would always feel that I had the chance to escape”. [Sylvester revised ed. interviews 1993 p.200]. But he had also claimed that “Hell is here and now!” [AS. P.167]. Life in this world is not simplistic, easy or always beautiful: Bacon was being realistic in visualising its paradoxes. He liked to quote T.S. Eliot’s lines in Sweeny Agonistes:
“Birth, Copulation and Death.
That’s all the facts when you come down to brass tacks.
Birth, copulation and death” …
Bacon made a similar proposal that was partly nihilistic, partly optimistic: “Here’s to everything you want! What more can I offer you? After all, life itself is such a charade, there’s no reason why one shouldn’t try to achieve everything one wants. Very few people find their real instincts. Every now and then there’s an artist who does and who makes something new and actually thickens the texture of life. But that’s very rare. Most people just wait for something to happen to them. You have to be really free to find yourself in that way, without any moral or religious constraints. After all, life is nothing but a series of sensations, so one may as well try and make oneself extraordinary, extraordinary and brilliant, even if it means becoming a brilliant fool like me and having the kind of disastrous life that I have had. There it is, I myself have always known that life was absurd, even when I was young – though I was never young in the sense of being innocent. … There it is, I don’t believe in anything, but I’m always glad to wake up in the morning. It doesn’t depress me. I’m never depressed. My basic nervous system is filled with this optimism. It’s mad, I know, because it’s optimism about nothing. I think of life as meaning less yet it excites me. I always think that something marvellous is about to happen.” [P.p.222].
Francis was in fact depressed at several points in his life and career, yet the paradox, or perhaps irony, is that out of his negative outlook on the meaninglessness of life, he created so many strikingly arresting images, some of which could be called ‘beautiful’. Their values and focus are added to by his choice of simple, unmoulded traditionally gilded frames, by his regular framer Alfred Hecht. These enhance his large canvases of challenging, sometimes relatively ugly subject-matter, helping to give emphasis to the qualities of the paint, colour, composition and idea or concept.
BACON’S CRUCIFIXIONS
Peppiatt described Bacon’s expressive aim in painting so many images around the subject of the Crucifixion as portraying ‘A wound at the core of being’ [P.p.99]. Francis also claimed that they were more like self-portraits than religious pictures [S.p.44]. Bacon never claimed to be personally identifying with Christ in the Crucifixions, though Peppiatt suggests that he might, in the same way that he was haunted by the tragic figure of the Oresteia later in his career [P.p.274] . He was generally using the theme as “a marvellous armature one which to hang all kinds of thoughts and sensations.” [P.p.99; S.p.44]. He was never drawn into explaining the images; rather he pointed to the subject as a complex symbol representing the pain, sense of abandonment, loneliness and betrayal often felt by humanity, and the violence of life itself. The closest Bacon came to explaining his Crucifixions was in an interview with Sylvester: “You may say it’s a curious thing for a non-religious person to take the Crucifixion, but I don’t think that it has anything to do with it. The great Crucifixions that one knows of - one doesn’t know whether they were painted by men who had religious beliefs.,,, (It may be that they were painted as part of Christian culture and were made for believers (affirming Sylvester’s proposal) ... It may be unsatisfactory, but I haven’t found another subject so far that has been as helpful for covering certain areas of human feeling and behaviour.” [S.p.44]. Interestingly, though Francis talked of ‘horror’ with regard to his Crucifixion paintings, he actually regarded the crucified figure as “poignant” rather than horrific. [S.p.83]. He said that he painted the subject, “not because he believed, but as a myth which made him feel many things” [AS.p.146].
When comparing the Crucifixion to the depths of catharsis in Greek tragedy, which is also referred to in some painting titles, Bacon admitted that: “I think Greek mythology is even further from us than Christianity… one of the things about the Crucifixion is the very fact that the central figure of Christ is raised into a very pronounced and isolated position, which gives it, from a formal point of view, greater possibilities than having the different figures placed on the same level. The alteration of level is, from my point of view, very important.” [S.p.46]. I don’t sense that he was just referring merely to the formal compositional qualities in a painting here, but to the possibility of focusing the attention on the figure and he ideas that he hung on this ‘armature’, rather as Francis used space-frames to create focus. Bacon’s crucified figures are rarely set above other figures in his compositions, but as in the 1992 and 1965 triptychs, the crucified one is definitely the most dominant figure through the prominence and gore that makes one focus upon it. Yet the Crucifixions are not about Christ in any way referring to the absolving of sin or their representation of the love or forgiveness of God. Nor are they intended for devotional contemplation. They show the victim as a suffering, tortured human or as dead meat, the victim of human violence. Brian Sewell’s astute critique of the Crucifixions claimed: “He took the Crucifixion, stripped it of all its Christian implications, and invested it instead with the universal beastliness of man and abattoir running with blood, deafened with screams.”. [AS.p.314].
Bacon’s early use of the triptych format is fascinating. Triptychs are still largely though not universally associated with religious images, particularly altarpieces. The subject-matter of Bacon’s triptychs, even his ‘Crucifixion’ images could hardly be termed ‘religious’. Yet by using the triptych format Bacon focuses the viewer’s attention and thoughts on the significance of his subjects more intensely than one single image might do. They do not always provide a narrative link between the panels. Most of the connections need to be made in the mind of the viewer.
Bacon was fascinated by images of the crucifixion from early in his career. Patrick White had supported him by buying one of his earliest paintings of the Crucifixion [AS.p.149]. He spoke of the crucifixion as “a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation.” [S.p.44; P.p.99]. The artist used the theme to express aspects of the human condition rather than with religious significance: “You might say it is almost nearer to a self-portrait. You are working on all sorts of very private feelings about behaviour and the way life is.”
It is recorded that in the late 1930s he had a large mural in his bedroom of a crucified nailed arm with a small part of a torso. He created a significant number of paintings related to the subject, including a large number in 1933 which he later destroyed. Among the most significant are:
Crucifixion [1933 Murderme Collection, London]
Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifix [1944 Tate Gallery, London]
Painting [1946 Museum of Modern Art, New York]
Fragment of a Crucifixion [1950 Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven]
Three Studies for a Crucifixion triptych [1962 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York]]
Crucifixion triptych [1965 Bayerische Staatsgemälesammlungen Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich]
Crucifixion [1933 Murderme Collection, London] is the closest that Francis came to abstract surrealism under the influence of Picasso’s surreal work around 1927, which Bacon had seen in Paris [S.p.8]. It is only one of many studies of the Crucifixion, which Bacon painted during this year, probably under the influence of Roy de Maistre, though in a very different style from his mentor. Here, the crucified figure is more like a stick man or X-Ray scumbled in white against a monochromatic dark background. Though not explained, the dark background is reminiscent of the ‘darkness covering the earth’ at Jesus’ crucifixion. Another linear figure in white seems to be reaching out to touch or embrace the figure on the cross. This may be a character such as Mary Magdalene or a soldier piercing the crucified figure with a spear, but Bacon avoids obvious narrative content or explanation. White may be spurting from the side of the figure or the shape may suggest the crucified figure’s stretched lungs reaching to breathe. (Bacon would have recognised this difficulty due to his chronic asthma.) Beneath, three curved white marks suggest the ribs of the crucified. Whereas later Bacon associated the crucified figure with people and life generally, rather than painting an image of the crucified Jesus, this early work may have been more specifically illustrative of the Christian story, following the example of the Roaman Catholic de Maistre..
There is a similarity between this abstraction and Giacometti’s linear drawings, as well as his early surreal sculpture of the ribs of Woman With Her Throat Cut [1932] of which Bacon may have seen a recent image. Both even have very small heads, as do some of Picasso’s figures in the drawings that Francis had seen in Paris. It is unclear whether the two lines and marks stretching down from the figure are blood pouring from the body or legs and pierced feet. Herbert Read promoted Bacon by publishing this picture in Art Now opposite Picasso’s Bather of 1929. This was a key advance for an emerging artist. The choice of comparison was rather strange, as the approach to the human figure in each is very different. Sir Michael Sadler, Master of University College, Oxford, further encouraged Bacon by buying two of his crucifixion paintings and commissioned work from the young painter, particularly a portrait based on an X-ray of his skull [P.p.65]. These contacts and critical acclaim helped to build the social standing and artistic position of Francis in the world of contemporary art.
Wound for a Crucifixion [1933] was destroyed by Bacon alongside other exhibited works, in a fit of pique after the bad critical reaction to his unsuccessful one man show in the basement of Sutherland House in 1934. Two people had wanted to buy the ‘Wound’ – Eric Alden and Diana Watson, who were both to become patrons of the young artist. [P.p.67]. He later regretted having destroyed it, as it prefigured his Three Figures for the Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944. This may be the picture referred to by Molly Craven a neighbouring tenant to Francis in Chelsea, as being in Bacon’s bedroom: “a vast mural of a crucified arm... enough, I felt to induce a fever” which she thought was based on Dürer’s Crucifixion, but she may have meant ‘Grünewald’: “The whole was an enormous left arm with the nails in it, and just a hint of torso, pointing towards the window. The body was virtually cut off by the chimneypiece. A tortured bedroom if ever there was one!” [F.p.37]. Bacon himself described it as “a very beautiful wound in an abstract shape, moulded on a sculptor’s armature.” [P.p.67].
Crucifixion [1933] The third and last of the major Crucifixion paintings of 1933 is in strong colour and with massive forms. The Tau, or T-shaped cross has a bestial shape on it, imprisoned in a special cage. It resembles a figure only in the ways that the surreal ‘Three Figures for the Base of a Crucifixion’ do. A dog-like beast reaches over the cross-beam, like a figure lowering the crucified in paintings of the Deposition from the Cross. It seemsto represent a threat lowering overhumanity. In the background are shapes reminiscent of Giacometti.
Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifix [1944] The original title of this seminal piece was ‘Figures at the Foot of the Cross’. [P.p.87]. The panels are painted on sundeala board, a fibre-board which was used by both de Maistre and Sutherland at the time, suggesting their influence on the young painter. As with his 1933 Crucifixion and Painting 1946, Bacon used a combination of oil paint and pastel. They represent figures that seem an amalgam of Picasso’s surreal period and a hybrid between the human and the animal. From the little of Bacon’s earliest work that survives in photographic records, it seems that these paintings continued his fascination with crucifixion imagery from early in his career, despite describing himself as an avowed atheist. This differs from the earlier Crucifixions painted in 1933, in that it represents the reactions of others to the suffering. It is possible that Bacon intended to create a larger piece to go above them, or that they themselves were studies for just one piece rather than a triptych [P.p.86 &92]. He suggested this later when reworking the images on a larger scale.
Picasso too had been fascinated by the Crucifixion, despite not being religious, creating many studies based on Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. Only one painting survives but Bacon had seen over a hundred of the drawings on exhibition in the Paul Rosenberg Gallery, Paris in 1927/8. Memories of these influenced the distortion in Bacon’s works, as did Picasso’s Guernica [1937],which Bacon saw when the Spanish Civil War painting and other studies and related pictures like ‘The Dream and Lie of Franco’ were exhibited in the New Burlington Galleries, London in October 1938. The exhibition then transferred to the Whitechapel Gallery. [P.p.86]. Herbert Read’s ecstatic contemporary article on Guernica as ‘the modern Calvary’ is quoted in Peppiatt [P.p.88 cf. London Bulletin no. 6 October 1938 for full text]. Read enthused: “It is painted, not with the same kind, but with the same degree of fervour that inspired Grünewald and the Master of the Avignon Pieta, Van Eyck and Bellini.”... Picasso is more universal.. infused with the intensest passion that a great work of art, transcending all schools and categories, is born and being born, lives immortally.” One can imagine that Bacon was seeking something similarly universal when he talked of longing to paint one day the perfect picture that would sensitise the nervous system.
The distortion of the human figure in Francis’ paintings was influenced by more than this violent distortion in Picasso’s work in the decade from 1929. Source material also included photographs of the human body and wild animals. The left hand creature is based on imagery from a book on spiritualism and ectoplasm. The bandages on the central figure have their roots in a reproduction of Grünewald’s Mocking of Christ , as does the snarling mouth [1503-5 Alte Pinakothek, Munich]. Bacon made this far more sinister: the forms have been called a ‘penis dentatus’ by some critics [P.p.86] and recall some of the teeth in faces in a few of Picasso’s more violent images.
Though the figures at the base of the Crucifixion are anonymous, Bacon spoke of them as having been influenced by the classical idea of the Furies (Eumenides) in Greek Tragedy, who also appear at the windows in T.S. Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party, which Bacon had seen at the Westminster Theatre in March 1939. These were mythic figures unleashed to exact revenge on those who commit the most horrific crimes. In an interview in 1964 he claimed that he was visited frequently by the furies and that the Oresteia ‘bred images’ in him. [P.p.91]. In a later letter of 9th January 1959 Bacon described the works as: “sketches for the Eumenides which I intended to use as the base of a large Crucifixion, which I may still do.” [P.p.92]. Bacon would say later in his life with reference to sense of guilt, especially after George Dyer’s death “Furies often visit me.” [P.p.269]. He would represent them again in his Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus [1981 left panel], Triptych [1976 central panel] and the second version of Three Figures for a Crucifixion, which he gave to the Tate. The strange crucified form in his painting Fragment of a Crucifixion [1950 Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven] almost looks like a fury itself, being based on a famous photograph of a barn owl flying towards the camera. There it feels as though the crucified one is flying out to torment the persecuting viewer or artist.
In talking of the triptych, Bacon said that ideally he would have surmounted it with a Crucifixion to represent our human capacity for barbarous cruelty. He never explained why he did not complete the project. Perhaps the horror of these figures was enough. While the panels, like most of Bacon’s work, do not contain a specific narrative, the anguish of the figures is apparent. The flame-like orange background could have been influenced by the flames of the Blitz and anguish at the mangled, destroyed bodies which Bacon helped to clear from bombed buildings. Bacon had already used this orange on two other works. Roy de Maistre had done much experimentation with music and colour, including sensual responses and emotive connections to particular colour, so Bacon’s choice of background may have been linked to these. Later in his career Francis was very particular about the expressiveness and symbolic qualities of the colours which he chose for each work.
The tide of war was turning in 1944, with destructive violence being exacted on the Nazis as they exacted horrors on Europe and Britain and the allies responded. The three figures seem to be both victims and aggressive. Their screams have been interpreted as expressing both anguish and horror, as well as being the bestial shouts of those promoting aggression. On his studio wall Bacon had photographs of Hitler and Goering shouting encouragement to their troupes at rallies. The style of the painting was influenced by Picasso’s studies of Grunewald’s Crucifixion, and of course Guernica, but Francis rendered similar horrors of war more organically. His figures and faces are more metamorphic in their distortions. His use of colour, took the monochrome of Picasso’s images a step further. Picasso’s large scale canvas was not yet practical for Bacon as a young emerging artist. He would rival it in the drama and grandeur of Francis’ large mature triptychs later in his life. From his contact with Surrealist art, film and manifestos in Paris, Bacon had learned the value of shocking people to be noticed as an artist. It was not good enough to just make something that was ‘new’.
Even at this early stage in his career, Bacon claimed later that he did not begin with a drawing, very unlike Picasso. He claimed that he started with a loaded 1 inch brush. Yet the images are so assured that it is likely that he had produced initial sketches in the design process.
Painting 1946 [Museum of Modern Art, New York]
Due to the positive reception of Three Figures for the Base of a Crucifixion, the work influenced the immediate development of Bacon’s art. His Painting 1946 has a background of flesh-colour pink blinds, against which is a large splayed eviscerated carcass of beef. The subject must have been influenced by Bacon’s admiration of the textured carcass paintings of Chaim Soutine [c1925]. For Soutine, meat was as important a symbol as it became for Francis. This canvas is among the closest that Bacon’s work came to the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images found in Surrealism. He claimed that it had been painted by improvisation, rather like the imagery created by automatism, without conscious control. Bacon sometimes exaggerated such claims for effect. In the post-war years he told Farson in relation to portraiture, as well as this paining ‘that drink and its after-effects forced him to concentrate on his painting, and that at times it gave him ‘a sort of freedom’. Working at great speed he attacked the canvas.... “My ideal would really be just to pick up a handful of paint and throw it at the canvas and hope that the portrait was there”’ [F.p.82]. “You find that the mark you make suggests another mark from which you can develop, and sometimes when I’ve been working I’ve been so sick of it that I just take the brush and put marks all over it, thinking it’s not going to work at all, and then suddenly out of the chaos comes the possibility of making an image that I hadn’t thought of before.” [F.p.83]
Bacon admitted to David Sylvester that the imagery in Painting 1946 developed relatively accidentally. He claimed (perhaps disingenuously) to have started trying to paint a gorilla in a cornfield, then a bird alighting in a field “It may have been bound up in some way with the three forms that had gone before, but suddenly the lines that I’d drawn suggested something totally different, and out of this suggestion grew the picture. I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another.” [S.p.11]. Here the image is almost like the irrational juxtaposition of imagery in a bad dream or the montaged elements of a film by Buñuel or Eisenstein. The combined images include the carcass, bones, other pieces of carcass displayed on a circular metal frame. In front of the crucified carcass is the figure of a suited man with a yellow flower in the shadow of a black umbrella. Far from being detached emotionally, his face appears to be in a rictus grin. This figure is ominous; only the bottom of his face is seen, its eyes and nose being lost in blackness. He has been associated by critics with a dictator or Nietzsche’s idea of a dominant malicious leader and Bacon’s fascination with photographs of Hitler in front of the imperial eagle symbol used by the Nazis. The drawn blinds hanging in the background perhaps refer to the blinds in photographs of Hitler’s bunker. Here the carcass suggests destruction of life rather than victory, perhaps reflecting the recent uncovering of the horrors of the death camps in the spring of 1945 after the end of World War II. The shape of the umbrella and the amorphous, seemingly charred seated figure of the man, may also relate to the news of the horrific destruction caused by the atomic bomb, the mushroom cloud of which may be reflected in the form of the open umbrella.
The pink colour of the background seems almost innocuous. It may be linked to the colour of flesh or with the pink panels of the walls of Albert Speer’s Mosaic Room in Berlin’s New Reich Chancellery. What looks almost like a patterned carpet as a floor also resembles the panels of coloured marble in the Chancellery’s Mosaic Room. The painting obviously meant a lot to Bacon, as he repeated it in a second version 25 years later in 1971. There the background is a more strident Chrome Yellow and the floor a greeny-grey. The man’s body is more clearly delineated. He wears a brown coat beneath a brown umbrella and his crossed legs and buttocks appear to be bare, though with laced boots. This later canvas, given to the Tate Gallery, lacks some of the immediacy and conviction of the original.
Painting 1946 is more experimental than many of Bacon’s earlier works. It employs a combination of paint and pastel, with a surface that was considered technically relatively unstable. So it travel infrequently, remaining in the Modern Art Gallery in New York, for which it was bought two years after it was created. It was purchased initially by Erica Brausen of the Redfern Gallery, then the Hannover Gallery, for £200 (then a generous sum for a still relatively new artist to the scene). She was to become Bacon’s first dealer, and passed it on to the Museum of Modern Art, New York for £240. It is said that by the time Bacon saw the painting again, decades after it had been purchased for America, the background pink had altered to a hue and tone that Bacon considered disagreeable. He apparently asked to be allowed to repaint this, but the curators wisely refused.
Because of the materials combined in its making, the work was considered in too unstable a condition to travel from America to Bacon’s important retrospective at the Tate Gallery. Francis’ disappointment led to his decision to repaint the image for his Grand Palais exhibition in Paris, in case the Museum of Modern Art would again refuse. But by that time MoMA had the work restored and the combination of unstable materials stabilised.
Fragment of a Crucifixion [1950 Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven]
This is one of Bacon’s strangest creatures; it is more like a small flying or splayed, distorted animal with a screaming human mouth, short impotent legs and visible genitals, in form similar to the open heart in Catholic images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Although it is one of his strangest crucifixions, it is closest to the imagery of traditional Christian crucifixion paintings. Above, a dog-like creature reaches over the transom bar of the cross. It is in the position of the figure reaching over the cross in Deposition pictures. It is painted on the raw brown of canvas, with spontaneously- drawn graffiti-like marks on either side of the cross.
This image feels to be the work most influenced by Giacometti. Bacon claimed to dislike it later, as he felt it was too much like “traditional story-telling” [AS.p.145]. But again he may have been disingenuous in his statement, as the imagery is more surreal than any common narrative.
Farson claims that in an interview, Sir Basil Spence told him that in 1951, he had considered Bacon for designing the altar tapestry in Coventry Cathedral, rather than Graham Sutherland. [F.p.134]. If this is true, I expect that Bacon would have refused the commission. However, it is fascinating to speculate what the painter, as a committed atheist, might have designed. Although Sutherland’s tapestry was, and still is, controversial, Bacon’s choice of imagery would undoubtedly have been more-so.
Three Studies for a Crucifixion triptych [1962 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York]
The 1962 and 1965 triptychs of the Crucifixion are among the most narrative of Bacon’s works apart from the tragic triptych after the death of George Dyer. The 1962 triptych, painted against a rich crimson and scarlet background is the most visceral and blood-like. (Bacon often spoke of his love of the colour of congealing blood.) It was painted specifically for inclusion in the major retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery in that year, developing from the three smaller panels on the same subject [1944] owned by the Tate. It was the first of a large number of triptychs on which Bacon worked during the rest of his career.
Bacon said “I worked on them (the individual canvases of the triptych) separately and gradually, as I finished them, worked on the three across the room together. It was a thing that I did in about a fortnight, when I was in a bad mood of drinking, and I did it under tremendous hangovers and drink; I sometimes hardly knew what I was doing. And it’s one of the only pictures I’ve been able to do under drink. I think perhaps the drink helped me to be a bit freer... in the end you could call it despair. Because it is really comes out of an absolute feeling of it’s impossible to do these things, so I might as well do anything. And out of this anything, one sees what happens/” [S.p.11].
Francis was no-doubt over-exaggerating his dependence on drink throughout the painting of the project, but whatever was driving him, he certainly created powerful images. The crucified figure is in the right-hand panel, hanging downward, like a carcass of meat, and more like a deposition than the carcass in Painting [1946]. (It is unlikely that Bacon was intending any conscious or subconscious reference here to Jewish kosher aversion to pork or unceremoniously slaughtered meat, and almost certainly not intending any ironic association with his surname, as some have joked). The figure was partly influenced by Cimabue’s Crucifixion, irrevocably damaged in the floods of Florence in1966. Francis admired the great painting and gave his prize-money of that year towards its restoration and the Florence Appeal. Bacon described the sinuous curvature of Christ’s body in Cimabue’s work as like ‘a worm crawling down the cross... I did try to make something of the feeling which I’ve sometimes had from the picture of this image just moving, undulating down the cross” [S.p.14]. In Francis’ painting the arms are a circle of bones and the rib-cage is open. The idea of presenting the crucified body upside-down may have been suggested by photographs of the great crucifix hanging damaged in a tree outside Florence after the flood, but it has also been suggested that it could have been influenced by photographs of Mussolini’s hanging corpse. One leg-bone appears to be sawn-through. The mouth is open and screaming, while a bulbous pillow like lump of fat seems to have emptied from the torso. Bacon used the later idea to represent life seeping form figures like coloured shadows. Beneath the figure is a black silhouette, which looks rather like a dog, but could be the shadow of the crucified, the shadow of life pouring from him, a mourning woman looking on, or in the case of the abattoir, the slaughterer:
Speaking in the context of these 60s Crucifixion triptychs, with their strong emphasis on the bones and ripped flesh of the carcass Bacon said: “There is this great beauty of the colour of meat... of course we are meat, we are partial carcasses. If I go into a butchers shop I always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal. But using the meat in that particular way (in the Crucifixions) is possibly the way one might use the spine, because we are constantly seeing images of the human body through X-ray photographs and that obviously does alter the way one might use the human body.” [S.p.46].... they (his Crucifixions) certainly have always emphasised the horror side of it. But I don’t feel this particularly in my work. I have never tried to be horrific. One only has to have observed things to know the undercurrents to realise that anything that I have been able to do hasn’t stressed that side of life. When you go into a butcher’s shop and see how beautiful meat can be and then you think about it, you can think of the whole horror of life – of one thing living off another.” [S.p.48]
He told Sylvester in relation to this triptych: “I’ve always been moved by pictures of slaughter-houses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the crucifixion. There’ve been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animal just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death. We don’t know of course, but it appears by these photographs that they’re so aware of what is going to happen to them, they do everything to escape. I think these pictures were very much based on that kind of thing, which to me is very, very near the whole thing of the Crucifixion. I know for religious people, for Christians, the Crucifixion has a totally different significance. But as a non-believer, it was just an act of man’s behaviour, a way of behaviour to one another.” [S.p.23]. For a Christian believer, this perspective can also be a moving and meaningful interpretation. In some ways, what the hardened soldiers were doing to Jesus’ body, and what was in the minds of those were crucifying him and demanding crucifixion, may not have been too far from Bacon’s perception. From that perspective, as well as that of a humanitarian activist, Christ’s words ‘Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing!” [Lk.23:34] make sense.
The central panel continues the image of horror. The figure lying on a striped mattress and white pillow, on an iron-framed bed looks rather like an horrifically mutilated victim of Jack the Ripper. Blood splatters the mattress, pillow and the three black blinds that have been drawn down in the room. While legs, feet, buttocks and head are distinguishable, they are badly distorted. The head seems to have been caved-in, around the teeth-filled mouth and some of the innards of the body may be strewn on the mattress. There are resonances with Sickert’s paintings of women as victims. This figure could be either male or female. The flayed and crucified figure could be waiting to be laid to rest in the tomb.
In the left-hand panel, two male figures watch the spectacle, their view looking directly outward towards the spectator, drawing us into the scene, as figures do in conventional religious paintings of the crucifixion. One wears a suit, perhaps representing a pot-bellied figure of authority, arms behind his back, unaffected by the horror. The other, who is bald, bandaged, or wearing a turban, is dressed entirely in black apart from a collar, resembling ermine. He points towards the scenes in the other two panels. He looks more pointedly at the viewer as though justifying what has been done. Before him is a large dark panel or opening. Neither of these figures seem perturbed. Two, sawn half-carcases rest on a table at the front of the image, almost as though they are the legs of the crucified, or the distorted image of a skull in the foreground of Holbein’s The Ambassadors [National Gallery, London].
One traditionally reads most western triptych paintings from left to right. But the narrative this triptych may be intended to be read from right to left. The crucified figure is taken down from the cross, laid to rest in the tomb, and the on-looking black figure could be sealing the tomb aware of the third crucified man or drawing our attention to the blackness, bleakness and horrors of the human condition.
Bacon obviously realised the importance of these images, since they are painted with such care and detail of texture. Far from being as spontaneous as the imagery suggested, they are precisely outlined and carefully in-filled with paint. This would seem to deny the possibility that the work was created in a drunken state.
Crucifixion triptych [1965 Bayerische Staatsgemälesammlungen Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich]
Francis returned to the subject in 1965 in preparing new, impressive images for his prestigious Grand Palais, Paris exhibition to be held 6 years later in 1971. The scene here is not necessarily religious, though its narrative seems to be similar to that of the 1962 triptych. Here the crucified figure is in the central panel. Rather than having his arms free, his forearms have been strapped down to the base of the cross, rather like photographs of men strapped into the electric-chair in American executions or Nazi tortures. The battered figure wears a rosette on his chest like butchered prize-winning beef. The main figure in the left-hand panel is similar to the raped figure on the bed in the central panel of the 1962 triptych, but is even more dismembered, resembling a skull on a pile of body-parts, with other innerds spilling onto the mattress, which here is on the floor rather than on a bed-frame. A semi-naked woman figure is in the room, standing almost like a prostitute awaiting trade. It has been suggested that she represents Mary Magdalene, falsely associated in some historic traditions with having been a former prostitute. She stands, lost, in front of a large black void, which may represent her despair and lack of hope. The right hand panel is stranger. The two on-looking men have here become straw-hatted gentlemen at a bar, who might equally be watching or scoring a cricket-match, rather that witnessing a crucifixion. The appear unmoved by the horrific scene before them. Further to the foreground, though ignored by them is a bound contrapposto figure, who may be intended to be equivalent to the mocked and whipped Christ in the biblical narrative. He is based on Michelangelo nudes, yet controversially wears a swastika armband as in an earlier Crucifixion. He is almost in the position of George Dyer on the stool or toilet in his other triptychs. There may be social content in this triptych, implying that some are affected by the horrors of the human condition, while some remain oblivious or unemotional about it. Uncomfortably the naked figures in both the right and left hand panels incorporate Nazi swastika armbands, suggesting rather distastefully, a link between the persecuted figures, Christ, and the Jewish Holocaust. Bacon discussed this with David Sylvester and admitted that in hindsight it was ‘a stupid thing to do’. He claimed that he had wanted to break the visual continuity of the arm and add strong colour to it, and that this was done entirely for aesthetic reasons, to make the figure and composition work formally. He denied intending specific Nazi associations [S.p.65]. But Bacon was fascinated by the horrors engendered by Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels, pinning photographs of them among so many other atrocities on his studio wall and considering what influenced their brutality and how they were allowed to get away with it for so long.
It has been claimed that “Bacon’s Crucifixions are dominated by the smells of the slaughterhouse. There is no way out and no redemption only horror, pain and dead meat” [P.p.225]. But this in not fully true; they carry far more serious psychological and humanitarian intentions. In a way Bacon was pandering to his ‘bad-boy’ image when he allowed Deakin to photograph him in Smithfield Market, flanked by two sides of beef [P.p224]. His imagery was not just trying to shock sensibilities by adopting such a key religious subject, so significant in the history of art and culture, to a carcass of meat. He was using that shock to focus people’s thoughts on the human condition.
Francis’s Crucifixion paintings are not blasphemous, degrading or nihilistic about the subject-matter. They are hardly more visceral than Grünewald or Otto Dix’s representations of the subject. They represent ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ (and animals), and are secular not religious subjects. Soldiers in war and forensic scientists witness far worse. What is wonderful in the paintings is that Bacon was able to make such striking even beautiful images out of the statement that human beings have butchered a world through advancing themselves above the image of God or any sense of right, truth, justice and care of one’s neighbour.
THE SCREAMING POPES
Soon after the Three Figures for the Base of a Crucifixion, Bacon began to work on a series of heads, which included his first head of a screaming pope. These were exhibited at the Hannover Gallery from 8th Nov. to 10th Dec. 1949. Bacon gave no explanation of the reason for this series or the meanings behind the pictures. A review in Time magazine quotes him as saying: “They are just an attempt to make a certain type of feeling visual... Painting is the pattern of one’s nervous system being projected onto the canvas”. Of the head of the pope (Head VI) he continued “One of the problems is to paint like Velazquez but with the texture of hippopotamus skin” [21 Nov.1949]. The meaning of this reference to hippopotamus is unclear and was also never explained. As the term ‘the hide of a rhinoceros’ sounds similar, he may be referring to the hardening of human beings as a result of the pressures or horrors of life. Perhaps he felt that the Church was hardened or immune to the damage that he considered it had done to humanity, and saw the Pope as a symbol of this. The main focus of the picture is a stretched screaming mouth above vestmented shoulders in front of a blind with a pull-cord. It has been suggested that the blind refers to Hitler’s bunker blinds, which were represented in Painting 1946. The painter seems to have been trying to create the sense of shock that he himself felt on first sight of horrific magazine photographs of atrocities. With its iconoclastic ecclesiastical imagery, Head VI was the image that created the greatest shock and confusion in visitors to the exhibition, but it was praised by Wyndham Lewis in a review in the Spectator [12 May1949].
The theme of the Popes preoccupied Bacon through 1950 and he returned to it sporadically over the next 10 years. He wrote of them at the time: “It is thrilling to paint from a picture which really excites you. I’m sick to death of everything I’ve done in the past, but continue to think like a child or a fool that I’m on the edge of doing a good painting.” [P.p.125]. David Sylvester speculated that the image of the Pope (‘Il Papa’) might have been connected subconsciously with Bacon’s feeling about his own father’s authoritarian dominance. As his background was Protestant, it seems unlikely, as Bacon claimed that he had never thought of the subject in that way [S.p.71]. The papal figure may have attracted him more because it was a sign of the ultimate traditional authority-figure, whose religion and political and social dominance was no longer secure. In the 20th Century the papal pomp and authority was already dissolving amid the disbelief and distrust of authoritarian regimes in modern post-war society. The changing position of the Pope may also have appealed to Bacon’s own sense of isolation in which self-protection had become so necessary.
Francis claimed in an interview that he had nothing against Popes, but he “wanted an excuse to use those colours, and you can’t give ordinary clothes that colour without getting into a sort of false Fauve manner.” [1962 Tate Gallery retrospective catalogue p.29]. This claim may be considered slightly disingenuous, as there were obviously reasons other than formal ones for choosing such a distinguished and significant subject. For example, Bacon sold Sylvester: “It is true, of course, that the Pope is unique. He is put in a unique position by being the Pope, and therefore, like in certain great tragedies, he’s as though raised onto a dais on which the grandeur of this image can be displayed to the world.” [S.p.26]. One of the tragedies against which the Pope might be screaming could be the fact that he was representing a faith and a power in which many in the world could no longer believe. Bacon also spoke of the difference between painting such a portrait in the past and the present: “Even when Velazquez was painting (and Rembrandt), in a particular way they were still , whatever their attitude to life, slightly conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities, which man now, you could say, has had completely cancelled out of him.” [S.p.29].
In some of the paintings the folds of curtains behind the pope extend over his face and body, as if forming the bars of a cage or a veil. These may suggest that the former powers of the papacy, as well as religion itself, are now imprisoned, or create their own prison.
Bacon later stated that regretted having made the works, though it was not because he regretted the theme. He claimed that his regret was that he wished that he could have done them better. He admired Velazquez’ technique, style and the power of the master’s image so greatly that he felt that he had been ‘stupid’ to use it in the way that he had. Surprisingly, however, when Bacon had the opportunity to view the original Velazquez painting himself on a visit to Italy for the Venice Biennale, where he was exhibiting with Lucien Freud and Ben Nicholson, he avoided travelling to do so. He may have claimed that the painting was “one of the greatest portraits that have ever been made.” [S.p.24], and admitted to becoming ‘obsessed by it’ [S.p.37], but he only worked from postcards and reproductions of the paintings and never actually saw the original. This may have stemmed from a similar source to his shyness with people. Perhaps he was awed at Velazquez’ genius, which he admired in the worked in the National Gallery, and felt that he would be intimidated or disappointed by the original. Peppiatt believes that he also may have held a superstition about a direct confrontation with the picture. But it is just as likely, that Francis might have been frightened that he could be disappointed by the painting if he saw the original of something that had obsessed him for years. When in Rome, instead of visiting the Palazzo Doria Pamphilij, where the painting hung, he admitted to having spent hours walking around St. Peter’s - a rather strange pursuit for someone who claimed not to believe in religion and said that he “loathed churches” S.p.38].
Bacon amalgamated Diego Velazquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X [Doria Pamphilij Gallery, Rome, 1650] with a scream in one of the most famous stills from Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin [1925] - the old nurse shot through her eye and screaming. Francis kept various reproductions of both images on his studio wall for years. During his early visits to Paris, Bacon had been impressed by the strong imagery of Eisenstein’s radical films. Battleship Potemkin and Strike both contained strong images of butchery. Eisenstein’s theories of the expressive possibilities of montage published in The Film Sense [1943] influenced Bacon’s own attitude to the powerful juxtaposition of fragmentary imagery in his paintings. As with Painting 1946, Bacon was not making primarily narrative paintings, but creating the expressive equivalent of montaged imagery. An exception is Triptych 1973, painted after George Dyer’s death, of which Bacon told a Times reporter in 1985: “I suppose in so far as my pictures are ever any kind of illustration, this comes as close as any to a kind of narrative.” [quoted F.p.187]
The screaming face remained a theme in Bacon’s oeuvre for over half of his career. Some critics associate it with Francis’ lifelong asthma, but this seems anachronistic and too literal. Bacon himself talked of using the mouth as an expressive theme, rather as Monet had been fascinated by sunsets [S.p.72]. Painting is essentially a silent medium, yet the screaming / crying / calling / roaring / shouting / yawning or laughing mouths in Bacon’s work give a sense of the dimension of sound, vocal expression and movement to ta physically static, silent image. In the 1958 T.V. documentary ‘The Art Game’, when the interviewer claimed that people found his work shocking, the artist replied: “I think that sometimes I have used subject-matter which people think is sensational because one of the things I have wanted to do was to record the human cry... and if I could do it... it would of course be sensational... (That cry is) the whole coagulation of pain, despair... Happiness and love is a wonderful thing to paint also – I always hope I will be able to do that too... it’s only the reverse side of the shadow.” He said of his paintings of men screaming: “I wanted to paint the scream more than the horror. I think if I had really thought about what causes somebody to scream, I would have made the scream that I tried to paint more successful... because I should in a sense have been more conscious of the horror that produced the scream. In fact they were too abstract.” [S.p.49].
As well as the Eisenstein photograph of the dying, screaming nurse, Bacon used photographs of mouths from other photographic sources including fine art images of classical heads of maenads and the agonised shouts of Laocoȍn and his sons, or paintings of the execution of martyrs. An iconic scream that Francis remembered form his youth was that of a mother in Massacre of the Innocents by Nicholas Poussin, which Bacon knew from his visits to the Musée Condé in Chantilly. Another regular source for his screaming mouths was a book of hand-coloured plates of diseases of the mouth, which he had bought on his first stay in Paris and which he claimed obsessed him [S.p.35]. This was a major inspiration and source for his ‘Heads’ series of 1949, of which Head VI represented the Pope.
Bacon also used a copy of the semi-Surrealist magazine Document [1930], which included photographs of mouths by Jacques-Andre Boiffard, illustrating an article by its editor Georges Bataille on the links between animal and human expression, which was close to Bacon’s ideas: “... human life is still bestially concentrated in the mouth: fury, makes men grind their teeth, terror and atrocious suffering transform the mouth into the organ of tearing screams. (The head, neck and mouth under tension) assumes the position it normally occupies in the constitution of animals. As if explosive impulses were to spurt directly out of the body through the mouth, in the form of screams.”
Bacon worked on his series of paintings of the Pope, often screaming, over more than twenty years. He was already working on ideas for the images in 1946 when painting in the South of France. He began them almost immediately after the completion of Painting 1946 in which the human figure is juxtaposed against a carcass of beef, in which the human condition seems to be regarded as more bestial than spiritual. He is reported as stating that whenever he passed a butcher’s shop or abattoir he was surprised to think that he was not represented there, rather than animals [S.p.46]
Bacon destroyed a number of his papal images. His first surviving version of the Pope was Head VI [late 1949 Arts Council of Great Britain collection]. Here the Pope may be experiencing similar existential anguish to the artist. He is also recognising many of the horrors of the world that ordinary people, including believers, experienced. It is uncertain whether Bacon was making specific reference to the contemporary criticism which Pope Pius XII was receiving over his failure to stand up against the Nazis and Italian Fascists during his reign. He had been informed of horrors being inflicted in concentration camps and other atrocities. Yet he opted for appeasement and acquiesce to the rise and power of the Nazis, rather than standing up to their atrocities and using his powers and influence to work against them. It is obvious from Francis obsession with the image that the papal paintings were painted with serious intentions. He continued producing related images through to the mid-1960s, though he later dismissed the works as ‘silly’, saying that he regretted painting them [S.p.37]. Bacon produced several works based on different artists who he admired, including Van Gogh, Delacroix and Millet. But in the papal heads seem to have become closer to his heart. Their meaning seems to be as much about the power and religious associations of the subject as the strength and artistic qualities of the image.
Velazquez’ portrait appears to express the power and confidence of the sitter. He is enthroned, like an icon of power, rather like the fascist imagery in the background of Painting 1946. While Velazquez’ imagery suggests propaganda of papal importance, Bacon subverts it. This suggests to some critics the connection with the criticism of Pope Pius XII, as the theme was being painted at a time when the criticism of Pius XII was at its height and the role and relevance of the Catholic Church and its proclamations were being questioned more than ever before. On the walls of Bacon’s studio the artist hung a photograph of Pius XII being carried aloft from St. Peters in Rome above the heads of the crowd on a ‘sedia gestatoria’. By contrast to this demonstration of power, Bacon’s Popes appear to represent the existential human agony of feeling isolated and alone, vulnerable, with a loss of faith and trust in the divine as well as his own Church institution. Frustration with faith was a feature of the growing atheism or agnosticism which grew in Western society in the post-war years and continues today. In most of Bacon’s papal paintings, the Pope is contained within a transparent frame, which is almost like a psychological as well as temporal and spatial prison. These may be related to a description which Bacon read in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy [1872] about people “enclosed within the wretched glass capsule of the human condition.” Bacon’s Popes are far from being Nietzsche’s ‘Superman’ leaders: they seem trapped within the imitations of their own symbolic image and role.
The scream of the Pope is in several ways parallel to the screaming face of the nurse gunned-down by soldiers on the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin. Both are witnessing a changing world where human priorities were altering, powers and positions were changing, and traditions, accepted norms and ways of life were recognised as no longer sufficient for the needs of the majority of human beings. In 1957 Bacon produced a painting of the nurse [Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main], though he represented her naked, seated against a green background. She too is being destroyed by the institution which should be protecting the people. Here, as in many of his male figures, she seems to represent the confusion and terror of the human race in the face of changing understandings of life – a symbol of the disillusionment with ideas and ideals, which Bacon also felt.
Bacon seems to have been fascinated by the scream as a subject. It may also relate to Edvard Munch’s famous painting in which a screaming figure was juxtaposed to a sunset that Munch said appeared as ‘a scream emanating from and expanding through the whole of nature’. Bacon’s painting The Chimpanzee [1955 Staatsgalerie Stuttgart] expresses a similar scream behind bars. In relating back to the face of a mother in Nicholas Poussin’s canvas of The Massacre of the Innocents, 1630 in the Château de Chantilly, Bacon may also have been considering links between faith and violence, which were so apparent in his native Ireland. [S.p.35]. The Poussin was the first image that Bacon, who had not been brought up with art, remembered having had a strong early effect on him. It is possible that the horror on the mother’s face as she attempted to save her son, affected him subconsciously, by comparison to his own mother’s coldness towards him. He called the image “probably the best human cry in painting” [S.p.34].
The Study after Velazquez [Private Collection 1950] includes a strongly striped background based on photographs of Albert Speer’s settings for Hitler’s 1936 (1937?) Nuremberg Rally. Speer’s ‘Cathedral of Light’ included a huge battery of searchlights directed vertically to create a form of Aurora Borealis effect or pillars of a Valhalla of light reaching into the heavens. Bacon may have made connections with the drapery folds behind the Pope, to tight prison bars that subvert his position of radiance and authoritarian dominance. Radiating from the figure at the base of the picture are grey lines that may represent reflection of the light, but appear more like straps tying down and restraining the papal figure in physical or psychological bondage. They might suggest the straps on an Electric Chair, also represented in one of Bacon’s Crucifixion triptychs. These lines are more subtly present in Study after Velazquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X [1953 Des Moines Art Centre]. The rails around the Chrome-Yellow throne certainly resemble those on an electric chair. These amalgamations of the spiritual & political powers of the Pope with the Fascist aspirations of the Nazi regime were never precisely interpreted by Bacon. He claimed to journalist Neville Wallis that his motives for the images were ‘purely aesthetic’. But in the perspective of Bacon’s other subject-matter this professed disinterestedness in the subject seems unconvincing. He later claimed “I’m just trying to make images as accurately of my nervous system as I can. I don’t even know what half of them mean. I’m not trying to say anything” [S.p.43 & 82]. It seems obvious that Bacon was deliberately creating ambiguous images without making deliberate social, political or religious statements. If we read religious, philosophical, symbolic or biographical meanings into his work, he would claim that these are our subjective interpretations, not any didactic message intended by the artist.
The paintings of the Pope may also be associated with Bacon’s homosexuality. He knew that the Roman Catholic Church, which he had encountered in his background of early years in Dublin, was opposed to his sexuality, as was the Protestant Church, most other churches at the time and much of British society. His own father, as a military man, was similarly inflexible in his attitudes, who punished and rejected Francis when he discovered his homosexuality. The screaming pope may even be interpreted as shouting orders or expressing disgust dictatorially. Some critics have speculated that subconsciously or consciously Bacon may have associated images of the Pope with the dictatorial attitudes of his own father, for whom he also later admitted to feeling a sexual attraction, though he disliked him [S.p.71]. Some apparently find vestments and religious power erotic. But there is little of attraction in Bacon’s images of the tormented Pope, other than the visual attractiveness of the image.
Despite all these potential interpretations of the papal images we must remember that Bacon refused to specifically describe or define the meanings of his paintings. He left the interpretation to the viewer, who may bring many possible interpretations to the image from personal existential angst to religious beliefs. A major incentive behind them may even have primarily been that to create such a dramatic and shocking image of a person who was still an iconic figure in world society, would shock and draw attention to the artist’s works. It certainly did.
After a period of dearth in the 1950s, Bacon’s creativity revived and among many new themes and triptychs, in the early 1960s, Bacon revived an interest in religious imagery. He returned to occasional images of the Popes. His later dislike of the paintings of popes was particularly from a technical critique, as he told Peter Beard:
“I really don’t like those popes. I think it’s an aesthetic thing really - I just don’t like the form. I think I could have done it so much better.” [quoted F.p.214 & 226]. Yet no artist is ever truly satisfied with their work and Francis was looking back on work done before he had reached his maturity. He was criticising the works in the light of his later ideas, understanding of art and technical development. It is clear from the fame that these works still maintain, that the paintings of Popes were very significant in his career and his expansion of ideas and techniques. Nevertheless, he still spoke of the Pope pictures as “a great failure. I was hypnotised at the time by the sheer beauty. They were too obvious, and too cheap.” [AS.p.128].
I find it hard to agree that they were “too obvious, too cheap” at the time. They were brash and attracted attention, but Bacon was being innovative and critical of society even a decade before ‘Beyond the Fringe’, ‘That Was The Week That Was’ and other critiques of the religious and political status quo. His was among the first 20th Century British art to challenge accepted norms and institutions in the ways that Hogarth and political cartoonists had done, but in the realm of Fine Art, and at the level of academic History Painting.
STUDIES OF VAN GOGH ON THE ROAD TO TARASCON
In my personal opinion, Bacon’s variations on images of Van Gogh are not among his greatest works, but they are nevertheless extremely significant. They were produced mostly from 1956 to 1957, in a spate of painting at a time when Bacon was seeking new directions. Previously, Vincent had been the subject of one of his ‘Heads’ painted in 1951. Many of the Vincent pictures were still wet when hung at the Hannover Gallery exhibition in March 1957, and two arrived after the opening, This gives the impression that he may have worked on some in desperation to have enough images for the show. Among his most expressionist work, the methods and compositions of some do not seem to have been considered as profoundly as many of his other compositions. Yet they influenced the use of a brighter colour palette in his subsequent painting and his use of expressive, though later more considered, brush-marks. They seem experimental and not always fully resolved, as pieces through which he was trying to find new ways of working. Francis used the freshness of Vincent’s approach to paint and also Soutine, who Bacon admired, and de Kooning, who was currently in fashion, but about whose work Francis later expressed greater ambivalence.
In the images of Vincent, Bacon dealt with the identity of ‘the artist’ more specifically than in many of his other works. He seems to have identified with Vincent, as he did with Rimbaud and Lautréamont, as original outsiders. All Bacon’s paintings could be regarded as the artist confronting his subjects, but by painting Van Gogh in a number of pictures, produced quickly for exhibition in 1957, he was considering the nature of an artist in the world and his role as an experiencer and observer of his environment. Technically, their painting style is closer to Vincent’s expressive overall brushwork than any of Bacon’s other pictures, perhaps because he was reflecting Van Gogh’s own method of expression of the forces in the world, as expounded in Vincent’s letters, which Bacon re-read regularly.
Bacon didn’t fully explain his fascination with Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon [1888], which had been destroyed in the bombing of the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Magdeburg, during World War II. It was certainly not among Van Gogh’s greatest works. It may have fascinated him because it had been destroyed by war. Yet also, more than Vincent’s other self-portraits, it showed the artist standing in context of the world which he was trying to capture in his art, rather than looking at himself in a mirror. Picasso represented himself in scenes in his many pictures of the artist with his model in his studio, but it is not something Francis tried in his own self-portraits, other than a few where he represents himself as part of a group. The fact that Vincent’s painting was famous for having been destroyed may also have inspired Bacon’s sense of the irony and ultimate meaninglessness of what Frances called “the game of making art”. He called the Road to Tarascon self-portrait “the phantom of the road”. [P.p.168] .
Vincent has been described as a ‘tortured soul’. Bacon didn’t admit to being that himself; rather he often claimed to be ‘optimistic’. But there is no doubt that there were tortured elements of his personality and life. He did admit that he felt isolated as an artist [AS.p.274]. Vincent had called himself “a loner upon earth”, and Farson definitely recognised loneliness in Bacon, even in busy social situations. Bacon read Van Gogh’s letters avidly, keeping them by his bedside [P.p.168]. One cannot read these without in many ways identifying as well as empathising with the artist.
We cannot be sure in what ways Francis identified with Vincent. He certainly recognised a similar search for realism rather than illustrative naturalism in his work. He said of Vincent: “You know, for me, Van Gogh got very close to the real thing about art when he said something like, I can’t remember the right words: “What I do may be a lie, but it conveys reality more accurately.” That’s a very complex thing. After all, it’s not so-called ‘realist’ painters who manage to convey reality best.” [P.M.p.164]. Bacon took this idea further “Well, art itself is artifice. It’s an illusion, and if an image is going to work it has to be reinvented artificially. I mean, think of Van Gogh. You’ve never actually seen a boot or a starry night like that, have you? ... But reality has to be reinvented to convey the intensity of the real.” [P.M.p.164]. This ‘reinvention to convey the intensity of the real’ is at the heart of Francis’ work as well as that of Van Gogh and many of the artists who Bacon admired.
Sadly, partly because of his homosexuality, Bacon also felt that he needed to developed artificiality in his own life. But in the ethos of the clubs and circles that he frequented, that artificiality often seems to have become a caricature of himself, who was actually more sensitive than his drinking, waspish comments and the violence of his art made him seem. He confessed to Peppiatt: “I’m probably the most artificial man you’ve ever met” [P.M.p.173]. “I’ve had a disastrous life, but actually it has become more various than my paintings. It’s gone deeper than what are called the ‘moeurs’ of my times. I think I’m unique. Everyone is unique of course, it’s just that I have been able to work a bit on my uniqueness. I’ve tried to make myself profoundly artificial” [P.M.p.181]. And in a sad period of reflection he admitted: “I’ve tried in different ways to remake myself over the years. Of course it hasn’t really worked. But there it is. Nothing has ever really worked out for me.” [M.P.p.95]. Part of his admiration for Van Gogh may have been that in Vincent’s letters he recognised a man who was ‘profoundly real’ and had expressed that reality so movingly in both his paintings and writings.
Vincent was, or regarded himself as, an outsider in society, creating work that visually and emotively interpreted his own inner feelings and responses to the outside world. He was aware that his art was not yet understood or appreciated, but believed that the time would come when his realism would be recognised. Bacon considered himself an outsider from his family in a similar way to Vincent, as he had not lived up to their expectations of him. Bacon’s expression of his sexuality was very different from that of Vincent, but he saw himself as an outsider in being homosexual, and was similarly frustrated in relationships and unhappy in love, though Bacon indulged his sexuality more than Vincent was able to do. The idea of Van God being “the ultimate outsider” [P.p.169] probably appealed to the romantic side of Francis. Bacon would have read in Vincent’s letters the artist’s feelings, spiritual understandings and expressive and artistic ideas. Vincent, like Bacon, drew beauty and creativity from his frustrations, sensations and longings, yet all these moved them both towards their own destruction in different ways. Francis had recognised a similar self-destructiveness in the talents and obsessions of Peter Lacy. Vincent’s letters also record his struggle with the Christian faith of his youth, missionary activity and his family’s theological tradition. When Vincent wrote “for me the God of the clergymen is dead”, however, he meant something very different from Bacon or Nietzsche’s pronouncements on the ‘banality’ and ‘impossibility’ of faith in the 20th Century. Vincent never personally renounced belief in God, just the limited type of God that his tradition had promoted.
In his portraits of Van Gogh, Bacon interpreted in his own style the free, expressive brushwork and vitality of Vincent’s painting, as well as the use of strong, expressive colour. This is especially shown in Study for Portrait of Van Gogh III [Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington 1957], one of his most scribbly paintings. Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V [also in Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington 1957] is by contrast a slimmed down simplified composition, with strong lines of perspective and colour fields in the background that seem similar to Diebenkorn’s later Ocean Park Series [painted between 1966 and 1988].
American Abstract Expressionism was coming into fashion in Europe, through its promotion by American institutions. It developed some similar ideas to those of Bacon, but Francis claimed not to have been attracted to what he regarded as ‘decorative’ and ‘chancy’ art, which he considered was not balanced by ordered discipline of composition. (He seems to be talking particularly of artists like De Kooning here, rather than Mark Rothko or Barnet Newman.) Francis’s figurative work owed more to the disciplined expressive art of Rodin, Courbet and a strong admiration for Michelangelo [S.p.114] and Degas, whose clarity of drawing was far stronger than the spontaneity and lack of precision of Bacon’s own drawing and anatomy. Bacon claimed “I learned grandeur of form from Michelangelo, and the voluptuous male nude… and I learned positions from Muybridge.” {AS.p.126]. Surprisingly, Francis told Peppiatt that he found and loved the voluptuousness in Michelangelo’s drawings more than his sculptures. [P.M.p.164]: (Bacon certainly represented Vincent with greater ‘grandeur of form’ and scale than in Vincent’s much smaller self-portraits and the figure dominated by the landscape in the Road to Tarascon.) Francis had admired Degas’ drawing in an exhibition of his drawn monotypes and drawings in the Lefevre Gallery, London in spring 1958 and believed them to be greater than his oil paintings {P.M.p.164]. Bacon spoke of his own spontaneity as sometimes even throwing paint on the canvas without knowing what would happen. But he stressed “I really like highly disciplined painting. I don’t use highly disciplined methods of constructing it. I think the only thing is that my paint looks immediate.” [S.p.92]. This is far from the experimental, intuitive expressiveness of Francis’ Van Gogh paintings, but perhaps he needed to go through this phase to free his techniques and use of colour as well as to discover what was important to him about composition and subject-matter.
Interviewed by Sylvester, he likened his idea of ‘the creative accident’ to his love of gambling [S.p.51-53]. This parallel was probably slightly tongue-in-cheek, as his later art was quite calculated, as may have been his gambling at times when he was not drunk or distracted. Of what he called “the creative accident... splashing the stuff down and see how it lands” [F.p.8 & 9], he told Sylvester: “I foresee it in my mind, I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it... It is not an accident because it becomes a selective process which part of this accident one chooses to preserve. One is attempting of course to keep the vitality of the accident and yet preserve a continuity.” [S.p.17]. He further explained his process of the more ordered throwing and scrubbing with paint to Sylvester [S.p.90-94]. Without the freedom of the Van Gogh portraits, Francins might have taken longer to discover the value of the ‘creative accident’.
In the early 1960s, by contrast to the news fashion for Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Bacon’s figurative work appeared to some to be outmoded as a form of Modern Art, though he painted with renewed vigour and confidence. His late work was more carefully controlled, as he told Richard Cork in 1991 “I never think of my work as convulsive... I love very ordered work.” [quoted F.p.9 & S.p.56]. By contrast he also said of his 1962 Crucifixion: “I did (it) when I was on drink for about a fortnight. Sometimes it loosens you, but again I think it also dulls other areas. It leaves you freer, but on the other hand it dulls your final judgement of what you hold. I don’t actually believe that drink and drugs help me.” [S.p.54].
It is clear from this that Bacon’s painting is not as unreasoned as he sometimes claimed. He came to his canvas with an initial idea, however vague, and, as most artists, modified and changed it as it developed, sometimes reaching a very different conclusion to that with which he began.
PORTRAITS
Bacon’s portraits of friends have often been criticised for making people appear ugly or deformed. Surprisingly, for a time it became ‘chic’ to have your portrait painted by Francis [P.M.p.368]. But though he had a nihilistic attitude towards human value and lack of confidence in human identity, this was not his main aim in his portraits. He claimed of his portraiture: “Nowadays you need to reinvent the way you communicate facts.” [P.M.p.345]. “I am only trying to deform into truth... After all, photography has done so much so how are you to make a portrait nowadays unless you can bring what’s called the facts of someone’s appearance more directly and more violently back onto the nervous system? You have to deform appearance into image.” [M.P.p.87].
Sometimes he expressed both love and hostility towards the subjects of his portraits [AS.p.204]. This may reflect Francis’s relationships generally, as he was both a generous and committed friend to many, yet could quickly take offence, make cruel, stinging remarks, and break friendships which had lasted for years. The portraits may be distorted, yet when one compares photographs of his sitters to many of their portraits, Francis managed to capture recognisable elements of their nature or character and features, without precise representation of their physiognomy. Bacon told Sylvester: “There is no point in doing a portrait of somebody if you’re not going to make it look like them.” [AS.p.230]. In the academic hierarchy of the arts, Bacon believed that portraiture should replace history painting as the summit of achievement. [P.p.208]. The portraiture which he intended to create was that which explored the subject beyond its surface. As History Painting was once considered deeply philosophical, representing and exploring the roots of culture, Francis felt that his type of portraiture coulod examine the true reality of people.
In discussing his portraiture Bacon claimed: “We nearly always live through screens - a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps from time to time I have been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.” “All I want to do is distort the reality of the human figure into reality.” [F.p.135]. He explained further: “If you think of a portrait, you may at one time have put the mouth somewhere, but you suddenly see through this graph that the mouth should go right across the face... one wants the thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than the simple illustration of the object that you set out to do... facts (and) appearances are ambiguous, and therefore this way of recording form is nearer to the fact by its ambiguity of recording,” [S.p.56]. He likened some of Rembrandt’s late, most free self-portraits to this process [S.p.68], recognising that expressive marks can be more ‘real’ than photographic naturalism. He admired Monet’s late work because he had taken art beyond naturalism: “I think he became really extraordinary towards the end of his life/ He’s given the whole thing (the Waterlilies in the Tuileries) an extraordinary tension by taking it as far has he can into abstraction without losing the specific image. There are only a few great works like this where technique and subject matter are so closely interlocked that you can’t separate one from the other... I often come down here to look at the technique in them.” [P.M.p.163]. We see in this some of the motivation in Bacon’s own works, where figures become abstracted in order to express emotion and vigour without losing the imagery of the subject-matter.
Bacon talked of his portraying ‘emanations from people… fat leaving its ghost”.[AS.p.231]. This is what he was trying to hunt down or explore in his portrait images. Sometimes he represented it physically by the black or coloured shadowed shapes oozing from below some of his figures. By ‘emanations’, he did not mean the spiritualism which was rife in cultured circles in the first half of the 20th Century, but the true nature of his subjects, which might be found in exploring their bone-structure in the case of Leiris or Isabel Rawsthorne, or what made them beautiful or handsome, as in his portrait of Peter Bears or John Edwards.
Bacon developed portraiture as an important part of his oeuvre in the period of renewed creativity in the early 1960s. He learned from Picasso that the portrait can distort the features. He claimed that with the advent of photography “photography has totally altered (figurative painting)... I think Velazquez believed he was recording he court at that time and certain people at that time. But a really good artist today would be forced to make a game of the same situation. He knows that that particular thing could be recorded on film, so this side of the activity has been taken over by something else and all that he is involved with is making the sensibility open up through the image.” [S.p.28 & Catalogue artist’s statement Granville Gallery, New York 1963].
For Bacon more than Picasso, the distortions of physiognomy explore the psychology and presence of the sitter as much as, if not more than their facial features. He suggests particular aspects of human psychology as well as reflecting his own mood and feelings about the sitter. Significantly, he claimed that he believed homosexuals to really ‘look’ at people more precisely and observantly than others, because they are so obsessed by watching the body. [quoted P.p.208]. This may say more about his personal, acute awareness and observati0on of those around him than being a general psychological truth about homosexuals.)
Unlike most portraiture, which is done with the sitter posing before the artist, interestingly, Bacon claimed in 1966 that he preferred painting portraits from a series of photographs and from memory, rather than from life [S.p.38]. He said that he found people’s presence in the room ‘inhibiting’, though admitted that this may have been more a result of his “own neurotic sense”. He certainly preferred to paint alone and rarely allowed anyone to watch his painting process. He commissioned his Colony Room friend, John Deakin, who had been a photographer for Vogue, to develop multiple shots of his intended sitters in various poses, from different angles and positions, with different gestures and in varied locations, both interiors and exteriors. Usually Bacon told Deakin the positions he wanted his sitters to adopt, before the photography session. He did not copy the photographs, but used them repeatedly as sources of reference or triggers for the imagination, apparently sometimes folding, ripping, amalgamating and montaging them to form his painted and distorted compositions of the sitter. Later in life Bacon distanced himself from the role of Deakin in the development of his work [F.p.168]. After Deakin’s death, John Edwards took over the role of photographer for the artist’s subjects.
One would think that a photograph would limit the material from which the artist was able to drawfor a portrait, but for Bacon it was just a starting-point. He often transformed relatively simple, clear photographic images dramatically to make powerful presences. Sometimes he translated relatively ordinary looking characters into figures who feel like great heroes or victims in classical literature, myths and Greek tragedies. Of the process, he said: “Through the photographic image I find myself beginning to wander into the image and unlock what I think of as its reality more than I can by looking at it. And photographs are not only points of reference; they are often triggers of ideas.” [S.p.30]. When Sylvester asked him “Are you saying that painting is almost a way of bringing something back, that the process of painting is almost like the process of recalling?” Bacon agreed: “I am saying it. And I think that the methods by which this is done are so artificial that the model before you, in my case, inhibits the artificiality by which the thing can be made.” [S.p.40]
He often exaggerated the body language in the pose which he asked his photographer to record. He admitted that he was particularly inhibited by the idea of having people he knew posing for him: “They inhibit me because if I like them, I don’t want to practise before them the injury that I do to them in my work. I would rather practise the injury in private by which I think I can record the fact of them more clearly.” [S.p.41] “Wilde said: ‘you kill the thing you love’... I don’t know. Whether the distortions which I think sometimes bring the image over more violently are damage is a very questionable idea. I don’t think it is damage. You may say it’s damaging if you take it on the level of illustration. But not if you take it on the level of what I think of as art. One brings the sensation and the feeling of life over the only way one can. I don’t say it’s a good way, but one brings it over at the most acute point one can.” [S.p.42]. We certainly know that some of the subjects of Bacon’s portraits felt disturbed by what he had created. He destroyed a portrait of Cecil Beaton having seen his reaction, even though Bacon believe that it was one of the best portraits he had ever produced [P.p;183-4; AS.p.198-9]. Peppiatt gives a wonderful description of Henrietta Moraes: “She stood up with remarkable resilience to the experience of being flayed into a Bacon portrait.” [P.p.209].
With commissioned portraits, like his other works, Bacon’s exacting standards of himself and his art meant that he even destroyed portraits that had been commissioned, and which the sitter was happy with, abandoning the commission. He spoke of “the possibility of an extraordinary irrational remaking of the positive image that you long to make. And this is the obsession: how like can I make this thing in the most irrational way? So that you’re not only remaking the look of the image, you’re remaking all the areas of feeling which you yourself have apprehensions of. You want to open as many levels of feeling if possible, which cannot be done in ... pure illustration, in purely figurative terms.” He then qualified this by showing how Velazquez and Rembrandt had dealt with the problem of portraiture in different ways [S.p.28].
Bacon repeatedly painted certain friends, particularly Muriel Belcher from the Colony Room, the drinking club that he frequented in Soho and other drinking friends like Henrietta Moraes, and the artists Lucien Freud and Isabella Rawsthorne. His own self-portraits sometimes recall Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray, seemingly reflecting the inner life and activities of a man who on the outside remained attractive. The portraits, however, do not always suggest the inner thoughts of his individual sitters as much as Bacon’s own response to them. They record the effect or sensation of the presence of someone, which is only part of their nature. He was interested in the ‘particular’ person [S.p.26], yet surprisingly felt he could reach it through working from photographs of them rather than being present with them in the studio. This reticence with sitters may be partly because of his shyness, feeling intimidated in their presence, or being uncomfortable as he considered people’s possible reactions to his work while he was painting. But he also did not want them to be put off by his rather chaotic working methods, distorting by experimentation and often making slow progress, despite painting fluently and fast. Presumably his self-portraits were different, worked from mirrors rather than photographs, but we cannot be certain, as Francis was reticent in talking about his painting process, and rarely allowed anyone ot watch him at work.
In his interviews with Davis Sylvester, Bacon said of his portraits: “The living quality is what you have to get. In painting a portrait the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person... The sitter is someone of flesh and blood and what has to be caught is their emanation. I’m not talking in a spiritual way... that is the last thing I believe in. But there are always emanations from people whoever they are, though some people are stronger than others.” Although Bacon frequently claimed that humans are a meaningless accident, his words here, and the portraits themselves, show that he personally really valued many of those he painted.
His triptych Three Studies of Lucien Freud [1969 Private Collection], is among 25 portraits that Francis did of his fellow artist. The panels show Freud enclosed within a tight perspective frame, very similar to the frame around Peter Dyer in the triptych Three Studies of the Male Back [1970 Kunsthaus, Zurich]. However, the images of Freud show him sitting inside the frame, with only one leg reaching out of the base. By contrast Dyer sits outside the frame with just one foot reaching into it and his face reflected in a mirror inside the frame. In the Triptych of Portraits of John Edwards the frame is almost identical to that around Lucien Freud, but the effect is made much more peaceful by the sensitive beauty or ‘serenity’ [P.M.p.367] of his portrayal of Edwards. Whether this difference is intentionally significant, we cannot be sure, since Bacon would have been silent on such explanations, but the position of the frame does seem important to whatever meaning Bacon was exploring in the characters of the two sitters.
Giacometti used similar frames in his drawings to focus the attention on the figure within the space of the composition. Bacon particularly admired Giacometti’s ability “to take human appearance to the edge of dissolution by reducing it to its essence” [quoted P.p.206]. Francis was doing something similar in his explorations of physiognomy and the human form. He used a very different style and had rather different aims, but the idea of infiltrating the image and the person without illustrating surface reality is very similar. In 1985 he spoke of creating images which were “a concentration of reality and a shorthand of sensation… to abbreviate into intensity.” {AS.p.269.]
Bacon managed to represent the strength of his sitters’ images even more than their character in portraits of Isabella Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes especially. He was also projecting his own ideas, perceptions and psychological ideas onto the figures he was representing. His late portraits of John Edwards, Bacon’s young East End companion later in his life, appear to lack the violent energy of, for example, the paintings in memory of his former lover George Dyer. They are far more peaceful, appreciative and less distorted. Bacon had toll Stephen Spender that there were certain friends “who were far too beautiful for him to distort.” [AS.p.168]. Edwards was more self-reliant than Dyer and his relationship with Bacon was more about companionship than drunkenness, dependency or confrontation.
Francis’ two late portraits of his older Parisian literary friend Michel Leiris seem extremely penetrating in their psychological insight, as well as exploring the writer’s physiognomy. He wrote: “I am always hoping to deform people into appearance... for instance, I think that, of those two paintings of Michel Leiris, the one I did which is less literally like him, is in fact more poignantly like him.” In them Bacon controlled the distortion masterfully to create a sense that the face is being seen from several perspectives simultaneously, with more love and valuing of the subject than Picasso’s cubist portraits. Picasso may have begun the concept of representing features from different angles in one image, but Pablo imposed his style upon the subject. Bacon, by comparison, allowed the nature of the subject to direct his representation.
Leiris’ wife ran the prestigious Galerie Kahnweiler in Paris, which added to the prestige of Francis’ friendship with the couple. Bacon particularly valued the judgement of both on his work as well as admiring Michel for his writing. He was thrilled that Leiris was chosen to write the text for his Grand Palais retrospective exhibition. He especially thanked Michel for not labelling him an ‘expressionist’, as so many critics did, but as a ‘realiste’. [P.p262]. This was too easy and misleading a term; the painter felt he was exploring the inner reality of his subjects far more than the Expressionists or Abstract Expressionist had done. His portraits of Leiris demonstrate Bacon’s care for, and appreciation of the writer; they are painted with intense scrutiny of his features, but with love. This valuing of his subject again belies Francis’ statements that human beings are no more than animals or meat.
TRIPTYCHS
Bacon worked on a number of important triptychs from 1944 to 1965. The triptych form has particular religious associations, and psychologically enhances a sense of the power and significance of the subject and imagery. It is not just associated in Christian iconography with the Holy Trinity, but from a wider perspective, it develops the idea that there may be narrative links between the panels and leads the viewer to compare andassociate their imagery. Bacon claimed that the frame of each panel acted rather like the ‘space-frames’ in his paintings: “They isolate one from another. And they cut off the story between one and another. It helps to avoid story-telling...” [S.p.23]. He discussed his use of the triptych more fully in S.p.84-86.
Bacon used the triptych format in several of his Crucifixion projects, but he also used it for other significant themes. Subjects of other triptychs include: T.S. Eliot’s Poem Sweeney Agonistes and The Oresteia of Aeschylus [Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo], though, as discussed previously, Bacon did not give them these titles himself. He said of the Sweeney Agonistes Triptych that the gallery labelled it after mentioned that he happened to be reading T.S. Eliot and was personally unhappy with the titling [F.p.5]. The works do not ‘illustrate’ the literature; rather they reflect his reading and thoughts around the painting.
His 1976 work, just entitled Triptych, incorporated aspects of the Oresteia but he also suggested that it included other literary influences such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Michel Leiris’ Frêle Bruit (the 4th volume of his friend’s autobiographical work). Bacon read broadly, and there are often made literary associations in his work and his conversations. But he avoided explaining his imagery, preferring the viewer to interact with and interpret the paintings themselves. Triptych [1976] appears to be one of his most complex works, bringing together many seemingly random elements in the composition of each panel. Combining imagery in the triptychs recalls his surreal interest in montage from early works like Painting [1946], but perhaps here the montaged forms suggest more narrative intent. In the central panel two black birds, resembling the Furies, seem to be threatening a central seated naked figure. They may be augurs of death, as on the figure’s lap is a reflective platter or round mirror, reflecting an ugly head and spine. This may be suggestive of an offering. In the foreground are a chalice and ripped fragments of paper, which also litter the floor of the other panels of the triptych. The left and right panels seem to represent the head and shoulders of the same man, suited in grey, with a black collar. In each panel the main figure is not confined within a linear cage or space, as in even the Oresteia triptych, painted five years later. Rather, he is either reflected in a mirror, observing us through a window in the canvas or confronting us. It is almost as though he is the artist himself (though the face is too narrow to be that of Bacon, and resembles Bacon’s Irish-born Parisian compatriot Samuel Beckett as portrayed by his fellow artist Louis le Brocqy (who also lived in Paris during the time that Bacon was there [P.M.p.257]. This triptych feels like one of Bacon’s most directly confrontational images. In the left hand panel the figure reaches out towards us, almost as though he is pointing a gun at the viewer, but the impression is more like that of a painter reaching forward with his thumb to measure the proportions or reality of what is before him. Perhaps the image is a mirror on a black easel, from which the artist is imagining himself observing and painting a self-portrait. The ripped fragments at his feet may represent the floor of Bacon’s studio, roughly strewn with source material and fragments of discarded paper. If this is the case, the central panel may be suggested to contain the multifarious imagery that inhabited Bacon’s oeuvre during his career: the nude, bestial creatures, literary and media sources etc. Before the right hand figure are a smaller nude couple, appearing to wrestle in sexual union. The nude in the central panel may be one of the many canvases stacked up in Bacon’s studio. Unusually, the outer panels are not pure rectangles, but have irregular cut-in, stepped bases. This may be an intentional reference to the shaped panels of religious triptychs, which are designed to close and fold over one another as in Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece.
BACON’S HOMOSEXUAL IMAGERY
Despite huge advances in psychology and genetics, the complicated question of what influences individuals to develop as ‘straight’ or homosexual - the ‘nature vs. nurture’ debate - is still not understood. It is now widely recognised that there are a broad spectrum of sexualities, and that one’s sexuality is not a ‘choice’ or ‘evil’ as homosexuality was once condemned as being. Most reasoning people today, even in some Christian churches that once condemned it, understand and accept homosexuality as part of the true spectrum of human life. Bacon claimed many times that he knew from early on in his life that he was wholly homosexual. Yet though he expressed peace and happiness over this and no sense of sin or guilt (having moved forward from his early guilt and torment [P.p78; AS.p.273]), he also talked of his sexuality disparagingly as though it was not ‘normal’. Bacon said of himself: “Being a homosexual is a defect. It’s like losing a limb.” [P.p.17] .. “Homosexuality is more tragic and more banal than what’s called ‘normal’ life.” [P.p.220].. (By ‘banal’, I don’t think he was claiming that it was trivial or boring, but that he felt it to be a more basic drive to erotic fulfilment than the more comprehensive, fulfilling loving relationship for which he longed.) These are sad statements, though understandable, as the closely reflect the psychological understanding of homosexuality in the mid-20th Century in which he lived. It is still sadly the reaction of some churches and cultures today. Homosexuality was then considered a misplacement of affection, an illness caused by psychological damage during one’s upbringing, an evil choice, or a disorder of the mind. Peppiatt sensed that Francis felt guilt at not living up to the moral and lifestyle expectations of his family background, as well as his personal strict code of behaviour and sense of responsibility towards other. Bacon recognised that his sexuality was totally homosexual and could not have been changed. [P.p.248]. He may perhaps have felt guilt at some of his particular ways of indulging his sexual appetites, to which he was introduced at an early age in London and Berlin. He had been introduced at an young age to promiscuity and abusive relationships rather than the stable relationship to which his conversations show that his deeper longings aspired. Promiscuity was common in the gay world at the time. In some ways this was inevitable due to the social pressures on homosexuals to keep their desires hidden and repressed. The underground nature of most homosexual meeting-places at the time meant that many met anonymously and did not form lasting relationships. Open, committed, loving relationships between one man and another were far rarer before the legalisation allowing them in 1967.
For a painter who often expressed his optimism against the odds, creating such powerful art, and living such a seemingly popular social life, it is sad to read Bacon’s claim with regard to feelings and relationships: “My life has always been a disaster.” [P.p.243]. Life as a homosexual was regularly unsafe, as it still is not today in many places. Francis was frequently beaten up in London, Paris and Tangier, both by those who condemned his homosexual nature or by violent pick-ups and temporary partners. He complained that in picking up men “I usually only find brutes” [P.M.p.372]. He would often cover up his bruises and other forms of damage by pretending to have fallen. [P.p.231].
In a rare statement of honesty about his relationships, Bacons admitted to what he had longed for: “I think it would be absolutely marvellous to succumb utterly to someone… I have always longed to meet a man who was tougher and more intelligent than myself. But, unfortunately, when you get to know them, most men turn out to be terribly weak.” [P.p.217]. This was especially true in the case of two tragic relationships in his life, with Peter Lacy and George Dyer.
It is often dangerous to interpret an artist’s art primarily in the light of their biography. Rarely are Bacon’s paintings dealing solely with specific personal relationships or incidents (the paintings after George Dyer’s suicide are exceptions). But Bacon was filtering his subjects, even his crucifixions, and probably also his paintings of Van Gogh, through his own perceptions, interpretations and experiences.
Bacon admitted to having survived in his early life in London from about the age of 16 years, as a petty thief and supporting himself as what might be called a ‘rent-boy’. In his early 20s he helped to finance his life in London by advertising in The Times euphemistically as a ‘Gentleman’s Companion’. But these are not necessarily the relationships reflected in his art, as some critics have interpreted them. He claimed that his art should be ;anonymous’ as well as ‘specific’. It is too simplistic to read his life, art, sexuality or attitude to religion and morals in the light of the abuse he suffered as a child, his attraction to abusive relationships, and his addiction to getting drunk etc. These may be part of his ways of coping with his sexuality and many other problems in his life. Yet his artistic images do not necessarily reflect all his intimate personal ideas, actions or relationships. It is far too easy to imply or infer that there are direct parallels between his paintings and brutality, masochism, sadism and aggression. He primarily used his subjects to express aspects of general life as he perceived it, through images that were related to his own life and experiences he witnessed around him. The homosexual imagery and brutality in some of his work must reflect his active sexuality, but also represents areas of unfulfilled fantasy and the violent nature of the world, some of which he knew.
He had a few long-term relationships with partners, though they were all fraught with complications. Many were damaged by the promiscuous nature of the urban underground homosexual scene of which became part. With them he learned to act out sexual fantasies [P.p102] and had some lovers with a penchant for masochism and flagellation. Francis was attracted to the ‘rough trade’ side of the homosexual world, which did not encourage development of stable, lasting relationships. Interestingly, considering the way that his father and his grooms as a child had hurt him by labelling him a ‘sissy’, he also had little time for those he considered weak and could be waspishly cruel in his language and humour towards them.
There are so many possible and complex psychological triggers for homosexuality and sadomasochism, so it is only speculative to make connections. Remembering being told by his parents at an early age that he was ‘ugly’ must have had a traumatising affect upon his insecurity. He spoke in later years after Lacy and Dyer’s deaths: “I loathe this old pudding face of mine, but it’s all I’ve got to paint now.” [P.p.250]. He certainly was not ugly. When one looks at photographs of the young Francis he had cherub-like good looks which he retained into his late 50s. His mature face in 1950 was photographed by Cecil Beaton and others, and even Lucien Freud’s intensely observed portrait of Francis in the Tate Gallery is visually attractive. But our psychology does not always help us accept such realities. As a youth, his self-image was damaged by rejection from his parents, his father’s dominant aggression, fear of threats of violence from Sinn Fein in Ireland, the brutality towards him of his father’s grooms, stable-lads, sexual abuse from his uncle and other acquaintances, experiences on the streets of London and the gay underworld. These, with the violence of his experiences during the Blitz and innumerable other influences may have triggered the development of his own desires, feelings about life, and his penchant for violence as reflected in some of his paintings. He claimed that his life-experiences had hardened him. This hardening may have inured him to pain and some sensibilities, yet he was positive about how it had built up his creativity: “An artist has to go through every extreme to stretch one’s sensibility.” [P.p.279] ... “An artist’s sensibilities should always be kept stretched.” [P.M.p.247].
It is claimed that sadomasochistic acts heighten the sensations, so Bacon’s predilections may have developed as a response to lack of feeling or from his sense of rejection from the class and culture into which he was born. Peppiatt recalls that Bacon had a strong capacity to withstand physical pain, as witnessed during surgery and mental anguish [P.p.95]. Farson mentions several times that he appeared lonely, even though he was an active socialite. He must have recognised that may of his social group in the clubs were just hangers-on because of his generosity, and not committed to him. George Dyer certainly recognised this among the hangers-on in Bacon’s set. Francis used the word ‘sensations’ many times in his interviews, as well as speaking of how the act of painting violently stimulated the nervous system. So both his sexual activity and his painting may have been part of stimulating what he had claimed was a ‘defect’ within him ‘rather like having a limp.” [P.p17]. He also perhaps eroticised pain in his canvasses.
It seems wrong to try to pin-down Bacon’s psychology too precisely, as several art-historians, critics and psychologists have attempted to do in interpreting his work. Nor is it necessarily important to do so. Bacon had no time for people who interpreted his art from Freudian or other psychological perspectives, though he read and referred to Sigmund Freud often. “We are all hounding ourselves.” he claimed, in a 1983 letter to Hugh Davies, “We have been made aware of this side of ourselves by Freud.” [AS.p.254]. He liked to be in charge of the interpretation of his own art [P.p.274] and claimed not to read reviews of his work, but he was sensitive to hostility towards it. [p.p.246]. Some critics made over-the top, even laughable interpretations, such as interpreting his umbrellas as erect phalluses, etc. (though Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams does refer to this symbolism), or reading his screaming mouths as Freudian orifices [S.p.48]. Bacon claimed to believe that art can unlock “the greatest and deepest things a man can feel.” [F.p.135]. But he recognised that people’s responses to art vary enormously, as are our ideas of what we perceive as beautiful or meaningful. Bacon often covered his tracks over the meaning of his paintings by claiming that he didn’t know what they meant, He deflected both critics and his agents the Marlborough Gallery who wished to give erudite titles to his works. He tantalisingly said of some: “No-one will ever know where that one comes from!” [P.p.268]. However, he was definitely being disingenuous or playing with his audience when he claimed: “When I hear certain people talk, I always think I belong to a very ancient simplicity. I’m probably the simplest person I know... I’m simple and natural. After I’m dead, people will see how absolutely natural my distortions are.” [P.p.269].
Bacon’s early life in London brought him quickly into contact with the homosexual subculture. Although he had a small weekly allowance from his mother, it was far from sufficient so he partly financed himself through making relationships. As well as looking for sex, he seems also to have been looking for substitutes for parental support, especially those who valued him and treated him more gently. He found this in a number of relationships with older men, and friendships with a few women. Bacon’s former Nanny Jessie Lightfoot, lived with and supported him much of his life in London and he was bereft when she died in 1951, when he was away gambling in Nice. It must have been a very tolerant as well as conspiratorial relationship because she helped to select the contacts who responded to his adverts as a ‘Gentleman’s companion’ in The Times. [P.p55; M.P.p.94]. Yvonne Bocquentin, with whom he lived in Chantilly, had taken him in, almost as a surrogate mother, supported and tutored him in culture as a wandering youth in Paris. Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes and Muriel Belcher were his great friends and supporters in the club world. Sonia Orwell’s house became the nearest the mature Bacon ever came to a normal home – a refuge from his escapist rounds of bars, clubs, restaurants and casinos, and somewhere where he could have serious intellectual conversations. She also looked after him following a serious operation. [P.p.204].
Of the older men who were early supports, were the Australian painter Roy de Maistre and Roy’s lover the novelist Patrick White, who both gave early artistic, social and patronal support. Several wealthy lovers became patrons, including Eric Hall who paid for many of his bills, holidays and gambling for over 15 years. (Sadly his relationship with Bacon broke Hall’s marriage and the mental health of his son Ivan. [P.p.103]). Hall, who was nearly 20 years older, seems to have accepted or tolerated Francis’ promiscuity, but the relationship broke finally when Bacon developed a temporarily secure relationship with Peter Lacy. It was Hall who donated the 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion to the Tate Gallery in 1953. Hall made many sacrifices to support Francis, including his family, reputation and his personal religious commitment. But though Bacon was committed to him, his lifestyle had hardened and become too addicted. Eric Hall died in 1959 at the age of 68, when Bacon was 49. After Nanny Lightfoot’s death Bacon left the home he, she and Hall had occupied together and moved restlessly between various flats and short-lived relationships for several years.
Friendships were not confined to homosexuals: Graham Sutherland, John Rothenstein (Director of the Tate Gallery), Michel Leiris (an elderly Parisian writer and intellectual), all became a supportive friends. Francis portrayed Leiris especially with intense feeling. Lord Robert and Lady Lisa Sainsbury were also keen long-time supporters, friends and patrons, though his portraits of them and the other paintings that they bought from him for their collection are very far from his best works. Bacon claimed “I can’t paint for other people, I can only paint for myself.” [ AS. p.136].
Bacon made occasional visits to Morocco in the 1950s and early 1960s, since attitudes to homosexuality were more tolerated there. A strong and perhaps his most equal sexual relationship developed with the former Air Force pilot, Peter Lacy whose naked figure he painted sleeping. They had met initially in London and their relationship developed around the time that Lacy bought a house in Hurst, Berkshire before, in the mid-1950s, settling in Tangier. In North Africa Peter lost himself in the subculture, which attracted many European homosexuals as the attitude towards casual sex between men was considered less consequential and binding than between man and woman. He became a well-known socialite, playing the piano in bars, and indulging in the underground culture. As in most of Bacon’s relationships there were stormy aspects to his with Lacy. Lacy was already on a downward slide when they met as Lacy was already an alcoholic and attracted to promiscuous activities. Bacon called their relationship ‘neurotic’ [P.p.146], yet he claimed that he felt “I couldn’t live with him, and I couldn’t live without him” [P.p.151]. Despite their differences, it seemed the first semi-secure, almost-equal relationship that Francis developed with someone who was not a paternal figure. Francis was initially attracted to Peter’s looks, physical strength and seeming self-confidence, though these qualities dissolved as his alcoholism and self-destructive impulses advanced. The relationship partly harnessed Francis’ sexual excesses, though he disparaged some of Lacy’s fantasies as ‘kinky’ and recognised that as he was in his 40s he was a lot older than those youths to whom Lacy was normally attracted. Lacy’s move to Tangier was influenced by his search for relationships with younger men and boys. If the relationship between Francis and Peter had worked, it might have tamed both of them. This was the first relationship where Bacon had not been the dominant partner, as, being relatively shy, he was partly dominated by Lacy’s personality [P.p.152]. He also shared a similar intellectual and social background with his partner for the first time. Bacon claimed “I’d never really fallen in love until then, being totally, physically obsessed by someone – is like having some dreadful disease”. [cf. P.p.145 for Bacon’s longer description of his attachment to Lacy.]
The relationship developed at a time when Francis had become most creative and productive, becoming financially independent through selling his paintings regularly for reasonable prices. One wonders whether Bacon’s life might have been more stable if the relationship had lasted, though by the time they met Lacy declining due to alcoholism and his obsessive behaviour. Francis was often drunk and indulgent, but not as far gone as Peter became. The relationship had practically ended, and contact has almost ceased when Lacy died in hospital in Tangier in 1962 on the eve of Bacon’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery. Lacy is buried in the countryside which Bacon portrayed in Landscape near Malabata, Tangier [1963]. The representation of the scene is wild and rather bleak, which may reflect Bacon’s memories of the painful aspects of their relationship, as well as his grief in remembering Peter a year after his death. As with George Dyer later, after Peter’s death Francis continued to portray him several times in paintings, reconsidering and remembering him. Peppiatt believed that Francis felt a certain amount of personal guilt for Lacy’s death, but there was no way that he should have considered himself responsible. Peter was far under the control of his alcoholism and desires in his relationships and activities, which were psychologically damaged and damaging, even before they met [M.P.p.95].
Bacon’s relationship with George Dyer, which began in the following year (1963) and lasted until Dyer’s suicide in 1971, was less equal and affirming, as Frances and George had very different backgrounds and intellects. Most of his sexual relationships were unequal, apart from that with Lacy and the young Spanish 35 year old lover shortly before his death. As a banker, the Spaniard was more financially secure and charming than most of Bacon’s former lovers. Though Peppiatt later identified him in his ‘Memoir’ [P.M.p.368], the Spaniard wished to remain anonymous and to keep his homosexuality secret, so I refrain from actually naming him here. He had met Bacon in London and the affair continued for many months. Bacon had been advised by doctors that he was too unwell and vulnerable to travel to visit him in Madrid, but he seems to have hoped that renewed contact with the young Spaniard might revive his health andspirits. Sadly the journey, his illness and his asthma exacerbated his heart condition and he died on 28th April 1992 in hospital soon after arrival, at the age of 82 years.
John Edwards, another East-Ender, with whom Bacon developed a relationship relatively late in life became his sole executor and beneficiary, inheriting about £11.5 million.. Edwards has been described as illiterate, though he was more probably dyslexic. Bacon met him in 1974/1975, and the relationship developed them both. John’s family ran three East End pubs. Edwards shared superficial similarities with Dyer and Bacon was attracted to what he believed was ‘toughness, yet he had a much happier disposition than George and stood up to Francis, with a positive rapport. Edwards was far less dependent on Bacon than Dyer had been, and his relationship with the artist in his 70s was more one of a younger man with a father-figure who was physically attracted to him. Their friendship appears to have been one based on companionship rather than dominated by sex. Edwards was often at pains to play-down his homosexuality, though they did not hide their relationship physically or publicly. A greater peacefulness in the relationship seems to be reflected in Bacon’s portraits of Edwards, which feel calm and appreciative rather than voyeuristic. He portrayed John with far less distortion.
While Francis Bacon’s homosexuality was evident from early in his life some have wondered whether the distortion in Bacon’s expression of the figure reflects a discomfort with his personal identity. He remembered his parents telling him that he was ugly, which is hard to understand, as in early photographs he appears quite cherubic and maintained a youthful appearance into relative middle-age. Thankfully he found that in London some found him attractive, as his looks in Cecil Beaton’s photographs of him confirm. “I certainly had no idea who I was or what I wanted to do, or anything. My parents had told me that I looked horrible and I think I just accepted it. So I was terribly glad when people picked me up because I used to think, well, perhaps I’m not so awful looking as that after all. It just made me want all the more to get this person or that person to take a fancy to me. Of course, you’d never think it, with my looks, but for a moment I did seem to attract people. When I was very young, I suppose people thought I was pretty. For some reason. Anyway, I used to get by in that fashion, and I don’t think I was too particular about how I did it.” [P.M.p.175-6] Even in this statement later in life, Bacon betrayed that he still felt lack of content over his appearance. As a youth in the capital he was remembered as wearing excessive make-up, which may have been part of the gay subculture, but may also have been part of his attempt to improve his identity. He had been damaged by his father’s hostile reaction when his sexuality became apparent. He was regularly condemned as a ‘sissy’ and, as already mentioned, his father encouraged his grooms to flog him to harden him. Bacon later reflected to Sylvester that he eventually found erotic pleasure in this. Moving to London at the age of 16 he soon became part of the homosexual underworld, and developed gay relationships, many of which were only temporarily, as was common in repressed, secretive gay society of the time. David Hockney’s depiction of his lovers a generation later have a sensuous beauty in which one seems to recognise love or valuing of the subject, whereas most of Bacon’s images of his lovers are less attractive. Exceptions are his portraits of Peter Lacy and John Edwards. In forming himself, Hockney admired the confidence in Bacon’s expressions of homosexuality, which became an influence on the overt sexuality in Hockney’s own work.
Although Bacon acted as though he was confident with his sexuality, some of his mannerisms suggested that he was also self-conscious, especially about his jowlish appearance and short neck [F.p.50]. He was the only artist who refused to be photographed by British Vogue for their feature on ‘Painters and Pictures [P.p.145]. Bacon was certainly more confident about his sexuality than the older artist John Minton who also visited the clubs and was generous with his inherited wealth, often supplementing Bacon’s finances. Though active on the scene Minton was profoundly insecure in his homosexuality. He finally found his ideal life companion in 1957 but remained so insecure that he tragically committed suicide due to jealousy of his lover’s other friendships [F.p.192]. Both John Minton and Keith Vaughan, whose works were as openly homosexual and erotic as those of Bacon were jealous of Bacon’s ascendancy in the market as their own work declined in popularity.
Bacon’s imagery of the naked male is more distorted and often violent than the elegant lines of Hockney’s nudes. He was of an earlier generation from Hockney, when many felt greater guilt about their sexuality. Its expression remained illegal until 1967, and even after that, it remained considered immoral by many, provoking social revulsion. (Unfortunately the situation continues today, nearly 60 years later, in some cultures, some churches and some social groups, still leading to rejection, course criticism and causes of depression and suicide in those to whom homosexuality has developed naturally in their character.) The visual representation of sexuality in Bacon’s paintings sometimes reflects a similar self-revulsion and one wonders if Francis was as fully comfortable with his condition and relationships as he claimed.
It is not clear whether his antipathy about religion was caused partly by his recognition that churches, which still in the 1950s and 60s, dominated the moral opinions of society, would not accept homosexuality. It remains an irony, and in some cases bigotry, that many Church institutions remain ambivalent towards what is now recognised psychologically as a perfectly natural sexual attraction. There are a larger percentage of homosexuals in Christian congregations and among the clergy than in most other areas of society. There may be several reasons for this, yet sadly many of those homosexuals find that they need to keep their longings hidden. Fortunately in contemporary society this is less the case than when Francis Bacon was developing and maturing. Those churches which still condemn or do not accept homosexual expression definitely need to reconsider their interpretations of the very few mentions of homosexuality in the Bible. It has been demonstrated by many reputable scholarly Christian commentators that the few prohibitions against same-sex activity in scripture do not refer to the natural relationships between same-sex partners, which form stable, committed relationships today. Although stable same-sex relationships were not accepted in the ancient world as in much enlightened cultures today, most of the biblical condemnations were probably prohibiting indulgence in pagan temple prostitution or the promiscuous practices of Roman society.
For Bacon, however, society and the Church were still hostile to his form of sexuality. His art was in some ways intended as a positive provocation, not necessarily for society to change its attitudes but to shock. Among Bacon’s most provocative paintings are Two Figures [1953] and Two Figures in the Grass [1954], based on Muybridge’s iconic photographs of naked men wrestling. When shown at the Hanover Gallery the owner Erica Brausen hung them in the most inaccessible upstairs pert of her gallery, as they appeared to be Bacon’s most explicitly homosexual works. Some visitors denounced the paintings to the police, but neither the gallery nor the artist were prosecuted, as D.H. Lawrence’s works had been 30 years before. Despite their obvious connotations and context, the police inquiry concluded that they were paintings of wrestlers. When the artist spoke about them, it became apparent that rather than being intended as scandalous images of sex, they are rather sad. They partly represent Bacon’s loneliness, having lost some who he had loved. He also suggested that they contained memories of passions that could no longer be fulfilled: “It’s a very haunting subject, and I should be able to do it in a quite different way now...that I feel exorcized – although one’s never exorcized, because people say that you forget about death but you don’t. After all, I’ve had a very unfortunate life, because all the people I’ve been really fond of have died. And you don’t stop thinking about them; time doesn’t heal. But you concentrate on something that was an obsession, and what you would have put into your obsession with the physical act you put into your work. Because one of the terrible things about so-called love, certainly for an artist, I think, is the destruction.” [S.p.76]. These images, which on the surface seem so full of vigorous passion, scandalised people who still considered homosexuality as immoral in a society where homosexual sex was still illegal, yet in reality they carry the ghosts of what the artist considered lost possibilities. Francis used Muybridge’s photograph of wrestlers to recall passions and vigour that were now only in memory. He told Sylvester: “I manipulate the Muybridge bodies into the form of the bodies I have known.” [S.p.114] He reworked the wrestlers imagery regularly, as in Triptych August 1972 and Three Studies for Figures on Beds [1972] but they feel more like fantasies of sex.
Bacon’s statement “you can be optimistic and totally without hope” [S.p.80] seems to speak to Francis’ approach to his sexuality as well as life. He may not have felt guilt about a drive that he realised was natural to him, and often seemed to have self-confidence in his sexuality [P.M.p.x] but for many reasons he was not fully fulfilled or completely comfortable in it either. He claimed that, like many fellow homosexuals, he was more attracted to heterosexual men than homosexuals, especially any that behaved effeminately [P.M.p.51 & 247], which partly added to his sense of frustration with his ability to express his love. He is recorded as asking Giacometti “Do you think that it is possible for a homosexual to be a great artist?” [AS.p.189]. This may have been tongue-in-cheek or representing aspects of his self-doubt. One only needs to look at Leonardo, Michelangelo, Caravaggio and many contemporary gay artists to prove the affirmative answer. In his relationships he was longing for something like the ‘perfect image’ that he said that he longed for in producing his art. Yet through the instability of his lifestyle and that of those to whom he was attracted, relationships rarely lasted, and even when they did, as with Eric Hall, Peter Lacy, George Dyer and John Edwards, they held seeds of destruction as well as love. He was living in a world where homosexuality was not considered a normal form of sexual expression, and society’s norms and expectations almost automatically induced a sense of guilt and the feeling that he was subnormal and debased in his longings. Coupled with the damage that his family had caused to his self-image, it is no wonder that yearnings and longings, accompanied by ominous presences like the Furies / Eumenides loom over so much of his work.
Not all Bacon’s representations of the nude male or female are erotic. His figures are more representative of the sensuous nature of the naked figure being represented. Study from the Human Body [1949 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne] is relatively modest, showing the figure from behind. He used rich flesh colours with strong tints, sometimes textured with scumbled paint and heavy shadows which resemble bruises. Despite his admiration of Degas and Rodin, Bacon did not attempt anatomical correctness or naturalistic detail. Though he admired the dexterity of Degas’ drawing, his own painting of anatomy is relatively imprecise. He had not gone through any Art-School programme that included life-drawing, and rarely produced careful drawings in preparation for his canvases, preferring to work directly and instinctively on the final piece. He told Sylvester when asked “And you never work from sketches or drawings, you never do a rehearsal for the picture?”... “I often think I should, but I don’t. It’s not very helpful to my kind of painting. As the actual texture, colour, the whole way the paint moves, are so accidental, any sketches that I did beforehand could only give a kind of skeleton, possibly, of the way the thing might happen.” [S.p.21]. This was somewhat disingenuous, as many brief preliminary sketched ideas survive for his compositions and figures, often in paint, ink. Sometimes he tried to more fully work out compositions in gouache or oil on paper, then scrapped them when the painting was underway. But they are very rough and sketchy, more a means to an end. He certainly did not use drawing to work out his paintings or their details with precision. He may denied drawing because he was aware of his graphic weaknesses and often destroyed quick sketch-work. It is also possible that, being aware that Caravaggio, the greatest historic painter known for his homosexuality, had a reputation for never drawing, Francis may have been attempting to align his reputation with his. Perhaps he wanted to be regarded as the sort of artist who could produce masterpieces without needing to draw, so cultivated that impression by his statements. [P.p.225].
Bacon was representing the psychological and existential presence of the figures rather than their exact physiognomy or anatomical features. His figures were certainly never painted for primarily decorative reasons. His Female Nude [1960 Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main] based on photographs of Henrietta Moraes, is almost at the level of an erotic cartoon or graffiti, with raised arms and upwardly pointed breasts. Many of the poses he chose for his figures were exaggerated. As with his portraits, he rarely, if ever, painted people posing from life before him. Rather he almost always adapted photographs, either by John Deakin and others, or taken from books or magazines. He often reused favourite poses from Deakin’s images or Muybridge and added new faces or ideas to them. For the poses of some of his portraits of Lucian Freud and John Edwards, Francis even reused poses from Deakin’s photographs of George Dyer, montaged with photographs of the subjects’ faces.
THE TRAGIC RELATIONSHIP WITH GEORGE DYER
Bacon’s relationships were sometimes abusive and abusing. He was also subject to beatings from hostile strangers and some who he picked up on the streets. The aspects of masochism and sadism in some of his pictures may reflect violence in his own relationships. His lover from 1964 to 1971 George Dyer became a frequent sitter. Dyer was a small-time, East End petty-criminal with only basic education who Bacon sometimes claimed to have met when George was robbing his house. (Such an encounter with the criminal underworld was the fantasy of some pornographic literature and film scenarios. Actually, Bacon initially met him at the Golden Lion pub, which both frequented, and where Dyer had offered to buy drinks for him and his friends.) He regarded George as more handsome than himself, and tougher than he was, though Dyer was not as strong as Francis fantasised. (Francis himself had developed a false image of his own unattractiveness.) Obviously Francis found George sexually appealing, but Dyer was self-conscious about many things, particularly his stammer. George was regularly made aware of the difference between his background and that of Bacon and the social, cultural and arty sets to whom Francis introduced him. While Bacon was more open about his sexuality, Dyer tried to play down the homosexual connection between himself and Bacon. [P.p.211]. He felt inferior, as many in the club circles put him down and laughed at him, including Bacon himself at times. Dyer became popular among those who wanted to be introduced into Bacon’s coterie, but he soon became unhappy as he recognised the shallowness of the popularity and sycophancy. [F.p.173]. As Bacon supplied him with money, he bought multiple drinks for the groupies in order to remain popular. His own drinking became obsessive, perhaps partly to cover his sense of inadequacy in the social circles in which he moved.
The relationship with Francis was often stormy but though Bacon regularly tried to break with him he kept returning [F.p.175]. In one difficult period, after they had separated in August 1970, in revenge George informed the police that they would find cannabis in Bacon’s home. A raid led to the artist’s prosecution in October, though Bacon was acquitted on his claim that due to his chronic asthma he would not have used cannabis. The artist claimed that it must have been left by visitors, but it is possible that it had been planted by George himself. [F.p.180-1; P.M.p.177]. With his broad East-End accent and petty-criminal background, Dyer probably appealed to Bacon as a bit of ‘rough trade’. Though the artist had a far more upper-middle-class background, and Dyer was very clearly working-class, Bacon had himself lived a similarly disordered early life in the underworld subculture from the age of 16 years, and spent much time later among underground drinking and gambling clubs. (Gambling was still illegal in Britain at the time.)
Despite their often disordered relationship, Bacon made Dyer the subject of a large number of paintings during their time together, which are among Bacon’s most varied and complex studies, replete with different ideas and references. He is the subject of two great monumental triptychs in 1964 - Three Figures in a Room [Centre Pompidou, Paris] and 1970 [Three Studies of the Male Back, Kunsthaus, Zurich. Both show the figure in unconventional poses - sitting on the lavatory, reclining sensuously on a divan, posing on a high stool, shaving his chin, cleaning his feet, massaging or shaving his legs. The latter triptych seems like a variation on Degas’ paintings, pastels and mono-prints of women engaged in their toilette, such as After the Bath; Woman Drying Herself [1890-95], which was one of Bacon’s favourite pictures in the National Gallery.
Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror [1968 Museo Thysssen-Bournemisza, Madrid] represented the man who was still his primary muse and lover. Here he was painted dressed in a lounge suit, still commonly worn among young men of his class at the time. In many other portraits he was represented naked and in more intimate poses. His face is deformed and the reflection is even more fractured in the mirror. This image is hardly sensual, though it has been suggested that the splashes of white paint across the image may represent spilt semen. Dyer’s look into the mirror may be reflecting narcissistic aspects of his personality, as he explores his own image, or bacon;s admiration of him. Dyer seems isolated within the circle of the floor. The artist’s view of him here seems slightly more detached, though this may be reading biographical details into the painting of Dyer’s isolation within the relationship. Tensions in the relationship developed, particularly because Dyer felt out of place amid Bacon’s more sophisticated artistic, cultural and sometimes bitchy circle. While supportive and generous to friends, Francis himself could also be scathing and waspish in his criticism, especially when drunk. He was a liability at parties; his reactions to people and his language, even to significant figures like Princess Margaret, could be unpredictable. Dyer increasingly resorted to alcohol and drugs. He had already made at least one attempt at suicide on their visit to New York, (apparently more attempt at various times according to P.M.p.192), and Bacon was becoming frustrated with his histrionics and excessive drunkenness [P.M.p.177].
Dyer didn’t understand the attraction of Bacon’s work, but he was mesmerised by being part of his coterie and obviously committed to the artist. He was remembered as saying at a private view: “All that money and I fink they’re reely horrible!” [P.p.214]. As Bacon became lauded internationally he spent increasing time away from Dyer. Perhaps the greatest honour shown to the artist was the major retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Bacon took Dyer to Paris but an argument between them developed on the eve of the opening of the show. Francis walked out and later attended a reception before the Private View and the post-exhibition banquet. On the eve of the opening, George Dyer took a massive overdose and was found dead next morning in the bathroom of their hotel, on the toilet, covered with blood. Initially the suicide was hushed-up in order to not distract from the Private View, but the irony was not lost on many that one of the major exhibits on display was the painting of Dyer siting on a toilet in a bathroom. Over the weeks, Bacon appeared to recover relatively quickly from the tragedy, (even to some he appeared relieved of the pressures of the relationship [F.p.183]), yet it undoubtedly affected him powerfully, since he worked on a significant series of memorial triptychs representing Dyer over the next three years. Peppiatt claims the memory of George haunted Bacon for the remainder of his life [P.p.242]: He expressed guilt for many years, over not having been there to support George, though there was no way that he could have missed the final preparations for the show and George was “absolutely impossible in drink” at the time. [P.M.p.177]. He claimed after Dyer’s death that he would “never have an intimate relationship again... That side of life has been cancelled out of me now.” [P.p.253]. This did not prove to be the case, as he later took up with John Edwards, yet the late works in memory of George are among his most powerful mature works, but as Bacon said sadly, “painting him doesn’t bring him back.” [P.p.249].
In the first of these – Triptych in Memory of George Dyer [1971 Fondation Beyer, Basel] George is represented in the left hand panel as a fallen boxer and as a suited socialite in the right hand panel, seen both in a mirror and lying on the floor with black blood pouring from his head. The central panel is more ambiguous in which a dark silhouetted figure with pink, bared, muscular arms, opens a door onto a crimson staircase stretching both upward and down to a dark window with black blinds. On the floor are ripped fragments of newspaper. No explanation is given for these, but the representation of different sides of Dyer’s personality and fate is disquieting.
In the outer panels of Bacon’s second triptych – August 1972 [Tate Gallery, London] Bacon adapted Deakin’s photographs of Dyer, seated in underpants on a cane chair. Life seems to be pouring out of him in the form of pools of pink flesh. The central panel shows two more amorphous figures wrestling sexually. While they are part of each other physically, their identities are not as specific as the portraits of Dyer in the left and right panels. All the figures are set against black openings. Beneath the buff floor are triangular areas of black, perhaps representing the darkness of Dyer’s feelings and psychology, or the darkness of death into which he fell. They seem to be images of hopelessness.
The most powerful and disturbing of the Dyer triptychs is May-June 1973 [Private Collection]. This is more directly connected to Dyer’s suicide, painted about 20 months after Dyer’s death. In each panel he is viewed naked in the bathroom, viewed through a doorway. He slopes on the toilet in the left-hand panel, and appears to vomit blood into the wash-basin in the right hand panel. A white arrow drawn on the floor points to him, rather like a chalk-mark at the site of a tragedy. The central panel is a naked portrait of Dyer, in drunken despair, with his eyes closed, in the bathroom beneath a single, extinguished light-bulb. Whether this is symbolic of the extinguishing of Dyer’s life,is not explained. From him emanates a strong, black, bat-like shadow that has been interpreted by some as the angel of death. Alternatively, this could be his own shadow, the escape of his spirit, the threat of darkness upon him, the loss of his heroic identity, or several other interpretations. (Shadows are important in Bacon’s images as compositional elements, but also as reminders of the constant presence of the possibility of death. Coloured shadows seem to suggest that life is seeping out of his subjects). The walls of the room are maroon, the colour of dark, clotted blood, which Bacon claimed to live. They have the expressive feeling of the colour-fields of Rothko’s Seagram Murals in the Tate Gallery, while the floor is the mundane buff-colour of anonymous hotel carpets. The work has been related by a few critics to Ingres’ Death of Marat [1791], though Bacon never suggested such a connection. Its style is raw, with roughly applied paint, expressing the realism of the tragedy of Byer’s life and death.
BACON’S OWN DEATH AND REPUTATION IN POSTERITY
Although Francis often seemed self-confident as an older painter, who could afford to go, do, eat and drink anything he wanted, he told Peppiatt: “I want nothing, really, except not to grow old. But then I never really feel old. I always think “old” is ten years away from whatever age I am.” [P.m.p.371]. Bacon himself died in hospital in Madrid on the morning of 28April 1992 at the age of 82 from a heart attack aggravated by pneumonia and his life-long asthma. Ironically, in his last hours he was looked after by two nurses who were nuns from the order of the Servants of Mary. Far from being thought meaningless, as he claimed that his life and art to be, international obituaries praised his reflections of life and ideas in the mid to late 20th Century. David Sylvester wrote: “Since he died. I’ve not thought about him as a painter, I’ve only thought of the qualities ... his honesty with himself and about himself.” [F.p.4]. As was appropriate to his claimed philosophy, yet sadly, Bacon’s funeral was a simple 8 minute cremation with no ceremony, as he had requested, and no-one invited. A few journalists turned up and there was a single small posy on the coffin. The cremation took place at La Almudena cemetery. Ironically, his plain wooden coffin was decorated with a metal crucifix and accompanied by the music of Gregorian chant. His ashes were returned to England, with no memorial service of commemoration back in Britain. They were scattered somewhere known only to a few friends, with a tree later planted near the spot. He was not given the meaningful funeral or burial that might have been expected for an artist of his stature and prominence. Yet this end reflected his personal statements about the meaninglessness of life and art. He claimed that one would be nothing when one has died. But by contrast, his reputation grew phenomenally in the years following his death accompanied by a wealth of memoirs and retrospective exhibitions.
Late in his career Bacon had returned several times to themes and images that had been popular previously. He repeated Painting [1946] and in 1988 a second version of Triptych 1944 (Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion). The later triptych on a larger scale was also acquired by the Tate Gallery, London. Some of these later variants lack the power, conviction and spontaneity of his original sources. Nevertheless many of his later works are strong, including self-portraits and Portraits of Michel Leiris, the elderly Parisian writer and intellectual friend who wrote so meaningfully about his paintings. Two of his most abstractly painted figurative works Blood on Pavement [1988 Private Collection] and Jet of Water [1988 Private Collection], show him tackling new directions, possibilities and subjects. The latter especially makes the most of the power of seemingly ‘accidental’ marks. It forms a powerful composition, of which he expressed pride.. Blood on the Pavement returned to his obsession with the vulnerability of human beings, especially in the light of threats of violence and violent death.
Far from being as meaningless as Bacon occasionally claimed the subjects of his paintings to be, they reflect the existential need in human beings to find value. He admitted to David Sylvester: “I would like, if anything remains of mine when I’m dead, I would like the best images to remain... When I say I care, I care because – I can only talk from an absolutely personal view – I think some of the images I have made have for me got a kind of potency about them, and so, you may say, I care that these ones should remain. But if I think really logically, it’s stupid to think even that way, because I won’t know anything about it, any more than those people who fuss during their lifetime about whether their things are good, really, or bad, because they won’t ever know. Because time is the only great critic.” [S.p.88]. Bacon recognised the philosophical irony or double standard in this wish for the best work to survive. For someone who claimed that his art and life were meaningless, there would have been little reason for destroying so many works that he considered unworthy, yet he protected his reputation by slashing a huge number of canvases. (Unfortunately we also recognise that a large number of mediocre works have survived, as the finance-rather-than-quality orientated art market often tries to make money out of as much as it can.) But his statement accords with the high standards which he set for his work, even if he controlled his making process by “creative accidents.”
Bacon was so critical and negative about much of his work, that owners and galleries avoided giving him pictures back for repainting if he asked if he could improve them. He was just as likely to destroy them, as he had done with most of his earlier works and many before they left his easel. Marlborough Fine Arts would often remove finished paintings from his studio, while still wet, for safety before sale, before he could change his mind and destroy them. Looking around his 1985 retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, he is reported to have said: “If I had not had to live, I would never have let any of these out.” [P.p.309]. Such statements were part of Bacon’s regular bravado, and may be regarded as rather tongue-in-cheek. But they reflect his sense of valuing the creative process and the best art. In the choice of 108 paintings for the Grand Palais exhibition, Bacon excluded everything created before 1944, including Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion. Two-thirds of the works were from the last decade of his career to that date.
Bacon claimed that he was not so interested in promoting his own name and a reputation for posterity. He additionally claimed that he had already fulfilled this sufficiently in his surviving work. He spoke of the “stupidity... of the idea of immortality. After all, to be an artist at all is a form of vanity. And that vanity may be washed over by this rationally futile idea of immortality. It would also be vanity to suggest that what one does oneself might help to thicken life. But, of course, we do know that our lives have been thickened by great art... by the great things that a few people have left.” [S.p.89]. Bacon may not be a ‘great Master’, as Velazquez, Rembrandt, Turner or Constable undoubtedly were. Monet, who he admired, was famously described by Cézanne as ‘just an eye, but what an eye!” Nevertheless, Francis Bacon left an oeuvre that makes one think about life and philosophy perhaps even more profoundly than Rembrandt or Velazquez. Hopefully through that thinking many come to the conclusion that there is more to human life than Bacon personally concluded, and find an optimism that helps people work towards a better world than the horrors that Bacon had witnessed during his life. Our contemporary society worldwide is in a worse and more perilous state than even Francis Bacvon expereiced or conceived, so our need is for a more effective cultural counterbalance.
Interestingly, late in his interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon did not speak of his work as trying to engender a sense of social conscience or social justice, but rather emphasised how his art was expressing his own responses to life rather than encouraging change. In talking of social injustices it is clear, that though he had difficult times as a youth, he came from, lived and painted among a class which did not endure what the poor and disaffected suffered and continued to endure. Even those ‘rough trade’ characters to whom he was attracted were not among the poorest, and he lifted them financially by his generosity. Of social injustices he said: “I think it’s the texture of life. I know that you can say that all life is completely artificial, but I think that what is called social justice makes it more pointedly artificial....I’m in a way very conscious of them. But I think, as I live in a country where there has been a certain amount of wealth, it’s difficult to talk about a country where there has always been extreme poverty. And it’s quite possible that people could be helped in extremely poor countries to exist on a plane where it was possible for them to escape from their hunger and their general despair. But I’m not upset by the fact that people do suffer because I think the suffering of people and the differences between people are what have made great art, not egalitarianism." [S.p.125].
I personally find the attitude in this latter statement more uncomfortable than the moral arguments that were made by critics in the past against Bacon’s work. Here was a man who eventually made millions of pounds through his art after a struggling start. He preferred to drink champagne and fine wines, and dined in expensive restaurants. Though he lived and painted in simple squalor personally, with very few possessions, he could afford to be generous to friends. He often mentioned the degradation of the human condition, yet he did not express a strong social conscience or social or political consciousness. He seems to have remained unconcerned about wider social issues, perhaps because he considered the human situation so ‘banal’ and ‘meaningless’ that human degradation was inevitable. When he became wealthy, he also seems to have made little moral distinction over those to whom he gave money or support, or over what he was giving them money for. [P.p.201]. This may be partly due to his social background, and his isolation from the news, in which world suffering was not as vividly or widely reported as in the media today. However, he gave money generously to people who he knew who were in need and was also generous to the Florence Appeal after its devastating flood damaged so many artworks. (It may seemingly ironically the Cimabue Crucifix was the one great work which he was intent on having restored, but it shows his sensitivity to the subject and the expressiveness of the masterpiece.) Bacon’s preoccupation with art, relationships, club-life, social contacts and fine dining sheltered or isolated him from some other sufferings of the wider life of the world, which one would have thought he was representing generally in the subject-matter of his work. Perhaps he saw enough horror in his own world and could not cope with the horrors of the rest. The scream of the nurse from the Battleship Potemkin stood for much of the general suffering of humanity. In some ways Bacon was obsessed by his own sensations, not the sensations of the suffering world which he represented so viscerally. Nevertheless, his art still has far more moral content than most of the modernist art of his contemporaries.
One might speculate what images Francis might have painted in response to the threats of climate-change, Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, tragedies among the illegal immigrant boat-crossings, dishonest politicians or other contemporary horrors. But to speak into such a world is the responsibility of today’s thinkers, artists, writers and activists. If we are to try to change the world to be more like the principles which Christ defined as ‘The Kingdom of God’, and expounded in the ‘Beatitudes’ and ‘Sermon on the Mount’ I believe that it is important to represent a realistic hope and promote good without romantic idealism, as well as increasing people’s awareness of the horrors of reality and promoting ways in which they might be overcome. Bacon may have been disingenuous in saying that he didn’t try to put meaning into his paintings. There is definitely profound meaning in his work, even though much of that meaning was rooted in despair and sometimes revulsion.
There is also definitely beauty in the ways that Bacon represented what he considered the squalor of the human condition and the value of human beings with in it. Bacon’s images often drag the mind of the viewer into the gutter of life that he represented, yet he was proud that he lived a “curious kind of gilded gutter-life” himself through the indulgence that he was able to afford [P.M.p.168]. The most effective art to promote hope, (whether humanistic hope or religious trust,) is not preachy or didactic, just as Bacon’s negative art was neither preachy not didactic. The art which elevates the viewer can be positive and suggestive of the sort of qualities which enhance people’s minds, cultures and aspirations. Bacon reduced human beings to the condition of ‘animals’, though actually animals often have a higher consciousness and value that he was meaning by his use of the term. The aim of a more positive artist might be to raise human aspirations to seek fulfilment in more positive thoughts and more abundant, meaningful living. Similarly, while Francis portrayed his screaming Popes experiencing religious and existential angst, because they were no longer relevant or effective in the contemporary world, it is the role of the modern Christian to demonstrate and witness that Christ’s ways and teachings are actually extremely relevant, practical, enlivening and fulfilling in a world that is itself experiencing existential angst and fear about its ultimate ecological and moral survival. The world in which Francis Bacon developed as a man and as an artist, was one which condemned the nature which he realised was natural to him.
The social demand that his sexuality should be repressed, drove its expression underground, where he was damaged by the excesses of the underworld. Love in more peaceful and affirming relationships that might have fulfilled him emotionally was not available to him. His drinking and other excesses in his social and sexual life became unfulfilling substitutes. As he admitted, the subject-matter and style of Francis’ art was often an expression of his life and the turmoil of frustrations that he felt, though at an ‘anonymous remove from precise autobiography’, apart from certain works after George Dyer’s suicide. If Bacon had been affirmed from an early age and been socially accepted sufficiently to feel peace with his personal identity, his resultant art may not have been so powerful, since he possibly would not have needed to ‘intensify his sensations’ so extremely. Yet what he recognised as his inner creative genius might have fulfilled itself in other artistic directions: One does no need to be repressed, an outsider, or damaged psychologically to create great art.
It worries me that so many foreign cultures, churches and individual Christians today still hold narrow, outdated interpretations of the very few scripture verses about homosexuality. Many homosexuals are among those attracted to the Christian faith since, Jesus of Nazareth’s teachings about God, love acceptance and truth are so affirming. Yet bigotry and hypocrisy and narrowness among a minority of Christians and most Christian institutions still means that many of a homosexual orientation remain forced to hide or repress their true identity. Some Christians even still believe that sexuality needs to be ‘healed’ and they cause damage by offering bogus spiritual therapies which can exacerbate homosexuals’ sense of guilt when they are not healed. The institutional leaders of the Church of England claim to be having ‘conversations’ to resolve differences in attitudes in the Anglican Communion over ‘Issues of Human Sexuality’. This procrastination has been deliberately extended for far too long. It is often a pretence at ‘conversation’ by those leaders who have firm views against homosexuality and are determined that the Church will not change its official attitude. In the years that this deliberate procrastination is going on more and more people are being psychologically damaged by the Church’s lack of affirmation and have become disillusioned with this form of Church, recognising that it does not reflect the true, loving affirmation which Christ gives them. Homosexuality for many is a natural psychological part of their development. Most civilized, educated and enlightened societies now recognise this. Loving same-sex relationships are generally accepted and valued in western society. Such sexuality and its rightful expression is not regarded as the consequence of ‘sin’ or ‘sinful’.
If the contemporary Christian Church is not to continue to damage people psychologically as Francis Bacon was so badly damaged, it needs to recognise that general society (including many members of church congregations) has reached the truth far more quickly than Christian institutions have. While such a large number of Christian clergy and laity who are homosexual are expected to repress, deny or not fully express a sexuality that it a natural part of their development and identity, they will remain unfulfilled and in some cases damaged. The Church is adding to the psychological damage of many, rather than opening them up to the abundance of life that following the true teachings of Jesus Christ promised to us. Many Christian homosexuals are lonely and still resort to suicide. One wonders when, if ever, the Christian Church will turn to following and resembling its founder and not remain entrenched in following those of its leaders who are blinkered or over-hesitant. The Christian Church has always advanced through revolution, not through hesitant, prolonged procrastination. Jesus turned belief away from the ‘whitewashed tombs’ of insistence on outdated, legalistic traditions and the false interpretations of scripture by the Sadducees, Pharisees and Scribes who dominated and repressed true religion. He taught people to follow the truth that his love and trust in God revealed. Jesus showed that God accepted those who were once condemned as sinners and he directed them towards more positive paths that enabled them to find righteous, holistically fulfilled lives. We need to recognise that the active homosexual can be as holy as any other true Christians. Yet, like all people, they need to feel sufficiently affirmed, accepted and trusted before they can live and feel fully fulfilled Christ’s true followers need to lead the contemporary Church to accept contemporary truth, so that we all might live holily, spiritually free, and abundantly. A Christian aim must be to replace both ‘gilded gutter lives’ and hypocritical lives or beliefs, with ways of life and faith that are true, accepted as righteous, and able to be fulfilling.
FURTHER BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dawn Ades & Andrew Forge 1985 Francis Bacon (Exhibition Catalogue). London: Tate Gallery.
Richard Calvocoressi & Martin Hammer 2005 Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads (Exhibition Catalogue). Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland.
Barbara Dawson & Martin Harrison (eds.) 2010 Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty (Exhibition Catalogue). The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.
Daniel Farson 1993 The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. London: Century.
Mathew Gale & Chris Stephens (eds.) 2008 Francis Bacon (Exhibition Catalogue). London: Tate Gallery.
Martin Hammer 2013 Francis Bacon. London: Phaidon.
Martin Hammer 2005 Bacon and Sutherland. New Haven & London.
Michael Peppiatt 1996 Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Michael Peppiatt 2015 Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir. London: Bloomsbury.
John Russell 1993 Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson.
Andrew Sinclair 1993 Francis Bacon: His Life & Violent Times. London. Sinclair-Stevenson.
David Sylvester 1975 Interviews with Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson.
David Sylvester 1993 Interviews with Francis Bacon (Expanded Edition). London: Thames and Hudson.
David Sylvester 2000 Looking Back at Francis Bacon. London.
Ernst Van Alphen 1992 Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self. London.