Art Gallery of Alex Alien

"Mr Francis Bacon is a very capable artist…But the subject of his pictures are so extraordinary, and, indeed, so extremely repellent, that it is scarcely possible to consider anything else. His themes are as vivid and as meaningless as a nightmare… Perhaps the nastiest of his ideas is what seems to be some sort of visceral specimen, a pale and flabby bag of flesh.”

"The human beings in Bacon's pictures seem half-animal, or half-reptilian. Sometimes they have the whiteness of death; sometimes they are white and red, like joints of meat... He wants to make the animal come through the human being; and he wants the paint itself to carry its own implications..."

Francis Bacon: The Observer Profile; The Observer Weekend Review, Sunday, 27th May, 1962.

"Bacon had worked on a triptych in the last years of the War, his traumas put on board with rough strokes. He admitted to the influence of Picasso’s work in the ‘twenties, but he had gone further in distorting the organic form that related to the human image. The triptych was to receive some hostility for its ferocity, one critic writing that Bacon had discovered ‘in the art of painting the felicities of the death warrant [and] covered the lamp-shades of his immediate predecessors with human skins.’ He did shock, he did strike for the bowels, the inner nerve."

Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon – His Life and Violent Times, Crown Publishing, New York 1993.

"For most people, Bacon causes a shock. He says himself that his work is making images, and these are shock-images. The meaning of this shock does not refer to something 'sensational' (which is represented), but depends on sensation, on lines and colours. You are confronted with the intense presence of figures, sometimes solitary figures, sometimes with several bodies, suspended in a plane, in an eternity of colours... You can sense power and violence in him along with great charm As soon as he sits more than an hour, he twists in every direction; he really looks like a Bacon. But his posture is always simple, given a sensation that he might feel."

Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, Texts & Interviews 1975-1995, The MIT Press, 2006.

"Bacon himself dated his artistic coming of age to the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion of 1944 and imposed the orange triptych (now famous, but which Eric Hall, Bacon’s companion, had trouble persuading the Tate to accept it as a gift) as the fons et origo of everything he had painted. Thenceforth by order of the artist no works prior to 1944 were allowed into the canon – although bacon had been painting for some twenty years previously… John Russell’s perceptive monograph begins with the Three Studies, and the interviews that David Sylvester conducted and edited brilliantly make only the briefest mention of anything that happened before. Similarly, in later life, Bacon insisted that all retrospectives show nothing prior to 1944."

"He has certainly been very important to me. It was he who, later on, gave the Three Figures of the Crucifixion to the Tate Gallery. At first they didn't want them. He had to insist before they finally accepted them." Michel Archimbaud: "What was his name?" Francis Bacon: "Eric Hall." ... M.A: "Why did you go back to that work which to a certain extent, in its first version, is your key work - the one which you consider as having signalled your real debut as a painter?" F.B: "I don't know. I had always intended to rework that painting in a much bigger format, and then one day I decided to do it. But it didn't recreate exactly the same work. It's slightly modified compared to the 1944 version, particularly in terms of colour, as orange predominates in the first version and red in the second."

"Bacon’s Three Studies collapses the traditional Cartesian coordiantes of representational space. In so doing it symbolically dismantles Cartesianism tout court (with Cartesianism itself serving as shorthand for a subject-centred metaphysics). The painting places us in an environment where we cannot get our bearings, cannot define meaningful reference points. However, even though Bacon continues to offer us improbable geometries throughout his later paintings most are by no means as disorienting as the Three Studies. In fact, we regularly find Bacon’s figures held within the confines of a spectral cube defining precisely the regular, schematised Cartesian space that we cannot locate in the Three Studies."

Luke Skrebowski, The Vitality of the Accident; Francis Bacon's Metaphoric Figuration; Metamorphosis Issue 05, London Consortium, 2004.

"If there’s one thing the new horror flick Teeth teaches us, it’s that nothing sours a romantic soirée like a vagina dentata. The phrase — Latin for 'vagina with teeth' — conjures men’s primal fear of sex, the opposite sex, the word 'vajayjay,' and dentistry. Teeth writer and director Mitchell Lichtenstein (son of the late pop artist Roy Lichtenstein) has said that he first heard of the 'vagina dentata' in the ’70s, in a college class taught by feminist social critic Camille Paglia. These days, it’s used mostly to describe art: an abstracted naked lady with a praying-mantis face in Pablo Picasso’s 1930 painting Seated Bather; the monster grins of human-dinosaur mutants in Francis Bacon’s 1944 painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. It’s also been applied to the fanged space bugs that menace moist tunnels in the Alien films."

Greg Cook, Let Me See Your Grill - The origins of the vagina dentata, The Phoenix, January 22, 2008.

"Bacon’s oblique depictions of the Eumenides (Erinyes) date back to the work he situated as his ‘Opus 1’, the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). Obviously, for this mythological form there was no recourse to a realistic pictorial precedent, in the form of either painting or a photograph, and in any case his prime concern was to capture the sensation aroused in him by the idea of the Furies. The Furies, which in this secular Three Marys were emblems for malevolence and personal disaster, reappear in his iconography from 1974 onwards, and most conspicuously in the 1981 triptych. Triptych – Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus was begun by 1979, and in an early state the left panel incorporated the trickling blood but omitted the suspended Eumenides … considered Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion as a development of Picasso’s ‘forms’, and not until about 1950 did he come to regard the human body as his principle subject.”

Martin Harrison, Francis Bacon: Extreme Points of Realism; Francis Bacon - The Violence of the Real, Thames & Hudson, 2006.

"In a recent conversation with the Editor of Cambridge Opinion, Bacon spoke of a certain kind of organic form as an alternative to the creation of the human image which ‘could open up all sorts of possibilities, probably of a secondary intensity’, and actually his first triptych, the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, executed in 1944, was a contribution to this kind of organic invention. The forms bear a relation to the human figure but are placed outside the human pale by extreme distortion and the sense they convey of existing in a state total and perpetual rage. Alley records that Bacon has referred to them in a letter as sketches for the Eumenides. (The word means ‘gracious ones’ and is a propitiary name for the Furies who exist for the purpose of avenging crimes against the ties of blood)."

"Bacon's Three Studies put forward a less comfortable point of view. They suggested that people would always go on doing dreadful things to one another, and that other people would always come by to gloat. That was not the whole meaning of the Three Studies, but it was one of their meanings, and it made a lot visitors hightail it out of the gallery. On any reading, these were terrifying images. The three figures in question had anatomies that were part human, part animal and part conundrum. They could probe, bite and suck, but their functioning in other respects was mysterious. Ears and mouths they had, but two at least of them were sightless. One was unpleasantly bandaged. Common to all three figures was a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated gluttony and a ravening undifferentiated capacity for hatred. Each was as if cornered, and only waiting for a chance to drag the observer down and savage him."

John Russell, Time Vindicates Francis Bacon’s Searing Vision, The New York Times, June 9, 1985.

"In his cultural history of the horror genre, The Monster Show, writer David J. Skal compares Francis Bacon's famous 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion to equally disturbing special effects work in John Carpenter's The Thing. The surrealistic imagery conjured by Rob Bottin to depict the transformation of a human being into a shape-changing thing from another world is nearly unimaginable, and Milton is one of its few precedents. It must be seen to be believed, and it represents a kind of high-water mark for fevered creativity in the horror film...The Thing can clearly be categorized as part of a movement in genre film that dealt with biological horror... The Thing looks, unblinking, into the abyss, where it finds our own anxieties, suspicions, and phobias reflected in the eyes of shapeless, unknowable monsters."

Bryant Frazer, John Carpenter's The Thing, Deep Focus Movie Reviews; June 1999.

"Lynch started as a painter, and continues to work in that medium, and it is perhaps more useful to consider his films as you would paintings. He mentioned at the GFT that Francis Bacon was a great hero and influence, so I ask about Bacon's famous 1944 triptych, Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion (which, by the way, is worth looking at as a possible inspiration for the look of the baby in Eraserhead). Bacon's masterpiece - like, say, Mulholland Drive - has characters and seems to contain some sort of narrative, but it's not entirely clear what that is. 'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' Lynch smiles, delighted by the comparison. 'If you had those paintings on the wall and 100 people came in and you said, Tell me the story that you get from that triptych,' you'd get 100 different stories. But there could be some beautiful stories.' There also seems to be a common mood between Bacon's paintings and Lynch's films. 'Sure,' he agrees. 'A kind of lonely despair and sickness.' He laughs. 'Yeah.'..."

Peter Ross & David Lynch, Trance mission, Sunday Herald, Scotland, November 4, 2007.

"Since he exhibited Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion at the Lefevre Gallery in London 44 years ago, Francis Bacon has remained master of the macabre. The writhing half-human, half-animal forms he painted in that triptych may have owed something to the German Expressionists and something to Picasso. But Mr. Bacon's nightmare was fundamentally his own. Coming as it did at the end of World War II, in a city that had been devastated by bombings and spiritually enervated, the display of Three Studies at Lefevre seemed to many of those who saw it to epitomize the spirit of the time. Mr. Bacon had left his home in Ireland at the age of 17 and spent the next 19 years drifting throughout Europe and England. All at once, this show established him as the pre-eminent painter of psychological and physical brutality. During the last four and a half decades, Mr. Bacon has done nothing to shake that reputation. Now he is the subject of a very handsome retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum for his 80th birthday."

Michael Kimmelman, The Master of the Macabre, Francis Bacon, The New York Times, October 26, 1989.

"Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion seems derived from Picasso's Crucifixion, but further distorted, with ostrich necks and button heads protruding from bags - the whole effect gloomily phallic, like Bosch without the humour. These objects are perched on stools, and depicted as if they were sculpture, as in the Picassos of 1930. I have no doubt of Mr Bacon's uncommon gifts, but these pictures expressing his sense of the atrocious world into which we have survived seems [ to me ] symbols of outrage rather than works of art. If peace redresses him, he may delight as he now dismays."

"The paintings of Francis Bacon embody his passionate and determined challenge of ‘fate’ in its various guises. His marked fascination for Aeschylus' Orestes or Christ rests with their having questioned fate, while the Eumenides or Furies of Greek mythology, first presented in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of Crucifixion (1944), became a leitmotif in the English painter's work. Even the manner in which Bacon approached the canvas was described by him as a struggle between the artist's will and the 'inevitability' of the paint. But what is fate for many of us Bacon preferred to call chance or accident. The distinction for him rested with the artificial explanations or beliefs we impose upon life. Bacon attacked these relentlessly because they engender an unquestioning and destructive acceptance of the vagaries of life, or, simply put, they result in a fantastic approach to life."

"The work was really beginning to take shape now, resulting, in 1944, in the massive and enormously powerful triptych entitled Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Although the triptych may be regarded as a point of reference for Bacon's work as a whole, we know very little about the circumstances leading to the creation of this piece, which was painted as the war dragged interminably to its conclusion and before the full extent of its horrors could be appreciated. As Bacon was to say thirty years later to Sylvester, the studies were designed to stand for 'the usual figures at the base of the cross.... But I never did that; I just left these as attempts' - as creatures of his imagination, half nightmare, half monument of an age. Bacon never wanted any of his earlier works to be shown, regarding the triptych as his point of departure, and it is with these strange monsters on their orange background that the career of this disturbing artist really began."

Christophe Domino, Francis Bacon - Taking Reality By Surprise, Thames & Hudson, 1996.

"I've had a desire to do forms, as when I originally did three froms at the base of the Crucifixion. They were influenced by the Picasso things which were done at the end of the ‘twenties. And I think there’s a whole area there suggested by Picasso, which in a way has been unexplored, of organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it... I've never known why my paintings are known as horrible. I'm always labelled with horror, but I never think about horror. Pleasure is such a diverse thing. And horror is too. Can you call the famous Isenheim alter a horror piece? Its one of the greatest paintings of the Crucifixion, with the body studded with thorns like nails, but oddly enough the form is so grand it takes away from the horror. But that is the horror in the sense that it is so vitalising; isn't that how people came out of the great tragedies? People came out as though purged into happiness, into a fuller reality of existence."

Francis Bacon, Interviews with Francis Bacon; David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1993.

"Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) is the most important Bacon work in our collection. It's a kind of expressionist painting in the triptych format of a religious painting. But it isn't itself religious; actually it's a deeply atheist painting. The absence of the Christ figure is apparent, and Bacon said that it wasn't about Christian iconography; more the Three Furies (the avenging goddesses of Greek antiquity). When it was first exhibited in 1945, images were leaking out of the concentration camps, it resonated with the spirit of the time and was a bleak picture of humanity. Bacon's picture became part of the intellectual climate, characterised as 'existentialist'. While the image itself is somewhat repellent, in terms of colour and framing the painting is rather sumptuous. Bacon offers a picture of the world as a brutal place, but one that is also exhilarating. It chimes with his view of the world. Bacon painted in a rather loose way. He was self-taught and constantly experimenting. Bacon was hugely important in showing the ambitions of British art, but he transcended national identity. He was a world artist."

Toby Treves, Tate Britain Curator, Great British Bacon, The Radio Times, 19-25 March, 2005.

Wieland Schmeid, The Crucifixion; Commitment and Conflict, Prestel 1996.

"Three studies for figures at the base of a Crucifixion, 1944, oil and pastel on cardboard, each 95 x 73.5 cm, Tate Gallery, London. This painting was first exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery in London in 1945 to a public still reeling from the the effects of the Second World War. The screeching, stretching forms with their bandaged eyes and bared teeth horrified and disgusted who had come to the exhibition to forget. Their minds stuck fast in front of the half-animal, half-human forms perched like humped, bobbing birds on their pedestals reaching to bite and suck. However these three monsters, inspired from the savage furies that chase Orestes in Aeschylus' Eumenides go further than the Second World War. Their thrashing bodies evoke a deeper torment. This is a Crucifixion not the Crucifixion and these are creatures 'that gather as ghouls around any scene of human degradation' (Russell, Thames & Hudson, 1993). The figure in the central panel suggests a phallus on a tripod, its grimacing mouth and perfect square teeth precedes the cavernous scream on the right. The left-hand figure lurches forward, its neck protruding from mutilated wing stumps. Thickly painted orange paint resonates like blood and a patch of grass stabs like nails. From the title Crucifixion, Bacon has kept only the feeling of damnation without redemption."

"Since the second world war, Francis Bacon has consistently been regarded as a major artist, indeed, many would concur with the judgement of Alan Bowness, Director of the Tate, that he is 'surely the greatest living painter'... His public career effectively began with the exhibition of Three studies for figures at the base of a Crucifixion, 1944, at the Lefevre Gallery in April 1945. This triptych, now in the Tate's permanent collection, contains many of the elements which were to recur in Bacon's later work. These include the use of extreme anatomical and physiognomic distortions as the principal means of expression; a general tenor of violence and relentless physicality; and iconographic and formal allusions - through reference to the Crucifixion, the triptych format, etc. - to an abandoned tradition of Christian religious painting. Three Studies also reveals a disjunction between contorted foreground figures, and the illusory space which contains them. The later is constructed, pictorially, through relatively bland expanses of background colour, in this case a garish orange, broken by the suggestions of the space-frame device. Bacon was to make frequent use of these compositional conventions in later paintings."

Peter Fuller, Francis Bacon. London; Exhibition Reviews, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 127, No. 989, August 1985.

"Their anatomy was half-human, half-animal, and they were confined in a low-ceilinged, windowless and oddly proportioned space. They could bite, probe, and suck, and they had very long eel-like necks, but their functioning in other respects was mysterious. Ears and mouths they had, but two at least were sightless. One was bandaged. The left-hand figure had the hairstyle of a female jail-bird. At shoulder-level it had what might have been mutilated wing-stumps. An inch or two below these there was drawn tight what might have been either a shower curtain or a pair of outsized pajama trousers. Set down on what looked like a metal stool, the figure was trashing round as if to savage whatever came within biting distance. The central figure, anatomically somewhat like a dis-feathered ostrich, had a human mouth, heavily bandaged, set at the end of its long, thick tubular neck. What that neck might have looked like without the bandage was indicated by the right-handed figure. It had big ears at the corner of its mouth, and was able to open that mouth to an angle of about ninety degrees. It's one visible leg was as much a sofa-leg as an animal leg, and the patch of grass on which it stood was nearer to a bed of nails than to the shaven lawns of Oxford and Cambridge. Common to all three figures was a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated gluttony, a ravening undifferentiated capacity for hatred. Each was if as cornered, and only waiting for the chance to drag the observer down to its own level. They caused a total consternation. We had no name for them, and no name for what we felt about them. They were regarded as freaks, monsters irrelevant to the concerns of the day, and the product of an imagination so eccentric as not to count in any possible permanent way."

"As Russell suggests, visitors and even critics were so unnerved by the Three Studies that they fled – a reaction that would have pleased Bacon more than praise. It confirmed his capacity to disturb, and having drunk deep at the fount of surrealism as an aspiring young painter Bacon knew that truly original art was bound to offend, the more deeply the better... What sets the Three Studies apart from all Bacon's previous known work is its scale and its deliberateness. The searchings of fifteen years' sporadic apprenticeship come to a dramatic conclusion here. It is as if, freed from self-doubt and inhibition (and, clearly, from the presence of his father), 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 unsilenceable 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 generalized evil? Despite the rawness, and for all the artist's lack of formal education, the work grew out of a highly developed visual and literary culture as well as out of emotional urgency. the most important - but by no means only - source for this picture, as for those that led up to it, was Picasso."

"The triptych arrangement enabled him to join three repugnant creatures in one work. At the same time, it isolates each presence within gilt frames so that none can alleviate he other's torment. The female figure on the left, saddled with a pair of limp feelers hanging from her shoulder-stumps, cranes forward. She seems to be trying to slide off her perch and discover what is happening in the central panel, but cannot move. Paralysis also affects the monster on the right, a hump-back oddity with starved ribs who can only stretch out its distended neck and utter a helpless roar. The realistic human ear attached to this screaming head clashes with the animality of its body. And the same principle of shock through contrast applies to the patch of grass growing so unexpectedly in the orange ground which gives the whole triptych such a parched and eye-smarting air. The impulsive handling of paint and pastel, smeared, scraped, slashed and dragged over the hardboard rather than applied with conventional refinement, shows the urgency with which Bacon set down this atheistic vision of hell. But discipline counters the rhetoric wherever you look. Spare black outlines brushed in behind the figures lend order to the triptych, and direct out attention towards the middle. Here, the focal image offers no trace of a body on a cross. Instead, a beast as brutish as its companions bares jagged teeth at us. The beast could be growling, like an enraged dog warning strangers not to get too close. Or it might be yelling because its eyes, like poor Gloucester's in King Lear, have been put out. The ambiguity has been exposed, for Bacon understands that a cry can signify aggression just as easily as pain."

Richard Cork, 1992; Francis Bacon - His Life & Violent Times; Andrew Sinclair, Crown Publishing, New York 1993.

"Bacon's is an art of breakdown, meltdown and entropy - a fact he makes plain by taking the classic forms of Western European religious art (the triptych, the icon) and twisting them to his own ends. One of the first pictures to be seen in the exhibition is that with which the artist made his London exhibiting debut, in 1944: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The writer John Russell, who went to see the painting in an exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery just a month before the end of the Second World War, has left a fine description of the appalling impact it made on the fragile optimism of its first audience. 'Immediately to the right of the door were images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut snap at the sight of them. Their anatomy was half-human, half-animal and they were confined in a low-ceilinged, windowless and oddly proportioned space. They could bite, probe and suck, and they had very long, eel-like necks ... Common to all three figures was a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated gluttony, a ravening undifferentiated capacity for hatred. They caused a total consternation. We had no name for them, and no name for what we felt about them.' Yet the mood at the Pompidou Centre is one of reverence. The paintings are hung within spaces and arranged in configurations that suggest the sacredness of the chapel. There is even, perhaps, a sense in which Bacon has now come to seem all too easily accessible an artist. These days Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion does not seem to prompt shock but (and this may itself be shocking in another way) an almost straightforward sense of recognition. On the day when I visited the exhibition, I saw a young couple approach Bacon's howling, sneering, squatting maenads, consider them for a moment or two in silence, nod sadly and move on. Yes, the choreography of their bodies seemed to say, yes, this is what the world is like. Ghouls like these ones lurk everywhere - in corners of the mind best left unvisited, in the shadow lands of society, in war zones."

Andrew Graham-Dixon, The artist formerly known as British, The Independent, July 16, 1996.

"Nobody seemed familiar with him or his work. Finally I found someone who knew him, the painter Michael Wishart. My instincts had been correct. The youngish man was indeed Francis Bacon, and the house opposite ours belonged to his cousin, a Miss Watson, who owned virtually all that was left of the serveral hundred paintings Francis had destroyed. Forget about her, Michael said, come and meet Francis. Francis lived across from South Kensington Station in a vast gloomy studio that had belonged to the Pre-Raphaelite painter Millais... Michael had told me about the illicit roulette parties that Francis, who was an accomplished croupier, liked to organise. He also told me about the rough trade and the drinking and the fishnet stockings. What he had not mentioned was Francis's sightless old nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who sat knitting in a rocking chair, mumbling away about the wickedness of the Duchess of Windsor: 'They better bring back the gibbet for her.' At night, the kitchen table doubled as her bed. Nanny Lightfoot, I suddenly realized, must have given Francis the idea for the central panel of his early masterpiece, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. She must have taught him the same game that many old-time nannies (mine included) taught their charges: how to turn a fist into a face. Make a fist, stick the tip of your thumb between the knuckles of your first and second fingers and the black ends of two matches either side of the second and third ones, drape a handkerchief over the fist, and it turns into a head like the one in the Bacon. I thought it wiser to keep this discovery to myself."

John Richardson, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999.

Desmond Morris on Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c. 1944)

The face of the figure is distorted into a scream of horrific intensity. He painted many screams in later works, but none can match the impact of this one. It is the scream of the torture victim at the very moment that the lash cuts the flesh. The victim, of course, is Bacon himself. He was heavily into bondage and masochistic ritual in his private life, and he relived his painful eroticism in many of his images of trussed up, agonised, distorted figures.

Francis was fascinated by extreme forms of facial expression, and the mouth stretched open to full gape was his favourite. One day he amused me by saying, in an apologetic tone: "You know, I think I've got the scream, but I am having terrible trouble with the smile." The truth was that he could get no kicks from an image of a smiling face. It was not part of his complex sexual obsession.

Others may see in this screaming face a reflection of the agonies of war-torn Europe, a statement about the horrors of modern existence, or the entrapment and isolation of modern man in his urban cell. I see nothing of the sort. I see a devout masochist enjoying the thrill of encapsulating the secret joys of his most private moments. The great mystery about Bacon's work is why this lifelong fetishistic indulgence should have resulted in the creation of such truly great art. But then mystery is the very essence of art. As Picasso once said: "I don't understand it and if I did, I wouldn't tell you."

- Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was presented to Tate by Eric Hall in 1953.

Francis Bacon fixed the starting point of his artistic career on Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, executed in 1944, although he had been painting for over a decade, had created a number of extremely interesting paintings, and had appeared in several exhibitions, sowing the first seeds of his future notoriety as an artist. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion manifests a terrible, expressive violence. It does not represent any violent act. But some undefined and inhuman violence that occurred in an unseen space and time beyond the limits of the painting has impressed its horror on the forms and the coloured area surrounding them.

The composition is separated into three distinct canvases that are coordinated so as to form a triptych. The arrangement is of such disturbing originality that Bacon afterwards used it on a frequent basis, whenever the pictorial motif seemed to require this type of treatment. The orange hue spread across the space of the three canvases so violently strikes the observer as to overwhelm all powers of perception and eliminate the possibility of reading the forms according to common conventions of rational logic. A single sentiment unifies the figures, each of which is isolated on its own canvas: it is a furious, suffering, and horrified expression, of victims and witnesses to something whose effect is an atrocious sense of tragedy.

The human and bestial elements composing the figures, all rendered ambiguous by their respective deformation, are so impenetrable and enigmatic as to thwart comprehension of any explicit meaning. Any attempt to deduce prior intention in the morphology of these bodies by means of logic will fail, collapsing in admission that this painting leads into an unknown area, at whose boundaries conventional logic must halt. In Bacon, painting is not a field for the imitation of apparent reality, but an independent and artificial act emerging from the innermost and most instinctive needs of the individual, dominated exclusively by the profound, wild force of expression.

What the contradictory composition and mingling of the bodies' grey magma with other colours transmits in Three Studies is the lacerating expression of a cry, regardless of its nature or its cause. It is a cry reduced to its wild force, beyond the normal human need to identify and resolve the cause of malaise. More animal than human, so excessive as to become unaware of its own expressive implications: it is no longer capable of communicating anything intelligible. The very obscurity of the origin of this sensation and the likely identity of the visible subject allows the image to avoid any particular illustrative signification and penetrate instead to the quicker and more intuitive level of the mind: where sensations act, such as the modes of awareness that precede logic and run deeper than it.

Bacon needs to renounce natural logic and upset it in the act of painting in order to reveal and transform into comprehensible terms something originating in the unconscious: the complex, multiple, and contradictory mass of emotions and the obsessive images that arouse it. This is its material, nothing other than the experience of human existence and the unconscious subtrate over which it passes. Through revelation of the unconscious in painting, the insignificant existence of the individual rises to the grandness of a mythical experience: to a condition that transforms an infinitude of empirical experiences into the tragic story of mankind.

The magnetic orange surface is blinding, to the point that space is perceived more at the psychic than logical level. The struggle of pictorial composition reveals the traces of lines, partial geometrical figures interrupted during the construction of space. They are residual fragments of what painting in the past had used to delineate an organic configuration of man's architectural or natural environment around the human figure, the setting in which he was the measure and central point of reference. This representation of space dominated by man could express much of the narrative and symbolic intelligibility of the image. Of this impossible perfection, which fell to pieces in the wreckage of modern civilization, nothing survives in the chromatic magma of Bacon's work other than fragments that are perceptible with the same immediacy, plunging into the depths of the unknown abyss of the mind and the other sensations that constitute the material of painting. They are the traces of a tragedy that is identified with the progress of history, in the innermost way, not in distinct episodes, but with the same rhythm: the terrifying and vital rhythm of the transformation of man and his culture.

Biomorphic typologies burst into this work from the history of human civilization, recalling certain figures of bathers by Picasso from the 1920s, at the limits of the comical and the grotesque. They are forms that emerge from artistic culture, but with the same forcefulness of a mental obsession. The resulting figure is a traumatic expression of the horror that originates in profound feelings, revealed by artistic memory and the history of painting, felt as if it were living matter. It is as if Bacon encountered Picasso's creatures along the course of his imagination, as if it were a beaten path. He himself would define his conception of his historical source in art as "a formal armor."

An infinity of clues in the painting, and an infinity of clues in the historical memory of the subject looking at the work show that the horror is provoked by the immanent drama of a catastrophe for which mankind is responsible. (This triptych dates from 1944, a time when the conscience of Europe was upset by the horror of war). But the true object is the expression of horror in itself, superior to any specific and transitory cause. A relative cause might allow it to be overcome. But horror, as an integral force of existence, beyond all the contingent evidence that experience might have known, permits neither distractions nor progress. What Bacon does is grasp the most universal expression of horror through the force of painting: by giving from to a wail. Because the figures do not illustrate any action, the key to understanding the nature of their presence is implicit in the expression, "Studies," that enigmatically appears in their title. This expression is foreign to the representation of reality, belonging instead to the most specifically academic tradition of artistic work. Indeed, the figures are in the preparatory state of suspension in which every artist of any epoch places his model when he starts to transform it into the image of his inner world.

If Bacon gives the work a title like "Studies," which refers to a neutral condition of artistic work, it is because this preparatory act of traditional painting practice becomes the very object of the image. And in imposing this limit, he manages to transform his own existential experience into sensation and to express it as a universal force. Indeed, this is one of the most radical ambitions in modern art, where the real subject of the work is art itself.

Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion were painted over the course of two weeks in 1944 in the ground floor flat at 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, which had once been the studio of the artist John Everett Millais. During the day the converted billiard room served as Bacon's studio, and at night as an illicit casino.

B recalled that at the time he was drinking heavily and that he painted the studies in an alcoholic haze. Later he was to admit that he hardly knew what he was doing, though he believed that alcohol had loosened his style. Yet, despite this unpromising genesis, the triptych of three writhing, anthropomorphic figures, with their featureless, scarcely human faces contorted into what might be either pain or exquisite ecstasy, set against a background of visceral oranges, reds and blacks, marks a watershed in British painting.

Bacon had been painting the Crucifixion since 1933, commissioned by his then patron, Eric Hall, but he considered the works unsuccessful and destroyed them, and, for a while, abandoned painting. When he did return to the subject of the Crucifixion 11 years later he was influenced by his reading of Aeschylus's savage drama The Oresteia (itself a trilogy) which tells the tale of the curse of the House of Atreus and the pursuit, by the avenging Furies (or Eumenides), of those responsible for murder. Generally considered to be his first masterwork, Bacon was at some pains to suppress the showing of any paintings that pre-dated the Three Studies.

Executed in oil and pastel and, for economy, on light Sundeala boards rather than canvas, Bacon's Eumenides are barely recognisable as human figures, for they have no eyes but only gaping, silently screaming mouths. The creature on the left, seated on a table of sorts, is the most recognisably human. Partially draped in a length of cloth, this bent form, with its hunched white shoulders, its stumpy, malformed arms and bowed head topped with a mop of dark hair, might be a mourner at some unnamed wake, while that in the central panel, with its grimacing mouth set directly into its elongated neck, is blindfolded by a white cloth - a motif taken, perhaps, from Matthias Grnewald's Mocking of Christ - and resembles some large, flightless bird. The figure on the right appears to have most of its upper face missing. Its head is thrown back, its mouth stretched open to reveal its teeth, as if in the grips of some bestial orgasmic spasm.

The heads of all three figures point downwards, following a series of converging lines that radiate out from the central plinth and imply a room or an enclosed space. The mood is one of bleak isolation and violent angst. This work is to painting what Sartre's Huis Clos is to literature; a paean to existential despair.

This is also a Crucifixion with a difference, for there is no evidence, not even a shadow, of the actual event. No trace of Christ or his cross, though Bacon did say in a letter in 1959 that Three Studies were, "intended to [be] use[d] at the base of a large Crucifixion which I may still do". Yet how genuine this remark was is hard to gauge from the bleakly nihilistic non-believer who once said, "I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during our own existence..." "we are born and we die, but in between we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives."

Distortion and fragmentation are the tools that Bacon used to explore these elemental states, for he was at enormous pains to eradicate what he saw as any figurative illustration. What he wanted to convey was something visceral, a presence beyond mere likeness; of beings controlled by chthonic urges and base instincts, the Dionysian Calibans of human existence rather than the Apollonian Ariel's; his territory was what Freud would have called the id.

The sense of futility that Bacon was trying to capture is not surprising, given that it was 1944, and that rumours of the Nazi death-camps had begun to leak out. Such nihilism is also present in much of the work of TS Eliot. Bacon had come to know Aeschylus through Eliot's 1939 play, The Family Reunion, in which the central character, Harry, is haunted by "the sleepless hunters/ that will not let me sleep." Here the Furies embody the guilt and remorse felt by Harry, who harbours a dark secret.

Like many other artists and writers of the early 20th century, Bacon had read Nietzsche, and shared something of his hypothesis of "a strong pessimism". He had been particularly attracted to The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche's passionate rejection of Christianity, and his passion for life resonated with Bacon, who said: "... you can be optimistic and totally without hope. One's basic nature is totally without hope, and yet one's nervous system is made out of optimistic stuff."

The American critic, Donald Kuspit, thought Bacon's figures were "sick with death - not necessarily literal death but rather the feeling of being nothing." Their loneliness, he suggested, depicted a "general sense of oblivion."

Bacon had always been fascinated with images of the mouth, in particular diseased mouths, after he found a second-hand book in which these were illustrated in a series of coloured plates. He spoke of "the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth", and said that he "always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset." He was also taken with a photograph by the Surrealist J-A Boiffard in the radical magazine, Documents, in which the editor, the French writer and philosopher of the abject, Georges Bataille, had written a short text on La Bouche. Bataille rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion.

For Bacon, as for Bataille, the open, gaping, screaming wound of the mouth expressed something of our most intense emotional experiences and brought us close to our bestial selves. The linking of the noble and the base, of man and beast so as to blur the distinction between them, was part of Bataille's attack on the "idealist deception" that man practices upon himself. The open mouth of Bacon's right-hand figure ends in a savage, snarling, snout of teeth. For the promiscuously gay and sadomasochistically inclined Bacon the mouth had obvious sexual connotations. He was also, almost certainly, thinking of the scene in Battleship Potemkin where the wounded nursemaid stands screaming on the Odessa steps; in addition to making a reference to the despairing mother in Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents.

First shown at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945, the triptych caused a sensation. The critic John Russell was shocked by "images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut with a snap at the sight of them. Their anatomy was half-human, half- animal..." Yet by 1971 he was able to write, "there was painting in England before the Three Studies, and painting after them, and no one... can confuse the two." More than 60 years later it has still not lost any of its power.

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 of English parents, the second of five children. He was asthmatic and had no conventional schooling. In 1925 his father threw him out for wearing his mother's clothes. In London he worked as a decorator and began to paint. In 1936 he submitted work to the International Surrealist exhibition but was rejected as "not sufficiently surreal". Between 1941-4 he destroyed all his work, and was pronounced unfit for military service. In 1945 he resumed painting. In 1953 Three Studies was acquired by the Tate. In 1955 he had his first retrospective at the ICA. In 1960 he had his first exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art, London. In the early 1960s he and George Dyer became lovers and he painted Three Figures in a Room.

Francis Bacon was widely acclaimed as an Expressionist: violent emotions burst through his paintings, wrenching sharp, nervous responses from an audience fomenting the ideals (and illusions?) of peace and humanity. Bacon was not the first to do it - before him we had Edvard Munch (see The Scream), or Egon Schiele (see Seated Couple)... to illustrate only two Expressionist forerunners.

Why was (and is) Bacon so disturbing then? Why do his comments on the meaninglessness of this world continue to reach so deep into us? Well, for one thing, when he exhibited in 1945, his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion in London, Europe had just been through a war. Not a time to "revel" in Bacon's humanoid Furies, which, half-human and half-animal (John Russell)1, with missing limbs and bandaged, could very well remind one of dismembered mutilated cadavers, if it were not for their movement and much alive mouth and ear.

To a shocked audience, Francis Bacon responded by saying that he was trying "to unlock the valves of feeling" and not trying to be "horrific". 2. Also, Bacon - a declared atheist - maintained that his figures were references to the Furies, those goddesses which lead Greek tragic heroes to destruction by reminding them of their sins - after the Second World War, portrayal of angry goddesses like these makes sense.

Not to say that this interpretation brought only ovations. Here's the voice of critic Raymond Mortimer, "I have no doubt of Mr Bacon's uncommon gifts, but these pictures expressing his sense of the atrocious world into which we have survived seems [to me] symbols of outrage rather than works of art." 3

One should keep in mind however, that the Furies interpretation is not the only one possible. First of all, the title still points to a Christian subject, and that should be investigated. Even though Francis Bacon said the triptych does not necessarily refer to Christ's Crucifixion 4, just take a moment and look carefully at the three panels. If you still stare blindly at the bandage and at the contrast between the central figure and the wriggling two on the sides, have a look at a Crucifixion piece by Antonello da Messina.

You'll see that the figures "at the base of the Crucifixion" could very well be Christ and the two thieves. Don't expect Francis Bacon to give you too much of an interpretation though. After all, as with Picasso and Guernica, see and understand what you will: the painter has done his job already. Now the painting is yours to interpret, according to your personal propensity.

But, in case you want a final word from Francis Bacon, David Sylvester is bringing you one - so here's the late Francis Bacon, honest (supposedly - he has been known to stray from the truth once or twice) but evasive:
"It was a thing that I did in about a fortnight, when I was in a bad mood of drinking, and I did it under tremendous hangovers and drink; I sometimes hardly knew what I was doing. It's one of the only pictures I've been able to do under drink. I think perhaps the drink helped me to be a bit freer." 5*

End Notes:
1. FrancisBacon.cx2. Tate Gallery3. FrancisBacon.cx 4. Tate Gallery 5. Francis Bacon; Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester* (NB: Bacon is talking about his 1962 Three Studies for a Crucifixion here and not the 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion).

Writer's Bio:
"I have a BA from Hanover College, IN, where I majored in Spanish and minored in Art. I work as a graphic designer, and paint when time allows. As for art history, I'm a reader, traveler and museum visitor. I hope to be able to share my love of art with other About.com members."

Since he exhibited Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion at the Lefevre Gallery in London 44 years ago, Francis Bacon has remained master of the macabre. The writhing half-human, half-animal forms he painted in that triptych may have owed something to the German Expressionists and something to Picasso. But Mr. Bacon's nightmare was fundamentally his own.

Coming as it did at the end of World War II, in a city that had been devastated by bombings and spiritually enervated, the display of Three Studies at Lefevre seemed to many of those who saw it to epitomize the spirit of the time. Mr. Bacon had left his home in Ireland at the age of 17 and spent the next 19 years drifting throughout Europe and England. All at once, this show established him as the pre-eminent painter of psychological and physical brutality. During the last four and a half decades, Mr. Bacon has done nothing to shake that reputation.

Now he is the subject of a very handsome retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum for his 80th birthday. The show remains here through Jan. 7, after which it is to go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Feb. 11 to April 29) and to the Museum of Modern Art in New York (May 31 to Aug. 28). With nearly 60 works from public and private collections around the world, this is the first major overview of the painter's achievements held in the United States since 1963. The exhibition has been organized by James T. Demetrion, the Hirshhorn's director, who obtained many of Mr. Bacon's best-known paintings.

There is, for example, one of the startlingly coloured works the artist based on van Gogh's Painter on the Road to Tarascon. There are a handful of the Popes that the artist created by combining elements of Velazquez's portrait of Innocent X with the image of a screaming nurse from The Battleship Potemkin, the Sergei Eisenstein film. The artist's arresting Man With Dog of 1953 can be seen here, and so can at least one canvas, depicting a paralytic child walking on all fours, that Mr. Bacon derived from Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century photographer whose studies of figures in motion have had a profound impact on the painter.

There are a dozen or so small and strangely beautiful portrait heads of friends and associates as well as a handful of large triptychs from the 1960's and 70's, including a work from May to June 1973 that is Mr. Bacon's wrenching meditation on the death of a friend, George Dyer.

There is not, unfortunately, the Three Studies of Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion from the 40's, which was deemed too fragile to travel from the Tate Gallery in London. But a second version of this work that Mr. Bacon completed last year is on view, and to see it is to realize both how much the artist has changed over the years and how much he has stayed the same.

Mr. Bacon has stayed the same in the sense that his subjects have not really varied, nor have the essential elements of his imagery. His focus remains on the human body. He continues to twist it, mangle its features, X-ray it and make it evaporate, transmogrify and bleed. His figures huddle and struggle in windowless rooms lighted only by a bare bulb that dangles from the ceiling. They vomit into a sink, find themselves pinned to the bed with a hypodermic needle or face to face with one of the ancient Greeks' Furies.

When two men are engaged in sex, as they sometimes are in his paintings, they seem to be wrestling each other to the death. When the artist paints himself in a state of repose, it appears as if he is recovering from a crippling hangover. Even when Mr. Bacon is creating imaginary creatures, as in the second version of Three Figures the references to sex and violence cannot be missed. Mr. Bacon's images are rarely subtle.

Francis Bacon's Tangled Web

Vanity Fair August 2000

Eight years after his death, Francis Bacon, perhaps Europe's most acclaimed painter since turner, is at the center of a major scandal. John Edwards, a former pub manager who is the painter's heir, has sued Bacon's longtime dealer, Marlborough Fine Art. Examining charges that the gallery cheated both the artist and Edwards, its chicanery shielded by a token Liechtenstein branch, MICHAEL SHNAYERSON finds that all the parties in this scandal may have hidden motives, including Bacon himself

Francis Bacon has come to stay in an old stone building in Dublin. The widely declared "greatest painter since Turner," once condemned by Margaret Thatcher as "that awful artist who paints those horrible pictures," died in April 1992. But his spirit is here, in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, to which his humble London studio has been brought, bit by carefully recoded bit. A team of eight archaeologists disassembled the site, noting the placement of every crumbled photograph and paint-smudged book in a three-dimensional grid. Now four curators are are logging each of the studio's roughly10,000 items into a computer database. This is a first: no artist's studio has ever been enshrined in quite this way before.

The visual links are fascinating, if inscrutable. A torn-out magazine photograph of monkeys with open mouths may have helped inspire Bacon's "screaming popes" series. An old radiography text has drawings encompassed by frames and set off with arrows - both signature icons of many Bacon paintings. A large cutout picture of the head of one of Bacon's lovers, George Dyer, appears to have served as a stencil for portraits of the 2rough trade" thug. In November, Bacon's studio will emerge from the boxes and folders, complete with walls and door, as a permanent installation, like one of those dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. It will be re-created just he way it was: dirty and messy.

These, as it happens, are also apt words to describe the lawsuit filed by Bacon's estate against the artist's longtime dealer, Marlborough Fine Art. The lawsuit's charges suggest the sort of art-world scandal not seen since... well, since the last time Marlborough was accused of such chicanery, by the estate of the painter Mark Rothko, in 1971. Indeed, the superficial similarities between the two cases, and the fact that Marlborough stands accused of cheating Bacon during the same period it grossly underpaid Rothko's estate and was fined by a New York Surrogate Court judge more than $9 million for doing so, suggest to many observers in the art world a likelihood of guilt on the gallery's part - though such guild would be no less shocking for that.

To some, the Bacon case seems, if anything, more egregious, because the painter appeared so trusting of the gallery during his more than three decades of representation by it, and because the younger male friend who inherited Bacon's estate - estimated to be worth between $50 and $100 million - is a shy, uneducated Cockney whose work experience, before meeting the painter, consisted of helping his older brothers run a string of pubs in London's East End. But the picture that has emerged in the press - of big bad Marlborough hornswoggling the hapless illiterate - may be almost as distorted as one of Bacon's portraits, given the gallery's own, surprisingly persuasive, version of events. Imagine, instead, a real-life version of the board game Clue, in which a crime may have been committed in the drawing room and every character in the house has a motive. Including the deceased.

From outside, 7 Reece Mews appears just as it did when Bacon worked there. It's hard to locate, which is one of its charms: you take a tiny street off London's Old Brompton Road, then look for the arrow that points to a cobblestoned court of brick-walled former stables. Though plain, the mews is a lovely sanctuary in South Kensington. Inside No. 7, obviously, nothing remains as it was. Now that the archaeological excavation is done, , a work crew is sheetrocking the walls, finishing the transformation of Bacon's studio into a sleek apartment where Bacon's heir, 50 year-old John Edwards, will stay when he comes to London from his large country farmhouse in Suffolk. or from his home in Thailand.

A self-portrait by Bacon, 1970.

By the time Bacon moved to his address in 1961, his critical reputation was established, though he remained at age 51, a painter of modest means. That was fine by him: all his life he had a disregard for money that verged, literally, on the criminal. As a young man he moved from one small apartment to another, often without paying the rent due. As his paintings started selling, he loved having a wad of bills in his pocket to blow on gambling in private dens, or champagne at the Colony Room, seedy Soho bar where he held court almost everyday (the gleefully profane manager there, Muriel Belcher, had been shred enough, when she first saw how charismatic he was, to pay him £10 a week just to show up), or oysters at Wheeler's fish restaurant, where he invariably picked up the check for a group that often included painters Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach. After he bid his artist friends good night, he liked to spend money on young men who indulged his desire to be beaten, whipped, and sodomized - a lifelong acting out, it was sometimes said, of the physical abuse he'd received his quick-tempered fool of a father, a military man who bred horses in Ireland.

Otherwise, Bacon spent little money on himself, and the studio reflected that. A steep wooden staircase with a rope banister led up to a bare kitchen and tiny bed-sitting room with lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling. The adjacent studio was as chaotic as the apartment was stark. Its door was a palette of paint smears - as close, Bacon liked to joke, as he ever got to abstract art. Within lay piles of what appeaered to be garbage: torn newspaper and magazine picture, creased photographs of the friends he liked to paint, and hundreds of unwashed, discarded paintbrushes in buttered-beans and orange-juice cans. On his easel would be the next of his startling yet strangely beautiful portraits, the features of his subject stretched to the grotesque and rendered by the streaks and gobs of excess paint that Bacon flung onto the canvas with inspired daring.

Three years before his move to Reece Mews, bacon had left his first dealer, a mannishly dressed lesbian named Erica Brausen, to sign with London's hottest gallery for contemporary artists, Marlborough Fine Art. It was a move made less to burnish his career than to settle a £5,000 gambling debt that Bacon felt Brausen would be unable to pay off for him. In return for his signing a 10-year contract, Marlborough advanced him money against current and future paintings, with the price of each to be determined by its size. A painting measuring 20 inches by 24 inches was valued at £165 ($462), while one of 65 inches by 78 inches was valued at £420 ($1,176); these were two sizes that Bacon favoured. According to the contract, the painter would try to supply the gallery with £3,500 ($9,800) worth of pictures each year, and would be represented exclusively by Marlborough, which would also handle all his finances - acting, in effect, as his manager.

Four decades later, Bacon's estate would start asking pointed questions about that arrangement. Why, its complaint asks, was an artist so cavalier about money allowed to sign a binding contract without independent legal representation? Why was the pay scale for an artist of Bacon's stature based on measurement, and why did it not include a provision for paying Bacon a higher percentage of the retail price of his paintings if their market value increased over that 10-year period? Why, though Marlborough was required by the agreement to give Bacon an accounting of the paintings sold, did it appear never to do so? And why, the estate began to wonder, were Bacon's paintings not sold in London, but through Marlborough's notorious Liechtenstein branch, Marlborough AG?

At the outset, Bacon had no cause to complain. New York dealer Richard Feigen had staged a show of Bacon paintings in Chicago: "I was getting $1,300 for the nost expensive paintings," Feigen recalls ruefully. "The others were priced between $900 and $1,200." No one was necessarily buying them. The Marlborough deal gave Bacon his market price for 8 or 10 paintings a year - guaranteed. It also put him in the hands of Frank Lloyd, the most brilliant English art marketer of the postwar period.

Lloyd, born Franz Kurt Levai near Vienna in 1911, had started Marlborough after the World War II with a fellow Austrian refugee, Harry Fischer, naming it for the Duke of Marlborough to lend it an air of grandeur. The "old uncles," as Bacon would come to call them, chose to deal in top-tier modern art, much of it acquired discreetly from highborn British families brought low by the war. For entrée, they relied on a junior partner, David Somerset, the future 11th Duke of Beaufort.

By the time he signed Bacon, Lloyd had fashioned Marlborough into a powerhouse that had virtually cornered the market on undervalued European painters of the early 20th century - such as Klimt and Schiele - while cosseting and promoting contemporary artists as no other gallery did. As efficient as an investment bank, Marlborough gave artists advance, staggered payments, and handled all their finances for them. Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Oskar Kokoscka, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, and Lucien Freud - all were excited and proud to be Marlborough artists. Many gave their art to the gallery on consignment, receiving nothing until a painting was sold. But Bacon wanted ready cash, so the gallery bought his paintings outright.

Lloyd's shrewdest stratagem was to establish the branch in Liechtenstein. It was little more than a mail drop, but Lloyd and Fischer bought and sold much of the art they handled through Marlborough AG; that way, both they and their clients could exploit loopholes in English tax laws. "The legal avoidance of taxes was an integral part of the growth of Marlborough," explains one longtime London dealer. "Lloyd's real purpose in opening the gallery," says another, "was to move currency around. It was much more efficient, he found, to move currency around by paintings than any other way - and they made money on the paintings, too!"

Why did other galleries not follow Marlborough's lead? The first dealer laughs. "Laziness... and social responsibility. I think one should pay taxes. " By the mid-1970s, Bacon's paintings were sold exclusively through through Marlborough AG.

The paintings would be picked up in groups very few months by a Marlborough factotum named Valeries Beston, who soon came to play as large a role in Bacon's life as he played in hers. Not only did "Miss B," as bacon fondly called her, log the new paintings into a record book and arrange for their sale by Marlborough AG, she also handled his mail, paid his bills, even dealt with his laundry. 2Valerie was very, very attracted to him - a kind of love," says Michael Peppiatt, whose 1996 biography of Bacon, Anatomy of an Enigma, is, to date, the definitive one. "It was a major thing in her life, it was her raison d'être. It was like a shrine to Bacon in her office - photos and mementos." For legal matters, Miss B steered Bacon to Marlborough's solicitors. According to the estate, the solicitors in turn, recommended the accountant Bacon used to prepare his tax returns.

At some point, Bacon established a Swiss bank account - almost certainly with the help of Marlborough AG, though how much remains unclear. Into this account the gallery began to make partial payments for paintings it bought from the artist. For the Liechtenstein branch, this was a legal maneuver. For Bacon, as an English resident, establishing the account broke no law, either. But failing to declare Marlborough's payments to the English Inland Revenue as taxable income did.

SELF-DEFACING

A 1962 Irving Penn photograph of Francis Bacon with a Rembrandt self-portrait.

Midway through his 10-year agreement, Bacon chose to exercise an escape clause. Yet he stayed on as a Marlborough artist without a contract for the rest of his life. To those who side with the gallery in the Bacon case, this is the point that undercuts the estate's legal action. Bacon, they argue, was pleased with how he was treated by Marlborough; if he hadn't been, he would have left. Anyway, they say, he should have been pleased. In addition to paying him up front for his work, Marlborough was organizing major shows for him and meting out paintings in a carefully controlled way at steadily rising prices to establish him as a major artist.

"He did mention to me," says one old friend, "when that contract was up, 'I just can't be bothered to go anywhere else. I can't be bothered. I'll stay with them.' "

"Francis once said to me, 'I'd rather be in the hands of a competent crook than in the hands of an incompetent honest man,' " recalls art critic Brian Sewell of the Evening Standard. "What he said, and this shows the shrewdness of Francis, is that he preferred a third of a million pounds rather than half of half a million pounds. And what he said is that the prices were being constantly pushed up by Marlborough in a way that they would never be pushed up by anyone else. And so however little he got in broad percentage terms, it was still more than he'd have got if he went with anyone else."

"He implied they'd been so good for him and put him where he was that he was grateful for that, and didn't want to change," says art historian Sam Hunter, recalling a conversation with Bacon about Marlborough. "And he was very loyal by character."

There is, however, another interpretation for why Bacon never left Marlborough. Perhaps he feared that no other gallery would funnel money into a Swiss account as Marlborough did, enabling him to shelter a sizable chunk of his income from English taxes. Perhaps, too, the account put the painter in a vulnerable position. "He was perhaps less happy than he seemed," suggests one old friend of Bacon's who occupies a high enough position in the art world to be a sort of Deep Throat for the Bacon saga. Is that to say Bacon did feel trapped? "Yes, that's the nub of it," says this source, 2but I can' say anymore."

Lending credence to this theory are mentions, in a 1978 book, The Legacy of Matk Rothko, by Lee Seldes, of Swiss accounts established by Marlborough for another of its artists at roughly the same time. Like Bacon, Rothko had a Swiss account for partial payments from the gallery, in his case to avoid U.S. taxes. Seldes suggests he may have been haunted by the gallery's knowledge of his illegal act. "Those who know about such things in the art world would say that Marlborough often offered collectors as well as artists kickbacks deposited in numbered Swiss bank accounts," Seldes writes. "If so, these arrangements might have made severing one's ties with Marlborough... quite difficult."

The Rothko case is mentioned only in passing in the Bacon com