Francis Bacon Archive

                                                                                 

                                           

                                                                 

 

  The Body, the Meat and the Spirit: Becoming  Animal

Gilles Deleuze

 

 

"Man is the animal whose nature has not yet been fixed."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886.

 

 

"Flesh and meat are life! If I paint red meat as I paint bodies it is just because I find it very beautiful. I don’t think anyone has ever really understood that. Ham, pigs, tongues, sides of beef seen in the butcher’s window, all that death, I find it very beautiful. And it’s all for sale—how unbelievably surrealistic!  I often imagine that the accident that made man into the animal he has become also happened to other animals—lions or hyenas for example—while man remained a primate...I imagine men hanging in butcher’s shops for hyenas, who would be dressed in fur coats. The men would be hung by their feet, or cut up for stew or kebabs."

Francis Bacon, Exclusive interview with Francis Giacobetti, 1991-2, The Art Newspaper, June 2003.

 

 

"There's a picture of a screaming chimpanzee - a simian form with bared mouth - that goes to the core of Bacon's work. If you then look at Head 1 from 1948 and Head 2 from 1949, say, both are half-animal, half human, as if morphing between forms. There was no difference to Bacon. He knew humans were animals: primal and confrontational. You see it also in his figures of screaming popes. he always saw the animal in man, even in in the supreme  pontiff. There's that ambiguity with Bacon:  you don't know if you're witnessing a scream of pain, anger or release."

Michael Peppiatt, Great British Bacon, Radio Times, 19-25 march, 2005.

 

 

"Art is estrangement, self-estrangement (causing self-forgetfulness) but also estrangement from the human. Art is uncanny in the sense of monstrous,  the not quite or no longer human, the almost - or once-human...Art perhaps pays the price by 'going [Celan says] beyond what is human, stepping into the realm which is turned toward the human, but uncanny - the realm where the monkey, the automatons and with them...oh, art, too seem to be at home..."

Gerald L. Burns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

 

 

"....what Bacon’s painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility, of undecideability between man and animal….Bacon pushes this to the point where even his most isolated figure is already a coupled figure, man is coupled with his animal in a latent bullfight. This objective zone of indiscernibility is the entire body, but the body insofar as it is flesh or meat."

Gilles Deleuze.

 

 

"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 realized that there is no such state as 'the human condition'. The is only 'the alien condition', and 'the reptilian condition', 'the animal condition'; being animal in the world.  Man 'was' always already an accident alien animal thrown by chance and chaos."

Alex Alien  In Conversation  with April Hunter.

 

 

"Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman -- a rope over an abyss...What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is a transition..." 

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra.

 

 

"Art is continually haunted by the animal."    What is Philosophy?    Gilles Deleuze &  Felix Guattari.

 

 

"I am a brave animal, a military one even."   Nietzsche to Brandes.

 

 

"Bacon was a visionary, but in addition it had an extraordinary gift: the common sense. We were great friends. Both we professed the religion of the fatalism. It united the same distrust to us by the human species: the man is small, like the cell of the cancer, and the cancer extends with an amazing speed ".

Peter Beard on Francis Bacon.

 

 

"Avant-garde painting eludes the aesthetics of beauty in that it does not draw on a communal sense of shared pleasure. To the public taste its products seem 'monstrous', 'formless,' purely negative nonentities. When one represents the non-demonstrable, representation itself is martyred. Among other things this means that neither painting nor the viewing public can draw on established symbols, figures, or plastic forms that would permit the sense of understanding of their being..."   

Presenting The Unpresentable: The Sublime,  J.F. Lyotard,  Art Forum, April, 1982.                                                                                       

 

 

"This Byronic aspect of his (Bacon's) nature had something to do with...an intense animalism. The animalism was the first thing one felt on meeting him, a palpable magnetic field."    

John McEwan on meeting Francis  Bacon.

 

 

                                                                

                                                                                                       Monkey 1955    Francis Bacon        

 

 

The body is the Figure, or rather the material of the Figure. Above all the material of the Figure is not to be confused with the material structure in space which is separate from this. The body is a Figure, not structure. Conversely, the Figure being a body, is not a face and does not even have a face. It has a head, because the head is an integral part of the body. It can even be reduced to its head. As a portraitist, Francis Bacon is a painter of heads and not of faces. There is a big difference between the two. For the face is a structured spatial organization which covers the head, while the head is an adjunct of the body, even though it is its top. It is not that it lacks a spirit, but it is a spirit which is body, corporeal and vital breath, an animal spirit; it is the animal spirit of man: a pig-spirit, a buffalo-spirit, a dog-spirit, a bat-spirit... This means that Bacon is pursuing a very special project as a portraitist: unmaking the face, rediscovering or pulling up the head beneath the face.

 

The deformations which bodies undergo are also the animal features of the head. There is in no way a correspondence between animal forms and forms of the face. In fact, the face has lost its form in the process of being subjected to operations of cleaning and brushing which disorganize it and make a head burgeon in its place. And the marks or features of animality are moreover not animal forms, but rather spirits which haunt the cleaned parts, which draw out the head, individualizing and qualifying the head without a face.¹ As procedures used by Bacon, cleaning and features here assume a specific meaning. What happens is that the man's head is replaced by an animal; but this is not the animal as form, it is the animal as outline, for example the trembling outline of a bird which spirals over the cleaned area, while the simulacra of face portraits, beside it, serve only as 'witness' (as in the 1976 triptych). What happens is that an animal, a real dog for example, is outlined as the shadow of its master; or conversely the shadow of the man assumes an autonomous and unspecified animal existence. The shadow escapes from the body like an animal to which we give shelter. Instead of formal correspondences, what Bacon's painting constitutes is a zone of the indiscernible, of the undecidable, between man and animal. Man becomes animal, but he does not become so without the animal simultaneously becoming spirit, the spirit of man, the physical spirit of man presented in the mirror as Eumenides or fate. This is never a combination of forms, it is rather a common fact: the common fact of man and animal. To the point that Bacon's most isolated Figure is to begin with a coupled figure, man coupled with his animal in an underlying act of bullfighting.

 

                                                        

                                                                Study of a Baboon 1953    Francis Bacon                                                     

 

This objective zone of the indiscernible was to start with the whole body, but the body in terms of flesh or meat. Without any doubt the body also has bones, but bones are only spatial structure. Distinctions have often been made between flesh and bones, and even between relationships of flesh and bone. The body only reveals itself when it ceases to be supported by the bones, when the flesh ceases to cover the bones, when they exist in a mutual relation, but each independently, the bones as the material structure of the body, the flesh as the corporeal material of the Figure. Bacon admires Edgar Degas' young woman, After the Bath (1885-86), whose broken-up spinal column seems to emerge from the flesh, while the flesh is made the more vulnerable and agile, more acrobatic.² In quite a different composition, Bacon painted a similar spinal column for a Figure contorted upside-down. This pictorial tension between flesh and bones is something which has to be achieved. Now to be specific it is meat which brings about this tension in the painting, not least through the splendor of the colours. Meat is that state of the body where the flesh and the bones confront one another locally, instead of entering into composition structurally. Likewise the mouth and the teeth, which are little bones. In meat, it is as if the flesh drops from the bones, while the bones rise above the flesh. This is what is specific to bacon, as opposed to Rembrandt or Soutine. If there is some kind of 'interpretation' of the body in Bacon we find it in his fondness for painting lying figures whose raised arm or thigh stands in for a bone, in such a way that the lulled flesh seems to descend or fall from it. Thus in the central panel of the 1968 triptych, the two sleeping twins flanked by witnesses to the animal spirits; but also the series of the sleeping man with his arms up, of the sleeping woman with the vertical leg, and the sleeping or drugged woman with the raised thighs. Far beyond any apparent sadism, the bones are like gymnastic apparatus (a skeleton-like frame) whose flesh is the acrobat. The athleticism of the body is naturally prolonged in this acrobatics of the flesh. We shall see the importance of falling in Bacon's works. But already in the crucifixions what interests him is the droop, and the sinking head which reveals the flesh. And in those of 1962 and 1965, in the context of an armchair-cross or a trail of bones, we can literally see the flesh dropping from the bones. For Bacon as for Franz Kafka, the spinal column becomes nothing but the sword under the skin which a torturer has slid inside the body of an innocent sleeper.³ It sometimes even happens that there is a bone just added on in a random spray of paint as an afterthought[...]

 

                                                       

                                                           Study for Chimpanzee, March 1957    Francis Bacon

 

But is it possible to say the same thing, exactly the same thing, about meat and the head, namely that it is the objective zone of indecision of mean and of animals? Can one say objectively that the head is meat (as much as the meat is spirit)? Of all the parts of the body, is not the head the one closest to the bones? look at El Greco, and once more at Chaim Soutine. Now it looks as if Bacon does not experience the head like that. The bone belongs to the face, not to the head. For Bacon there is no death's head. The head is deboned rather than bony. Yet it is not at all soft, but firm. The head is flesh, and the mask itself is not mortuary, it is a firm block of flesh which separates itself from the bones; these are the studies of a portrait of William Blake. Bacon's own head is flesh haunted by a very beautiful gaze without an orbit. And this is how he honours Rembrandt, for having been able to paint a last self-portrait like such a block of flesh without orbits.⁴ Throughout Bacon's oeuvre, the head-meat relation goes through intensive shifts of scale which make it more and more intimate. At first the meat (flesh on one side, bone on the other) is set on the edge of the track or the balustrade where the figure-head stands; but it is also the thick, fleshly rain surrounding the head which unmakes its face beneath the umbrella. The scream which issues from the Pope's mouth, the pity which issues from his eyes has meat as its object. Then the meat has a head whereby it flees and descends from the cross, as in the two earlier crucifixions. Later on all of Bacon's series of heads will also declare their identification with meat, and among the finest are those which are painted in the colours of meat, red and blue. Finally, the meat is itself a head, and the head has become the de-localized force of meat, as in the Fragment of a crucifixion of 1950, where all the meat is screaming, with a dog spirit looking down from the top of the cross. How we know that Bacon does not like this painting is the simplicity of the manifest procedure; all he had to do was dig out a mouth in the middle of the meat. The affinity of the mouth, and of the mouth's interior, with meat still has to be made plain, and it has to reach that point where it has become strictly the section of a cut artery, or even of a jacket sleeve which stands in as an artery, as in the blood-soaked packages of the Sweeney Agonistes triptych. Then the mouth acquires that power of de-localization which turns all of the meat into a head without a face. It is no longer a specific organ, but the hole through which the entire body escapes, and through which the flesh drops (what is required for this procedure of loose involuntary marks). What Bacon calls 'the scream' is the immeasurable pity which extends to the meat.

 

                                                            

                                                              Sweeney Agonistes, 1967  Francis Bacon

 

Notes

1.Felix Guattari has analysed these phenomena of facial disorganization: the 'features of faceness' are released and become equally well the features of the head's animality. See Felix Guattari, L'Inconscient machinique (Paris: Editions Recherches, 1979) p. 75.

2.David Sylvester, L'art de l'impossible: entretiens avec Francis Bacon trans. Michel Leiris and Michael Pappiatt (Geneva: editions d'Art Albert Skira, 1976) p. 92-94.

3.Franz Kafka, "Das Schwert" (The Sword) in Max Brod (ed.) The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-23 trans. Martin Greenberg and H Ardent Schacken (New York: Schoken Books, 1949) p. 109-110

4.David Sylvester, L'art de l'impossible op.cit., p. 114

From Tracy Warr (ed.) The Artist's Body, Translated by Liz Heron, Phaidon Press, London 2000, p. 197. Originally published as "Le corps, la viande et l'espirit, le devenir-animal" in Francis Bacon (Paris; Editions de la difference, 1981) p. 19-22.                                                                 

 

                                                     

                                                               

                                                               Second Version of Study for a Bullfight    1969   Francis Bacon 

                                  

Bullfighting, Sex and Sensation 


Hélène Frichot,  Colloquy Issue Five                    

   

The investigation that follows will flex in four directions, backwards and forwards, along the elastic thread that ties the event of the bullfight to sex and thence a warm spill of sensation. In order to enter the fray that is the bullfight, I will appropriate a term from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari by way of which each of the four thrusts I advance, or fights I present, can be read as asignifying ruptures [1]. With this concept we are encouraged to question the integrity of signification. By breaching the threshold of signification there results a momentary loss of the senses, at which point we might take the opportunity to search out or invent other modes of making sense. The activity of writing, for instance, as one means of experimenting with sense, "has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come" [2]. Though the bullfight is organised by way of its own particular codes ofoperation and signification, much is also left to chance and the unexpected [3]. With this emphasis on unexpected novelty in mind, I ask you to consider this paper as an arena in which four bullfights will be conducted. The twists and turns of the trope of the bullfight will be surveyed across four different textual terrains in order to explore the effects that result in bringing these terrains into the vicinity of each other. As such, I will touch upon the work of Georges Bataille, Friedrich Nietzsche, Francis Bacon and Michel Leiris. As Nietzsche has suggested, using the tauromachic trope, to enter into a "frightful and dangerous" enterprise does not necessarily enable the capture of an enraged bull [4]; at the outset we cannot necessarily be assured of what will eventuate with the outcome. Furthermore, that the bull is always vanquished merely holds to the dictates of good and common sense, conventions that, in this arena, are only tenuously maintained. It is instead the event that surfaces as an incorporeal bloc of sensation, exploding in the midst of the spectacle, that this paper determines to pursue.

I follow throughout the Ariadne thread offered by Deleuze in that I rely on a number of his concepts to traverse the "terrain of truth." As Michel Leiris relates, this is the bullfighting term for the site of combat in which bullfighter and bull, torero and toro, are to be found clinched in a perilous embrace [5]. After Deleuze, I wish to ask, what is it that shimmers above the site of this battle or, in what way can such an event be figured as an asignifying rupture? In brief, the asignifying rupture is a moment of embrace and withdrawal, making it apt to the dance of the torero and toro. It is composed of a minimum of two parts that conjoin or become juxtaposed in a frenzy that approaches a state of mutual dissolution. This fleeting conjunction might be mapped or rapidly surveyed, but it resists the organisational grasp of good sense, and the predictable assumptions and identifications of common sense. It is what Deleuze and Guattari describe as "an experimentation in contact with the real" [6] that resists the order of signification. It is, for instance, the first burst of the bull breaking into the arena, the explosive meeting place between it, the matador and the cheering crowds. It cannot be captured by the cool accounts of the attendant aficionados who pride themselves on their knowledge of the tauromachic craft [7]. Maintaining the aloof eye of criticism, such experts are unable to forget themselves in the midst of the event. Instead, the asignifying rupture procures a momentary loss of the senses and the bifurcation of sense. “What would be the purpose,” asks Deleuze, “of rising from the domain of truth to the domain of sense…?” [8] This would be to assume that truth could be neatly denoted, manifested or signified by sense, which, among other things, would effectively occlude the intensity of the battle, rupture or event that is unfolding. The events presented herein have little to do with a distinction between the true and the false. To further explicate the figure of the asignifying rupture, which requires that we rethink the domain of sense, I will at once enter the arena for the first fight, though I must point out that no fight is to be given priority over another. Instead, it is their contiguous arrangement that will entertain us here.

Thus we arrive at the first event, that scene laid bare beneath the sharp blades of a bursting Madrid sun, where the narrator of Bataille's Histoire de l'Oeil [9] describes the corrida. Witness the bull and the spangle-dressed, firm thighed young matador committed to their bloody circuit. Recall, in this scene depicted by Bataille, three spectators clutched hotly amidst a crowd of thousands of Spaniards and others, in anticipation, not only of the good fight, but of the salt scent of sex. The heroine, a true Salome, has been handed the gift of a pair of peeled testicles, retrieved from the last slaughtered bull. They are placed side by side on a platter in such a way that the narrator is compelled to imagine eggs and eyeballs and saucers of milk. Having bitten viciously into one of these globes, the heroine lifts her dress in order to slide the second white sphere between her other set of lips. At this very moment two wet shining spheres become imaginatively conjoined, for the otherwise taciturn bull, now playing in the arena, has taken offence at the matador and speared him through the eye socket with one of his horns. This "volatile juncture" is a becoming, or, to borrow an illustration from Deleuze and Guattari, an orchid and a moth mapping themselves onto each other in a reproductive, quasi-sexual display; deterritorialising, reterritorialising and deterritorialising in turn [10]. For just a moment, the open cunt of the heroine cannot be distinguished from the now staring hole cut through the matador's face, eyeball and testicle become indiscernible, and the bull finds that it has punctured its own ball.

The asignifying rupture depicted above procures zones of indiscernibility between all the constituent parts of the narrated event. In the midst of the melee a combination of fleshy parts become detached from the flesh and the interchange of touching–touched results in what Deleuze calls a being of sensation or an incorporeal entity. It is no longer a matter of the intertwining and interpenetration of hard and soft parts, it is the event itself that begins to tremble. The asignifying rupture puts into action a relay of intensities or acute moments that rise above the combination of bodily parts. A little death, Simone's orgasm, is mapped across a more serious and irreversible death, that of the matador. This spill of sensation is nothing to laugh about. As Deleuze and Guattari have themselves admitted, the line of flight, that trajectory which carries the asignifying rupture, can, on occasion, emit the odour of death [11]. From the outset it is important to note, after Bataille, the uncomfortable proximity between sex and death. How, then, might sense and sensation escape this dire entanglement?

 

                                                 

                                                                 Study for a Bullfight   1969   Francis Bacon 

To assuage the disturbing spectacle of the above event, I will now introduce the second bullfight. Here I address Deleuze's passing citation of a bullfight as lent to him, in a painterly way, by Bacon. Deleuze addresses Bacon's work by searching after that moment in which the figure breaks away from the figurative and sensation is achieved in all its non–representational gore. Deleuze writes, "the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations" [12]. He then goes on to suggest that this constitutes not only the work of the artist, but that of the writer, the musician and the architect. The absence of the philosopher in the above list suggests that another task altogether has been reserved for her. Where the artist manifests blocs of sensation in order that the work is preserved or made to stand on its own, the philosopher creates concepts, which similarly depart on a trajectory of independence. Deleuze superimposes his work as philosopher upon the work of Bacon the artist. Though these two planes, the former of immanence the latter of composition, touch upon each other, Deleuze insists that they are irreducible [13].

In pursuit of the logic of sensation, where the philosopher, Deleuze, might be said to greet and conjoin briefly with the artist, Bacon, the former posits the notion of figure against that of figuration. Where figure is conceived as the direct relation of form to sensation, figuration is the stultification of form, the operation whereby form merely stands in place of the absent object that it is supposed to represent. Bacon's bullfights display the movement of bodily deformation and fleshy zones of indiscernibility that escape the facticity of experiencing flesh. Nevertheless, Deleuze pauses for a moment to question whether the bullfight is, after all, too dramatic, "a scene of horror," which "reintroduces a story to be told " [14]. With the reintroduction of narrative the figure is reified as figuration, as a something to be represented, that is, the figure enters the realm of signification. In this turn toward representation that which is impeded is the "direct action upon the nervous system" [15] which sensation would otherwise procure.

What is Deleuze's great objection to representation, which is present throughout his entire oeuvre? Is it that representation is the harbinger of death? The form that is the word, for instance, as Hegel has suggested and Maurice Blanchot has reiterated, announces the death of the thing it replaces. Blanchot writes, "For me to say, ‘This Woman’ I must take her flesh and blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her " [16]. Yet the above still participates in the long history of the illusion of representation that so appalls Deleuze [17]. The compulsion toward representation is the overwhelming desire to render some identity between word and thing, but between the flesh and blood woman and our naming of her as such there subsists another entity that Deleuze would prefer to pursue. It is a matter of untying the knots of representation, which are determined to secure an identification between word and thing, concept and thinking subject, and so on, for these are merely attempts to tame the force of difference [18]. That which Deleuze wants to celebrate, alongside the creation of concepts or the production of sense, is sensation, which he gives as the meeting place between things and thought, where difference continues to shimmer [19]. Sensation, which sets the form into motion, participates in the surging forth of all the differential elements of life despite the persistent proximity of death.

            

                                                

                                                            Study for a Bullfight No 1    1969   Francis Bacon 

                               

Bacon's paintings exemplify the movement of sensation rendered in spasms. His two renditions of the bullfight not only blur torero and toro, bullfighter and bull, but engage this affective exchange with a background condition. The background of flat uniform colour or aplat, rises to the surface of the canvas to meet the circuit of broken lines or tons rompus that mark out the coupling of bull andbullfighter. Deleuze describes this oscillation of figure and ground, "like a passage from the finite to the infinite, but also from territory to deterritorialisation [20]. This movement is at once, paradoxically, rendered strangely immobile. Thespasms that shudder across Bacon's canvases are augmented by his habit of constructing series and triptychs, wherein the repetition of the intermingling of figure and ground generate shifting differences, some more violent than others.

Bacon’s two studies of a bullfight create a series; we are obliged to read one canvas alongside the other. As Deleuze points out, where Bacon's first study frames an aroused crowd inscribed upon the canvas inside a vertical panel, the second study obliterates these spectators. Deleuze insists that whatever the occasion of arousal, the distinction between spectator and event is of less interest than the possibility of travelling the passage or thrust between sensing and sensed, between the finite and the infinite. It follows that a dichotomy between bullfight and spectator is dissolved. Deleuze writes "I become insensation, and something happens through sensation " [21].The spectator, or spectators of Bacon's first study enter the painting by losing their sharp relief against the background. The spectators become conjoined with the action of the fight, dissolving into the aplat, the infinite background of flat uniform colour, which in turn rises up in the broken and twisting lines of the almost indistinguishable forms of man and beast. Spectators are not left untouched at the periphery of the "terrain of truth", the corrida, or, for that matter, the painting, but are entangled, deterritorialised and reterritorialised, in turn, amidst the event or hecceity at hand.

As Deleuze suggests in Difference and Repetition: "it is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work ... of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind " [22]. Hence, with Bacon's bullfights, "we hear the hoofbeats of the animal " [23]. We make direct contact with the rhythm that writhes beneath all the senses and this rhythm might be designated as life. The mind by way of the rhythm of sensation is seemingly touched without mediation. What's more, Deleuze willfully dissolves the differentiation of mind and brain, virtual and material: "the brain is the mind itself " [24], he says, but the brain and its irreversible loss of cells is also "a set of little deaths that put constant death within us " [25]. These little deaths, a series of rhythmic orgasmic spasms, are like those that escape from Simone during the first bullfight. Again, we sense the faint odour of death that riddles the vibrations of life.

The rhythmic celebration of life reverberates insistently with a Nietzschean song, or rather, the Dionysian dithyramb, that wild hymn that accompanies the exploits of Bacchus. With this association I arrive at the third bullfight. This thread will lead us down the passages of Daedalus's labyrinth, where the Minotaur, poised at that indecisive juncture between man and bull will, according to Deleuze, conjoin with the lovely Ariadne to beget a monstrous offspring: Nietzsche's Ubermensch or Overman. In effect, Deleuze conflates the figure of the Minotaur and Dionysus. Following Nietzsche's advances, Deleuze figures the bull as Dionysus, a creative artist "surging forth with life " [26]. It is important to note, though I cannot at this time follow this particular tributary of thought, that life is exactly that in which Deleuze's immaculate conception of creative philosophy is compelled to partake. As for the labyrinth, it might be considered an arena where the thrusts, circuits and passages of the bullfight at first seem petrified or overdetermined. It is a territory that houses a terrifying beast, which the hero, Theseus desires to vanquish or transcend, but this beast, according to Deleuze, is life.

The myth of the Minotaur, with which weare familiar, depicts Theseus, "thanks to the help of Ariadne " [27], retracing his steps through the labyrinth by rewinding the thread that he had laid. Theseus makes sense of the Labyrinth, which otherwise addles the senses or all sense of direction. He stakes a claim and forges a swathe of territory, he reterritorialises that which would otherwise deterritorialise and then he cruelly abandons his lover, Ariadne. It is Bacchus or Dionysus the bull who subsequently comes to the aid of Ariadne and celebrates her exploits by deterritorialising her crown into the night sky as a constellation of stars. Byway of these shining lights navigators might once have oriented or reterritorialised themselves. And so, with this series of events that continue to proliferate, we have a movement backwards and forwards between signification and asignifying ruptures. This is what Deleuze has called a vis elastica: the imposition and decomposition of territory in the movements of territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, the figure–ground confusion between the finite and the infinite, the explanation of movement by way of the elasticity of sensation [28].

At such an elastic juncture the philosopher's plane of immanence and the artist's plane of composition appear to touch or intermingle. On the one hand Deleuze delineates the conceptual becoming, that is, the philosophical creation of concepts, which follow the trajectory upon which "the common event itself eludes what is " [29]. Here sense is caused to move backwards and forwards, entering into the domain of paradox. On the other hand, he delineates the sensory becoming that is related to art: "the action by which something or someone is ceaselessly becoming-other (while continuing to be what they are) " [30]. He insists that these varieties of becoming are not the same, and yet it is possible to witness both of them at work along the same passage or line of flight. One might almost begin to suspect that Deleuze himself trips over the tangle of threads as he finds his way through the labyrinth of sense and sensation. With one false step the bull could gore out his eye and render him senseless.

Finally, we arrive at the last bullfight, where I will introduce the autobiographer extraordinaire, Michel Leiris, who was born in April, "under the jurisdiction of two signs: the Ram and the Bull " [31]. The erotic act, for Leiris, is tied inextricably to the circuits, thrusts, passages and trajectories of the corrida. Across the pages of L'Age d'Homme (Manhood), the embrace of bull and matador is depicted as a gesturology "performed on the brink of death and in order to inflict death " [32]. What Leiris seems to promise is a multiplicity of little deaths, wherein man and beast become enwrapped. The figure of woman, as it occurs across this autobiographical–cum–auto–affective scene, tends to be associated, paradoxically, with sharpened weapons that pierce, as though in homage to the horns of the bull. Nevertheless, no straightforward ascription of gender fixes the roles of the two parties clinched together in the arena.

Leiris divulges his own quavering identifications with the toro and torero as follows: "When I go to a bullfight, I tend to identify myself with either the bull at the moment the sword is plunged into its body, or with the matador who risks being killed (perhaps emasculated?) by a thrust of the horn at the very moment he most clearly affirms his virility " [33]. The spectator, Leiris, enters the arena, questioning his sexuality and rupturing the boundaries of his body in a spasm that conjoins with the other incorporeal entities at play. He suffers, or so he relates, "a seizure whose outcome I can never know " [34]. This constitutes, for the writer, the absurdity of the proximity of death. Reading Leiris, Blanchot locates this fear in the fact that "we cannot experience the reality of death" [35] and the unreality of death holds us quavering in an indeterminate state between life and its other.

Leiris also insists that the seizure of death bears an analogy to the sexual spasm, both inflict upon the subject "the collapse of all the faculties" [36] and are thus suggestive of a return to chaos. Still, it is only from the diminutivedeath, with which the orgasm is identified, that we are granted re–entry to life. Unlike death proper, the sexual spasm is an asignifying rupture that allows a return. Most crucial to Leiris's fascination in the bullfight is his suggestion that by writing in the confessional mode of auto–biography, he suffers the mortal risks of the matador. It is as though he desires the fatal penetration of the horn, which would result in the effusion of his erstwhile inner, hidden world into the world at large. The act of writing becomes bound up with an erotics and where, in the midst of this delirium of exposure, Blanchot insists death is inextricably interwoven, Deleuze turns instead to"a possibility of life " [37].One is compelled to ask: Can either perspective be accepted without the other?

Leiris is well aware that the activity of writing places him in no real danger of being gored, that he is threatened merely by the "shadow of a horn " [38]. This is not to suggest that the literary task for Leiris cannot be considered an engagement rife with peril. In much the same way that the torero is obliged to attend to what Leiris denominates as the "tauromachic" code [39], the writer suggests that he too must proceed according to certain rules. Should his scrutinising exactitude slacken for just a moment, his task, which is to "gather [his] life into a single solid block " [40], will slip from his grasp. This task, as it turns out, can never arrive at a point of culmination, for the writer, though riddled with an infinite series ofl ittle deaths, will not be able to narrate his own demise.

Four times I have visited the bullfight figured as event or asignifying rupture. Finally, in the midst of the dance that cuts its trajectory through the "terrain of truth," the dire matter of life or death itself becomes a rupture that resists signification. With this statement, I lead myself into one of the many junctions that riddle the labyrinth. It is not possible here to take a final definitive step, for to state, in exact terms, the sense of the term life is as pre-emptive as attempting to grasp the sense of death. Sense, according to Deleuze, is that which is expressed, it is a fourth dimension or an open field that is presupposed by the determinations of denotation, manifestation and signification. Residing neither on the side of the object nor on the side of those words that are gathered into a proposition that is directed toward the object, the threshold of sense is stretched taut and bifurcated. This is not to suggest that sense snaps in two, rather, it oscillates backwards and forwards. Deleuze is insistent that, unlike good sense, sense travels in more than one direction. And what of the “asygnifying features” [41] of sensation? It must be noted that sensation can also be located at the meeting place between things and thought, and so there persists not only an oscillation of sense but also of sensation. It is not a matter of identifying the constraints of life or the interruption of death with the strictures of good and common sense, but of being prepared to stretch out on the threshold that shimmers in between.

It cannot be denied that the culmination of every bullfight results, at some point, in the demise of the bull. Even if the matador is fatally gored in the heat of the battle, the bull will eventually be lead to its slaughter. Perhaps, then, as Deleuze has pondered, the drama of the bullfight tells a tale that is too well worn. The oscillation of sense congeals in the anticipation and horror of bloodshed. Despite the above, it is too easy to forget that each event of the bullfight brings with it a very particular concatenation of parts. Though I visit four such events, I cannot claim to have personally experienced the thrills of the corrida. Still, and this may well be an illegitimate step, could this experience not be obtained after a different fashion? Deleuze and Guattari speculate upon whether it is possible to use drugs without actually taking drugs, which is to suggest that a lack of experience should not preclude one’s construction and augmentation of conceptual and sensory becomings [42].The ongoing practice of creative construction is exactly a “question of life and death,” enabling the philosopher, artist, writer, bullfighter and bull to play out any number of scenarios and cause them to circulate [43].I n fits and starts, according to an array of speeds and slownesses, the simultaneous distinction and intermingling of sensation and sense proceed. As Bataille suggests, life, and its intimate proximity to death “is the tumultuous movement that bursts forth and consumes itself” [44], an asignifying rupture extraordinaire.

Works Cited

[1] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome,” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),pp. 9–12.

[2] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 5.

[3] Timothy Mitchell, Blood Sport: A Social History of Spanish Bullfighting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1991), p. 169.

[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 18.

[5] Michel Leiris, Manhood, trans. Richard Howard, foreword Susan Sontag (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 37.

[6] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 12.

[7] On the figure of the aficionado see Mitchell, Blood Sport, pp. 2, 3.

[8] Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin Boundas (New York:Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 68.

[9] Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschal (London: Penguin Books, 1967).

[10] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 10.

[11] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 229

[12] Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 167.

[13] Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 216.

[14] Deleuze, “Painting and Sensation,” TheDeleuze Reader, ed. and intro. Constantin Boundas (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1993), p. 190.

[15] Deleuze, “Painting and Sensation,” p.190.

[16] Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, trans. Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Robert Lamberton (New York: Station Hill Press, 1999), p. 379.

[17] See Deleuze, “Conclusion,” Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University press,1994).

[18] Deleuze, “Conclusion,” Difference and Repetition,, p. 266.

[19] Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 202.

[20] Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 180.

[21] Deleuze, “Painting and Sensation,” p.187.

[22] Deleuze, Repetition and Difference, p. 8.

[23] Deleuze, “Painting and Sensation,” p.192.

[24] Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?,p. 211.

[25] Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 216.

[26] Deleuze, 'The Mystery of Ariadne According to Nietzsche,' Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W.Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), p. 105.

[27] Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary Innes (London: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 183.

[28] Deleuze, “Painting and Sensation,” p.191.

[29] Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p.177.

[30] Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?.

[31] Leiris, Manhood, p. 3.

[32] Leiris, Manhood, p. 42.

[33] Leiris, Manhood, p. 42.

[34] Leiris, Manhood, p. 50.

[35] Blanchot, “Glances Beyond the Grave,” On Leiris, Yale French Studies, no. 81 (Connecticut: Yale University, 1992),p. 159.

[36] Leiris, Manhood, p. 51.

[37] Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Critical Inquiry 23 (Winter, 1997), p. 229.

[38] The quote is from Blanchot, but Leiris, in his own words, does in fact register that it is, rather, the "shadow of a bull's horn" he wishes to introduce into the literary work. Leiris, Manhood,p. 154. Blanchot, “Glances Beyond the Grave,” p. 154. See also Allan Stoekl,“Leiris's Unwritten Autobiography,” Politics Writing, Mutilation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

[39] Leiris, Manhood, p. 163.

[40] Leiris, Manhood, p. 162.

[41] Deleuze, “The Diagram,” The Deleuze Reader , p. 194.

[42] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 166. See also Ian Buchanan, “Introduction,” A Deleuzian Century?, ed. Ian Buchanan, TheSouth Atlantic Quarterly, 96: 3 summer (Durham: 1997), p. 385.

[43] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 151.

[44] Georges Bataille, The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), p. 246.


Copyright © Monash University 2001. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

Portrait of the artist as a cruel man - motion picture of artist Francis Bacon

by Jan Stuart

The Advocate, October 13, 1998

 

Those of us who cannot afford to buy art take endless pleasure in entertainments that portray artists as unworthy of the money we can't give them. From Lust for Life to I Shot Andy Warhol, artists are shown as emotional adolescents who create their own rules - mopey, mercurial, obsessive, enamored of the brawling hoi polloi, and noncommittal in affairs of the heart. "Artists are bizarre, fixed, cold," sang Seurat's lover Dot in Sunday in the Park With George. And And that was a compliment.

If she pined after Francis Bacon instead, she might have downgraded the "cold" to "cruel." This is a man who, upon finding his lover unconscious on the floor, coolly checks the fellow's breath with a compact mirror and then flops in a chair to begin the tedious wait for him to stir. This is a man who watches his lover toss in the agony of a nightmare rather than wake him up.

John Maybury's Love Is the Devil is a nihilist's wet dream, a portrait of the artist as an aging man without a redemptive bone in his body. As played with poisoned fangs by Derek Jacobi, Bacon is a prince of darkness who has constructed an inverted world in which, as one friend says, "no good deed goes unpunished." A public sadist and a bedroom masochist, Bacon shudders with orgasmic pleasure at the taste of a boxer's blood on his face or the tragic spectacle of the Odessa Steps massacre in The Battleship Potemkin.

Love Is the Devil zeroes in on Bacon's destructive relationship with George Dyer, a hunky, unsophisticated thief with whom Bacon traded a home and hefty allowances for modeling rights and kinky sex. (For a change, the artist's muse is not of the opposite sex, a convention of the genre that even gay writer Christopher Hampton couldn't resist in Carrington.) Dyer (a devastating Daniel Craig) is a rough-hewn angel doomed from the moment he falls, quite literally, from the skies and into Bacon's life.

"Welcome to the concentration of camp? says Bacon as he introduces his new boyfriend into his vipers' nest of drinking buddies, and the Nazi resonance is altogether apt. Bacon and his grotesque circle annihilate everyone around them as well as each other: They are grown-up versions of the little monsters who disemboweled cats in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. This "twilight world of unhappy poofs" perfectly embodies the spirit of horror-equals-pleasure that informed Bacon's aesthetic.

Maybury was denied access to the paintings by the artist's estate, a lucky happenstance as it resulted in a stunning deployment of slow-motion, fisheye-lens, and fun-house-mirror effects to re-create the disturbing mood of Bacon's canvases. The result is perhaps the most sensual evocation of an artist's milieu since John Huston's dazzling nightlife tableaux for the opening of Moulin Rouge.

But Maybury's trendily impressionistic structure of short, time-hopping scenes (the film is subtitled Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon) is thin camouflage for the film's basic cliche. For all its visual elan, this is yet one more take on the heartless artist and his neglected muse. As it bangs home the ironic contrast between the public acclaim and the private tortures, Maybury's film eventually collapses under the weight of its redundancy. I'd trade all of Love Is the Devil's gorgeous cruelties for a single shot of Bacon trapped in the purgatory of a supermarket checkout line, waiting for the manager to bring the override key.

Stuart is theater critic and senior film writer for Newsday.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Liberation Publications, Inc.

 

 

Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. - book reviews

by Lisa Liebmann

ArtForum,  Summer, 1997

 

 

This biography has a lot going for it: an urbane, insightful author and a famously flamboyant, risque subject who simultaneously is and isn't one of the signal forces in twentieth-century art. Michael Peppiatt, to his credit, does not fully conceal a certain ambivalence about the masochistic and controlling Francis Bacon, who lost two lovers to suicide - each just before the opening of a major exhibition - and kept house with his old nanny until he was forty-two, nor about the sometimes contrived-seeming terribilita of the Baconian oeuvre. The leitmotiv of Dorian Gray, invoked either to emphasize the artist's remarkably enduring if rather pickled boyishness or to conjure up the splenetic wonders of the portraits, serves Peppiatt well on both scores.

Even Bacon's detractors might agree that the artist at his best succeeded brilliantly in realizing his goal of getting pictures "to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime." There has been much less consensus, however, about the passing importance of that accomplishment, never mind its profound resonance. Peppiatt does not exactly bring the gavel down on this issue. Instead, he plea-bargains, in a sense, emphasizing the single-mindedness of an artist who so powerfully declared his loyalty to the human figure during the postwar decades - a period Peppiatt himself seems to identify almost exclusively with abstraction. (The cameo appearences in this book of the painter Lucian Freud, one of Bacon's frequent sitters, do little to cloud his view.)

Certainly, Bacon was a bit of a one-note trombonist. The mood of existential futility and ferocity so thoroughly associated with his work was pretty well in place from the very start, around 1930, which is when the artist, barely in his early twenties, gave up a promising first career as a self-styled interior decorator and furniture designer. (He largely stopped painting for nearly a decade soon after he began, however, and for the most part acknowledged only work dating from this second beginning, right before World War II.) Bacon seems, in general, to have been one of those people who were hatched fully formed. At fifteen or so, he was already well into women's underwear, a lifelong preference that in the short run proved to be a fast one-way ticket out of the house of his sclerotically hotheaded father. Once he returned to London from more than a year's sojourn abroad - on the loose in Weimar Berlin and prewar Paris, between the ages of seventeen and nineteen - he remained as out as out can be. There is indeed a hint of irony lurking about the notion that a man who spent hardly any time at all finding himself could be responsible - along with, say, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus - for some of the most widely recognizable symbols of postwar angst and doubt.

At times, Bacon's trademark flick-of-the-wrist-and-blur-of-the-brush facial distortions seem merely to be tricks, effective formal gimmicks, with a dash of Surrealist horror a la early Bunuel, derived from Picasso's Marie-Therese portraits, de Kooning's liberated licks of paint, and from the artist's longstanding skill at applying makeup to his own face. Many of his figure-ground relationships, in turn, seem to have evolved out of the combined principles of Muybridge's photographic studies of wrestlers and of AbEx gravitas as delivered by painters such as Motherwell, Newman, and Rothko. Yet we learn that the erstwhile decorator dismissed abstraction as "decorative" pattern-making and was witheringly snooty about its practitioners, referring to Pollock as "that old lacemaker" and comparing de Kooning's "Woman" paintings to "playing cards." According to Peppiatt, however, Bacon "also understood that taking a figurative image to the verge - but just short - of abstraction gave it a mysterious and compelling tension."

Something about the central emotion conveyed - the career-long fixation on themes of nihilism, carnal decay, and the primal sexual combat of males - screams adolescence. So did the artist's cloaked and cultivated aura - he played down his more or less upper-class background and was attracted to working-class men - and his society-flouting, sex-rebel stance. It appears that I am not alone in having first discovered and embraced this artist while still in my teens. By the '70s, Bacon had become a cult hero second only to Warhol among alienated youth all over Europe and the United States, but nowhere more than in Paris, where, as Peppiatt informs us, "These groupie-like followers had been building up . . . ever since Bacon's retrospective at the Grand Palais," in 1971. (Bernardo Bertolucci - that connoisseur of raffish chic - also saw the exhibition, just before he started shooting Last Tango in Paris, and "was so impressed by the paintings that he went back to the Grand Palais to look at them with his leading man, Marlon Brando." Thus, the film not only features Bacon images in its opening credits, but has a main character directly inspired by the classic Baconian physiognomy - "faces," as the director put it, "eaten up by something that comes from within.")

For a show at Galerie Maeght Lelong more than a decade later, in 1984, the groupies "turned out again in almost unmanageable force, with a strong punk addition that made them look more threatening. . . . His status was neatly confirmed when the words 'ONLY FRANCIS BACON IS MORE WONDERFUL THAN YOU' appeared on the graffiti-covered house where Serge Gainsbourg, the anarchist poet-cum-singer, lived."

Peppiatt met Bacon in Paris in 1963, while on assignment for a Cambridge University student magazine, and remained a friend until the artist's death in 1992. He is a remarkably unobtrusive observer. Although writing intimately and knowledgeably about an artist whose importance and popularity are inextricable from the '70s zeitgeist of sexual, especially homosexual, liberation - Bacon, in this respect, plays Lucifer to Hockney's happy angel - Peppiatt reveals nothing, even through his dedications, about himself. What he does offer are wonderful, pithy descriptions of louche as well as luxurious living in Berlin and Paris during the late '20s, the time of Bacon's defining wanderjahren; of Bacon's bizarre London menage, which for many years consisted of the artist, his older lover, and the memorable Nanny Lightfood, who did a bit of shoplifting for the household and had a vociferously expressed penchant for capital punishment (she wanted to see the duchess of Windsor hanged); and best of all, of that indiscriminate deployer of the pronoun "she," the artist. Bacon can be heard loud and clear in this keenly pitched book. No mean feat for a dead queen.

Lisa Liebmann writes frequently for Artforum.

 

 

F R A N C I S B A C O N: anatomy of an enigma

 

Salon  Sept. 16, 1997

BY CHARLES TAYLOR | In a 1985 interview with Melvyn Bragg for British television's "South Bank Show," the painter Francis Bacon said, "We are born, and we die, and that's it." There's less torment in those words, though, than there is acceptance that life can be a pretty bleak proposition. If you don't see much point in worrying about what awaits you in the next world, or if you don't even believe there's a next world, chances are you'll be able to get on with things free of the anxiety that hounds so many. In Michael Peppiatt's new biography, "Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma," Bacon's acceptance translates into a weird capacity for enjoying life. Among friends and drinking acquaintances, he was spontaneous, generous, engaged in a hunt for the next pleasure that nightly took him from fine restaurants to seedy Soho drinking clubs to rough streets in search of rough trade. That he could also be cruel and cutting spoke not only of the sudden mood shifts induced by his large and lifelong capacity for alcohol, but of his refusal to blunt his opinions, even if it meant hurting or jettisoning people who had been his friends for years.

Peppiatt met Bacon in the early '60s when he interviewed him for a student newspaper. He stayed friends with Bacon for the rest of the artist's life, and his account benefits from clear-eyed fondness. Given the details Peppiatt makes public here, we can be grateful that he hasn't written a sensationalistic book, though many of the details are juicy. In addition to the most complete view to date of the upbringing that Bacon referred to only obliquely (even to close friends), Peppiatt fills in the details of the young Bacon's travels through '20s Berlin and '30s Paris. (Bacon was kicked out of his home at 16, after his father caught him trying on his mother's underwear.) We find out that the only person from his upbringing with whom Bacon stayed close was his nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. When she couldn't find work, he took her in, and she lived with him and his various lovers until her death, in 1951. When money was really tight, Jessie shoplifted food or scanned the offers Francis received after advertising himself in the Times as a "gentleman's companion."

Nothing is presented moralistically here. Peppiatt doesn't gloss over the way Bacon took advantage of some lovers or the sharp-tongued remarks that left even longtime friends wounded, any more than he sentimentalizes the generosity that led Bacon to press large sums on friends who had hit hard times. Best of all, Peppiatt doesn't present Bacon's fondness for drinking or masochistic sex as sad or self-destructive. (Perhaps that's because he recognizes Bacon's extraordinary discipline.) And he doesn't shortchange the grief in Bacon's memorial triptychs to his lover George Dyer, who committed suicide on the eve of Bacon's 1971 retrospective at Paris' Grand Palais (among living artists, an honor that had been accorded only to Picasso).

Peppiatt's judgment of how the events of Bacon's life played out in his paintings feels very sound, if at times a bit too Freudian. The problem he faces is similar to the one Bacon said figurative painters face in the age of photography. With photography taking over the function of illustration, it is up to figurative painters to find a reality beyond literal representation. Peppiatt does an admirable job of laying out the facts of Bacon's life, and a superb job of painting a portrait of the man with both affection and perspective. But the facts cannot alone account for the shock and the mystery of Bacon's work. Peppiatt's real accomplishment is that he makes you feel Bacon as a living presence. Like any biography worth its salt, "Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma" makes you grieve for its subject.

Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon.

 

 

 

 

The dualist - painting, Francis Bacon, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany

David Cohen

Art in America January 1997

Francis Bacon offers a strange feast for the eye. Abundant painterly pleasures were to be had at the sumptuous retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (the show, which comes four years after the artist's death, is now at its second venue, the Haus der Kunst, Munich), but such pleasures are necessarily tinged with a frisson of guilt. To marvel at Bacon's manipulations of material and form, anatomy and perspective, innovation and convention is to delight, at the same time, in the representation of extraordinary states of mutilation and pain. To enjoy - as one is enticed to enjoy - such adventures in representation, one must divorce the form from the content. And yet one cannot: to separate them would be like pulling apart Siamese twins, leaving limbs and torsos as bloodied as any in the paintings of Francis Bacon. To enjoy Bacon is, inevitably, at some imaginative level, to participate in injury.

Just as there is an esthetic compulsion to look more and more closely at Bacon's paintings - especially when they are gathered "in the flesh" at a major exhibition of this kind - so there is a moral imperative to come to terms with Bacon's violence. In a way, though, these two levels of attention are mutually exclusive. The work's painterliness enjoins us to estheticize any extremities of depiction, such as the way faces are mashed by unexpected twists of the brush, just at the very moment when we might be groping for psychological or political excuses for such distortions. Pondering Goya's etchings, "Disasters of War," Jean Genet describes a similar quandary: "We are so absorbed by the lightness and vitality of Goya's line that the beauty of the spectacle makes us forget to condemn the war it represents."

There is a standard intepretation of Bacon as an artist who reflects the violence of his century, but this has come to seem inadequate precisely because it fails to confront the ambiguity of the violence in his work, as well as the fact that the word "violence" operates on different levels in the artist's own statements. Andrew Sinclair exclaim his recent biography, Francis Bacon: His life and Violent Times (1995), that the artist "read the entrails of his half-century, pulverised them and vomited his three Eumenides in paint" [see A.i. A., Dec. '94]. This is a reference to Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), which Bacon identified as a depiction of the furies in the Orestia of Aeschylus.(1) Sinclair is able to draw upon plenty of reserves of violence in Bacon's life, from his childhood in Ireland during the Troubles and in London during the zeppelin raids of World War I (he was born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents), through an adolescence all the more turbulent because of his homosexuality and his ambiguous relationship to his tyrannical, racehorse-trainer father. He follows Bacon's move to the seedy Berlin of the Weimar Republic and Paris of the 1920s, where the artist came of age and defined his outlook (it was after seeing a Picasso exhibition in Paris that he resolved to become a painter). During the 1930s Bacon was predominantly a designer of innovative modern future; he never darkened the door of an art school but experimented during these years with the current French artistic avant-garde as his models. Sinclair also draws liberally upon the historical calamities that marked the years of Bacon's public emergence. The artist was excused from military service on account of his asthma, but World War II nonetheless had a galvanizing effect on him. As he launched his painting career in earnest towards the close of 1944, Auschwitz and Hiroshima were godparents to his painted furies. But Sinclair's biographically and historically causal view can be countered with Mark Roskill's contention - ever fresh from his 1963 essay "Francis Bacon as a Mannerist" - that "if both Rosso Florentino's art and Bacon's look "sick" to us, this is because they play upon our sensations in parallel ways, not because their periods gave them the relevant imagery and mood."(2)

Bacon's use of the word "violent" in his interviews with David Sylvester(3) (who, along with Fabrice Hergott, curated the current retrospective) was not always literal, despite enough blood-and-guts in his images to warrant such a use. The "violence" of images - apart from specific scenes of mutilation or torture - can as often mean, to Bacon, the abruptness or keenness with which images present themselves. He can thus speak of making things "more clearly, more exactly, more violently." Violence is as much what happens to images as within them. Bacon's people don't always suffer from their mutilations; many are quite able to go about their usual business. It is in this sense that he is a mannerist: violent distortion is just his way of doing figures, of painting faces. His stylistic distortions of body or visage - the mangled, lacerated features, the radical contortions or mutilations of limbs - as often accentuate aliveness as portend death.

But Bacon has it both ways with violence: he elevates and sanitizes injury to the level of style, but he also trades on the emotionallly charged resonance of injury, exploiting the repulsion and fascination that such wounds - were they real - would elicit. Bacon exhibits an ambivalence toward violence not only in his finished paintings but also in the procedures underlying them. For instance, he said that he preferred to develop his portraits from photographs rather than have the person actually sit for him. The living presence of his sitters would inhibit him, he told Sylvester, "because, if I like them, I don't want to practise before them the injury that I do to them in my work. I would rather practise the injury in private by which I think I can record the fact of them more clearly."

Bacon was famously and consistently disdainful of abstraction. He told Sylvester that "it can convey very watered-down lyrical feelings, because I think any shapes can. But I don't think it can really convey feeling in the grand sense." Elsewhere he insisted that "the image matters more than the beauty of the paint." Invariably, however, viewers must adopt a point of view diametrically opposed to the painter's if they are to survive the assault of his art. At some conscious or unconscious level, every admirer of Bacon has to say to himself or herself: the paint matters more than the ugliness of the image.

An anti-epicurean stance comes through in Bacon's avowed preference for Picasso over Matisse. Matisse was "too lyrical and decorative. ... He doesn't have Picasso's brutality of fact." And yet Matisse springs to mind on seeing the first painting in the Paris exhibition, Interior of a Room (ca. 1935). When Bacon fully embarked on his painting career in 1944-45 (with the Three Studies) he destroyed his previous output. Those few early pieces which were already in other hands, and thus survived, would be omitted from exhibitions during his lifetime. The exception to this rule was the ghostly, Picassoid Crucifixion (1933), which had been reproduced by Herbert Read in his landmark 1934 book, Art Now, marking Bacon's first official recognition as an artist. (Read had wanted to include Bacon in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries, but bizarrely his co-selectors deemed him "not Surrealist enough.")

An accurate reckoning of his pre-1944 output within the context of his entire career is now possible, and is one of the things that makes the Paris/Munich show so significant - and the most comprehensive Bacon retrospective to date, even though there were more pictures in the 1985 Tate survey, and at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1971. Another of the artist's own myths exploded by this exhibition is that of his not having made drawings. The curators have gathered several revealing works on paper - in gouache, pen and crayon - as well as his paintings over photographs in books.

The 1935 Interior of a Room is richly prophetic on a number of counts. It already announces Bacon's love for spatial ambiguity and somewhat nauseating color. Structurally, the composition is probably too ambitious for its own good, but it is telling that there is (loosely speaking) a tripartite division, anticipating his adoption of the triptych format. And there is evidence of another consistent trait, the desire to do subversive things with paint, smudging and smearing it to gain disconcerting effects. But with all the cubistic complications of space and the intrusions of both oddly biomorphic elements and irregular rods, there is an unfamiliar decorative intensity in the lozenge shapes we can read as wallpaper in the center of the image, and in the luscious red and purple stripes to the right. The way the lozenges - yellow and green on green - are "written" in a pinched, abbreviated, uneven handwriting seems pure Matisse. What would happen in subsequent work is that a dualism of living matter and mm" surroundings would sharpen: the dog at bottom right is the only living thing depicted, but it is passive and inert; there is more life in the ambiguous forms in the opposite corner. The vitality invested in these lozenges will be reinvested in organic forms (the dog will spring into action, so to speak). Backgrounds will become exactly that - background, consigned to a secondary role - and they win be forced to take on an intentionally deadpan quality, creating all the more heightened a contrast with the main event, the concentrated, centered having form. Sometimes the background will be painted in "dead" acrylic, the figures in "fleshy" oil to intensify the dichotomy.

The decorative element, so joyously bodied forth in the painting of the young interior designer, would be subordinated, once he relaunched his career, but not expunged. The stripes of the top right corner of Interior reassert themselves in Painting (1950). Here they look more Bonnard than Matisse, perhaps because the nude - of uncertain gender - is standing in a bathtub. The stripes are the second subject, but only just. Although they and the blue and red rectangles topping and tailing the composition can be read as depicting the wall and the side of the bath, there is an unnerving consonance between this figure painting and then-contemporary American abstraction.

Various considerations conspire to block appreciation of the decorative aspects of Bacon's work: his disdain for abstraction; his status as (apart from Giacometti, whom he much admired) quite probably the greatest reinventor of figuration after Picasso; the sheer brutality of his subject matter. And yet, the abstract qualities are an indispensable component of the paintings. However compelling the central figure in Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho (1967), however intriguing the ambiguous animal-cum-automobile form behind her, the first and last memory of the work is of the rich blue flapping shapes at the top of the composition and the swerving spiral that ares below. Of course, these can be "read" - as awnings and road respectively - but this does not distract from their autonomy as abstract shapes, their right to be regarded as flat shapes on the canvas. Likewise, the brushwork m the decorate flooring/plush carpet of the 1973 triptych Three Portraits: Posthumous Portrait of George Dyer, Self Portrait, Portrait of Lucian Freud (1973), with its gay abandon, is too involved in its own lyricism to be explained away in descriptive terms. Often in Bacon one senses an abstract painting bursting to escape from the figurative space it is enlisted to describe.

But this is to discuss abstraction as if it is a quantifiable state apart from from. Bacon's argument with abstraction is not that he despises the abstract, but that he takes it to be inextricably linked to other facets of painting. "I think painting is a duality," he explained, "and that abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interested in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes." The patterns and shapes in the two paintings just mentioned, admired for their abstract, "esthetic" qualities, can also be absorbed within denser, more multifaceted readings of the images they serve. The billowing awnings in the Isabel Rawsthorne painting rhyme with the swelling of Rawsthorne's skirt, the voluptuous tightness of her clothing. The very involvedness of the ground in the triptych intensifies the isolation of three figures depicted within the same space. That the pattern arises from undisciplined doodles, with colors that are loosely flesh tones, lends to it a sexual suggestiveness.

Bacon's suspicion of the "entirely aesthetic thing" and his plea for another level of meaning recall Ruskin's famous distinction between "aesthesis" and "theoria," between "mere animal consciousness of the pleasantness" and "exulting, reverent and grateful perception." Of course, Ruskin's moral universe is turned upside down by the time this dualism reaches Bacon: his outlook is so imbued by a Nietzschean sense of vitalism that "mere animal consciousness" is actually the "exulted" condition he seeks. Ruskin's projected state beyond the esthetic, with its overtones of moral rectitude, would have smacked to Bacon of "illustration," to which he was just as hostile as he was toward "decoration" and "abstraction."

Illustration, according to Bacon, transports imagery along a cumbersome route through language, association, meaning. His ideal was to bypass such laborious stages of cognition in a brutal assault directly upon the core of our physical being: "Some paint," he said, "comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain." He is ever the inverted Cartesian, rooting for the body in its dualistic struggle with the mind. ("I masturbate, therefore I am," as Donald Kuspit once put it apropos of Bacon's men.(4)) To Bacon, the physical being is more real, more true than any moral or social being. A line from Andre Gide's The Immoralist making a similar Nietzschean plea for the authentic in raw physicality suggests itself as almost prophetic of Bacon's art: "The layers of acquired knowledge peel away from the mind like a cosmetic and reveal, in patches, the naked fresh beneath, the authentic being there."(5)

Bacon the dualist is as prone to play form against meaning as meaning against form. He is even capable, at times, of talking like a true formalist, as when he came to justify his use of a swastika armband in the right-hand panel of Crucifixion (1965).(6) This motif, appearing in a work, moreover, belonging to the Staatsgalerie in Munich, naturally gave rise to fanciful historical and political interpretations of precisely the kind Bacon preferred to avoid for his work. Pressed on the matter of the armband in his second interview with David Sylvester, Bacon disconcertingly replied that he wanted to "break the continuity of the arm and to add the colour .... 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 working formally." The swastika happened to present itself to him, he claims because he had just been studying photos of Hitler and his entourage.

When Bacon made his distinction between illustrational and nonillustrational form, his preference was obviously for the latter, for the form which works upon the nervous system, bypassing memory and expectation. And yet he is a realist in the sense that he paints immediately recognizable objects and forms from the observed world in a pictorial language that is predominantly accessible, and when ambiguous, deliberately and contrastively so. The dichotomy of real versus illustrational has one status in his statements, another in his work, for it is in fact the distorted, ambiguous forms - usually the figures - which are the more vital and urgent forms, the more "real." As with the way Bacon paints background very differently from foreground, so in this respect his work presents a duality of different kinds or degrees of realism. There are the moments of radical distortion and painterly spasm, but these are offset by surrounding passages of blandness, in which the mode of depiction is as deadpan as the paint-handling. Everyday objects - furniture, baseboards, mirrors, rolller blinds, fight bulbs, door knobs, etc. - are often achieved with the studied simplicity of a commercial artist, of a cartoonist or (dare one say it) an illustrator. This makes all the more forceful the explosions of flesh, the deformative smudges, or the onanistic ejaculations of paint which are allowed to intrude upon and puncture this otherwise innocuous surface. Opposite in execution as in appearance, these heightened moments stand apart from the calculated banality of what surrounds them - the real as in the actual substance of paint is pitted against "realism" as in pictorial representation.

"I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance," Bacon once said. Chance, with its risk of spoiling everything, is a sort of violence committed against Bacon's own meticulousness, a rude interruption of the smooth, measured surface. His infatuation with chance has none of the idealism of Surrealist or Abstract-Expressionist notions of automatism, which link spontaneity to freedom or truth. Instead, his chance is imbued with a nihilistic, existentialist sense of the arbitrary. Flung and frenzied marks declaim the violence of their moment of becoming.

It would be a mistake, though, to think of the miraculous splurges as the authentic Bacon, and the rest as the painter marking time. This is not just because the distinction between the two modes is frequently blurred. It also has to be stressed that the background Bacon is often Bacon at his most lyrical; that his design is capable of compelling compactness (as with the blue in the Rawsthorne portrait); that even the shorthand details and illustrational passages can have the sort of mesmerizing hold of such masters of the deadpan as Hopper and Magritte. But there is another reason not to overrate the chance effects, namely that they are not as "chancy" as they might appear. Bacon was in actual fact a compulsive gambler, losing large sums at the roulette wheel, but in the act of painting, the wheel can be said to have been weighted. Through his studio risk taking, he could simulate the thrill of the wheel knowing that each "gamble" would eventually pay off: time and an unlimited supply of paint and canvas were on his side. He could keep working until he won.

In a painting done toward the end of his career, Jet of Water (1988), life is seen to imitate art: a burst of water from a faucet in an anonymous street provided Bacon with a perfect subject to pursue his connection of the fluid, the violent and the effects of chance. In general, Bacon's work of the last 20 years had neither the disturbing power of the paintings of the 1940s and 1950s nor the compelling design quality of the 1960s canvases. Relative to his earlier work, a diffuseness bordering on sterility began to set in; the sharpness of contrast between figure and ground was a casualty, even as the dead-centered figure became almost ubiquitous, making the contrast especially needed. But, with a burst of the old energy, Jet of Water - and several other quietly sumptuous works from the last years gathered in the Paris/Munich exhibition - defied the impression of talent going to seed. This image redramatizes the dichotomy between an almost fey and punctilious background - actually very reminiscent of Pittura Metafisica, with its pale blue sky, delicately drawn architectural elements, characteristic dry-brush fines and edges - and a vigorous foreground, here very literary a "splash" of paint.

Bacon, who rightly insisted that he was not an expressionist, is arguably at his most canny when the materials seem most freely handled and invested with personal feeling and surprised response. It is telling that these qualities should emerge so forcefully in one of the numerous works done in homage to Velazquez, that master of control: Study for Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1965), with the brushiness of the flame- and limb-like folds of the backcloth, the diaphanous whiteness of the pontiff s frock, the unfinish of his oddly misshaped throne, the bravura economy of his cape. An almost love-hate ambivalence towards the very stuff of paint comes through in Study for Portrait of Van Gogh (1957) with its voluptuous yet disdainfully fluid dollops of red and white, and blue and black, mixed as much on the brush as on the sickly yellow ground.

There is actually a sort of violence in the way Bacon cannibalizes historic sources; his attitude toward the old masters mixed awe and contempt. As with his depictions of contemporaries, he was more comfortable working from photographs of past art than from the originals. (Numerous creased, paint-splattered art reproductions and photographic portraits recovered from the floor of Bacon's studio are included in the Pompidou catalogue.) Just as the 16th-century Mannerists subverted the classical perfection of Raphael so Bacon repeatedly took up artists