Francis Bacon News

                                                                 1996-2003

 Eyes, we say, are windows of the soul. In the relief maps embedded in the palms of hands we predict future lives. Faces tell the tale of our personal odysseys through good times and bad times, laughter and tragedy. By 50, so people say, we have the face we deserve, unless, like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, we possess a macabre portrait hidden in the attic that wears the liver spots and wrinkles denied by the face we show to the world downstairs.

These three together — face, eyes and hands — reveal what Francis Giacobetti (born in 1939), the brilliant French photographer whose extraordinary triptych portraits you see here, believes to be the anatomy of the personal and beautiful universe that makes each human being special.

Giacobetti has been making these triptychs for the past 12 years. To date, he has photographed 150 famous people from around the world. His subjects, who include musicians and painters, mountaineers and deep sea explorers, have one thing in common: each looks deeply into his or her subject matter with formidable intelligence and great passion. None could ever be accused of superficiality. And, in Giacobetti’s eyes, we see this through the lie of his sitters’ hands, the wear and tear in their faces and, most dramatically, in the startling constellations and unearthly landscapes of their eye.

While Giacobetti’s faces and hands, photographed in black and white, are never less than exquisite and revelatory, it is the eyes, staring so uncompromisingly from the centre of his triptychs, that capture ours.

What extraordinary eyes they prove to be. The eyes of Stephen Hawking, the astrophysicist, resemble a supernova or some new constellation in the infinite reaches of the universe whose workings he has tried to explain to a mass audience.

Giacobetti calls Francis Ford Coppola, director of Apocalypse Now, “A Michelangelo of the 20th century”, an artist who paints contemporary versions of Heaven, Hell and the Last Judgement, not on the roofs of Roman chapels but on reels of celluloid. Looking into Coppola’s apocalyptic eyes, Giacobetti-style, is like looking into the heart of darkness. Coppola’s is a vision, as his films have proven time and again, with a sure and disturbing take on the demons that struggle for our souls.

In contrast, those of Francis Bacon are a beautiful, electric blue; painterly for sure, yet shot through with fiery coronas. And, then, there are those of Yehudi Menuhin, the virtuoso: peaceful, deep and dreamy

So perfectly, in fact, do the lives and characters of Giacobetti’s sitters dovetail with the images he presents us of the irises of their eyes, that it is difficult not to feel that the photographer is playing some sort of elaborate aesthetic trick on us. Perhaps he photographed the eyes of Hawking and Coppola and then coloured them to match our expectations of their character? It is a tempting thought, but quite untrue.

So how does he do it? “I invented my own device for taking photographs of the eyes,” says Giacobetti, on the telephone from his studio in Paris. “It is a little secret, but what it does, more or less, is to shine light across the side of the eyes rather than directly into them. In this way, we can see the pattern of eyes in relief, which is not possible if you shine light directly into them. Of course, this is not some sort of optician’s device. My pictures have nothing to do with science, medicine or anatomy; my interest is only in their beauty." Anything else we read into these eyes is, it seems, coincidence.

Why the triptych form? “Because,” says the photographer, “I wanted my record of special people, deeply intelligent people, to be more than just a sequence of conventional pictures — a single image, snap! — no, I wanted them to be... a meditation.

"Just now I am preparing an exhibition in Paris of the portraits I have made to date. This will be at the new national library. The show is being designed by Dominique Perrault, the library’s architect. Each portrait will be two metres high; the total effect will be meditative, yes, almost hypnotic.”

The Paris exhibition will mark a halfway stage in Giacobetti’s pursuit of the hands, eyes and faces of the world’s great originals. “I plan to make a total of 300 portraits,” he says, “and I hope the project will be completed for the turn of the century. It has ended up as a kind of millennium project, although that was not the original intention.”

As yet, Giacobetti has produced very few photographs of British talent. “Perhaps,” he says with what must be laughter in his own blue eyes, “this is because I am Corsican, home of your big enemy [by which, of course, he means Napoleon Bonaparte]. But no, this is not true. I will make a plan soon to visit England. There are many people there I hope to photograph.” Any favourites? “Oh yes. I want to see Isaiah Berlin, Stanley Kubrick [American, living in England], Harold Pinter, Salman Rushdie, Norman Foster and Lucien Freud; but, of course, there are others, too.”

To date, Giacobetti has portrayed just six sets of British hands, eyes and faces; these are Francis Bacon (“with the water-blue eyes of a rosbif, like my own”), Yehudi Menuhin, Jack Preger, Lawrence Durrell, Stephen Hawking, and Sir John Vane, a biochemist who won the Nobel prize for medicine in 1982.

His favourite Brit to date is undoubtedly Francis Bacon; he has been working on a book and a film of Bacon’s life and work for some years. “I made a three-hour interview on film with Bacon,” says Giacobetti, “and this will eventually become part of a bigger project.” For now, we will have to make do with Giacobetti’s triptych of the maverick painter.

One of the conditions imposed on magazines publishing Giacobetti’s great work — known collectively as Hymn — is a demand “to respect the spirit of the project, that which intends to be a homage to the intelligence of the 20th century” and to accept that "the role of the images of the irises, as well as that of the hands, is purely aesthetic. In order that the privacy of the personalities participating in the project will be respected, The Independent, under no circumstances, will associate the publication of the subject to diagnostic methods based on the examination of the irises as well as palm reading of the hands."

No, Monsieur Giacobetti, we do indeed see the meditative beauty of Hymn, and we faithfully promise not to ask Mystic Meg or any other astrologer or soothsayer to tell us anything more about the life and times of Francis Bacon or Philippe Starck. Your eyes, your lens and your magic light tell us more than we could ever have known before.

Francis Bacon Born Dublin, 1909. “I don’t understand why we were so close. I love women — they are the most intelligent animal on the planet — and he loved men. As a painter, his lucidity is very rare.” These images were captured in London a few months before Bacon died in Madrid, 1992.

     Colony Club proprietor Michael Wojas holds Francis Bacon’s portrait of Muriel Belcher while the regulars carry on drinking

 SLICE OF BACON

  NEWS  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  SATURDAY, JUNE 15, 1996

  is expected to fetch up to £750,000 at Christie’s on June 27. Bacon was given a weekly “salary” of free drinks at

  the art world watering hole in exchange for bringing in new customers

Bacon & Giacometti: Likeness and Difference

David Sylvester introduces the exhibition in which he brings together two relatively isolated artists

DAVID SYLVESTER | FEATURES | MODERN PAINTERS | A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF THE FINE ARTS | SUMMER 1996

Outstanding artists are not as a rule isolated figures. Think of their situation since the time of Impressionism only. Some have been members of a major group — the Nabis, the Cubists — which has included several figures of consequence; others, like Mondrian, have been acknowledged leaders f a narrower school, even an artist as separate as Duchamp had useful allies. This has continued in our own time. It is possible to find a context  whether a professed group, like Cobra, or a widespread trend, like Pop Art — for most of the leading artists of the period — and finding a context becomes a necessary game when works by different artists have to be distributed among the spaces of a museum.

The exceptions, the mavericks, in this half-century, mostly turn out to be artists working to capture appearance — artist such as Bacon, Balthus, Antonin Artaud, Lucian Freud. In the nineteenth century that activity was a common pursuit. Artists of consequence took part together in the enterprise, sometimes in close conjunction and always with mutual awareness and rivalry. Something of that has survived into our own time in cases like like that of David Bomberg and his pupils Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, and that of William Coldstream and his pupils Michael Andrews, Euan Uglow and Patrick George. But by and large trapping appearance has become a lonely activity, against the grain. It is significant that Giacometti’s work of the first half of the 1930s is readily classifiable as part and parcel of a movement, Surrealism, but that, when he turned away from invention towards the re-creation of his sensations of reality, he became an isolated figure.

Works by two of these isolated artists are brought together in the present exhibition. It is not at all unusual for groups of works by Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti to be juxtaposed. They often appear in the same room — and the same eyeful — in installations of the permanent collections of museums. And in Jean Clair’s important polemical anthology of modern figurative art, 'Identita e Alterita', at the Venice Biennale of 1985, a long row of bronzes of standing women by Giacometti stood facing a long wall of paintings by Bacon. The present exhibition, it seems to me, takes a more constructive approach in placing the works so that, while both groups are in the same space, they are not visible simultaneously. It is like a concert the first half of which is dedicated to one composer, the second half of another, rather than a concert in which works by two composers are heard concurrently.

Bacon was a painter, Giacometti a sculptor and painter and a prolific draughtsman and a print-maker. Bacon worked from life for a few years in the 1950s, but for the most part from memory and photographs; Giacometti did almost all of his drawing and painting and a good deal of his sculpture from life (though his greatest sculptures were probably some of those done from memory between 1945 and 1955 — and also some of his abstracted figures and heads of 1927-29, and surrealist sculptures of 1930-34). These are certainly good reasons for putting them with each other rather than with anyone else among their contemporaries. For one thing, Balthus and Freud work, as did Giacometti’s friend Francis Gruber, within a treatment of form and space that is traditional, whereas Bacon and Giacometti both felt that there was no point in making art that used idioms already explored. On the other hand, Dubuffet, while also creating an innovatory figurative art, conveyed a human presence without trying to achieve a likeness to its appearance.

With regard to Bacon’s position on this map, he often described his artistic practice as a tightrope-walk between illustration and abstraction That could be said of Giacometti’s too. And also of de Kooning’s, with the difference that his tightrope ran along a middle route between those extremes, whereas with Bacon and Giacometti representation given priority over abstraction. Consequently, their figuration, while rich in ambiguities, is more specific than de Kooning’s: their human images, whether of heads or bodies, whether clothed or nude, are closely based on particular individuals — mostly friends or relations or partners — in short, are more-or-less portraits.

A further resemblance was that they were both acutely self-critical and given to destroying a large part of their production, and another was that their sense of failure came not so much from agonising about about a personal insufficiency as from a realisation that they were trying to do something that was near enough impossible — in other words, it came from high ambition rather than from modesty. It was their ambition, indeed, that made them go on and on working on paintings in an attempt to take them further, thereby often ruining them irretrievably. That didn’t matter to them; they would try again. They both thought of their individual works as members of a series of provisional attempts to solve ongoing problems, not as definitive statements, and the works were presented and promoted in ways that made this attitude clear. By the same token, and also because both artists were obsessional in the pursuit of their aims, they tended to work over and over again from the same models — whether they were working from life or memory or from photographs.

They were also repetitive and limited in the types of work they produced. Giacometti’s sculptures, from the time he became involved in appearance, are mostly either a woman standing still or a walking man or the bust of a man or a combination of these types (say, four standing women in a row or a single standing woman with four men walking here and there); his paintings are mostly frontal views of a single seated or standing figure, nude or clothed or a bust. Bacon’s paintings are mostly either small canvases with a single head, or big canvases with a single figure — nude or clothed, reclining or seated or standing, or, indeed, crucified, or moving around — or a couple having sex — so that the postures and gestures at least have a wide range. But the scale could not have a narrower range: form 1945 on the images are always about  three-quarters life size, whether the pictures are big or small. (One notable exception is a beautiful painting of 1952-53 which is in this exhibition a back view of a male nude posed like a diver that is one eighth life size.) And the works, with two or three exceptions, are invariably upright in format. They acquire a landscape format when Bacon has put together three canvases, big or small, separately framed, to form a triptych. There are nearly 30 big triptychs extant and the best of them are probably Bacon’s greatest claim to fame, along with his few surviving works of the 1940s.

And then both Bacon and Giacometti were deeply indebted to Picasso. Giacometti’s surrealist works, such as Suspended Ball and Slaughtered Woman, had a formal vocabulary that came straight out of Picasso’s pictures of the late 1920s presenting assemblages of bone-like shapes. Bacon’s crucial 1944 triptych was a homage to Picasso’s pictures of the late 1920s in which biomorphic figures turn tiny keys in the doors of bathing huts. Bacon’s subsequent work often borrows forms or devices from Picassos of various periods, from the time of the Demoiselles d’Avignon to that of Dora Maar; Giacometti’s subsequent work was a comprehensive rejection of Picasso’s values. Except for one value, also subscribed to by Bacon — namely, that an artist did well to borrow freely, eclectically and blatantly from existing art. Giacometti’s most visible exemplars are certain Egyptian, Sumerian and Cycladic sculpture, certain Oceanic sculpture, mostly Melanesian, Byzantine mosaics and paintings, Tintoretto’s drawings and Cézanne; Bacon’s are Egyptian sculpture, Michelangelo, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Degas, and a wide variety of photographs ranging from the action shots of Muybridge and of newspaper and magazine photographs, especially of sport, to photos in medical books.

The likeness between the two artists touched on so far are all very concrete evident in the work itself or in methods of working or of exhibiting. A more intangible affinity is that their work seems to hare a certain mental atmosphere — the atmosphere of post-war Europe, full of menace, guilt, disquiet, doubt, a sense of nearness to death.

Their personal lives had several important things in common. They were both childless Bacon was homosexual; Giacometti was left sterile by an illness in his youth. They were both creatures of habit, living their lives out in shabby surroundings with tiny studios long after they could have afforded luxury, space, or both. Neither possessed a car. Neither accumulated art or other chattels. Both lived very expensively and handed out huge tips. Giacometti haunted brothels and, in their absence, bars frequented by prostitutes; Bacon, homosexual bars. Both had a taste for good restaurants, though Giacometti could take o leave them, while Bacon really cared about food and drink; indeed, he was a good coo himself, whereas Giacometti  was probably incapable of boiling an egg. Giacometti, who was extremely handsome, tended to dress shabbily; Bacon, who had an attractive but odd face, dressed well. Both were free of any hankering for respectability or official honours. Both were entertaining talkers and good listeners, with a love of gossip as well as sustained intellectual discussion. Both were exceedingly generous friends, materially and spiritually. Both were deeply attracted to Isabel Rawsthorne (Giacometti was in love with her and for a short time they lived together): the exhibition examples of the several portraits each of them did of her. Neither took drugs, contrary to report. Bacon was a very heavy drinker, which Giacometti was not, but Bacon kept in close touch with his doctor, which Giacometti did not: Bacon died at 82, Giacometti at 64.

Continuing with their differences, I begin with their politics. Giacometti, an extreme Leftist in the 1930s, always remained firmly on the Left, while Bacon was simply cynical: ‘I just want the best kind of atmosphere to work in,, And so in politics I have tended to vote for the Right because they are less idealistic than the Left and therefore one is left freer than one would be if encumbered by the idealism of the Left. I always feel that for me the Right is the best of a bad job.’ His unabashed pragmatism was sometimes a stumbling-block in his relations with French intellectuals.

The two artists were poles apart in their points of departure. Giacometti cam from a family of distinguished painter, was highly precocious as both a painter and a sculptor, was given every encouragement and help to devote himself to art, including a long academic training. Bacon came from an upper-class English family and grew up in grand houses in Ireland and the West Country. In Paris when he was about twenty he saw an exhibition of Picasso, ‘and at that moment thought, well, I will try and paint too’, an ambition which provoked the strongest parental discouragement. He started designing furniture and rugs and immediately showed a mastery of these edis; teaching himself to paint was rather more difficult — though as images his paintings were interesting from the start. It was surely difficulty that led him to give up trying to work from the model and become entirely dependent on photographs and on reproductions of past masters, for these provided him with ready-made translations of the three dimensions of life into the two dimensions of a picture. Giacometti, on the other hand, had, from an early age, an exceptional facility in working from life — as well as from memory — as a draughtsman, as a painter and as a sculptor, and this was enhanced by years of practice in his father’s studio and in art schools. Indeed, his addiction to creating difficulties for himself, his tormented scrupulosity, could well be interpreted as a reaction against the boredom of easy mastery.

The most obvious difference in their actual work is that Giacometti’s art is quiet, while Bacon’s is loud, even in its silences. It is bigger in scale, has far more contras in colour and tone, and is much more express of specific emotions. Giacometti’s art, while pervaded by an elegiac mood, does not eek to convey emotions: he used, indeed, to say that he felt it was a shortcoming in his work that, whereas the brothers Le Nain were able to communicate particular emotions while achieving a likeness to reality, he himself was too focused on getting a likeness to be able to do more. Bacon’s art, in contrast, is dramatic, dealing intensely with death and copulation and other convulsive forms of action. He none the less tended to play down the idea that his work was ‘saying’ something. ‘I’m not really saying anything, because I’m probably much more concerned with the aesthetic qualities of a work than, perhaps, Munch was.' Moreover, he was always anxious not to fall into the trap, as he saw it, of ‘telling a story’, so that ‘the story talks louder than the paint' and 'the boredom sets in’. And he certainly didn’t tell a story in the explicit sort of way in which Munch or Kirchner or Kokoschka or Beckmann did. This distinction, however, did not occur to Giacometti when in 1955 he saw Bacon’s work for the first time and dismissed it as ‘expressionist’. By 1960 he was becoming more sympathetic towards it, and a year or two later he met and became friendly with Bacon. Their liking and admiration for each other as human beings was boundless. But Giacometti still used the label 'expressionist' to distance himself from the work, while saying wryly that his own work must seem very old-maidish to Bacon. The word Bacon did in fact apply to Giacometti’s sculptures was ‘arty’. On the other hand, he wrote in 1975 that for him ‘Giacometti was not only the greatest draughtsman of our time but among the greatest of all time’.

 The question of how expressionist Bacon’s art is, of how far it has ‘meaning’, remains extremely tangled. For example, it has to be asked whether his insistence that his work did not have ‘meaning’ was compatible with his use of subjects such as the Crucifixion and the Orestia, or with his stated belief that ‘the greatest art always returns you to the vulnerability of the human situation’. One the other hand, there are examples o his working attitude which demonstrate that he was much more mindful of formal qualities than of meaning. In one of his triptychs of the Crucifixion he put a swastika on the arm of a figure, and this, understandably, was widely interpreted as indicating that the figure was a Nazi. But this had not been in mind. ‘I wanted to put an armband to break the continuity of the arm and to add the colour of this red round the arm. You may say it was a stupid thing to do, but it was done entirely as part of trying to make the figure work — not work on the level of interpretation of its being a Nazi, but on the level of its its working formally.’ And when he made paintings of a particular girl lying on a bed with a hypodermic syringe stuck in her arm, it was not because she was a drug addict (though she did become one later). ‘I’ve used the figures  lying on beds with a hypodermic syringe as a form of nailing the image more strongly into reality or appearance. I don’t put the syringe because of the drug that’s being injected but because it’s less stupid than putting a nail through the arm, which would be even more melodramatic. I put the syringe because I want a nailing of the flesh onto the bed.’

Giacometti’s work, for all of its greater affective neutrality, was also subject to melodramatic misinterpretations, especially in the sculpture. When the extremely attenuated figures which he started making around 1946 emerged from the studio in 1948, they were taken to have an intended relationship to the emaciated prisoners at Belsen and Buchenwald. Even after this wave of fantasy had passed, they continued to be seen as incarnations of isolation and despair and alienation of post-war mankind. This was assumed to be the reason for their thinness, rather than the formal considerations that had made Giacometti  whittle them down. It was forgotten that similar degrees of attenuation are to be found in a wide range of antique and tribal sculpture. A liking for such sculpture was one of the causes of the unconventional proportions of Giacometti’s figures. Another was an instinctive fastidiousness that compelled him to fine things down. Another was his response to the conclusions he reached through thinking about the problem of representation in art. Giacometti was a philosophical artist who pondered on the semantics of sculpture as deeply and radically and to as much practical purpose as Cézanne on the semantics of painting. For example:

Even Rodin still took measurements when making his busts. He didn’t model a head as he actually saw it in space, at a certain distance, as I see you now with this distance between us. He really wanted to make a parallel in clay, the exact equivalent of the head’s volume in space. So basically it wasn’t visual but conceptual. He knew it was round before he began: that’s to say, he started from the conventional idea of a head that had prevailed in all European sculpture since the time of the Greeks, and made a volume in space  unlike anything he actually saw, because in the ordinary way it would never occur to me to get up and walk around you. If I didn’t know that your skull had a certain depth, I wouldn’t be able to guess it. So, if I made a sculpture of you according to my absolute perception of you, I would make a rather flat, scarcely modulated sculpture that would be much closer to a Cycladic sculpture, which has a stylised look, than to a sculpture by Rodin or Houdon, which has a realistic look. I think we have for so long automatically accepted the received idea of what a sculptured head should look like that we have made ourselves completely incapable of seeing a head as we really see it.

The effect upon the work of that sort of thinking was what gave Giacometti’s art its originality. And that sort of thinking was deeply rooted in the experience of working from life. Perhaps Giacometti could have reached the same conclusions purely from memory, but there is no way of confirming that because in fact his spells of doing it from memory followed on or coincided with doing it from life. Working from life was the foundation on which all Giacometti’s art was built. Working from life was a method tried for a time by Bacon and abandoned. That must be the most fundamental difference between them.

The exhibition does, however, include three trophies which have survived from a unique sustained effort by Bacon to work continuously from a particular live model. They are portraits of Lisa Sainsbury painted in a room in Battersea and completed respectively in October-November 1955, May 1956, and early 1957; five others were started and destroyed at some stage or another in their progress. There were other sitters during and around this time, including Robert Sainsbury and the present writer, but most of the work was painted from reproductions and photographs, among them photographs of a life mask of William Blake. What is interesting is that Bacon got Lisa Sainsbury to sit regularly over a period of eighteen months, rather like a Giacometti model, even if it was only once a week as against everyday. And the pose, most unusually for Bacon, has the frontality that was almost  de rigueur for a Giacometti painting. Unlike Giacometti. Bacon habitually went on with the picture  when the mode; was not present. The fist of these three portraits is a masterpiece, one of Bacon’s very finest paintings of the 1950s. It resembles the sitter faintly; it strongly resembles Queen Nefertiti. Here, like Giacometti in some of his sculptures of standing women, Bacon made the head of someone he knew coalesce with that of an ancient Egyptian sculpture in all its formal rigour and monumental grandeur.

‘Trapping Appearance, Portraits by Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti from the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection’, 25June-15 September, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich.

On the back of his triptychs Bacon was apt to write ‘Keep Under Glass’. This was for conservation reasons (his use of pastel with oils meant fragile surface). Also he liked glazing because it gave a photographic gloss to the images and reflections of the onlooker added ghostly movements. He even tried painting glass doors behind the glass and behind that (in Sleeping Figure, 1974) himself gasping on a bed. Hospitalisation, sex and dentistry, spittle or sperm, rinse, spew and flush, were tried: every permutation, plus flecks of peppery Letraset cultivated under glass.

                                          Bacon’s Sketch for a portrait of Lisa, 1955

In the 1960’s, Bacon began to use friends, among them Mr. Freud, as models, although working from photographs because he liked to work alone in his studio. And even here, the photos were merely to remind him of certain features. What counted was the image they projected to him, and it was this he would paint, often mangling faces or twisting bodies to catch their “appearance.”

“The image is a kind of tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and abstraction,” he once told David Sylvester, an old friend and distinguished British art critic who organized the Pompidou exhibition. “It will go right out from abstraction but will really have nothing to do with it. It’s an attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly.”

With these portraits, Bacon also began to reduce competing images in his canvases to a minimum, apparently eager to focus all attention on the pain or sex or violence or solitude he was trying to convey. Obsessed with geometric forms, he introduced lines as “glass cages” to create frames within frames. In Triptych Inspired by T. S. Eliot’s Poem ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ (1960), the flanking panels show two nude women and two nude men on beds inside "glass cages," while the central panel shows a bloody corpse in a train compartment.

In many of his works of this period, he used his lover, George Dyer, as his model, as in Three Studies of the Male Back. And after Dyer committed suicide in 1971 (just before Bacon’s Paris exhibition that year), Bacon continued to paint him, as if anxious to purge himself of responsibility for his friend’s death. Triptych: In Memory of George Dyer is particularly touching, with the central panel showing Dyer holding the key to the door of an apartment.

Bacon’s sense of the continuity of his work was underlined in 1988 when he repainted his 1944 triptych, now somewhat more stylized and with a dark red background replacing the original acid orange. And until the end of his life he continued to probe himself in studies for self-portraits. But he always insisted that his purpose was not to shock or disturb.

“My figures are not twisted or tortured by torture,” he said in a 1971 interview with a French magazine. “I do not deform bodies for the pleasure of it, rather in order to transmit the reality of the image in its most poignant phase. Perhaps it is not the best way, but it is the only way I know of to get to something that is as close as possible to life.”

                Above, a portrait of Bacon taken in his studio in 1971.   Photograph: Francis Goodman

                                                   Overrated: Francis Bacon

Sir, Francis Bacon was, indeed, one of the great painters of the 20th century, as David Sylvester’s magisterial exhibition in Paris confirms.

However, contrary to the views expressed in your leading article of July 9, he has not been a prophet entirety without honour in his own country.

Of the four major exhibitions of his work held during his lifetime, two were initiated by and shown at the Tate in 1962 and 1985.

We expect to celebrate his achievement here in many ways over the next decade.

Yours faithfully,

NICHOLAS SEROTA, Director,

Tate Gallery, Millbank. SW1.

 July 17.

Francis Bacon (Pompidou Centre, 14 October)

                                           ‘Study of a Figure in a Landscape’ by Francis Bacon, Phillips Collection, Washington

MARK HUTCHINSON  |  ARTS  |  THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT  |  FRIDAY AUGUST 2 1996

At the centre a kind of mentula dentata on a mounted block slouches towards us its lips painted its teeth bared suspended pended over the elegant base of a table it is poised on something resembling a pair if compass legs and might be walking or might se perched. Can it see us Is it blind Again we don’t know where the eyes might be a bandage has been attached its ragged edges hanging lamely down. To the left a more muted but no Less unsettling figure likewise mounted leans helplessly across from the formless drapery-like folds in which it is cupped in the direction of its companion it too has a head all but faceless time (only a nose is visible and seems >mothered beneath a wig of hair if the figure in he central canvas is openly aggressive its partner to the left seems paralysed with anxiety as though trying to struggle free of some suffocating morphological strait-jacket The third of the three canvases is equally unrelenting and again presents an animaloid figure with a vaguely human head resting on a single limb that is itself embedded in a patch of bristling spiked scrub is a kind of elongated partly ribbed scrotum from which a conger-like neck juts out the jaw of its head sprung open at right angles like a trap. All three figures have some of the colouring and texture of beach stones are openly sculptural in inspiration and are set off against a rough painted but sumptuous orange background that is lightly traced with grids.

Though not the actual opening to the exhibition “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” is the first thing you see as you approach the ticket-stiles. The inspiration for the figures according to Bacon were the Eumenides the avenging Furies that fell on the land after the long and bloody struggle between Athens and Sparta. Most commentators set it against the background of the war evoking material as diverse as Bacon’s brief spell in the ambulance corps pulling corpses from the rubble or post-war press rumours of a group of Nazi resistants the Werwolf still at large. Anyway, there it is for all its crude picture-play on male genitalia one of the most savage images ever to have survived translation on to canvas by comparison with which Picasso’s “Guernica” seems almost genteel old-worldly, in inspiration.

This raucous little triptych was painted in 1944 and is Bacon’s foundation myth the work he chose to open any major exhibition held in his lifetime It is not difficult to see why. Though all three icons (given their invested religious intensity sity what other term can we use still bear traces of the influence of Picasso their savagery sets the tone for much of Bacon’s subsequent earlier work while the contrast between the actual figures and the rich monochrome background ground looks ahead to the triptychs of the 1960s For this retrospective however Bacon’s first ambassador David Sylvester has decided to move the clocks back ten years and start with the ghostly “Crucifixion” from 1933. In one sense, it is the more natural candidate, since it was the reproduction of this work in Herbert Read’s Art Now that first brought Bacon to the public’s attention as a painter Once again, though the influence of Picasso is immediately apparent (this time, like the gouaches from the same period further on in the show, by way of Henry Moore), the eerie presence that radiates from this small canvas, as though Bacon had taken an X-ray of the human body and found, not a skeleton, but the proliferating cells of a crucifixion, is quite unlike anything being painted anywhere else at the time. Together with two further works from the 1930s of more scholarly interest, this and the “Three Figures” make up the antechamber chamber to the exhibition as we prepare for the onslaught of the first ten years of work.

One of the reasons for dwelling at such length on these two works is that they are among the very few early pieces that rival in force and intensity the paintings that make up the heart of Bacon’s achievement nearly all of which in my view were made over a ten-year period starting some time around 1962. The difference between the two periods equally well represented in Sylvester’s selection is striking their only common denominator, it seems, being the violence which shifts away from the subject-matter of the painting to the matter of paint itself and the way it is handled. Judging from the reputation they enjoy and an excellent critical anthology included in the catalogue these earlier works had a resonance for Bacon’s contemporaries that I am far from sure they possess today. Grim they might be — and it is certainly difficult to see the naked figure parting the curtains in “Study for the Human Body” as anything but an executioner — but there is something too gimmicky and systematic about the contrast between the violence of the thing depicted and the coolness of the composition the pictures are simply too staged ever really to involve the spectator Nowhere is this more evident than in the “Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X”, where you seem to be peering in at some deathly papal peep-show yet for all that are left curiously cold Part of the fascination these works held for their contemporaries can clearly be put down to the times as Bacon observes at one point in Michel Archimbaud’s Francis Bacon Entretiens (Gallimard 36fr), “I have the impression that people of my generation can’t really imagine a humanity without war”. Yet even in the 1950s there were dissenting voices including ing (as the catalogue admirably reveals the young John Berger who compared the kind of fascination exercised by Bacon’s caged popes to that of a puppet in a Punch and Judy show where the spectator can enjoy the violence precisely because he is at a comfortable remove.

Though Bacon’s fascination with the human body, and the male body in particular, are constant throughout his work the jump in style that occurs in the early 1960s is so abrupt that one wonders where it all began. The turning point seems to have been the Van Gogh series of which there is frustratingly only one on show (and not to my eye a particularly interesting one after which we approach the heart of the exhibition — the long run of luck as Bacon would put it — in which nearly everything works in his favour. What sparked off the new interest in colour and the semi-autobiographical focus on portraits of his friends was probably a combination of things his time in the South of France and Tangiers must have played a part as one imagines must feelings of remorse after the death of Peter Lacy. The whole mood of Bacon’s work shifts around this time the influx of warm colour is accompanied by a diffuse but marked sense of pathos (it would be interesting to know at exactly what point that distinctively Baconian adjective “poignant”, began to acquire the burden of connotation notation it carries in the recorded conversations).

It was Gilles Deleuze, I think whose compendious Francis Bacon Logique de la Sensation is now in its fourth edition (Editions de la Difference 198fr), who first compared Bacon’s fondness for gambling on three tables at once to his use of the triptych whether this tips the odds in the player’s favour in either case is anybody’s guess but what is certain is that it raises the power of a painting not merely three but three hundred-fold. Not all of these come off the “Triptych inspired by T S Eliot’s Poem Sweeney Agonistes” is too saturated to breathe properly and feels like three separate paintings while “Three Studies for a Crucifixion” allusions to Cimabue’s crawling worm notwithstanding standing has too much random interference coming in from strip-cartoons to get within firing range of the nervous system (the Munich leg of the exhibition where this will be replaced by the more provocative 1965 “Crucifixion”, will be better served in this respect, though even here the central panel seems much too crude for its intended target. When they do however the results are so splendid that many of his single paintings seem orphaned by comparison. One of the most surprising rooms in the exhibition is that with the series of three studies of heads works I had always found disappointing in photographs and which unlike the large canvases clearly do not reproduce well. Of the five series presented here the studies of Muriel Belcher and Henrietta Moraes (the latter also serves as the model for two surprisingly voluptuous female nudes along with the “Three Studies for Self Portraits” including “Self-Portrait” are marvellous examples of the sheer presence that Bacon’s turbulent brushwork creates at its best whereas in his full-length portraits he often seems to be engaged in a furious struggle to shift the locus of the human figure from the face the customary focus for the mystery of human presence to the body in these little series he seems to be concerned not only with investing the face with some of the animal force of the body but with seeing just how unnatural he can make a portrait trait while at the same time achieving a likeness. As Milan Kundera puts it in his preface to Bacon Portraits et Autoportraits (Les Belles Lettres 365fr), “Jusqu’a quel degre de distortion un individu reste-t-il encore lui-meme?

The highpoint of the exhibition however must be the “Triptych—In Memory of George Dyer”. The circumstances of Dyer’s death are well known — his suicide coincided with the opening of Bacon’s first major retrospective in Paris — and the painting may be said to speak for itself Nevertheless a number of observations can be made. First of all though a triptych tends to imply a hierarchy with the eye moving back and forth from the central panel around which the other two revolve I’m not sure that in this case it shouldn’t be read like a printed page from left to right The left-hand panel shows a contorted figure in a boxer’s boots and shorts improbably poised on a rim or bar to which he appears to have pinned himself in some kind of head-lock his body merging at one point with an abstract form that’s vaguely reminiscent of a painter’s palette. This is the most puzzling of the three panels and all the commentaries I have seen on it including those in the catalogue tend to assume that the figure like the other two represents resents Dyer yet turn a reproduction of it upside down and you will see first that the head bears no particular resemblance to Dyer and second that the figure in question appears to be smiling.

In the much-discussed central panel — which as Sylvester observes in the catalogue combines Dyer’s death with two of Bacon’s favourite touchstones Eliot’s The Waste Land (“I have heard the key . . .” and Picasso’s paintings of bathers before their beach-huts at Dinard — the figure holding a key in a lock, unlike so many of his predecessors in Bacon’s work, no longer drags his shadow behind him but is himself all shadow. Beneath his one foot is one of those illegible fragments of newsprint that litter Bacon’s canvases from time to time, and that one is tempted to read as a latter-day symbol of vanitas, an acknowledgement of the circumstances stances of Dyer’s death at the very hour of Bacon’s triumph. (In Les Passions de Francis Bacon, one of several handsome albums published to coincide with the exhibition, Philippe Sollers notes the irony of Dyer’s name, but not the specific echo it is likely to set up in an English sensibility, namely of Shakespeare’s Sonnet: CXI “. . . And almost thence my nature is subdued/To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand”, with its overtones of responsibility and remorse.)

Though the central panel could indeed be seen to embody the empty enigma of death about which the other two revolve, the force and dignity of the right-hand panel is such that it inevitably draws the other two in its wake. On it we see a bust of Dyer — his head smeared with blue and white markings like some warrior tricked up for his final voyage reflected in an autumn-blue table-top from where it leaks down into the pedestal to form a dark pool at the base  that must be the nearest Bacon ever came to a conventional likeness. The catalogue describes the right-hand panel as a spatial continuation of that on the left which is true enough yet focus on the central panel and you will notice that the bars in the panels to either side appear to dip slightly so that the three together make a wave movement with the central panel acting as a trough from which the right-hand panel emerges.

Finally, all three panels play on the idea of “both sides at once”; the left-hand figure has one leg wrapped impossibly round both sides of the rim, while, in the central panel, the figure’s head and right shoulder are painted as though placed on different sides of the door; in the right-hand panel, the same conceit is stated twice over, the bust and its reflection being both inside and outside the rectangles by which they are framed That poetry acted on a number of occasions as a catalyst for Bacon’s work is well known Yeats’s “The Second Coming” for example with its falcon and blood dimmed tide its rough beast and the pitiless gaze of its sphinx seems to have exercised a persistent tent hold on Bacon’s imagination here one is reminded of the closing lines of Auden’s “The Secret Agent” (“parting easily two who were never joined”) — lines Bacon would almost certainly have known, if only because he gave a copy of Auden’s poems to a tenant of his in 1937, Mollie Craven. At the same time, the breadth and serenity that this right-hand panel gives out are all but unique in Bacon’s work; it is as though, for want of a plausible after-life for Dyer, he had concentrated all his energies and sense of dignity on enshrining his friend, with a minimum of facial distortion this time, in a painted paradise.

Inevitably, the Dyer triptych, like so much of Bacon’s work, leads one to reflect on the painter’s rather ambiguous involvement with religion and violence. Given the unusual climate in which Bacon grew up (two world wars and a childhood in Ireland at the time of the Easter Rising and a father who appears to have been an out-and-out sadist (Bacon is said to have been horsewhipped as a boy in his father’s presence it is hardly surprising that so much in Bacon’s vision should read like a lifelong vengeance of the son on the father; Greek tragedy, to which Bacon was so attached, is pre-eminently, of course, a history of family disasters perpetuated from generation to generation (the Eumenides one might also note were notorious for punishing crimes against the family). That for so much of his adult life his sexual proclivities should have been illegal under English law cannot have helped matters either.

What is surprising on the other hand is that he should not only have survived all this but gone on to invent an objective idiom for it in paint In his Bacon (Cercle d Art 19Ofr). Philippe Dagen points up the striking contrast in many of Bacon’s portraits between the manhandling to which the head is subjected and the impassivity of the eyes as though Bacon was constantly rehearsing some private drama of violence and his or the sitter’s resurrection not through but despite the violence Dagens extended essay is also interesting for the parallels it draws between Bacon’s work and certain texts by Adorno and Bataille’s remarks for example on the way in pain or anger the neck will be extended so as to bring the mouth in line with the spinal column throw a very interesting light on the deliberate confusion of animal and human forms in some of Bacon’s more disturbing early works.

As for the crucifixions though Bacon never painted the Crucifixion only crucifixions or studies for a crucifixion and though it would obviously be senseless to interpret his work in any specifically Christian sense one cannot help noticing that the only point in the many interviews views Bacon gave at which his tone departs from its customary lucidity and becomes openly aggressive is when religion is invoked a crucifixion as Bacon liked to insist is indeed a particularly powerful example of man’s cruelty to man but it can hardly be a coincidence that it is also an image of a father who betrays a son like Artaud and Bataille, Bacon is one of those artists who is rather too dependent at times on the worlds they reject for one to feel altogether confident in their work. This doubtless explains why he should have felt so at home with French writers of his generation, such as Michel Leiris, whose Francis Bacon (Albin Michel 58Ofr) has been republished for the exhibition, along with a handsome little pocket book Francis Bacon ou la Brutalite des Faits (Le Seuil 6Ofr), containing four of his essays and five previously unpublished letters to Bacon. It also sheds light on the famous altercation with Auden, in which the latters attitude to religion — as principled and absolute as Bacon’s equally vehement rejection — seems to have touched a nerve in the painter. His obsession with Velazquez’s “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” hardly needs comment.

In describing Bacon’s world, Pierre Schneider once borrowed a very striking image from Tettullian that of the refrigerium interim, the glacial three-day gap between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. The choice of an image coined by a pagan-bom Christian who first formulated the doctrine of the Trinity is very suggestive if only because so much of Bacon’s work can be read like a resurrection of life from the mutilations imposed by violence By the time we reach the work of the late 1970s and 80s and the closing stages of the exhibition, one cannot help but feel that Bacon’s resurrection through paint was behind him In an interview in 1984 in Francis Bacon Entretiens (Edition Carre 35fr he spoke of wanting to “casser les styles a commencer par le mien”, but none of the late works on show here convince me that he did Does it matter. At one point in his book Deleuze asks rhetorically: “Qu’est ce qui restera de Bacon selon Bacon Peut-etre quelques series de tetes un ou deux triptyches aeriens et un large dos d’homme Guere plus qu’une pomme et un ou deux vases.” Though the culture circus would like us to think otherwise very few artists have left us more And perhaps the last word for once should go to the curator Bacon often bemoaned in conversation the lack of anyone to talk to, a fellow painter whose judgment he could trust or someone who might do for his own work what Pound did for “The Waste Land”, and it may be that he never really wanted one; if so many artists grow apart over the years from their friends and contemporaries, it is less a question of vanity one suspects than of aesthetic instinct. Yet in a sense he did find someone to play that role for the editorial montage which David Sylvester made of their fascinating conversations is itself an important landmark in Bacon’s career and begins one notices (the first interview in the book took place in 1962 around the same period that Bacon was to come into his own as a painter .Whatever quarrels one might have with Sylvester’s rigorously even-handed selection for my part, I would gladly have sacrificed some of the earlier and later work to allow room for more paintings on the same theme (the Van Gogh series, for example or the female nudes and Lucian Freud portraits), not least because the importance of taking up the same model time and again is an aspect of modem painting that Bacon shares with Giacometti and Picasso among others — the exhibition is also a homage to the man who has been pondering and defending Bacon’s work for the better part of fifty years.

                                                                                                                  Three Studies of Muriel Belcher oil on canvas 1966

He hung himself on a hook

MARTIN GAYFORD  |  ART  |  THE SUNDAY REVIEW  |  THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH  |  AUGUST 18, 1996

FRANCIS BACON fills the main exhibition rooms at the Pompidou Centre this summer (until October 14). How many other British artists would be accorded similar prominence in Paris? Turner, and Constable, no doubt, and Henry Moore, and that’s about it. To most art lovers in continental Europe the above is an exhaustive list of significant art from this island, and Bacon is a key element of it: the 20th-century English painter. But, back in his own country, Bacon is not necessarily awarded so much honour.

Several critics have come out over the last couple of months with admissions that, frankly, they can’t see what all the fuss is about. To many people, not necessarily philistines either,  Bacon  what he was to Mrs Thatcher: the man who painted those horrible pictures. This impeccably hung and selected exhibition offers an opportunity for an interim assessment of Bacon’s reputation. How good was he really?

The case against him comes in two parts, one moral and one aesthetic. Let’s take the first first. According to this his view of the world was too warped for his paintings to count as major art. Bacon, this line goes, was a Johnny One-note of art, offering a repetitive Hobbesian diet of visual nastiness and brutishness. Bacon’s vision of human existence therefore requires, in the words of the late Peter Fuller, "a moral refusal". In other words, life simply isn’t like that.

To this Bacon had an answer. In the course of his interviews with David Sylvester he described his aims as an artist thus: "I’ve always tried to put things over as directly and rawly as I possibly can, and perhaps, if a thing comes across directly, people find that it is horrific. Because people tend to be offended by facts, or what used to be called the truth."

This exhibition substantiates Bacon’s opinion of his own work.

Thus Bacon, in his own mind, was by no means a master of modernist Grand Guignol; on the contrary, he was a sort of realist. His work was an attempt to make images which would have the most intense possible effect on his nervous system, images which would affect the viewer "more violently and poignantly". True or false?

It seems to me that this exhibition substantiates Bacon’s opinion of his own work. Bacon was not an expressionist, but a painter who was out to capture how real people looked and, included in the way they looked, inevitably, the feelings that they gave him. He did this, however, in a highly idiosyncratic way. Many great figurative artists of the last century — from Cézanne to Kossoff, Auerbach and Freud — have slogged their way through a fresh vision by working directly from nature. Others have used drawings, or photographs.

Bacon worked from his memories. He used photographs, true, but the resulting image did not look photographic. Bacon looked at photographs, as he explained, to jog his memory — as one would look up a word in a dictionary. It was the memories he was after.

That explains a great deal about his paintings — their slightly dream-like quality, the impression they sometimes give of being not quite there, and at the same time tremendously vivid. There is an ectoplasmic feel, for example, about the Three Studies of the Human Head from 1953, one of his best paintings of the period, which is easily comprehensible as a memory, a powerful, probably drunken memory, rather than as an image of a sitter in front of the artist.

Essentially, he was trying to find an equivalent in paint to his own emotional reactions to people — and he clearly had an overpowering sense of the animal nature of man. Most of us scarcely think of ourselves as made up of muscle, which is meat. Bacon clearly never lost that awareness.

His distortions are no more radical than those employed by many 20th-century artists.

He was always surprised, he said, when he went into a butcher’s shop, not to find himself hanging up on a hook. This visceral sense of the beast in man evidently struck Bacon as both alarming and touching — "violent and poignant" — because it is linked so clearly with mortality.

Thus there is a feral blur — as if of something caught in the act of pouncing — not just about his paintings of animals, for example the Dog of 1952, but also about his pictures of people, such as the Study for Nude from the previous year. Some of his pictures of people have an air of sardonic menace — Study for a Portrait 1953 is an example — which one associates with gangland villains in films. Could Bacon sometimes be humorous? It’s a strange thought.

On the other hand, some of his people - the reclining man on the right section of the triptych Three Figures in a Room 1964 — have an air of nobility. But to see that you have to get over the shock value of his idiom. In fact, his distortions are no more radical than those employed by many 20th-century artists.

Thus Turning Figure from 1962 has a good deal in common with the running figure, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, by the Futurist, Umberto Boccioni. His heads are often dissected into curving planes in a way that brings Picasso to mind, or the Russian sculptor Antoine Pevsner.

The difference is that with Bacon there is a far greater sense that his figures are actually made out of living flesh. Indeed, one or two give the impression that the sitter has been rearranged along modernist lines with a chain saw. But that shock — not so much the shock of the new as the shock of the real — was exactly what Bacon was after. To the extent that he produced it, he succeeded.

The other charge against him is that the paintings do not work as art. In the later work there is certainly sometimes a jarring dislocation between the figures executed in meaty swirls of oil paint and the crisply clean, brightly-coloured settings which are close to geometric abstract painting. But that, arguably, is part of Bacon’s expressive purpose. It dramatises the contrast between messy, organic, mortal man and his clean, dead, manufactured environment.

A few years after his death, the best of Bacon’s painting looks sure to last.

It is less easy to acquit Bacon of the charge of repetitiousness. After the early surreal period of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, and the succeeding period of Screaming Popes, the classic Bacon man — and sometimes woman — evolved. The format to an extent became standardised. There was a saminess about his work which perhaps resulted from its lack of direct contact with reality.

Towards the end (he died in 1992) there was a clear falling off. Few paintings from the last decade of his life work, with the exception of the moving Study for Self-Portrait: Triptych from 1985-86. Some — especially those that examine the sexual potential of the cricket-pad — are not so much raw and shocking as preposterous.

But repetitiousness is a common fate of late 20th-century artists of all varieties — figurative, abstract, conceptual. Now, a few years after his death, the best of Bacon’s painting looks sure to last. But, as he said himself, it takes 75 to 100 years for a reputation to settle down. "Time is the only great critic."

                                                             Most of us never think of ourselves as made up of muscle, which is meat

                  ‘Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot's Poem, Sweeney Agonistes’ shows Bacon’s visceral sense of the beast in man

     Centre Georges Pompidou

Francis Bacon was born on October 28, 1909, in Dublin. His father bred horses in an Ireland already devastated by the Civil War. Around 1927, Francis Bacon lived for a time in Berlin before settling down in Paris, where he visted a Picasso exhibition at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery Standing before the works of the Spaniard, he decided to become a painter. However in 1929, he returned to London as a decorator. Painting then was only a hobby among others. He nevertheless shone there very early. His Crucifixion (1933) was reproduced by Herbert Read in his book Art Now and purchased by the art collector Michael Sadler. But his first exhibition in 1934 was a total flop. Painting was, however, a serious matter for him. Around 1944, he destroyed almost all his works. Only ten canvases of his first period remain. An autodafé is never insignificant, especially when it is the prelude to a crucifixion. The one he exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, scandalized. Bacon was launched. The director of the Hanover Gallery, Erica Brausen, had Alfred Barr purchase Painting, 1946. Two years after it was painted, the canvas entered the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During this period, Bacon started his series of “Heads”, which foreshadowed the litany of “Popes’ Portraits”.

He confessed to David Sylvester that another work impressed him very much: “You must know the beautiful Degas pastel in the National Gallery of a women sponging her back. And you will find at the very top of the spine that the spine almost comes out of the skin altogether. And it gives such a grip and twist that you’re more conscious of the vulnerability of the rest of the body than if he had drawn the spine naturally up to the neck. He breaks it so that this thing seems to protrude from the flesh. Now, whether Degas did this purposely or not, it makes it a much greater picture, because you’re suddenly conscious of the spine as well as the flesh, which he usually just painted covering the bones.”

Flesh was again at the origin of his admiration for Velasquez. The eight portraits executed during summer 1953 for his first exhibition in the United States at the Durlacher Gallery in New York are variations of a painting by Velasquez in 1650, representing the Pope Innocent X. When David Sylvester questioned him about the portrait painted by Velasquez, Bacon answered: “I’ve always thought this was one the greatest paintings in the world and I’ve had a crush on it”.

Besides Ingres, whose Oedipus and The Sphinx he reproduced, Bacon paid also a pointed homage to Van Gogh. In March 1957, he exhibited at the Hanover Gallery canvases of a series of eight inspired by a painting of the Dutchman dated 1888, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon. Its exhibition caused  a sensation, mostly because of the new manner inaugurated by Bacon, the rapid brushwork sweeping across the surface in broad strokes, and high-keyed colors in clearer harmony. The subject, less sulphurous than usual, also was appreciated. Lastly, Alberto Giacometti had a strong influence on Bacon and probably was the only one of his contemporaries to find favor with him. Their paintings share a reduction of space, by means of a kind of cage. To David Sylvester, who spoke about “heads or figures painted inside a sort of space-frame and it’s been supposed that you were picturing someone imprisoned in a glass box”. Francis Bacon answered: “I use that frame to see the image. For no other reason [...] I cut down the scale of the canvas by drawing in these rectangles which concentrate the image down. Just to see it better.” Giacometti used the same process. Asked by Pierre Schneider in 1965, he explained it by putting forward reasons very close to Bacon’s: “Why do I paint frames around the the figures in my canvases? Because I determine the true space of the figure once it is completed. With the vague intention of reducing the canvas [...] and also because my figures need a kind of no man’s land. The smaller the figures are, the larger space around them should be”.

Save cinema and painting, Bacon’s best catalyst was photography. Bacon owned the book Animal Locomotion published in 1878 by a pioneer of movement study, Eadweard Muybridge. He used it as a repertory of forms.

Francis Bacon’s friend, John Deakin, fashion photographer and portraitist for Vogue, had besides built up for him a large gallery of portraits in which Bacon could draw all the more conveniently since his studio floor was littered with these photographs. Visitors regularly trampled them, which according to Bacon "is an addition to the image..."

His models came from all horizons and made up the shady world of Soho in the ’50s: Muriel Belcher, the proprieties of the Colony Room, the bar where he had his lasting habits. Isabel Lambert, wife of the composer Alan Rawsthorne, painter herself and former assistant of Jacob Epstein. Henrietta Moraes, who posed, with Deakin’s intervention for torrid nude figures. Lucian Freud, one of the rare talented painters Bacon admitted into his circle. And his closest friends, George Dyer then John Edwards, pale louts from the East End for some, the only ones to to have known how to love Bacon for the others.

Dyer committed suicide in a hotel in Paris in 1972, at the time of his lover’s retrospective at the Grand Palais. Muriel Belcher died in 1979. These deaths fed Bacon’s natural pessimism: "I’ve done a lot of self-portraits, really, because people have been dying around me like flies and I’ve nobody else left to paint but myself. [...] I loathe my own face and I’ve done self-portraits because I’ve had nothing else to do [...] It is true to say... One of the nicest things that Cocteau said was ’Each day in the mirror I watch death at work.’ " Death worked slowly.

It caught up with Bacon in the spring, on April 28, 1992, in Madrid. He was eighty-two.

Within a year of returning to London, Francis Bacon managed to absorb the basic painting techniques he needed, move from watercolour and gouache to oil and organise two exhibitions. He also found a benevolent lover and an eccentric housekeeper who de¬ voted their lives to him.

His female companion was Jessie Lightfoot, who had looked after Francis from his infancy in Ireland and who came closer to him than anyone else in the family. A determined and capable woman, she would have been in her late fifties when Francis returned to London from Paris. The Bacon family had dismissed her once they no longer had need of a children’s nurse, and in the worsening economic climate, when domestic servants were less in demand, she had been unable to find other employment. By 1931. Jessie Lightfoot had moved in with Bacon at his Queensberry Mews studio.

The third member of the odd ménage created by Francis was Eric Hall. During their long, relatively stable relationship. Hall helped Bacon in numerous ways. First and foremast he provided the paternal encouragement and advice which the younger man felt he had so sorely lacked. A patron of the arts. Hall had a comfortable private fortune which he spent freely on his pleasures and interests, and in his company Bacon was able to supplement his erratic, piecemeal education. Together they went to concerts, the cinema and the theatre; and although Bacon had developed his own interests since adolescence, he became more aware of the theatre, and of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare especially, during this period. It is likely, too. that his reading became more sophisticated under Hall’s influence. 

In this belated and unorthodox education special attention was paid to the best food and wine. Eating and drinking remained high priorities for Bacon, and he credited Eric Hall with making him aware of their importance.

    Francis Bacon set up a delicate balance in his life between roaring rebel

       — atheist homosexual, drinker, gambler — and wounded, gifted son

The howl of an iconoclast

After a 15-year apprenticeship Bacon finds his voice

MICHAEL PEPPIATT | FEATURES | THE TIMES | WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 9 1996

The war years were a period of intense germination for Bacon. Because of his chronic asthma, he was pronounced unfit for active service. The artist nevertheless was acutely sensitive to the suffering he saw around him. The unfulfilled artist in Bacon, who was now in his early thirties, was forced to think in terms of the images he wanted to paint.

 He started with Figure Getting out of a Car. The painting shows a fowl-like, fleshy creature laying its long, bandaged, penis-like neck on a pile of ammunition, which is also unmistakably phallic-looking. The neck ends in a pair of meticulously painted teeth, bared in a snarl: and the whole spectre uncoils out of an open car drawn from one the artist had seen in a news photograph of Hitler’s arrival at a Nuremberg rally. This impressively aggressive image, which was probably painted in 1939-40. was recorded by Peter Rose Pulham, a photographer of the period and a friend of Bacon’s, in the artist’s studio in 1946: shortly thereafter. Bacon repainted the canvas almost entirely, so that ’ everything hut the bared teeth of the biomorph vanishes beneath a mass of vegetation. Only the Nazi car survives more or less intact, and the new version, with its toned down but more insidious atmosphere of threat, was entitled Landscape with Car.

The snarling, bandaged “penis demata" of the original image directly predicts the middle panel of the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, the work that announced resoundingly Bacon’s definitive entry into the art world. Similarly, a Study for a Figure, painted later in the war, that belongs to the “abandoned” canon of Bacon’s works, dearly foreshadows the left-hand panel of the triptych in its crouched position, its outstretched head and the great, diagonal, upward sweep — whether of flesh or fabric — from which it juts. A third abandoned image, sketched out in oil on composition board during the Petersfield interlude, consists of little more than a head, its upper half shadowed by a peaked cap. its lower split into a scream. Floating over a mess of random marks and such vestigial forms as a ghostly sketch of a hand, the mouth acts as a precisely defined exit for the inchoateness of the picture. The outpouring from this dark orifice neatly rimmed round with teeth conveys a specific threat, since it was clearly inspired in part by photographs of the Nazi war leaders. One likely source for the unfinished Petersfield image was a Picture Post snapshot of Goebbels, his mouth wide open in full public harangue. that Bacon kept in his studio for years.

Hindsight undoubtedly helps to disentangle die many elements that went into the making of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Yet even now, a half-century later, nothing really prepares the viewer for the triptych’s rawness, as it glowers from the mid-century with the memory of injury and the prophecy of more evil to come. What sets the Three Studies apart is its scale and its deliberateness. The searchings of 15 years’ sporadic apprenticeship come to a dramatic conclusion. It is as if, freed from self-doubt and inhibition, the artist had been goaded into making a statement of exacerbated authority. If Bacon may be said to have found his own voice in these ‘ panels, it is the scream of his open-mouthed monster on the right. But the basic questions continue to return, after decades of attempted interpretation. What does this howl mean? How did these ungainly, menacing figures come about? What gives the whole triptych, with its roughly delineated space and suffused orange background, its power as an emblem of brute suffering, ravening greed and generalised evil?

Despite the rawness, and for all the artist’s lack of formal education, the work grew out of a higher developed visual and literary culture as well as out of emotional urgency. The most important source for this picture, as for those that led up to it was Picasso. In 1938, at the London Gallery, there had been an exhibition of drawings and collages by Picasso that Bacon would have seen. More significantly, in October of that year, Guernica went on show at the New Burlington Galleries. Bacon absorbed Guernica with the single-minded concentration he had given to the older artist’s biomorphic period. In a sense, the Three Studies was his Guernica, a savage outburst and a decisive statement, albeit not provoked by any specific event or linked to any political cause.

Shaky and intermittent as his first efforts as a painter had been. Bacon now experienced with great gusto the world opening up around him. In a series of inspired accidents. his Painting 1946 was about to materialise, confirming his presence as a disturbing iconoclast in the mild mannered English art world. Bacon was to follow this with a series of Heads, brought together in a one-man show in 1949, that were to establish his mastery of oil paint and his uncanny ability to provoke chance effects within the infinitely malleable medium. The following year, he rounded off the period with a Fragment of a Crucifixion, which showed that his power to shock was in no way diminished by an increasingly sophisticated technique: it had simply become more insidious.

TOMORROW  Francis Bacon falls in love for the first time

Bacon falls violently in love

Day Four: Bacon’s obsessive affair with the self-destructive Peter Lacy takes him to Tangier,

where the artist, tortured by sexual jealousy, finds comfort in casual beatings in dark alleys

MICHAEL PEPPIATT   |   FEATURES   |   THE TIMES   |   THURSDAY OCTOBER 10 1996

Bacon was near 40 when he fell in love for the first time. He met Peter Lacy m the Colony Room, a newly opened Soho drinking club, and as Bacon described it. Their mutual attraction was anomalous from the start. “What Peter really liked was young boys. He was actually younger than me. hut he didn’t seem to realise it. It was kind of mistake That he went with me at all. Of course, it was the most total disaster from the start. Being in love in that extreme way — being totally, physically obsessed by someone — is like having some dreadful disease. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

Lacy had I he advantage, like Eric Hall before him. Of inherited money, which allowed him for most of his life not to work. Because of this, according to Bacon, “he felt the futility of life all the more clearly”. Lacy had also been a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, and afterwards he became a test pilot for a while. “All these things obviously shatter your nerves,”  Bacon ’reflected, long after Lacy’s death. “Most of rite time Peter was terribly neurotic, even hysterical.”

Part of the most intense period of their relationship (which Bacon characterised as “four years of continuous horror. with nothing but violent rows”) was lived — again uncharacteristically for "the artist — in the country, not far from Henley-on-Thames. Bacon recalled Lacy’s invitation to come and live with him there: “Of course, he hated my painting right from die beginning, and he said. “You can leave your painting and come and live with me.’-And I said: “What does living with you mean? And he said: “Well, you could live in a comer of my cottage on straw.” He wanted to have me chained to the wall. Peter was very lanky in all sorts of ways. He liked to have people watching as we had sex. But he was so neurotic that living together would never have worked.” Even if 'Bacon did not accept the invitation to move in. he was a frequent visitor, and he even managed to get some work done by setting up a makeshift studio in a conservatory.

Bacon's need to paint, then, had proved even stronger than his obsessive passion for Lacy. In 1953, Bacon completed 21 paintings, the most he had ever painted in a year. It was now that Bacon's obsession with the Pope theme took hold. Study for Portrait became the first in a series of eight fully recognisable pontiffs — caught as if in successive frames on a film. This was the longest series Bacon had ever undertaken, and it confirmed his bent for working in variations on a theme, a practice that came naturally to someone of his obsessive temperament. The first portrait remains the most precisely descriptive, with its steady, mournful gaze, and. As the series continues, so the portraits grow freer, until the figure radiates a kind of wild hysteria. In this respect, it is tempting to think that as Bacon worked he transposed some of his feelings about his alarmingly neurotic lover. Lacy, whose surface calm would suddenly erupt into uncontrollable rage.

When questioned about this series. Bacon replied, jocularly, that he had nothing against Popes, and that he merely “wanted an excuse to use those colours”. In retrospect, this sounds deliberately disingenuous, as if the artist wanted to avoid any explanation. It may be that he himself did not know why he was so obsessively drawn towards depictions of the Pope. but it indubitably went beyond the attraction of a particular colour.

In the Pope, one might say, the two must important elements in life for Bacon, the erotic and the aesthetic, were intertwined, and it seems reasonable to suppose that is why he was drawn to the theme so repeatedly and why it gave rise to some of his greatest images, such as the magnificent Study of a screaming Pope done after the Velazquez portrait in that same productive year, 1953. In this picture, the pleated curtains of the backdrop are made to fail through the Pope’s face, as if its flesh hung in folds: this is a peculiarly Baconian conceit, like the use of safety-pins and blind tassels or, later, lightbulbs and arrows.

Although he enjoyed being physically dominated. Bacon instinctively sought the upper hand in ail his important relationships. He could be whipped and physically abused, but by his toughness and intelligence he kept ultimate control. With Lacy, he had lost it spectacularly. He could withstand the violence and the rows, the scenes which ended with him being beaten up, his clothes destroyed and his paintings slashed: there were sides of it he positively relished. But he was kept, mentally as well as physically, in thrall: being less in love, Lacy seemed stronger and freer, and the pangs of sexual jealousy tormented Bacon as intensely as any Furies he had known. Naturally promiscuous but above all devoted to his own destruction, Lacy kept always slightly out of reach. The folie à deux raged within its own pain and degradation. By the time of the first Van Gogh portraits, it had readied an inevitable impasse. But when Lacy left for Tangier, that did not stop Bacon from following him.

Tangier acted like a magnet for homosexuals during the 1950s. The Moroccan port offered not only acceptance but widespread acquiescence in matters of sexual preference. The sight of crowds of native men in brilliantly coloured jellabas strolling hand in hand together through the town would have been particularity alluring to foreign homosexuals forced to hide their affections.

Bacon’s hangout in Tangier was Dean’s Bar. Dean was a mellifluously spoken black man of mysterious origins who seemed born to run a bar. For Lacy. Dean’s had become a place of near enslavement; and it marked the beginning of his last rapid decline. Whatever his means when Bacon first took up with him in the early 1950s, they had dwindled to the point where he was obliged to “tinkle die ivories" in Dean’s virtually day and night in order to eke out an existence.

“Periodically Peter got very drunk,” recalls David Herbert, a long-time resident of Tangier, “and on one of his benders he took a knife and slashed three-quarters of the paintings that Francis had been working on the previous six months. Francis took it quite calmly; in fact he seemed almost pleased.” The British Consul-General in Tangier, Bryce Naim, became worried because “Francis was frequently found by the police beaten up in some street in Tangier in the early hours of the morning”. Herbert goes on, “Bryce complained to the chief of police and asked to have more police on duty in the darker alleys. A few weeks passed; the beatings continued. Then the chief called on Bryce and said, ‘Pardon, Monsieur le Consul-General, mais il ny a rien à fiaire. Monsieur Bacon aime ca’ ”.

Bacon brought back very little from his lengthy stays in Tangier: he abandoned numerous works in progress and either he or Lacy destroyed most of the others. But the whole atmosphere and the luminosity of Morocco marked him deeply. There can be no doubt that the explosion of strong colours in the Van Gogh series is at least partly attributable to Bacon’s experience of the North African light (just as Van Gogh’s own palette took on a new intensity after his arrival in Arles). In Van Gogh in a Landscape. Bacon has actually used a view of the countryside outside Tangier, which impressed him so much that it later became the sole subject of a wonderfully mysterious painting called Landscape near Malahara, Tangier. Dated 1963 and painted in London, this picture in fact had a deeply persona importance for the artist.1 it was in that landscape that Lacy had been buried

The Tangier interlude and Bacon’s affair with Lacy was to last for another couple of years. “Peter had been very tough when I first knew him. Then he fell for this Moroccan boy, and after he went off and lived in Tangier he lost that toughness. I think it had something to do with the Arab men. He had also always been the most terrible kind of drunk, but by this time he was completely out of control. The boy had left him and so on. Anyway he said he never wanted to see me again. Then one day he just telephoned and said. “From now an. consider me as dead.” And I was very upset, because I had been deeply fond of him. And then much later, he sent this telegram asking me to go out and stay with him again in Tangier, and like a fool I went. Peter wasn’t there when I arrived. But there was this Arab boy, sitting up in a fig tree in the courtyard, and he asked me whether he could pick the figs. I said yes, certainly he could. And in the end he climbed in through the window, and he was terribly good-looking”.

“Then Peter came back and found us both in bed, and he got so absolutely mad he went round and broke every single thing in the place. I had to go out and try and spend the night on the beach”.

“Peter by that time was drinking three bottles of whisky a day, which no one can take. He was killing himself with drink. He set out to do it, like a suicide, and I think in the end his pancreas simply exploded. After that disastrous trip. I had no news of him until that exhibition at the Tate.”

News of Lacy’s death was among the telegrams that arrived to congratulate the artist on the opening day of his Tate retrospective. Bacon had never come to terms with die self-destructive passion that had drawn him to Lacy nor with the latter's rejection of him: and now that he was dead. Bacon was inconsolable. He saw Lacy’s death as a suicide, and he interpreted the fact that it had coincided with his opening as a deliberate extra punishment, as if he had to atone for the violence of his an in personal misfortune. The artist was convinced that the voracious Fury-like shapes on an orange ground that dominated the first room of the exhibition still pursued him.

In his grief, Bacon attempted several times to bring his dead friend back to a kind of life through the act of portraying him. In both named and unnamed portraits. Lacy seems to be struggling lo surface through the damaging smears of paint that blind an eye or excise an ear. Lacy himself had become part oft he artist's own myth of guilt and retribution. He began to picture himself too. in his first acknowledged self-portraits, in a last spasm of raging pink flesh and black shadow before dissolution. Indeed, from this point in his development when portraits of people became so central lo his work, each portrait wits painted as if il might be the last.

      The doomed and damaged Peter Lacy, left, dominated the younger Bacon, right, and his death continued to haunt the artist in his portraits

A PAINTING by Francis Bacon not seen in public for 35 years and known to scholars only from a black and white photograph is expected to fetch £1.5 million at auction. Seated Figure (Red Cardinal), which dates from I960, is one of 20 images from Bacon's Papal series. Most are in museums. After being exhibited in 1961,it was purchased by an American collector and on his death was sold in the 1970s to an anonymous European. The painting's whereabouts remained unknown until its appearance at Christie’s.

The image was inspired by Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope innocent X in Rome. Bacon contorted the image into a threatening, disfigured character that reflected the pain and bleakness of human existence. Brett Gorvy, director of contemporary art at Christie’s, said: "The pope’s face is acid burned and purple-bruised and has the texture of rotting flesh. Frustration, impotence and agony are all registered." The picture will be shown in Antwerp, Zurich. Paris and New York before being auctioned in London on December 4.

Bacon’s meaning, page 18

     Bacon’s  Seated Figure (Red Cardinal), “frustration, impotence and agony”

                  Out of the shadows:  Bacon’s Seated Figure (Red Cardinal),