When Francis Bacon said “The only really interesting thing is what happens
between two people in a room”, he did not mean what happens between an
artist and his model – or if so, only indirectly. Bacon’s portraits of
himself, his friends and (male) lovers are among the most enthusiastically
acclaimed of all his pictures, but they were done almost without exception
from photographs and memory, not from life. From a handful of paintings,
early and late, it is clear that for Bacon some of the most interesting
things happened before, during or after copulation – “or buggery, however
you want to put it”, as he himself put it in the late 1960s, with an
insouciance that could have been dangerous at any time before then.
Yet, as John Russell pointed out nearly thirty years ago, “perhaps the most
persistent of Bacon’s preoccupations is the problem of what a man is to do
when he is alone in a room”, and with only a very few exceptions, his
pictures until the later 1960s more often than not featured single figures:
human males, animals, especially apes, heads or heads-and-shoulders,
isolated in indeterminate spaces, framed or confined in a kind of geometric
canopy or glass box, seen through strips of (shower?) curtain, paint
cascading down the interiors or, in the few landscapes, deft strokes
rendering wild grasses with Oriental precision. True, it is not always clear
from its posture and mass whether the pictured form is human or ape; nor if
in fact there is more than one of them pictured. Bacon would sometimes, to
achieve the desired “thickness”, model his single figure on a sequence of
photographs from Eadweard Muybridge’s The Human Body in Motion that showed
two men wrestling – though at a glance, they could be having sex. (“I very
often think of people’s bodies that I’ve known, the contours of those bodies
that have particularly affected me, but then they’re grafted on to Muybridge
bodies”, Bacon explained.) Then, once he had begun to show two or more
people, the coupling – as in those earlier exceptions – becomes explicit.
And, in his later vision, coupling is murder. In panel after panel of the
large-scale triptychs which were Bacon’s preferred format from the 1960s on,
the human carcass – mangled, butchered and bloodied, studded with entry- and
exit-wounds, spilling muscle tissue and entrails, or intact but warped into
terrible knots of tension, straining in climax or death agony – is pinioned
on carpets or sprawled on stained mattress-ticking, like a police photograph
at the scene of a sex crime. And indeed other panels actually show
spectators or recorders – one holds a cinecamera – of the main event, be it
coupling or crucifixion, which has left its protagonist eviscerated.
Bacon disavowed any moral or philosophical intention behind these images of
human suffering and detachment, and still more emphatically denied trying to
make a historical point – notwithstanding his brief flirtation with the idea
of publishing a pictorial “History of Europe in [his] lifetime” (he was born
in 1909). One of the most articulate of painters, with a strong sense both
for drama and self-presentation, from the moment he became a succès de
scandale Bacon was a tireless subject of interviews (with Russell and David
Sylvester, preeminently): occasions he seized to rehearse a repertoire of
anecdotes and apophthegms, some haughty and whimsical, some purposefully
discomfiting in their frankness, but almost all prompted by the
contradictory urges to elevate his calling to a higher mystery or deflate
its pretensions with a rude reminder of fleshly limitation.
In this he was both disingenuous and provocative, refusing, for example, to
allow in his own crucifixions the significance granted to the image by the
entire Western tradition – it was an example of human behaviour, no more and
no less. Behaviour, furthermore, that aroused in Bacon a sense of his own
wounded or tortured nature: a crucifixion, he said, was almost a
self-portrait. Almost from the beginning – in “Painting, 1946”, now too
fragile to have made the trip from MoMA to the current exhibition at Tate
Britain – the painter evinced a fascination with sides of meat, a motif that
recurs in his later crucifixions and couplings. When asked about its
preponderance in his imagination he was ready with a dual response. “Every
time I go into a butcher’s”, he said, “I’m surprised that it’s not me
hanging there”; yet the meat was simultaneously a purely aesthetic stimulus,
its colours “absolutely beautiful”. Questioned about his more Grand Guignol
scenes he would shrug, affect complete ignorance of their import, personal
or otherwise, and insist on his overriding desire to make “beautiful
paintings”.
From the very small number of canvases that survived Bacon’s apprentice years
it is far from obvious that this was his ambition when he started (if it
was, his idea of beauty was as convulsive as any Surrealist’s). The big,
bold canvases in the grand manner of his gilded middle age, exposing lavish,
ritualistic cruelties, are indeed very beautiful, and only a handful of
pictures on show here, from the later 1950s, seem unsure in technique or
faltering in composition. In the room titled “Crucifixion” (the Tate’s hang
is a compromise between a chronological and a thematic arrangement), the
body, whatever else it is being subjected to, mostly retains recognizable
limbs and a torso. Not so in the first room, “Animal”, where a distended
eye, mouth, teeth and phallic appendages dominate: to these organs of
appetite and aggression, in some of Bacon’s early works, the human and the
nightmarishly non-human alike are reduced. Assisted by Bacon himself,
commentators have established an impeccably modern pedigree for these
seemingly sui generis images: in Picasso’s “biomorphic” beach scenes, 1930s
photojournalism and the films of Sergei Eisenstein and Luis Buñuel. (Lessons
in form and handling were learnt from Graham Sutherland and the Australian
Roy de Maistre, too, though Bacon was less prompt to acknowledge them in
later years.) In her catalogue essay Victoria Walsh cites Foundations of
Modern Art by Amédée Ozenfant (1931) as having perhaps fertilized the
insatiably curious young painter’s imagination in ways that would lie
dormant for years: “The search for intensity dominates the whole of modern
painting. There can be no intensity without simplification, and to some
degree, no intensity without distortion . . . of what is seen naturally”.
In 1931, Bacon was twenty-two, had made his way as, more or less, a rent boy
in Weimar Berlin, had learnt French living in Chantilly and was working in
London as an interior decorator and designer of Bauhaus-derived furniture
for clients who included the editor of Vogue and the novelist Patrick White.
But almost as soon as he began to paint in earnest (in oil on canvas, from
which he rarely deviated for forty-odd years), the beauty was there as well,
and was there till the end, in paintings that proclaim him one of the great
colourists of the last century: from the startling orange ground against
which the first three “Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion”
(1944) writhe and shriek, to the sumptuous deep reds of its grander, more
imposing and artistically pointless second version (1988). Orange flames out
at us again from the “Figure Studies”, 1945–6, while “Figure Study II” is
the work in which another of Bacon’s motifs – or obsessions – unequivocally
makes an entrance: the gaping mouth, open in a scream of terror, a snarl of
hatred or a howl of impotent rage. Indelibly fixed in Bacon’s imaginary by
Picture Post shots of Goebbels and Mussolini haranguing the crowds,
Poussin’s “Massacre of the Innocents” and the nurse’s silent scream in The
Battleship Potemkin, in “Figure Study II”, where it is appended to a crouched
or kneeling half-clothed form, the mouth powerfully subverts those reliable
signifiers of bourgeois respectability, umbrella, herringbone tweed and
potted plants.
In the late 1940s (with a series of “Head”s) and the early 50s (“Study for
Nude”, 1951; “Study of a Figure in a Landscape” and “Study for Crouching
Nude”, both 1952) Bacon’s pictures posit an extra-historical continuity
between the human at its noblest, as in Michelangelo’s drawings and
sculpture, and the simian – almost to the point of conflating them. “Head
VI” (1949), though, returns us, whatever Bacon thought or said, to the human
in historical time, combining the motifs of toothed, gaping mouth and wildly
staring eye with the vestments of a little brief authority: the highest
authority on earth, indeed, for many, though in Bacon the vestments are
imperial purple rather than rich pontifical red, as in his master-image, the
“Portrait of Pope Innocent X” by Velázquez. Bacon’s remarkable travesty
inaugurated a new series of studies “after” the great original, though his
fixation was inspired, in fact, by a reproduction. (Even when he visited
Rome, Bacon avoided seeing the Velázquez in the Doria Pamphilj, a diffidence
in which embarrassment perhaps played a part. Much later he dismissed most
of his repeated assaults on it as “silly”, and it is hard to disagree,
despite or because of the presence in the current Tate show of two of his
strongest and least familiar “Popes”, as well as “Head VI”: one, once
thought lost, from 1950, the other from 1965 – this last looking as if he
has been shot in the head at close range, or as if the rage or terror that
animated his predecessors had finally exploded his face from within.)
That so many of Bacon’s motifs derived, in complex, vigilant ways from
photography and film is entirely consistent with his acute awareness that
these new art forms had rendered representation in painting obsolete, and
with his horror of mere “illustration”. This was not to say that painting
should not deal in “fact”: just that fact comprehended more than what is
“seen naturally”. “One wants a thing to be as factual as possible and at the
same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation
other than simple illustration of the object”, as Bacon put it to David
Sylvester. He was also one of the most literary of painters, an admirer of
Ulysses, an avid reader of poetry and drama who saw that the Oresteia and T.
S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes were blood relations, who liked to quote lines
from both yet who repeatedly and sometimes fiercely repudiated attempts to
read “a story” into his own work.
But he insisted too much. At one level, his habit of working in triptychs, and
at a deeper one the suggestiveness he often in fact achieved, not just in
triptychs but in single paintings, militates against that very insistence.
It is hard to look at such works as the “Crucifixions” of 1962 and 65,
“Lying Figure” (1969), “Triptych, Studies from the Human Body” (1970) or
“Triptych March 1974” without a sense of prelude, climax and aftermath –
though not necessarily in that order. Some such adumbrated narrative, an
intimate human drama about to be embarked on, concluded or aborted also
haunts the restrained and very beautiful portrait studies of a suited “Man
in Blue”, his face and hands bright-lit on a deep blue ground, that are at
once the most “readable” of all Bacon’s male figures, and the most
ambiguous.
What is common to all these images, early, late and middle, is the
overwhelming presence or threat (or promise) of violence. Bacon’s obsession
with the figure drove him repeatedly to disfigure it – to all but dismantle
the heads and bodies he painted on his canvases, and destroy the canvases
themselves, when he judged them to be failures. Working from photographs, so
the artist said, enabled him to do the necessary violence to his subjects –
the better to “distort them into appearance”; and that could not happen if
the subject was actually present. (This showed an untypical délicatesse.
Bacon’s definition of friendship was two people “pulling each other apart”,
and in sex his pursuit of the roughest of rough trade bordered on the
suicidal.) But he also spoke repeatedly of his desire to make paintings that
would “return [the viewer] more violently to life”, by which he meant, as I
understand it, shock that viewer out of habitual or self-protective
ignorance and into awareness of his own physical reality. “An attempt to
bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and
poignantly” was how he described his own work. “There is an area of the
nervous system”, Bacon believed, “to which the texture of [oil] paint
communicates more violently than anything else.”
Paintings (some paintings anyway) could mysteriously “unlock the valves of
sensation” or of “intuition and perception about the human situation”;
could, by seemingly subliminal means, evoke a memory trace of raw,
unmediated existence. Somewhere behind this lay Baudelaire and Proust, with
their different ideas of involuntary memory. But for Bacon (who also liked
to cite Paul Valéry: “modern man wants the sensation without the boredom of
its conveyance”), to unlock the valves of his own subconscious was to bring
up onto the canvas and “onto the [viewer’s] nervous system” an apprehension
of life or “being-aliveness” as violent, primordial struggle, redeemed only
by an instinctive grace, or a stroke of luck.
For Bacon, a chronic asthmatic, the struggle began early: it was the struggle
for breath itself. The second son of a bad-tempered military
man-turned-horse breeder and the heiress to a Sheffield steel fortune, he
was brought up in Ireland and England in a succession of big houses where
the omnipresence of dogs and horses was a perpetual challenge to his
well-documented will to live. Bacon senior made no secret of his
disappointment in his sickly, sensitive son, whose party piece was to appear
at family gatherings in full drag. Michael Peppiatt is one among many
writers on Bacon to make the connection, in his absorbing biography Francis
Bacon: Anatomy of an enigma (1995, now revised, updated and reissued by
Constable in paperback), between the father’s screaming rages, the child’s
gasping for air and the importance of the gaping mouth in the work of the
mature artist. The killings and house-burnings of the Irish uprising and
Civil War (“Violence upon the roads; violence of horses”, in Yeats’s words)
formed the backdrop to Bacon’s childhood, further enlivened by the
attentions of the grooms who were encouraged to take horsewhips to the young
master to punish him for the attentions he was over-fond of paying them.
Three of his four siblings died premature deaths, but Francis would enjoy long
life, vigorous appetites and legendary resilience, physical and
psychological. Ejected from the family at sixteen, he soon discovered the
resourcefulness and the hunger for risk that would sustain him both as a
homosexual adventurer and a painter, along with his preferred modus vivendi:
to lurch between opulence and squalor, between a punishing creative routine
and an equally punitive, if delighted (and delightful), dissipation. In
later life the prices commanded by his paintings made him rich, but he had
established his careless mastery over money much earlier, in the casinos of
Berlin and Monte Carlo. The centrality to both gambling and painting of
chance, risk, instinct – in painting Bacon subsumed these under what he
called “accident”, the way one mark might suggest another, or perhaps an
entirely new image, without the apparent intervention of the will or
conscious direction – made them more than analogous: they were two sides of
the same life force, the same compulsion to live at the maximum pitch of
intensity, for the same high stakes and correspondingly high rewards.
In some sense all Bacon’s paintings represent another throw of the dice, a
record not of how he “saw the world” but of the only way he, human meat and
a carcass-in-waiting as he was, could yet feel himself to be truly alive.
Peppiatt, Sylvester and other witnesses have made clear that this
life-and-death struggle issued as often as not in despair and self-disgust;
but of course for the artist there was no choice. The paradox – and it
strikes with greater force in the final two large rooms of the Tate
exhibition, showing works from the last fifteen years of Bacon’s very
productive life – is that intensity itself could become a habit; that so
many of these later works look as mannered and fussy, in their beautiful,
wearyingly nasty way, as anything from the Academic schools of the
nineteenth century, in theirs.
The great exceptions are the paintings shown here in a room titled “Memorial”.
Bacon’s companion, George Dyer, committed suicide in their hotel room on the
eve of the artist’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971;
three extraordinary triptychs from 1971–3 recall Dyer’s living presence, and
imagine his last hours, with monumental and moving factuality. Bacon often
remarked on the “awfulness” of his personal life – another of his lovers,
Peter Lacey, had steadily drunk himself to death in the 1950s – and while no
one would wish he had known more unhappiness of this kind, we can regret
that he did not always achieve, or desire, the direct appeal to human
emotion these pictures make, while surrendering nothing of painterly value:
they have a stunning aura in which grandeur, indignity and grief are all
present, and inseparable.
As with Eliot in poetry, Bacon’s art sinks deep roots into the whole
psycho-physical life and attempts a reinvention of tradition (“the
figurative thing”), rather than the Freud-sponsored violation of the natural
order to which Surrealism aspired. To that extent, the confusion of the
Times reviewer, faced with Bacon’s very first solo show in 1934, was
understandable: “The difficulty . . . is to know how far his paintings and
drawings . . . may be regarded as artistic expression and how far as the
mere unloading on canvas and paper of what used to be called the
subconscious mind”. (Cited in “Bacon and his Critics”, by Gary Tinterow, in
the Tate catalogue.) Mere! We like to think we have come a long way since
then, but Bacon and the best of his commentators are part of the long way we
have come. The catalogue contains a useful chronology, but none of its seven
essayists adds substantially to what has already been written by Russell,
Lawrence Gowing, Michel Leiris and Gilles Deleuze. Michael Peppiatt’s new
book, Francis Bacon: Studies for a portrait, contains interviews with and
recollections of the artist from the 1960s almost until his death: that is,
either the raw materials of Peppiatt’s biography or bits of the biography
distilled into essays and articles. For completists only, it does include
the full, fascinating text of Bacon’s answers when he was interviewed for
the first time by his future biographer, in 1963, before celebrity began to
overtake some of his responses.
Much recent scholarly interest in Bacon has focused on the “drawings”
controversy: whether the many preparatory sketches and studies found in the
artist’s studio and elsewhere after his death – studies which, while he was
alive, he insisted he never produced – could be genuine. (It seems pretty
obvious that some are, and some aren’t.) A room at the Tate (“Archive”) is
devoted to some genuine-looking sketches, over-painted photographs and
“doctored” images, while Francis Bacon: Incunabula by Martin Harrison and
Rebecca Daniels is a spellbinding pictorial record of the most significant
of Bacon’s visual sources. The entire fantastic compost of rags, paints,
brushes, magazines, torn-out pages and tattered reproductions laid down over
decades in Bacon’s South Kensington mews has been reconstructed entire at
the Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane. While the artist’s living space was
almost monastic in its austerity, his workroom was a materialization of the
rich, sedimented strangeness of his inner world. To him, both discipline and
chaos seem to have been indispensable.
FRANCIS BACON
(Tate Britain, until January 4, 2009)
Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, editors
FRANCIS BACON
288pp. Tate Publishing. £24.99.
978 1 85437 738 8
Michael Peppiatt
FRANCIS BACON
Studies for a portrait
272pp. Yale University Press. £18.99 (US $35).
978 0 300 14255 6
Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels
FRANCIS BACON
Incunabula
256pp. Thames and Hudson. £39.95 (US $75).
978 0 500 09343 3
Alan Jenkins is Deputy Editor of the TLS. Drunken Boats, his
translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre, was published last year.
