Francis Bacon is something of a Marmite painter. There are those who love him – his searing honesty and the existential search to extract the essence of a subject – and those who dislike the violence, the distortions and the unconventional swirling brush marks, who prefer the greater restraint of his contemporary and friend, Lucien Freud. I am in the first camp and consider him one of the foremost painters of the 20th century, up there in the pantheon – with his intense gaze and visual experimentation – with Picasso. For Bacon, the mystery of painting was how appearance could be rendered. Of course, it could be illustrated to achieve a technical likeness or caught in a photograph, but what mattered to him was catching something essential.
What Sigmund Freud called the Id. In this, he can be compared with both Frank Auerbach and Alberto Giacometti, for whom the goal was not to create a recognisable likeness but to achieve an essence through a series of painterly marks. Bacon’s portraits – as befits the preoccupations of those postwar years when the philosopher Theodor Adorno doubted that any form of art could be made after the death camps – are exercises in capturing fleeting moments of meaning in a world where meaning was in short supply. Titled Human Presence, the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery shares these attempts to catch the elusive aura of an individual through the fusion of paint to communicate ‘directly with the nervous system’. In his self-portraits painted later in life, Bacon’s face seems to emerge from the darkness in a tangled knot of flesh, conveying his awareness of our fragile existence. He was, he said, ‘always surprised when I wake up in the morning’.
“It is all so meaningless we might as well be extraordinary” – Friedrich Nietzsche, as frequently quoted by Francis Bacon
Portraiture had, traditionally, been a question of flattering paintings of the great and the good: aristocrats, generals, Lady this and Lord that. Bacon’s portraits, on the other hand, are mostly of friends and lovers – those who lived rackety, bohemian lives on the margins of polite society, surviving on their wit and sexual charms in the drinking dens of Soho. The self-portraits of his pimento-shaped face he loathed were, he told the critic David Sylvester, a last resort as ‘ people have been dying around me like flies, and I’ve nobody else left to paint but myself’. This, perhaps, was a little disingenuous. Rather, they seem like archaeological excavations into his own psyche (a description, I suspect, he would hate). His 1963 Study for Self-Portrait was based on the body of his friend Lucien Freud, taken from a photo by John Deakin. Sitting on a blue sofa, his feet on the table in front of him, an ashtray full of cigarette butts in the foreground, his face has dissolved into a contorted, twisted pulp, perhaps an illustration of his anguish at the recent death of the debonair RAF officer Peter Lacey in Tangiers, with whom he had a deeply sadomasochistic relationship but whom, nevertheless, he described as the ‘love of his life’.
Bacon emerged as a significant artist in 1946 and became occupied with portraiture soon after. Born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family, he received little schooling and no conventional art training. As a young boy, he was beaten by his bullying father’s stable grooms, developing a sexual attraction to his own father, who more or less disinherited him when he found him dressing up in his mother’s clothes. London became his home. The village of Soho, in particular, provided him with a cast of sitters – Lacey, Lucien Freud, Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne, George Dyer and later John Edwards – drinkers and deviants, artists, writers, and minor aristocrats who were slumming it in the demi-monde of sooty post-war London. Largely self-taught, Bacon’s influences ranged from Rembrandt to Velasquez and Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin. The latter provided him with two of his abiding images: lone men – based on Velasquez’s 1650 painting of Pope Innocent X – and the screaming mouth of the nanny on the Odessa Steps with her blood-soaked face and broken glasses, revealing its rows of animalist teeth.
Bacon was fascinated by cruelty. This found early expression in his Three Studies at the Base of the Crucifixion. The Furies from Aeschylus’s Oresteia are depicted as part man, part beast, all tortured expressions, contorted necks and snarling open mouths. In this exhibition, the mostly male bodies – except Henrietta Moraes, whom he painted as The Rokeby Venus plus hypodermic syringe, and Isabel Rawsthorne – are shown in contorted states of anxiety. The Sleeping Figure of his sometime lover, the alcoholic Peter Lacy, depicts a huddled nude in the flayed flesh tones of Titian’s Flayed Marsyas, his elongated face seemly transmogrifying into a snout. In Study of a Figure in a Landscape, Bacon used a black and white holiday snap of him, taken in the Mediterranean, transposing the crouching figure into the grasslands of South Africa to create something threatening and feral.
The last wall, the undoubted climax of the show, has been dedicated to the triptych – surely it’s not coincidental that the triptych is a religious form – to his lover, the petty thief, George Dyer who committed suicide on 24th October 1971, two days, before Bacon’s groundbreaking retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. On the left, we see him crouched in a toilet. In the middle, he appears under a naked light bulb within a dark doorway, his black shadow spilling onto the ground around him like the silhouette of a bat. In the third, he is leaning over a bathroom sink, again viewed through a dark doorway, puking. In both the left and right paintings, ambiguous white arrows are painted on the floor. These are hard to interpret. Maybe, like the arrows in a theatre auditorium, they suggest a possible exit. In this case, suicide. The paintings are bleak and searingly honest, conjuring T.S. Elliot’s famous lines that life amounts to little more than ‘birth, copulation and death’. Bacon implies that there is nothing spiritual waiting in the wings. All that matters is this body, our fleshy desires, this here and now. The horror and terror is that it is all so fragile and alarmingly brief.
Sue Hubbard’s fourth novel, Flatlands (a tender portrait of wartime youth’ The Guardian), is published by Pushkin Press
Her new collection of poetry, God’s Little Artist: poems on the Life of Gwen John, is published by Seren Books: