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 of calm and measure in seeming contrast to his own sensibility - the unaffected naturalist Velazquez, the restrained classicists Poussin and Ingres, the rationalist pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge - twisting their images around for his own expressive purpose. (The contrast in sensibility was admittedly less when he borrowed from van Gogh.) Idealism and positivism are turned on their head when a pair of Muybridge's male wrestlers, for instance, naked for the purpose of documenting movement, metamorphose into male lovers. "Bacon's compulsive emotion would break Poussin's precious, porcelain mouth to pieces" says Donald Kuspit, referring to Bacon's appropriation in countless images of the aghast mother's expression from Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents.(7)

Bacon's willful misreading of the old masters can border on the deconstructive as he homes in upon unconscious lesions and incongruities which make the images so alive for him. Citing Degas's After the Bath in London's National Gallery, he delight in the way "the top of the spine almost comes out of the skin ... this gives it such a grip and a twist that you're more conscious of the vulnerability of the rest of the body than if he had drawn the spine naturally." But there is no arrogance in his exploitation of the masters. On the contrary, talking with David Sylvester he wonders, looking at a favorite Rembrandt, why any modern should bother competing with such an image. Logically speaking, his actual connection with the old masters is tenuous: he never trained academically, after all, never drew in life-class or copied in museums. And yet his relationship with them is more profound than the staginess of his appropriations would at first allow, and more meaningful than that of most self-conscious traditionalists: experience of Bacon's work puts one in mind of great paintings of the past. I have often detected in my own response to Bacon a marked discrepancy between attitudes in the presence of actual works and memories of them. In memory, as indeed in photographic reproduction, the image out-balances its conveyance, and one thinks of the paintings in iconographic or narrative terms. Seeing an immaculately hung and judiciously selected retrospective such as the Paris/Munich show restores the extraordinary sense of design and scale, the sheer painterliness, of Francis Bacon. But still, the images come across even more strongly. His estheticized violence, like that of Titan's Flaying of Marsyas or Rape of Lucretia, of Goya, Delacroix, of Manet's Execution of Maximillian, genuinely invokes what Bacon called "feeling in the grand sense."

(1.) A fragile work belonging to the Tate Gallery which is rarely allowed to travel, it is included in the Paris/Munich show. (2.) The Listener, London, July 25, 1963, quoted from Art International, September 1963, p. 44. (3.) Conducted between 1962 and 1986 and collected in a third edition as The Brutality of Fact (1987). Reviewing an earlier edition, the novelist Graham Greene reckoned that these dialogues "rank with the journals of Delacroix and the letters of Gauguin." All the quotes from Francis Bacon in this article come from the Sylvester interviews. (4.) Donald Kuspit, "Francis Bacon: The Authority of Flesh," Artforum, Summer 1975, p. 50. (5.) From the translation by Richard Howard, New York, Knopf, 1970. (6.) This triptych was only exhibited in Munich; the Guggenheim's Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962) was its substitute in Paris. (7.) The painting is at Chantilly and was actually seen by Bacon (unlike the Velazquez portrait of Pope Innocent, in Rome, which he only knew from reproduction) when he was living in Chantilly as a language student in 1928. Another acknowledged source for the gaping mouth form which so fascinated him was a still from the scene of massacre on the steps from Eisenstein's movie Battleship Potemkin (1925).

The Francis Bacon retrospective appeared at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris [June 27-Oct. 14, 1996], and is currently on view at the Haus der Kunst, Munich [Nov. 4, 1996-Jan. 31, 1997]. It is accompanied by a 335-page catalogue with contributions by the exhibition's curators, David Sylvester and Fabrice Hergott, as well as Jean Louis Schefer, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Herve Vanel and Yves Kobry.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

 

Francis Bacon - retrospective of painter's works at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France

by Linde Nochlin

ArtForum October 1996

On entering this major Francis Bacon retrospective, curated by David Sylvester, one was immediately confronted by the memorably horrific Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944. These weird sisters, phallic in inspiration, ambiguously maleficent in pose and identity, seem to have been inspired by the vengeful Eumenides who, in Aeschylus' drama, pursued Orestes after Athens lost the Peloponnesian war. Writhing before a stark orange background, mouths either hardly visible or wide open in a vagina dentata-esque howl, these creatures are nevertheless oddly domesticated, more demons of the middle-class parlor than mourners at a crucifixion. With its obvious references to World War II, this triptych initiates the thematic and formal intensities that were to mark Bacon's career as a whole; it was the work he invariably chose to inaugurate all his retrospectives after 1962.

It is hard to recapture the existentialist aura that surrounded Bacon's imagery in postwar Europe: the comparisons with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the references to the Blitz and the horrors of Auschwitz; the grandiose overreadings and philosophical generalizations that his work almost inevitably attracted in the '50s and early '60s. Yet, another reading of these early paintings is also possible. The first work of Bacon's that I really got to know well was one in the series of variations on Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1650, which was best represented in the Pompidou show by Study for Portrait, VII, 1953. Now generally condemned as "too obvious" or "too illustrative," it seemed at the time that, far from being an image of generalized postwar angst, the papal portrait constituted an exemplum virtutis of sardonic concreteness. Despite the usual reading of the pope's open mouth as a sign of existential nausea - universal scream on the order of Edvard Munch's famous image - I always read it, in the Vassar version with which I was familiar at any rate, Study for Portrait, IV, 1953, as a sneeze, which reduced the papal being, or rather, Velazquez's famous image of Innocent X, to a modern photo-op, the pope's partially covered mouth agape in a vigorous and nonexistential kerchoo. In Bacon's portrait, temporal immediacy and mere physical reflex wittily undermine the pictorial effects of hierarchy and permanence. And this not merely in the captured gesture, but in the very transparency of the physical substance of the image itself, its reality as a chance instant enhanced by the neat lines of gold that encase the quivering papal form.

Almost from the beginning, Bacon's work has been engaged with temporality, making, at the very least, a flirtation with narration almost unavoidable. Or one might say, more accurately, that Bacon's imagery, his considerable formal gifts and his technical bravura have been harnessed to change - sexual struggle, the metamorphosis of man into meat, or vice versa; the disruption or coagulation of the structure of face and body, the blatant reduction of the dignity of human form to a trickle or a puddle of paint; and, at the end, time's grimmest depredation, the horror, bestiality, and meaninglessness of death. His whole oeuvre, with rare exceptions, can be seen as a gigantic figure of meiosis, a rhetorical belittlement of the human condition, except that, as Lawrence Alloway pointed out many years ago, it so often makes reference and aspires to the Grand Manner of traditional High Art: Velazquez, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Degas. Yet such references are always ironized, pulled to earth by the intervention of more "factual" imagery - photography, most explicitly Eadweard Muybridge's series of the human figure in motion, medical illustrations, movie stills, snapshots - and also by the artist's furious yet controlled will to debasement, his stated wish to create painting which, in its very materiality, its lack of idealism or transcendence might touch the nervous system directly.

As early as 1953, Bacon turned to one of his most obsessively reiterated subjects: men engaged in sex. Although the famous Two Figures of that date, "one of the most provocative homosexual images of our epoch," according to Daniel Farson is not included in the Pompidou show, the equally innovative Two Figures in the Grass, 1954, is. Here, Muybridge's photograph of two wrestlers serves as the basis of a hallucinatory image of intercourse. The men seem to be going at it in a kind of grass-covered boxing ring (another reference to wrestling, perhaps?), and the fragile and activated substance of the nude figures seems almost to merge with the windblown grass carpet on which they lie. These spasms of passion are bordered by a stark black band at the bottom of the canvas and something that looks like pleated curtains above.

Although Bacon certainly was drawn more frequently to the male nude than to the female variety, he nevertheless created several important paintings of nude women, most notably the 1970 triptych Studies of the Human Body, which featured three sculptural and voluptuously mutilated figures posed on a kind of ramp-armature against a flat, continuous, mauvish pink background, the central, frontal figure incongruously haloed by a large bottle-green umbrella. No less striking, Lying Figure, 1969, was based on a series of photographs depicting Henrietta Moraes naked on a bed. In the painting, the model is presented head down, legs up, her head and face aggressively eradicated by bold swishes of paint, her arm nailed to the bed by an extremely businesslike syringe, whose presence Bacon explains as a kind of formal and iconographic necessity: "I included the syringe not because she was injecting herself with drugs, but because it is less stupid than putting a nail through her arm, which would have been even more melodramatic." The uptilted figure, offered to the spectator as though on a tray, is surrounded on the one hand by a series of sordid, realistic details - an ashtray, cigarette butts, a light switch, a bare lightbulb - and then, as though to deny the reality of the setting, by almost abstract circular forms like that of the striped mattress, the blue appendages of the bed, the yellow oblique oval of the "light" in the background.

It was in the late '60s and the '70s that Bacon created his great triptychs, not all of them successful but many of them powerful and disturbingly original. According to Gilles Deleuze, in Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, 1981), the triptych form enabled the artist to engage with the human figure without being drawn into the conventional storytelling mode. "It's not only that the painting is an isolated reality, and not only that the triptych consists of three isolated panels and the fundamental rule that they never be united into a single frame: it's rather that the Figure itself is isolated in the painting. . . . And Bacon has often told us why: in order to avoid the figurative, illustrative, and narrative character that the Figure would necessarily assume if it weren't in isolation." In one of the most memorable of the great triptychs of the '70s, Triptych, May-June 1973, Bacon is, however, less set than usual on staving off demon narrative. Here, contrary to Deleuze's assertion that the triptych form serves an isolating function, it seems to me that the images beg to be read as a story, from left to right. And the story, at once personal and melodramatic, is riveting: the suicide (right before the opening of a major retrospective of Bacon's work in 1971-72 at the Grand Palais in Paris) of the artist's lover, George Dyer, at the Hotel des Saint-Peres. Here, the ignoble furniture of daily recuperation - the toilet, the sink - become the instruments of Dyer's Passion. To the left, he shits; to the right, he vomits; to the center, he hovers against the black background which is transmuted into a giant shadow, his shadow. In the opaque darkness, death itself assumes the form, however inchoate, of a giant bat, a demon, a revenging angel. Sex, death, and the throes of creation are at one here, as Jean-Claude Lebensztejn points out in his brilliant catalogue essay, an extensive analysis of the recurrent squirt of white paint streaking across the surface of many of Bacon's most intense canvases of the period. Figured as a kind of materialized sexual spasm, a jet of sperm, the white spurts up in the final, right-hand images of the triptych, in which Dyer, who has overdosed, spews his soul into the hotel washbasin.

One may ask: Why this persistent "fear of narrative," permeating not only Bacon's own statements about his work, but most of the critical analyses of his work both pro and con? Almost everyone who has discussed Bacon - most prominently Deleuze - hastens to defend the artist from charges of illustrativeness, jumping in with an account of his antinarrative strategies, strategies in which the format of the triptych, the isolation of the human figure, and the patent flatness of the pictorial siting play an important role. This defensiveness is understandable enough in the heady days of Abstract Expressionism (which Bacon ostensibly hated but which obviously exerted a certain seductive power on his formal language), an era when "illustration" and "decoration" figured as the two sides of artistic failure. Nevertheless, nobody really explains just why illustration and narration are such terrible sins, temptations to be avoided at all costs. After all, British art, from Hogarth to the pre-Raphaelites and later, has had a considerably positive engagement with narration - and with narration in the service of morality at that. Perhaps that is why Bacon and his supporters have been particularly avid to separate the artist from this tradition, to make sure that he is seen and judged as a player in the game of International Modernism, as a painter whose formal inventiveness and up-to-date anguish sever his work completely from all connection with the fuddy-duddy past of pre-Roger Fry and pre-Clive Bell British achievement.

Finally, it would be interesting to compare some of Bacon's late, kinky, often campy male nudes, such as Study of the Human Body, 1982 - a rearview torso, isolated against a reddish-orange background, adorned with cricket pads, no less - with Warhol's extensive repertory of the same subject created at almost the same time. The Bacon-Warhol comparison is never attempted, but should be taken seriously. Bacon's male nudes, though less deadpan, share with Warhol's an equivocal delight in the body, a fascination with the seductiveness of technical finesse, and with the scars of an incorrigible materialism.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

 

 

Remaking Bacon - artist Francis Bacon

by Andres Mario Zervigon

Art Journal  Summer 1995

John Russell. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.192 pp.; 37 colour ills., 138 b/w. $11.95 paper

A large literary corpus has arisen around Francis Bacon reflecting in its size the consistent popularity of the artist as well as the strong impact of his paintings. Despite its size, the literary corpus on Bacon can be broken down into two approaches with one mostly focusing on the form Bacon's art takes (Russell) and the other focusing on the artist's biography (Sinclair). A third approach that has arisen recently, however, deploys theoretical concepts new to art history in an effort to understand the art's content and effect (van Alphen). The three books under review represent these different approaches, as well as a broader evolutionary process in art history that greatly expands the limits of what material is admissible and relevant, especially in terms of sexuality and gender.

The literary corpus on Bacon charts this evolution particularly well. Perhaps the excess seen in his paintings has discouraged commentators from breaking with the reigning critical and art historical orthodoxy. Their writing generally shows a need to establish control in the face of art that seems out of control. Considering the context of Bacon's initial success, this restraint is quite predictable. In an era dominated by abstraction and formalist criticism, Bacon's beaten bodies and blood-filled beds introduced a content that few people wished to discuss (as seen in Three Studies fore Crucifixion, fig 1). The result has been writing that analyzes Bacon in formalist terms and politely omits the erotic and violent elements that threaten to overwhelm his art. Only in the realm of biography have these issues arisen, but their connection to his art has been kept carefully vague. This effort to control Bacon's art, or at least to control its reception, renders the extreme praise for his paintings strangely baseless, but such a control conforms to the restrictions imposed by a once stodgy art history.(1) As the discipline has broadened, so has the willingness to discuss the sexuality and violence that in the past appeared too powerful a topic to broach. Now we can admit that the enthusiasm for this art may be related to the sexual violence that reviewers resisted discussing for so long.

In coming to terms with the critical silence that surrounds Bacon's art, one must confess that his painting is difficult to decipher. Though its figurative realism promises a legibility denied by abstract painting, its lack of clear setting or narrative disrupts the familiarity that the figures might otherwise provide. Furthermore, the violence these figures suffer can be attributed to no agent, while the sterility they occupy robs them of context. The vehicles of meaning that produce such clarity in Leon Golub's Mercenary series, for example, are rarely present in the work of Bacon. With this in mind, it is interesting to see how reviewers cope with Bacon's work when its sexual violence is overwhelming and the evidence otherwise assisting interpretation is limited.

John Russell's book, revised for the third time in 1993, continues to pursue a largely formalist approach to Bacon's painting, taking as its focus the artist's handling of paint. The result is a critical assessment of Bacon's entire oeuvre where works demonstrating less painterly skills are judged to be works of lesser quality. Russell's formal critique is a restrictive approach to painting in which the content is responsible for much of the overall impact, but his attention to quality offers sobriety to the praise-heavy world of Bacon studies. Perhaps because of this more tempered treatment, his book has been a standard text on Bacon since its first publication in 1971.

Russell's study is strongly influenced by David Sylvester's response to the negative criticism that greeted the first ten years of Bacon's successful output (1944-54).(2) A longtime advocate of Bacon, Sylvester sought to temper the artist's negative reception by shifting attention away from issues of content and highlighting instead Bacon's overlooked painterly skills. By mobilizing the existing critical language on abstraction, he explained that the only significance found in Bacon's art was its paint, an ambiguous presence that essentially signified nothing.(3) Sylvester's critical approach reduced any discussion of content to purely aesthetic considerations. Accordingly, such motifs as screaming bloody mouths were seen as harmless studies in pink, white, and red. By contrast, Bacon's negative press in its obsession with sexual violence spoke more clearly about the content and effect of his work than the positive reviews of then and now.

Russell, who has been writing on Bacon since the early sixties, adopts Sylvester's concern for paint but develops a more complicated analysis. In his hands, the ambiguous paint described by Sylvester becomes a semiabstract blur that threatens to abdicate its place in representation and assert a singular presence as pigment. According to Russell, Bacon's skill resides in his capacity to position this blur on the boundary between representation and abstraction, allying "the strongest possible dose of verifiable reality to the strongest possible dose of inspired risk" (p. 107). Here, in this narrow border region, Bacon distinguishes his art from straightforward representation; he produces wholly unique and compelling images through a use of abstracting deformities. Although Russell attributes these deformities to Bacon's technique of chance, he also acknowledges their origin in the artist's lively subconscious.

Russell's primary interest, as it turns out, is the photographic source of Bacon's images. The way in which the artist can scan innumerable photographs and synthesize their disparate features into one painted image fascinates Russell. This synthesis, he feels, produces images with a power quite distinct from their photographic sources, a skill few painters have mastered. Furthermore, Bacon's technique marries fine art and photography into a union well adapted to the demands that abstraction makes upon representation. It demonstrates that modem painting need not distance itself from representation, and indeed, that a reliance upon photography allows painting to reflect its epoch. Russell writes that Bacon "aims to set up one day against this undifferentiated flux of visual garbage [the overabundance of photographic images] the great single image which will halt the wandering eye and cause us to say, "This makes sense of life" (p. 59).

Bacon's painted blur marks his synthesis. The more successful paintings are those where the blue and the image work in harmony without one overtaking the other. By Russell's standard, the more shocking and celebrated paintings from the fifties are not Bacon's best since they rely too much upon direct quotations (Velazquez's Pope Innocent X, Eisenstein's Potempkin nurse) and consequently feature images that overwhelm their paint. The two come together more successfully with the onset of the sixties, when Bacon's skill at synthesis produces representations defined by, rather than surpassing the blur of paint; when a certain degree of likeness co-exists with a certain amount of abstraction. Miss Muriel Belcher (fig. 2) presents a good example of just such a combination. Through the seventies Bacon's painting continues to improve as a growing reliance upon personal experience augments his photographic reservoirs, further stimulating his ability to synthesize.(4) The result, says Russell, is a greater power and immediacy to Bacon's painting. Assisting his power is the increasingly convincing space of Bacon's paintings--the rooms and theaters that contain the blurred figures.

A periodization and a critique of Bacon's work may seem the basic ingredients of any formalist art historical study, but as far as Bacon is concerned, Russell's is one of the few. He describes exactly what makes this art successful and where that success is less realized.(5) As for interpretation, however, he reproduces the standard argument initially set out by John Rothenstein in 1962. In the catalogue to Bacon's first retrospective, Rothenstein explained that this painting reflects the violent century out of which it is born. By making human anguish dramatically significant to our generation, he added, Bacon's work communicates a message that goes beyond the specificity of the scenes depicted.(6) This interpretation, also adopted by Russell, dissolves the sexual brutality of Bacon's images into "universal reflections" of our century's suffering. Therefore, the shock that viewers feel before one of these paintings surpasses the base titillation of raw sexuality and arrives at a more philosophical, and hence acceptable, reflection on history. Russell's treatment of Bacon's biography generally reinforces this interpretation, linking the artist's experience of war and other grand episodes of violence to the motifs in his paintings. We hear little about the more individual and sexual nature of this violence since portions of Bacon's biography pertinent to these motifs are quietly left behind.

Only in the last chapter of this book does Russell change course and focus on the intimate nature of Bacon's iconography. Here he examines how the artist's relationship with his lover, George Dyer, affected the style and content of the painter's art. Bacon's physical familiarity with his lover, for example, is reflected in Three Studies of the Male Back, where "there was an exuberant power that could only have been born of a sense of being completely and gloriously at home with one another" (p. 161). The same familiarity occurs in the paintings following Dyer's suicide, when Bacon depicts his lover's death and repeatedly recreates their domesticity. Such obsessive redepiction arises from the loss of a lover rather than the loss of a friend, as Hugh Davies has maintained.(7) Russell only fails to explain why these many depictions of Dyer feature a figure so deformed and fragmented. Nonetheless, his last chapter begins to show how Bacon's sexuality informs the subject and form of his painting. In contrast to the rest of this book, we see that Bacon's paintings may not be just a "universal reflection" of history, as Russell describes, but a more individual manifestation of the painter's sexuality as well.

This final chapter represents the only significant addition Russell has made to his study since its original publication in 1971. His 1979 edition also contained an additional final chapter, but in this 1993 version Russell has reworked his earlier addendum into something of an obituary. While this allows him to digest the final twenty years of Bacon's production and nod in the increasingly biographical direction of Bacon criticism, its brevity is disappointing. Russell's interest, however, lies not so much in covering Bacon's life or proposing a comprehensive interpretation of the artist's painting. Instead, he intends to create a wide art historical space where Bacon may reside with other great modern painters. He argues this case quite convincingly.

While Russell gestures toward the biographical direction of current Bacon scholarship, Andrew Sinclair pursues its extreme. As his book's title suggests, Sinclair covers Bacon's life and violent times, using both as a basis for interpreting the paintings. In doing so Sinclair follows on Rothenstein's older interpretive approach, which saw Bacon and his work as a product of their times. But thirty years on, what is deemed acceptable and relevant in art history has dramatically changed, allowing Sinclair to firmly link Bacon's painting and historical context through biography. The private significance of Bacon's iconography now surfaces in greater detail: the artist's sexual life, his relationship with his parents and friends, and the vibrant subculture in which he thrived; all of these are reflected in his painting, according to Sinclair. Indeed, this study relies heavily upon such personal biographical material because it forms, for Sinclair, the only clear linkage between painting widely perceived as violent and a century commonly accepted as brutal.

The use of this linkage has recently become ever more widespread. Russell, of course, now finds it helpful, as does Daniel Farson in his recent book The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. Henrietta Moraes's upcoming autobiography will likely do the same.(8) Sinclair, however, possesses the tools of an accomplished social historian and with these delivers a specificity of facts that lead to startlingly literal interpretations of Bacon's art. But this specificity forces various factors to compete for a position as the influence or meaning of a given motif. The cages Bacon used so often in his paintings, for example, could be inspired by his radical sexual practices or by the steel boxes set up to protect London from German bombing runs during World War I. They could also hearken back to the transport vehicles in which British troops enclosed themselves during Ireland's Sinn Fein.(9) Although various influences may echo in a single motif, Sinclair's additive approach to image interpretation lacks an explanation for how these various factors combine or co-exist in the paintings. This problem arises, perhaps, because Sinclair's search for linkage requires each historical episode of the artist's violent context to have a visible connection to his painting.(10)

Otherwise, Sinclair adopts Russell's study in order to critically assess Bacon's painting. But this does not mean that Sinclair's study simply recycles an existing analysis. Rather, he improves upon it. The artist's skill with paint, for instance, acquires further significance once Sinclair has traced its origin to years of dedication and informal apprenticeship. Similarly, what Russell calls Bacon's game with chance comes to characterize not only the artist's technique but his whole life style as well, giving us a sense that the artist's dedication was infused with impulsiveness. This clarification highlights Bacon's intuitive approach to painting and generally shows the benefits of a study so heavily focused on the artist's life." But again, the search for clear links between Bacon's context and art grows problematic once Sinclair articulates Russell's ideas concerning the role of photography in Bacon's art. Now a stress on autobiographical sources of inspiration conflicts with the claim that Bacon's inspiration lay on his studio floor, in the innumerable photos and medical books collected and used over the course of a career. In those images Bacon found what he could not experience directly, such as the influence of Eadweard Muybridge. The nineteenth-century photographer is clealry part of Two Figures (fig. 3), for example, even if Bacon's sexual desire exhibits its own powerful presence. This conflict between claims of inspiration would be calmed if Sinclair explained how influences may occur in numbers and make their subtle effect as a network of stimuli. However, his demand for clear links between Bacon's historical context and artwork strains the contribution of any one influence, especially in lieu of such an explanation.

But the fact that Sinclair discusses Bacon's sexual desire at all is a vast improvement over other commentators. His study, despite its literalness, often benefits from this attention to "impolite" details, allowing us to see that Bacon's work begins as a personal expression of desire, even if it is accepted as a general reflection of history. So with Sinclair's exhaustive research and attention to detail, we see that Bacon's repeated depiction of love-making men expresses his openly gay identity. As for the cruel condition in which these men and other figures are seemingly depicted, Sinclair tells us of Bacon's professed interest in sadomasochism.

If we choose to see other factors as contributing rather then competing, then Sinclair's study can expose nuances of the cruelty visible in these paintings. For example, Bacon's many crucifixions may retain a direct sexual message while also representing the terrible suffering the artist experienced throughout his life: whipped and sexually abused by his father's horse grooms, struggling with asthma, kicked out of home at an early age. Sinclair's search for linkage works well where the details of his study expose the very personal side of Bacon's work. Indeed, one would expect that links between an artist's life and his/her art could say more about such personal messages than they could say about the historical context in which the art was made. Sinclair spends much of his time in this more personal realm of Bacon's biography, exactly where other commentators have feared to tread.

Lastly, Sinclair's friendship with the artist gives him unique insight into the facts that he so laboriously collects. They reflect well on the personality they are supposed to define. Furthermore, in Sinclair's hands these many facts take an anecdotal form, giving his study a readability uncharacteristic of art biographies.

Ernst van Alphen pursues an altogether different approach to Bacon's art, devising an interpretation less reliant upon considerations of form alone or the artist's biography. Instead, he employs relatively new theoretical conceptions in an effort to understand how these paintings affect their viewers. He proposes that by understanding this effect on viewers, we can see how the paintings communicate and ultimately how they can be interpreted. As evidence of the distinctive type of communication that Bacon's art initiates, van Alphen points to the silence that echoes throughout the Bacon literature. This is not just the critical silence of commentators unwilling to discuss the artist's scandalous private life or violent subject matter. Instead, van Alphen sees something typical of passersby before a brutal automobile accident, a silence of viewers left in pain by what they see. He calls this phenomenon the loss of self.

The primary agents of this loss are supposed to be the figures who populate Bacon's painting. Their disintegrated and fragmented form shocks us, imparting a pain that renders us speechless. Our response, however, is not a straightforward pain of sympathy, but a more complex although no less unsettling pain of isolation. Van Alphen explains that these figures in all their mutilation demonstrate a capacity to form their own sense-perceptions and hence a capacity to form their own self-perception. As we witness their independence from discursively formed perceptions of the self, we are momentarily divested of our identity isolated from the mechanisms that situate us within reality.

Ultimately, the course of this analysis is determined by the French writers on Bacon, namely Gilles Deleuze and Michel Leiris. Their studies examine Bacon's iconography through the lens of psychoanalytic theory.(12) Van Alphen takes up Deleuze's interest in the role of sensation, but he shifts the French writer's focus away from overall composition and focuses instead upon figural form. He then deploys a sophisticated theory of the gaze and a discursive theory of subjectivity to explain how Bacon's figures undermine Western conventions of the role of vision in constituting subjectivity.

Understanding this experience of loss can become rather difficult, but all the reader must truly comprehend is van Alphen's primary theoretical point: "While others see the subject's body as object and as whole, the subject has only inner experiences or fragmented outer views of her or his body" (p. 114). Hence, "the subject depends for wholeness on the gaze of the other" (p. 115). We overcome the fragmented outer views of our body by absorbing the whole views of ourselves made by others, through representations composed by subjects who look back at us as objects. Their look back is the gaze of the Other, central to van Alphen's theorization. Bacon denies the power of the Other's gaze by displaying figures completely unreliant upon it. They "are all represented as trapped in an entirely inner sensation of self." These figures arrive at their self-perception without the power of the gaze because "only the inner body . . . is given to a human being himself, " as van Alphen quotes Bahktin (p. 115). This capacity to independently generate self-perception constitutes a refusal of the wholeness offered by the Other's gaze. Bacon's figures, "can . . . be read, first figuratively, as the confinement of the subject within his inner sensations, and second, more literally, as the demarcation of the subject's position, always alone on the border of the world" (p. 119). The breakdown of this self/Other relationship leaves the viewer equally isolated and experiencing a similar though temporary loss of self. This phenomenon, then, accounts for the silence we feel before Bacon's paintings. "The viewer's subjectivity," van Alphen says, "is forced to engage in a confrontation with figures that block the very possibility of subject construction. But these works are not committed to this negative view for the sake of negativity. Their target is a specific element in subject formation in the Western world. They aim, that is, to respond through their specifically visual discourse to cultural discourses that are central to our culture" (p. 163).

Bacon's images present the fragmentation that the viewer as subject should recognize as the original inner-sense experience. Their condition is not the result of violence, but conversely, their independence from the violence normally wrought by visual perception. Van Alphen assures us that the only place violence arises as an issue is in the viewer, in whom a temporary loss of self creates pain. Otherwise, Bacon's images actually uplift the viewer since the artist refuses to allow his figures to be defined by the Other; they have a self-perceptual independence whose benefit we share.

Despite the heavy theoretical stress of his study, van Alphen devotes a large portion of his analysis to a visual interrogation of Bacon's works. Surprisingly perhaps, he focuses upon Bacon's use of the painted blur just as Russell does, and for rather similar reasons. That blur, he feels, articulates the fragmented state of the figures presented, and as such, it visually traces their various sense perceptions. In Reclining Woman (fig. 4) for example, the swirling pigment and the figure's position express the rapture of orgasm. But her cursory representation denies her discursively preformed attributes of physical beauty.(13) Instead, she is pure subject whose sense perception, though fragmentary, constitutes her form and allows her a pleasure unavailable to the viewer. Russell aesthetically appreciates the visibility of Bacon's paint, while van Alphen philosophically lauds it.

While Russell appreciates Bacon's space for its increasingly convincing quality, however, van Alphen appreciates its ever indeterminate character We can see this indeterminacy in mirrors that don't reflect but alter, frames of images that don't contain but release, and shadows that do not project but redefine. The space in Bacon's work absorbs the figures as they spill from their corporal confines, a process seen most clearly in Two Figures in the Grass, where the figures and space merge into one entity. Van Alphen feels that this lack of figural-spatial boundaries creates a pool into which visible traces of the figure's sensations can spill and accumulate, enhancing viewer awareness of the figure's sense perception. The viewer's enhanced awareness guarantees a loss of self.(14)

This theoretical articulation, endowing Bacon's work with the power to deconstruct cultural assumptions of visuality and subjectivity, offers an enticing alternative to heavily biographic and iconographic studies. It accounts for the response that these works generate and then interprets that response as a significant part of the meaning of the image But there remain a number of shortcomings to this approach. One is that Bacon's agency as an author remains rather vague through the whole of the book. Although van Alphen makes a good case arguing that the figures presented are active and in charge of their own subjectivity, the fact remains that they are still representations produced by the hand of a single individual. Of course, a basic postmodern premise is that reality is articulated by a language beyond our control, a phenomenon that displaces Bacon's agency as an author. But van Alphen has not theorized the removal of Bacon from his art. He remains present and, thus, responsible for producing what appear to be mutilated figures. One may be able to make a case that these figures are not producing their own stimuli, but rather, they are suffering pain by someone else's agency.

Another problem is that the features allegedly unique to Bacon's work that grant it a power to deconstruct might also be found in other art with a different effect. For example, Picasso's fractured yet sensual bodies, particularly those of women, have been seen by some critics as misogynist and lacking in any redeeming value.(15)

Van Alphen leaves us with a conclusion we may not be ready to accept; the appeal of Bacon's art arises from a pleasurable and uplifting refusal to be defined by the Other, a loss of self that resubjectifies the body. While this phenomenon seems to function in theory, could the average viewer consciously or subconsciously be aware of it enough to experience its pleasure? Van Alphen himself offers and then abandons a simpler and more direct explanation for the pleasure of, and silence around, Bacon's work. He notes early in his study that "no critic [of Bacon's work] has admitted that the violence [of this art] itself excercises a particular attraction for him or her; yet when one asserts the thematic centrality of violence, while at the same time expressing admiration, such an inference is hard to avoid" (p. 10). Could it be that Bacon's subject matter is indeed violent as so many attics have asserted, and could it be that the pleasure of viewing,his art is nothing more than the pleasure of masochism? This explanation could account for the strong reaction to and appeal of Bacon's art while also accounting for the suspicious silence of those who dare not speak the meaning of this art and its appeal.

These problems are minor considering the overall strength of van Alphen's study He is the first scholar to produce a Convincing interpretation of Bacon's work free of the heavily biographic and iconographic concerns that have burdened other commentators. More importantly, he is the first to finally address the critical silence that has existed for so long around Bacon's art. By reading this silence as an important factor in the art's meaning, he has proposed a wholly new way of understanding what was otherwise inexplicably impenetrable painting. His book shows the degree to which art history's new openness can expand the understanding of visual representations. By utilizing conceptions new to art history and incorporating the long-ignored viewer into his analysis, van Alphen demonstrates the new possibilities of our field of study.

Notes

(1.) Discussions on the quality of Bacon's work tend to lack the restraint characterizing the literature on this artist. For a discussion on the extreme praise Bacon's painting has received, see William Feaver, "The Greatest Living Painter?" Artnews 84 (September 1985):123-25. While many writers have praised Bacon's work, they have found it difficult to explain exactly why it warrants superlatives. Commentators clearly experience a strong appeal for his painting, yet they somehow find it difficult to articulate this appeal. Substantiations for such claims as, "The greatest British painter since Constable," are hard to find. Russell, at least, strives to demonstrate in clear formal terms why Bacon's painting is good.

(2.) Anita Brookner was one of the more thoughtful critics reviewing his work negatively, but Alan Clutton-Brock (The Listener) and David Corrupt (Evening Standard) typify the less premeditated reactions against Bacon's art, up to and even through the early 1960s.

(3.) In 1954 Sylvester wrote that Bacon's art presents paint "that brings flesh into being and at the same time dissolves it away. Paint that means nothing and something, and the something is never one thing. Paint whose fluidity conveys the fluidity of all it conveys." David Sylvester, "Francis Bacon," in La Biennale di Venezia, exh. cat. (Venice: Lombroso Editore, 1954): 317-19; English translation in Rive Droite, February 12-March 10, 1957.

(4.) Russell fails to explain what comprises this personal experience, other than to mention that the artist's friends appear more frequently in his work.

(5.) Many writers seem so impressed by Bacon's work that they hesitate to criticize it. Their writing attempts to describe the acceptable contents of his art and/or trace the images that inspired it They mostly laud his painting skill but fail to explain what comprises this skill.

(6.) "Bacon's contemporaries belong to generators that have seen the destruction of cities by bomb, the flight of whole peoples under the lash of fear, the concentration camps, the death camps and the rest. His power of making human anguish dramatically significant to our generation is due in part to the dignity and the sobriety of his treatment of all his subjects." John Rothenstein, Francis Bacon, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1962). Other critics who followed Rothenstein's lead are Sylvester himself, as well as Hugh Davies, Cecil Beaton, Lawrence Gowing, and Sam Hunter

(7.) Hugh Davies, "Bacon's Black Tryptichs," Art in America (March/April 1975): 62-68.

(8.) Moraes was a friend and model of the artist.

(9.) Bacon lived through all these, and therefore, such sources of inspiration are relevant.

(10.) As a further example, Sinclair writes about Bacon's childhood experience during London's World War I blackouts: "There was only a dull gleam on the pavement on starry nights, and the road was no brighter than a country lane. Bodies of people would loom out of the obscurity and disappear again Throughout the future portraits by Francis Bacon, distorted figures would emerge form a fearful night, as sudden and grotesque as the strangers glimpsed in the dim streets of London in the black-out" (p. 21)

(11.) Bacon always painted without the use of drawings or studies.

(12.) Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, logique de la sensation (Paris Editions de la difference, 1981); Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon: Face et profil (Paris Albin Michel, 1983).

(13.) van Alphen also points out that this figure's position facing away from the viewer further undermines her role as a source of our viewing pleasure.

(14.) In a parallel analysis van Alphen discusses how Bacon's blurred paint and ambiguous spaces deconstruct representation's role as a re-presentation Of realty The painted blur, he says, reaffirms the fact that visual representations nominally hide their means Of articulation and hence, "that the subject is [normally] the product rather than the producer of representation, and that paint does not stand in but stands before the figure, not uncovering but hiding it" (p. 13). As for Bacon's indeterminate space, he asserts that its failure to define the figures it surrounds further undermines the power of representation. An example of this indeterminacy can be seen in the room of Painting 1978 Here a figure reaches from what could be the inside or the outside of a room in an effort to open a door with his foot Similarly ambiguous is Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne (1967), where the figure exist; in three places simultaneously

(15.) For a discussion on this with further references, see Anna Chave, "New Encounters with Les Demoiselles D'Avignon," Art Bulletin 75 (December 1994): 596-611.

ANDRES MARIO ZERVIGON is a doctoral candidate in the Fine Arts Department of Harvard University. He is currently researching a dissertation on Otto Dix and the representation of modern identity.

COPYRIGHT 1995 College Art Association

 

 

 

Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self

The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times

Francis Bacon: In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud

 

Bacon Book Reviews by Faye Hirsch 

Art in America  December 1994

"One's basic nature is totally without hope, and yet one's nervous system is made out of optimistic stuff," Francis Bacon told David Sylvester in the early '70s.[1] Bacon died of asthma in spring 1992 at the age of 82, after a life so prodigal that only a high degree of optimism - and no doubt some sturdy genes - could account for his longevity. The artist also worked assiduously, starting at six or seven o'clock most mornings, he asserted, in spite of the hangovers that were the aftermath of his late-night carousals with the luminaries and drifters of his milieu. "What is called inspiration," said Bacon, "only comes from regular work."[2] This combination of profligacy and hard work provides a tough precedent dent for artists whose nervous systems aren't quite up to snuff. And it certainly makes one curious about the man. The Sylvester interviews - surely among the best we have with a 20th-century artist - and Bacon's several appearances on film have given us a taste of what he was like - his wit, his cynicism. "When he entered a room," writes Daniel Farson, "it was an occasion." Bacon refused to sanction a biography during his lifetime, but since his death two - Farson's The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon and Andrew Sinclair's Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times - have already appeared, and more are promised.[3]

The challenge for any artist's biographer is to formulate some meaningful nexus between the available data about the artist's life and his or her work. There is always a temptation to read the contours of a life into the visual imagery, and with Bacon that temptation is especially strong. Despite his repeated disavowal of the "illustrational" in his paintings, he frequently painted his friends and lovers - Isabel Rawsthorne, Lucian Freud, George Dyer, John Edwards, Sylvester, et al. He also led an eventful and, at times, violent existence that seems to have its correlative in his violent iconography. But, no matter how allusive the imagery seems, one must be wary of drawing too literal a connection. The Farson and Sinclair biographies of Bacon and Ernst van Alphen's Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, a study of Bacon's paintings, raise the question of whether there is some middle ground between an approach that sees the artist's work as an illustration of his life and times, and one that entirely eliminates biographical material from consideration of the work. Genet wrote of Rembrandt, "a hopeless complicity linked his eye to the world."[4] But deducing the nature of that complicity can be a tricky matter.

Sinclair's biography is written with the apparent conviction that the subject, his times, and his work are discernibly linked. The author says he had only sporadic direct conversations with Bacon, one in depth in 1988; a fresh tone, then, is not the chief virtue of this biography. Still, though he may not have had an ongoing relationship with Bacon - as opposed to Farson, whose work is engaging precisely because of his 40-year friendship with the artist - Sinclair consulted numerous friends and relations and did thorough research, fleshing out his account with the type of second-hand material that is missing from Farson's account. The same basics are presented by both biographers: Bacon's childhood among the lower aristocracy in Ireland, where he was the son of a Protestant military officer in service to England, and later a horse trainer; his youthful adventures in Weimar Germany; his bohemian escapades in London's Soho and in Tangier.

Bacon's education was sporadic, his antipathy to academies unwavering. He returned to Ireland only rarely after leaving home as a teenager, when he was banished by his father for dressing up in women's clothing. He remembered being horse whipped by his father's grooms at his father's behest; some connect this experience, justifiably or not, to his later sadomasochist bent (Bacon himself confessed that there was a sexual dimension to his paternal attachment).(5) After drifting about in London, he was sent to Berlin under the "protection" of one of his father's friends, a "sporting uncle," as Bacon called him, with whom he plunged into the seediest aspects of Weimar nightlife. When he returned to England, by way of Paris, where he was awed by the work of Picasso, Bacon came under the protection of the Australian painter Roy de Maistre. By the late '20s he was designing furniture, but he had also begun to paint, and a reproduction of an early crucifixion by him was included in Herbert Read's Art Now of 1993. Success was not to come steadily until after April 1945, when his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion appeared in a group show at Lefevre Gallery in London along with works by other British artists, including Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland (the latter was one of the many friends with whom he would subsequently fall out).

Bacon did, of course, live through dramatic times, and Sinclair often crams any gaps in biographical information with verbose descriptions of events of the period and the artist's surroundings. His long excursuses provide backdrops, but little recommends these descriptions over any other of, say, London during the Blitz or Ireland during the Sinn Fein rebellion. Often such events are used to explain, none too subtly, Bacon's artistic sensibility or to prefigure the appearance of specific details in his paintings. About a 1950 sea voyage the artist made to visit his sister in South Africa, Sinclair writes: "On his voyage, the white iron railings of the old liners with their polished wooden tops would have given, with their oblong definitions, a restraint and a cage to the violence of the living sea and the chaotic wake" - labored way to describe a simple ship railing, but this railing was contemplated by Bacon, who tended to include railings as frames within his paintings. All of Bacon's world, as seen through Sinclair's eyes, is made of such details, as if the paintings are somehow a distillation of that world. And working in reverse as well, Sinclair discerns in Bacon's paintings innumerable metaphors for contemporary existence: "The umbrella represented the dark halo of the modem age, the poison cloud of the nuclear threat from the air, its ribs spread like the black lines of sound in Munch's The Cry." Sinclair, a self-proclaimed "social historian," thus transforms art into a mirror of history.

Farson, by contrast, neither fantasizes about Bacon's subjective experiences, nor attempts to write art history. His is an anecdotal, sometimes self-promoting but always appealing account of the man. Farson knows first-hand the underworld Bacon frequented, and was eyewitness to numerous astonishing encounters. He skillfully recalls dialogue and minute gestures: Bacon tugging on his collar as he delivers a stinging bon mot, the unique impression Bacon made on others:

It was nearly one o'clock when [John] Deakin gave a stage whisper: "I think, kiddo, this is going to be one of the good days. Look who's just come in." Opening his mouth in that grimace of a well-meant smile, he nodded to a man on the far side of the bar who now came over to join us. He walked with the cautious tread of a first-class passenger venturing out on deck in a high sea, or that of a man who suspects there might be a small earthquake at any moment. This was my first sight of Francis Bacon; he was laughing already.

Farson does not disguise his adulation of the man ("I doubt if he was the greatest man I have known, but he was the most extraordinary"). Although objectivity may not be Farson's strong point, he does vividly recount instances of the cruelty of Bacon, who could be ruthless to friends, artists and critics, not to mention anyone with unattractive pretenses. (Farson describes Bacon's rude jeering at Princess Margaret when she gave an extemporaneous recital of Cole Porter songs at a party they were both attending. "Someone had to stop her," Bacon said afterwards.) Farson's picture is not always pretty - one dark chapter begins with vignettes of alcohol-sodden deaths (Bacon's was a quintessentially pickled circle and another, about Bacon's relationship with the pianist Peter Lacy, includes accounts of Lacy's having slashed Bacon's canvases and inflicted weals on the artist's back. Although Farson might to some degree be accused of sensationalism, Bacon did lead a sensational life. ("Seduire c'est tout," said Bacon to Farson.)

Admittedly, Farson's enterprise is less ambitious than Sinclair's, and his genre as much memoir as biography. The memoir, unlike biography, can risk seeming tainted by vanity, since the memorialist claims a privileged relationship with the deceased. And, indeed, Parson does not entirely avoid this pitfall. He includes, for instance, an abridged transcript of a television interview he did in 1958 with Bacon for a program called "The Art Game." Since the film of this interview was subsequently lost, one wonders if Farson's intention here is not primarily to claim precedence over Sylvester's (and others') later interviews. Drawing on the film's "continuity sheets" for dialogue, he shows himself eliciting remarks on several of Bacon's most famous themes some years before Sylvester did, For example, in 1962, Bacon told Sylvester that his painting was "an attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly." But four years earlier, according to Farson, Bacon had rhetorically asked, "How can I . . . present what is called the living sensation more nearly on the nervous system and more violently?" And although, in 1966, Bacon said to Sylvester, "I did hope one day to make the best painting of the human cry," eight years before he had already told Farson that "one of the things I wanted to do was to record the human cry, and that in itself is something sensational." There are similar expressions, as well, of Bacon's views of happiness and love, of optimism as the reverse side of "the shadow" - that is, mortality, and of his opinion of abstract art, particularly action painting, as mere "decoration."

Thus, Farson's belated transcription of his interview is nearly superfluous. Furthermore, much of the incidental dialogue elsewhere in Farson's book is so wonderfully recalled that many parts of it feel like very richly embellished interviews, in which characters and props have been added for emphasis. Even Farson's digressions into his own life or those of others in the Soho circles - photographer John Deakin's, for instance - nicely work to make the milieu come to life. This vitality is precisely what Sinclair's text lacks; in spite of his book's title, Bacon's fife and times in Sinclair's version seem too remote, too abstract to be of compelling interest.

By the time Michel Archimbaud interviewed Bacon in French in 1991-92, there were few new revelations. Francis Bacon: In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud, recently published in translation by Phaidon in an attractive paperback, is little more than an addendum to the incomparable Sylvester interviews, which are still in print. But Archimbaud's are the final formal interviews, with some insights to offer. The artist repeats his views on Eisenstein's Potemkin, on Velazquez, and on the subject of chance; but he also makes quite specific remarks about a wide range of artists from Degas and van Gogh to Warhol and Klee. And, because of Archimbaud's interest in music, Bacon reveals as well his tastes in a field he has spoken little of before. Had Archimbaud been able to carry his interviews through as planned, who knows what other tidbits he might have recorded? But the artist died before the last of the scheduled interviews could be conducted.

As an alternative to biographies and memoirs, a major new study by Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, scrupulously avoids the life in pursuit of a theoretical analysis of the work. "The first time I saw a painting by Bacon, I was literally left speechless," writes the author in his introduction. "I was perplexed about the level on which these paintings touched me: I could not even formulate what the paintings were about, still less what aspect of them hurt me so deeply." In thinking over his "incapacitation," van Alphen, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Leiden, turned to other works of art and literature that had a similar effect on him, in order to try to get at the expressive mechanisms that provoke a "momentary loss of self." His study of Bacon is a close analysis that draws on a wide range of literature and criticism to demonstrate "how Bacon's works hit the nervous system, not only of the viewer, but also of Western culture and its artistic traditions."

Van Alphen begins by examining the ways that Bacon's paintings "stimulate" but then cancel out, narrative readings. Through formal discontinuities that undermine temporal and spatial coherence, Bacon creates, particularly in the triptychs, "another kind of narrative: narrative that is contiguous with the reader [sic], that touches the reader by its focus on the performative `affect' of narrative." Van Alphen characterizes Bacon's "narrativity" as one in which the modernist gaze is destabilized even as it is seduced by an apparent readability. Bacon's subject matter is frequently concerned with perception and its tools - cameras, mirrors, lights - and the figure of the voyeur makes repeated appearances. Van Alphen sees Bacon as eroding the distance between the viewing subject and the painted object; Bacon's "procreative narrative," he says, "does not allow for a safe distance between viewer and a unified image, but . . . implicates the viewer, in almost a bodily way, in the act of production." What the viewer sees, according to van Alphen, is a shattered image with no potential for a heroic reconstruction of self. Such devices as the multiplication of interior frames or a displacement of corporeal forms onto landscape serve only to confuse inside and outside, subjectivity and the world. Finally, van Alphen claims that Bacon's representation of masculinity in bodies which "show no signs of stability, control, action, or production" "re-subjectifies" the body, establishing a new self through resistance to received notions of identity.

This is a sketchy summary of a dense argument that ranges through the hot spots of contemporary theory - narrative, perception, mortality, the body, gender. Van Alphen draws upon a battery of literary critics and philosophers ranging from William James to Roland Barthes to Leo Bersani. His own observations on Bacon can be quite insightful, but the constant sampling of secondary sources is sometimes wearying.[6] There are inspired analogies - van Alphen characterizes Bacon's portraits as "mystery portraits," comparing them to Willem Brakman's De Vadermoorders (The Fatherkillers), a crime novel in which the murderer is never unveiled. According to van Alphen, "Bacon ... shows that representation, seen as an act of detection, does not unmask the figure; it forms, or better, it deforms, decomposes, and kills the figure."

More surprising is van Alphen's choice of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood to shed fight on the splitting and replicating figures in Bacon's paintings. Clearly, homosexuality has something to do with it; van Alphen sees Barnes's book as apposite because in it lesbian love is presented as "the ideal representation of loss of self." But why choose Nightwood's lesbianism rather than, say, the male homosexuality of Genet's Querelle, where "twinning" and split subjectivity are also of great importance and, I might argue, in which the subcultures portrayed are closer to those that Bacon frequented? The answer, I believe, lies in van Alphen's desire to eliminate the person of the artist from his consideration of the paintings. But Bacon was, after all, a gay man, although he assiduously denied the importance of that fact for the interpretation of his paintings. No doubt van Alphen knows Bacon's position. Perhaps he has inadvertently succumbed to the artist's desire to control the critical interpretation of his work; or perhaps he is simply pursuing his own critical project, which seems to take the idea of "death of the author" to literal extremes. Van Alphen's last chapter, on masculinity, perhaps the best in his book, never once mentions homosexuality in a 26 page discussion of Bacon's deconstruction of masculine identity.

Van Alphen's fragmentary use of passages from criticism and philosophy sometimes results in distortions of the argument of his source. For example, in support of his assertion that there is a masochistic subtext to Bacon's depiction of "loss of self" van Alphen cites Leo Bersani's article, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" which appeared in an issue of October devoted to AIDS.[7] There Bersani argues that before gay men can truly see the mechanism of their own oppression, they must acknowledge their masochistic fascination with the phallocentric order. "The logic of homosexual desire includes the potential for a loving identification with the gay man's enemies," writes Bersani, but gay male sexuality frightens those in power, who transfer their terror, more or less unconsciously, into a hysterical reaction to the public health crisis of AIDS. Neglecting the important political implications of this article and Bersani's predominant emphasis on gay male sexuality, van Alphen focuses exclusively on the Freudian argumentation of the piece and stresses its universal aspects. Wouldn't it perhaps have been more relevant to use Bersani's argument to support a reading of Bacon's attack on pictorial conventions - that is, to see his radical perversions of the representational order as a species of specifically gay male homoeroticism? Instead, van Alphen moves on to discuss Bacon's work in the context of Nightwood, with its references to a specifically lesbian "gay body."

Van Alphen demonstrates only a minimal interest in the enormous Bacon bibliography, and his comparative visual material is relatively scant (in contrast to his many literary allusions). Clearly, he is no art historian - though that should not, of course, preclude his making a study of 20th-century art. Nevertheless, some of his statements - e.g., "The conventions of chiaroscuro culminated in the work of Rembrandt, whose paintings are commonly seen as the major achievement of visual art" - seem rather naive. Likewise, his comparison of Bacon's use of the triptych format with the traditional, use of it appear uninformed. He generalizes that the triptych "traditionally displays temporal continuity spatially. . . . This type of triptych is a plain representation of a story." In fact, a more knowing eye trained on the vast history of devotional triptychs would surely reveal narrative discontinuities just as disorienting, although obviously for different purposes, as anything found in Bacon. Temporal sequence is often beside the point in devotional triptychs, and the narratives of these works are so familiar (as van Alphen himself acknowledges) that to read them as "plain stories" win get the viewer nowhere.[8] Is there really a closer narrative connection, as van Alphen seems to believe, between the central crucifixion and the saints in the wings of Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece than there is between the two lateral images of Lucian Freud and the central image of the same artist in Bacon's Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969)?

The facts of Bacon's life are so seductive that they often encourage reckless interpretations of the paintings. On the other hand, some discussions of Bacon's works have intentionally concealed relevant biographical information - which is what van Alphen accuses Hugh Davies of doing in his 1975 commentary on Triptych May-June 1973.[9] Davies describes the three panels as depicting "a naked man vomiting into the bathroom sink, then crossing the room, then dying on the toilet." It is generally agreed that this painting depicts the death of Bacon's lover, George Dyer, from an overdose of drugs and alcohol on the night of the opening of Bacon's 1971-72 retrospective at the Grand Palais. But Davies omits some of this information and, according to van Alphen, thereby "turns the story into a burlesque tragedy." For van Alphen, however, Davies's real mistake is even to attempt to see the work as a sequence of narrative events. "How relevant," he asks, "is Bacon's biography to the reading of his paintings? . . . Davies's reading - and any narrative reading of this kind - rests on the assumption that the painting illustrates. . . . But the work does nothing to encourage this assumption."

Bacon himself might have disagreed. Talking about the painting to Melvyn Bragg, he described it as "the nearest I've ever done to a story." He also said: "That is how he was found."[10] But Bacon referred to this triptych as the exception rather than the rule; he was - rightfully, as Sinclair proves - leery of biographical interpretations of his work. And perhaps he would have respected the intentions of van Alphen's book, which offers valuable new readings of the work independent of distracting biographical detail.

Yet for this reader, van Alphen's tendency to step too warily around the details of Bacon's life is a weakness of his study. Rather than limiting the possibilities for a sound theoretical analysis of the artist's work, a judicious use of the biographical facts might well have helped van Alphen expand his interpretation in a manner fully complementary to his own admirable purposes.

[1.] David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, Thames & Hudson, 1975 & 1980; reprinted 1985, p. 80. [2.] In Melvyn Bragg's program on the artist for "The South Bank Show," June 9, 1985. [3.] David Plante, in his own excellent memoir of Bacon, "Bacon's Instinct," in the New Yorker (Nov. 1, 1993, pp. 98-99) mentions two additional biographies in the works (by Michael Peppiatt and Henrietta Moraes) as well as a number of memoirs. [4.] Jean Genet, "Rembrandt's Secret" What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet, trans. Randolph Hough, Madras A New York, Hanuman Books,1988, p. 77. [5.] Sylvester, pp. 71-72. [6.] And his own observations are never so alluringly radical as, say, those of Gilles Deleuze, who described Bacon's "marks or features of animality" as "spirits that haunt the wiped-off parts, deforming, individualizing and describing the head without a face." Deleuze, Logique de la Sensation, Paris, Editions de la Difference, 1981, chapter IV ("Le corps, la viande et l'esprit, le devenir-animal"), partly translated as "A New Power of Laughter for the Living," in Art International (Autumn, 1989), p. 34. [7.] Leo Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" October 43 (Winter, 1987), pp. 197-222. [8.] On the sacred in Bacon, see Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon: Full Face and In Profile, trans. John Weightman, New York, Rizzoli, 1983, pp. 40-41. It should be mentioned that John Russell has added a chapter to his 1971 study of Bacon in a 1993 edition from Thames & Hudson. [9.] Hugh M. Davies, "Bacon's Black Triptychs," Art in America, Mar.-Apr., 1975, pp. 62-68. [10.] Bragg, op. cit.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

 

 

Francis Bacon - Galerie Marlborough, Madrid, Spain

by Juan Vicente Aliaga

ArtForum February, 1993

 

GALERIE MARLBOROUGH

Francis Bacon's painting has been characterized as accentuating a latent state of things, as writing (in many works we see a character seated on a stool), as frozen action, petrified in those images of water jets or in the use of small red, black, or white arrows. Despite this dynamism and impulsive vitality, the configuration of closed spaces, prevails in Bacon's works. Precisely on this stage of inner doors, ordered like an oppressive huis clos, Bacon establishes a web of sensitive relations that visually mark the limits of pictorial space. It is a question of a net formed with permanent indicators: the electric cable of a light bulb; straight or curved lines that make a box; arrows; circles that surround the isolated figures; paintings within the paintings; paper left on the ground.

This exhibition was drawn from the paintings of the last decade. Nine of them displayed a certain calm, a serene quiet. We were not standing before a series of images surprising in their novelty (something that did not seem to worry him), rather, in these last works, Bacon offers quietude and contemplation.

It would be easy and simplistic to read these works as an omen of death. There are no echoes of decadence nor forced signs of decrepitude that allude to his end. Bacon does not permit a teleological reading, rather, his works are filled with historicity. He was no stranger to the chaos of World War II, for example, nor to personal pain due to the death of his friend George Dyer, as exemplified in his series of triptychs, Triptych. August., 1972, Triptych. May-June., 1973, Triptych. March., 1974. The horror, the abjection that oozed from the crucifixes has been transformed in his last paintings into quiet solitude. The masculine bodies entwined in a carnal embrace have given way to the solitary figure leaning over the washbasin, standing firm on the smooth ground, neutral, bald-headed, his convex back deformed, his testicles contracted in a fold.

Bacon's concept of space has not been modified: the same sparse, even walls of horizontals and verticals and a similar chromatic treatment characterize these late works. The confined space in which his figures move or their apparent immobility are no more asphyxiating than in previous periods. Even in works like Study for Self-Portrait, 1981, a mocking smile begins to be seen on the face split in two.

Conscious of the deterioration that time and experience leave on bodies, Bacon does not hide the wear and tear left by the years - above all the marks on the face, the wrinkles, the thinning hair - in his self-portraits. Folding back into himself, his gaze explores the pulse of life, the internal fissure. He is not interested in the immediate contour that envelops his figures; the gaze is not fixed on the objects. The simple, spare atmosphere of the rooms indicates this, contradicting the golden, lustrous frames in a ridiculous even absurd manner. In a statement to Richard Cork, Bacon declared: "I used to think of making dozens of things that I have never made. Our energy fluctuates and there is never enough time. Since time passes so quickly, one can never speak in definitive terms, one can never plan the future. It simply happens ... suddenly. Everything else seems superfluous."

COPYRIGHT 1993 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

 

 

Eminent outrage - British painter Francis Bacon

by James Gardner

National Review, August 6th, 1990

 

IN HIS MOST recent avatar at the Museum of Modern Art, Francis Bacon appears before us defanged and declawed. The primal rantings now sound like a petulant whimper. The spastic gestures and maimed movements now savor almost of balletic adroitness. And yet nothing has changed in the heart or mind of this octogenarian artist, the elder statesman of the British art world. The latest paintings in this retrospective manifest the same unyielding, implacable anguish that has been his hallmark for almost fifty years.

Rather it is we who have changed. For the past two generations at least, we have been assailed on all sides by art works of such calculated grotesqueness that we have lost all power to be genuinely shocked by anything. We analyze the forms or assay the political correctness of the artifact, depending upon our orientation. Sometimes we even go through the motions of outrage. But we know that ultimately it is only art. Anything Bacon can pitch, we can catch.

Yet, by any reasonable computation, Francis Bacon is as great an outrage as any generation should have to endure. And if the eminent artist has a sense of humor, as I suspect he does not, he must be chuckling heartily at the public's eagerness to embrace each festering and deformed carcass he throws at it.

Though Bacon was born in 1909, he becomes relevant to us and to himself only after 1943. That was the year in which, through a negation verging on self-parody, he studiously destroyed almost all of the art he had made up to that date. That was the year in which he was reborn as the shrill, tormented sociopath the art world loves. Since that time, Bacon has evolved remarkably little. His art has consisted in endless variations upon a closely circumscribed canon of themes and forms. Bacon was and remains a surrealist, an unrepentant irrationalist. But whereas others of that strain turned to Freud and to the dream world of the unconscious mind, Bacon reverts with a vengeance to Darwin and to the jungles of instinct. Whereas the other surrealists never lost their grounding in the man-made world, Bacon voids his paintings of most human traces, filling them with shrieking gibbons, salivating dogs, and subhuman apemen cast against a chillingly blank field.

His earlier works, it is true, are busier than that, overladen as they are with props: umbrellas and whole sides of beef, densely patterned Oriental rugs and landscapes whose nervously thin lines reveal a lingering debt to British modernists like Henry Moore and John Piper. A few later works, such as Sphinx II and Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh III, represent slight departures as well. But by the late Forties, with the "Head" series, Bacon had defined the highly idiosyncratic style in which he would work for the rest of his life. Emerging from a blackness qualified only by those wiry perspectival lines that have become something of the artist's signature, a massive, disembodied head appears. An ear floats absurdly to the side, perhaps torn away. The ill-defined eyes are shut in suspended rage; the mouth-like orifice is fixed in a noiseless ululation, exposing molars and fang-like canines. Were is there an end of it/The soundless wailing?" asks T. S. Eliot. For Bacon there is no end. That wailing, bitter, gnashing, self-consuming is the sound of life itself. All other sounds are lies.

Everything Francis Bacon depicts he distorts. And yet every depiction, even if we cannot describe or name the thing depicted, has the infallible ring of truth. An indescribable biomorph hangs down from a wire cage. A boneless, quivering mass of gelatinous flesh drowns in a sink or sits huddled over a toilet. Bacon is obsessed with movement within suspension, and with the suspension of movement. An expressionless face decomposes before our eyes into a psychotic omlette. A violent jet of water is frozen and immobilized as it streaks across the canvas.

To glance even cursorily at these paintings is to understand why they have come to seem the quintessential, unequivocal statement of the modem mood. But precisely for this reason it is too early to tell how good they really are. We shall need to be well out of the twentieth century before we can finally say whether Bacon was ever really on to something, or was merely a cantankerous, maladjusted misanthrope. Formally, his brilliant, stylish works are closer to masterpieces than anything else being done today. If some of the coloristic choices are of debatable merit, his way with a laden brush comes very close to perfection. What is wrong with the larger, spiritual dimensions of these sixty paintings at the Modern is their one-sidedness. To Bacon's binary mind, man, because he is not an angel, can only be a beast. In this belief Bacon is surely not alone in contemporary culture. Rather he is the foremost embodiment of the prevailing trend, the regnant humbug of the age. This is the willful fallacy which, in an age more happy than our own, may one day qualify the esteem in which we hold Francis Bacon and everyone like him.

 

 

An Interview with
Francis Bacon:
Provoking Accidents
Prompting Chance
by Michael Peppiatt

Art International, Number 8, Auntumn 1989

The following interview was recorded in Francis Bacon's London studio earlier this year.

You told me that you'd been to the Science Museum and you'd been looking at scientific images.

Yes, but that's nothing of any interest. You see, one has ideas, but it's only what you make of them. Theories are no good, it's only what you actually make. I had thought of doing a group of portraits, and I went there thinking that, amongst various things, I might find something that would provide a grid on which these portraits could be put, but I didn't find what I wanted and I don't think it's going to come off at all.

Are there certain things that you go back to a great deal, for example Egyptian images? You look at the same things a lot, don't you?

I look at the same things, I do think that Egyptian art is the greatest thing that has happened so far. But I get a great deal from poems, from the Greek tragedies, and those I find tremendously suggestive of all kinds of things.

Do you find the word more suggestive than the actual image?

Not necessarily, but very often it is.

Do the Greek tragedies suggest new images when you reread them, or do they just deepen the images that are already there?

They very often suggest new images. I don't think one can come down to anything specific, one doesn't really know. I mean you could glance at an advertisement or something and it could suggest just as much as reading Aeschylus. Anything can suggest things to you.

For you, it's normally an image that is suggested though, it's not sound, it's not words sparking off words. Words spark off images.

To a great extent. Great poets are remarkable in themselves and don't necessarily spark off images, what they write is just very exciting in itself.

You must be quite singular among contemporary artists to be moved in that way by literature. Looking at, for example, Degas, doesn't affect you?

No, Degas is complete in himself. I like his pastels enormously, particularly the nudes. They are formally remarkable, but they are very complete in themselves, so they don't suggest as much.

Not so much as something less complete? Are there less complete things which do? For example, I know you admire some of Michelangelo's unfinished things. And recently you were talking about some engineering drawings by Brunel and it sounded as though you were very excited by them.

In a certain mood, certain things start off a whole series of images and ideas which keep changing all the time.

Is there a whole series of images that you find haunting? There are specific images, aren't there, that have been very important to you?

Yes, but I don't think those are the things that I've been able to get anything from. You see, the best images just come about.

So that's almost a different category of experience.

Yes, I think my paintings just come about. I couldn't say where any of the elements come from.

Do you ever experiment with automatism?

No, I don't really believe in that. What I do believe is that chance and accident are the most fertile things at any artist's disposal at the present time. I'm trying to do some portraits now and I'm just hoping that they'll come about by chance. I want to capture an appearance without it being an illustrated appearance.

So it's something that you couldn't have planned consciously?

No. I wouldn't know it's what I wanted but it's what for me at the time makes a reality. Reality, that is, that comes about in the actual way the painting has been put down, which is a reality, but I'm also trying to make the reality into the appearance of the person I'm painting.

It's a locking together of two things.

It's a locking together of a great number of things, and it will only come about by chance. It's prompted chance because you have in the back of your mind the image of the person whose portrait you are trying to paint. You see, this is the point at which you absolutely cannot talk painting. It's in the making.

You're trying to bring two unique elements together?

It has nothing to do with Surrealist idea, because that's bringing two things together which has already made. This thing isn't made. It's got to be made.

But I mean that there is the person's appearance, and then there are all sorts of sensation about that particular person.

I don't know how much it's a question of sensation about the other person. It's the sensations within yourself. It's to do with the shock of two completely unillustrational things which come together and make an appearance. But again it's all words, it's all an approximation. I feel talking about painting is always superficial. We have lost our real directness. We talk in such a dreary, bourgeois kind of way. Nothing is ever directly said.

But are there things that really jolt you? I know you love Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Yeats, Eliot and so on, but do odd things, like newspaper photographs, jolt you every now and then?

I don't think photographs do it so much, just very occasionally.

You used to look at photographs a lot. Do you still look at books of photographs?

No. Dalí and Buñuel did something interesting with the Chien andalou, but that is where film is interesting and it doesn't work with single photographs in the same way. The slicing of the eyeball is interesting because it's in movement...

But is your sensibility still "joltable"? Does one become hardened to visual shock?

I don't think so, but not much that is produced now jolts one. Everything that is made now is made for public consumption and it makes it all so anodyne. It's rather like this ghastly government we have in this country. The whole thing's a kind of anodyne way of making money.

I suppose one doesn't have to be jolted as such to be interested, to be moved. One can be persuaded or convinced by something without it actually shocking one's sensibility. And I am sure that people have come to accept images that begin by seeming extremely violent, war pictures for instance.

They are violent, and yet it's not enough. Something much more horrendous is the last line in Yeats' "The Second Coming," which is a prophetic poem: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" That's stronger than any war painting. It's more extraordinary than even one of the horrors of war pictures, because that's just a literal horror, whereas the Yeats is a horror which has a whole vibration, in its prophetic quality.

It's shocking too because it's been put into a memorable form.

Well, of course that's the reason. Things are not shocking if they haven't been put into a memorable form. Otherwise, it's just blood spattered against a wall. In the end, if you see that two or three times, it's no longer shocking. It must be a form that has more than the implication of blood splashed against a wall. It's when it has much wider implications. It's something which reverberates within your psyche, it disturbs the whole life cycle within a person. It affects the atmosphere in which you live. Most of what is called art, your eye just flows over. It may be charming or nice, but it doesn't change you.

Do you think about painting all the time, or do you just think about things?

I think about things really, about images.

Do images keep dropping into your mind?

Images do drop in, constantly, but to crystallize all these phantoms that drop into your mind is another thing. A phantom and an image are two totally different things.

Do you dream, or remember your dreams? Do they affect you at all?

No. I'm sure I do dream but I've never remembered my dreams. About two or three years ago I had a very vivid dream and I tried to write it down because I thought I could use it. But it was a load of nonsense. When I looked at what I'd written down the next day, it had no shape to it, it was just nothing. I've never used dreams in my work. Anything that comes about does so by accident in the actual working of the painting. Suddenly something appears that I can grasp.

Do you often start blind?

No, I don't start blind. I have an idea of what I would like to do, but, as I start working, that completely evaporates. If it goes at all well, something will start to crystallize.

Do you make a sketch of some sort on the canvas, a basic structure?

Sometimes, a little bit. It never stays that way. It's just to get me into the act of doing it. Often, you just put on paint almost without knowing what you're doing. You've got to get some material on the canvas to begin with. Then it may or may not begin to work. It doesn't often happen within the first day or two. I just go on putting paint on, or wiping it out. Sometimes the shadows left from this lead to another image. But, still, I don't think those free marks that Henri Michaux used to make really work. They're too arbitrary.

Are they not conscious enough, not willed enough?

Something is only willed when the unconscious thing has begun to arise on which your will can be imposed.

You've got to have the feedback from the paint. It's a dialogue in a strange sense.

It is a dialogue, yes.

The paint is doing as much as you are. It's suggesting things to you. It's a constant exchange.

It is. And one's always hoping that the paint will do more for you. It's like painting a wall. The very first brushstroke gives a sudden shock of reality, which is cancelled out when you paint the whole wall.

And you find that when you start painting. That must be very depressing.

Very.

Do you still destroy a lot?

Yes. Practice doesn't really help. It should make you slightly more wily about realizing that something could come out of what you've done. But if that happens...

You become like an artisan?

Well, you always are an artisan. Once you become what is called an artist, there is nothing more awful, like those awful people who produce those awful images, and you know more or less what they're going to be like.

But it doesn't become any easier to paint?

No. In a way, it becomes more difficult. You're more conscious of the fact that nine-tenths of everything is inessential. What is called "reality" becomes so much more acute. The few things that matter become so much more concentrated and can be summed up with so much less.

 

 

 

Slaughterhouse Earth
The crucifixion of Francis Bacon

I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence.
Francis Bacon, 1955

 Gadfly Online

 

By John W. Whitehead
From Gadfly March 1998

"We are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal," Francis Bacon confided in a remarkable set of interviews with David Sylvester. To Bacon, planet earth seemed a slaughterhouse on the verge of annihilation at any moment.

Bacon was an enigma to many. He was fiercely atheistic, believing life was futile and meaningless. But he said, "You can be optimistic and totally without hope." Bacon was acerbic and difficult but kind and generous to friends and relatives. Gay with a sado-masochistic bent, he was predominantly right-wing in his thinking (although too individualistic to classify politically or otherwise).

Bacon, who died in 1992, had a despairing and often sarcastic sense of humour, along with a total disdain for convention. Indeed, he once booed a member of the British royal family who had decided to sing before a crowd at a ball. Publicly hissing at Princess Margaret may have been cruel and shocking, but it also demonstrated his honesty and sense of criticism. She was, in fact, singing off-key. Bacon had a way with words as well. When a member of the royal family asked him what he did for a living, "I'm an old queen," he replied.

Bacon's honesty and enigmatic personality translated to the canvas. Where at times Picasso was clearly playing an art game, Bacon's work always spoke of a different message. Bacon might very well be the greatest post-World War II painter. He inspired awe with his paintings of twisted body parts and distorted animalistic human faces which seemed intensely concerned with the torn and alienated human condition.

Bacon's paintings portray an intense loneliness, despair and inner turmoil. He saw violence, hatred and human degradation as essential elements in the parade of life.

Bacon expected his paintings to assault the viewer's nervous system. He strove to "unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently." Toward the end of his life, he was delighted to hear that a woman viewing one of his paintings in Paris had closed her eyes and crossed herself.

The great painter became who he was through many influences and experiences. A primary influence was his childhood.

"I think artists stay much closer to their childhood than other people," Bacon once remarked to a friend. "They remain far more constant to those early sensations."

The aspects of Bacon's childhood that most strongly affected his art were his aberrational family relationships, his war-time childhood, his life-long struggle with asthma and his introduction to homosexuality.

BACON: My relationship with my father and mother was never good. We never got on. They were horrified at the thought that I might want to be an artist.

The enfant terrible was born in Dublin in October 1909 to English parents who were continually moving between Ireland and England or from mansion to mansion in Ireland. Francis would later say, "My father and mother were never satisfied with where they were." This rootlessness would set the course for much of his adult life.

Bacon was a frail, sensitive child, often life-threateningly ill with attacks of asthma. His upbringing in Ireland would prove to be so traumatic that in later years an attempt to return to Ireland would bring on such a severe case of asthma that he came near to choking to death.

Although luxurious, his home life and childhood were characterized by dysfunctional relationships, and Bacon later spoke of his family with bitterness.

His father, Anthony Bacon, a veteran of the Boer War, was at least fourteen years older than Francis' mother, Winifred Firth, an heiress to a steel business and coal mine, who brought to the marriage a comfortable dowry.

Anthony was a soldier and horse trainer, and he raised his sons as if they were army horses, becoming violently outraged if anything went wrong. He gambled frequently, sometimes sending Francis to the post office to place a bet by telegram before the "off." Anthony regularly estranged his friends by his quarrelsomeness and was no better at getting along with his children. Francis later described him as "an intelligent man who never developed his intellect at all."

Domineering and prone to fits of rage, Anthony had Francis viciously horsewhipped by their Irish stable boys on at least one occasion. He also forced the boy, who was sensitive to pain and terribly allergic to horses and dogs, to go fox hunting—-a traumatic experience that brought on Francis' asthma. The father was also antagonistic toward Francis' homosexual leanings and banished him from the house at the age of 16 after discovering the boy dressed in his wife's underwear.

BACON: I disliked him, but I was sexually attracted to him when I was young. When I first sensed it, I hardly knew it was sexual. It was only later, through the grooms and the people in the stables I had affairs with, that I realized that it was a sexual thing towards my father.

Francis' mother was more gregarious by nature. She kept the house immaculate and was more easy-going than Anthony. However, in later years Francis would speak of her with resentment, claiming she seemed more concerned over her own pleasures than his needs as a child.

Francis had two brothers, the younger of whom died of tuberculosis as a child, prompting the only tears Francis ever saw his father weep. He also had two much younger sisters, born shortly before he left home.

In the face of his father's outright rejection and his mother's more subtle rejection, one person Francis truly loved was his lively, strong-willed maternal grandmother. She was a flamboyant and forceful woman who loved people and gave grand parties. "My grandmother and I used to tell each other everything," Bacon recalled. "I was a kind of confidant for her, I suppose, and I used to take her to the hunt balls and other things that went on when I was an adolescent."

Francis was terrified of his grandmother's second husband, Walter Loraine Bell, however. Cruel and sadistic, Bell was known as "Cat" Bell for his habit of hanging cats while he was drunk and of throwing live ones, trapped in bags, to his hounds. Among other cruelties, Bell put Francis' mother, uncle and grandmother on unbroken horses, forcing them to ride in terror for their lives. Francis' grandmother eventually divorced Bell for cruelty, but he made a lasting impression on Francis.

When his grandmother married a third time, Francis continued to spend much time with her at Farmleigh, her new home in Ireland. Bacon's new step-grandfather, Kerry Supple, was the Kildare District Inspector of the Royal Irish constabulary. As such, Supple drew the wrath of the new Sinn Fein, the Irish army rebelling against the English. In later years, Francis would recall the frightening days at Farmleigh when the windows were sandbagged against invaders, and snipers waited at the edges of the fields. But the rooms that overlooked the garden were beautiful—semicircular with bay windows—a theme later reflected in the curved backgrounds of some of his triptychs.

The violence prevalent in Bacon's work also had some of its roots in World War I and the Civil War in Ireland, both of which occurred during his childhood. As a youngster in Ireland, Bacon lived near a British cavalry regiment that trained close to his home. Sometimes the soldiers galloped up the driveway of the Bacon mansion, carrying out manourvres. And, in the dead of night, the family could sometimes hear bugles in the forests as the troops practiced.

Bacon would later remark, "Just the fact of being born is a ferocious event.... I was made aware of what is called the possibility of danger at a very young age." And Bacon carried a sense of annihilation with him the rest of his life which, according to biographer Michael Peppiatt, sharpened "his appetite not only for pleasure but for every aspect, however banal, of what he called 'conscious existence.'"

BACON: I remember that when there was a blackout they used to spray the Park with something phosphorescent out of watering cans, thinking that the Zeppelins would suppose it was the lights of London and drop bombs on the Park; it didn't work at all.

When the war began, Anthony Bacon was appointed to the War Office in London and the whole family moved there, introducing the 5-year-old Francis to black-outs, charred remnants of homes, the whine of bombs and the stealthy approach of the Zeppelins. By day, Francis collected shell fragments and shrapnel in a nearby park. At night, searchlights raked across the dark sky looking for an airborne enemy, impressing upon the child the idea that death might drop at any instant. The distorted human figures that loom from the frightening night in Bacon's paintings may have their ancestors in the Londoners who would suddenly appear from the dark and disappear again, continuing on their way through the shadowy streets.

The most long-lasting influence of that stay in London was the impression of the newsreels and photographs of actual trench warfare, a far cry from the exhibition trenches dug in Kensington Gardens. "From that awareness," wrote biographer Andrew Sinclair, "he would often choose the monochrome and the snapshot as an insight into reality rather than the many-coloured surface of what he could see, which might be only propaganda." Later in life, Bacon painted mainly from photographs and newspaper clippings rather than from real life.

After the Armistice, Anthony Bacon returned to Ireland with his family, at the onset of the Irish Civil War. In 1919, the Irish Republican Army formed, and armed bands of guerrillas began to roam the Irish countryside during Francis' formative years. "I suppose all that leaves some impression," Bacon said later. "You can't separate life from suffering and despair."

As English gentry in an Irish land, the Bacons were, in many respects, the enemy. Anthony Bacon frequently cautioned his children about what they should do if the IRA attacked their home during the night. Francis would visit his grandmother in fear, their car dodging snipers on the corners of her fields. Police barracks were torched, bodies hacked to pieces with axes, men hunted with bloodhounds and women shot for consorting with the British.

One night, a military guard dispatched to guard the home of Bacon's grandmother was ambushed. The men were shot as they tried to climb over the locked iron gates and left to hang there. The image would probably later influence Bacon's paintings of dead meat in butcher shops such as Painting (1946) which shows a split carcass suspended like a human body crucified.

The military transports soon were caged with wire netting in an effort to protect the soldiers from grenades, just as similar steel netting had been erected in London during the war to protect buildings and monuments. The cage theme later appeared in many of Bacon's works, for example around the figure of a screaming pope.

The theme of stalkers and their victims also found its way into Bacon's work. Some were more obvious, such as figures which appear to be in mortal combat. Other paintings seem to contain figures, writes Michael Peppiatt, who simply watch, either for "sexual excitement or—like the hidden snipers—the desire to destroy."

There was a genuine trauma in living through two wars, but many children suffered the same wartime experiences. Peppiatt has noted that the dramatic effect upon Bacon may have been due to his desire to seek out the strong sensations of fear and dwell upon them. Bacon, perhaps fueled by a need for high drama, was fond of describing his childhood in desolate and harsh terms, and it tainted everything within his reach.

Another element of Bacon's character which profoundly impacted his art was his homosexuality. The point when his leanings toward homosexuality began is difficult to determine, but at one fancy-dress party, Francis arrived as a flapper with an Eton crop, dressed in a backless gown and sporting long earrings, much to the amusement of the ladies and the disgust of his father.

At some point in his adolescence or earlier, Francis had sexual encounters with the Irish grooms at his home, possibly the same grooms who carried out the horsewhippings ordered by his father. The pain and humiliation of the horsewhippings, combined with the sexual attraction for the grooms and his father, no doubt gave rise to some of the violent sexual imagery in his artwork, as in Two Figures in the Grass (1954). Bacon felt that the subject of human coupling was limitless: "You need never have any other subject, really," he remarked. "It's a very haunting subject."

At age 16, Francis was banished from the family home and left to support himself, with a weekly allowance from his mother. Having concluded that instinct and chance were the driving forces of life, he set out to see where life would take him. He went at first to London where he took on a series of odd jobs to supplement his income and, according to Peppiatt, entered the gay underworld and frequently earned extra money by being picked up by wealthier gay men.

It was while in London that Bacon read some of Nietzsche's work, lost the last vestiges of any religious belief and came to the conclusion that life was futile unless he could somehow do something "extraordinary" with it.

After some time, Anthony Bacon again made an attempt to "straighten out" Francis, this time by entrusting him to the care of a distant family relative travelling to Berlin. However, things did not go the way his father planned, as it was only a short while before Francis and the "uncle" were in bed together.

In Berlin, Francis found himself in a luxurious and violent world of gay cabarets, transvestite clubs and nude dancing—an environment that offered any sexual experience he could desire. As a "pretty" young man, he had no trouble getting picked up and getting money.

In Berlin, Bacon also discovered the functional art of the Bauhaus movement which influenced the design of the furniture he began to build a few years later.

Eventually, Bacon's uncle moved on, and at 17, Francis set off for Paris. In Chantilly, a French woman and her family took him in, and he learned French and saw the sights. Eventually, he moved out on his own and entered the gay circles in Paris.

BACON: I went to Paris then for a short time. While there I saw at Rosenberg's an exhibition of Picasso, and at that moment I thought, well I will try and paint, too.

In Paris, he saw a work that deeply stirred his imagination, Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents (1630-31), which showed a mother trying to defend her child from a soldier's sword. The scream of the victim so affected him that he later referred to it as "probably the best human cry ever painted," and the human scream became one of his most painted subjects. Perhaps, as Peppiatt suggests, this is because it "corresponded to the release of a tension so deep within him."

In either Berlin or Paris, Bacon viewed Eisenstein's classic film The Battleship Potemkin (1925). He was especially stirred by the image of a nurse shot on the Odessa steps. Her face is bloodied, her glasses shattered and her mouth open in a terrified scream. He later credited the film as an important catalyst to his work, and he used the idea in Study for the Nurse (1957).

The impact of Massacre of the Innocents and Potemkin led him to purchase a medical book on diseases of the mouth. It contained hand-painted illustrations, and Bacon used it constantly when he painted. He once commented, "I've always been very moved by the movements of the mouth and the shape of the teeth. People say these have all sorts of sexual implications, and I was always very obsessed by the actual appearance of the mouth and teeth... I like, you may say, the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth."

In 1927, Bacon attended a Paris exhibition of Picasso's work, something he often mentioned later. Picasso's attempts to allow the subconscious to flow into the conscious and his use of chance to produce uncalculated results particularly impressed Bacon. The exhibit inspired him to begin drawing and making watercolours on his own. Six years later, his first recognizably Baconian image, Crucifixion (1933), reflected Picasso's influence. However, where Picasso's 1930 Crucifixion was made of bones, Bacon reduced his to an X-ray of a wraith-like figure.

Bacon repeated on various occasions that he saw the Crucifixion in terms of a "self-portrait," but, as Peppiatt notes, he did not elaborate on "the astonishing implications" of this concept—-a concept he projected in many of his other paintings. "For over half of his career," writes Peppiatt, "Bacon's work revolved around two of the most potent images of the Christian faith, the body on the cross and the Pope on his throne."

Other influences at this time included artists Soutine, de Chirico, Arp, Picabia and Dali, the art magazine Cahiers d'Art, and Luis Buñuel's film Un Chien Andalou. Bacon was also influenced by the review Documents which contained photographs of a screaming mouth and pictures of bloodied animal carcasses and Positioning in Radiography, a reference book which had photographs showing the position of the body for X-rays to be taken and the X-rays themselves.

Around age 20, unable to make a living in Paris, Bacon returned to London, carrying with him images of violence and anger—carcasses and screams that would impact the rest of his life. In London, he took up residence with Roy de Maistre, a man he saw as both father-figure and lover. De Maistre had money, which enabled Bacon to spend time designing and manufacturing furniture. De Maistre was also a painter, and the two held a joint art exhibit in their garage. It was during this time that Francis painted several crucifixions which would later lead to his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), perhaps inspired by de Maistre's convictions as a convert to Roman Catholicism.

Bacon himself was antagonistic toward religion, perhaps partly as a reaction to his dictatorial father whom he found both terrifying and attractive. As a boy Francis claimed to fear the Bible, the law and his father's verdict. Although his entire family had attended a Protestant church, Bacon saw this as primarily a public protest against Catholicism in the Irish country where civil war brewed. In addition, the Catholic Church condemned sodomy and homosexuality. Bacon, however, would later deny that religion played any role in his Crucifixion paintings and claim that he simply found the elevated human figure intriguing.

After a failed art show a few years later, Bacon was so discouraged by the lack of response to his work that he destroyed most of the works he had displayed and painted very little for the next ten years. He parted ways with de Maistre and took up a wandering lifestyle again, making a living through petty theft, running a roulette wheel, doing odd jobs and occasionally receiving requests to design furniture. "I think I'm one of those people who have a gift for always getting by somehow," Francis would later muse. "Even if it's a case of stealing or something like that, I don't feel any moral thing against it."

During this time gap, World War II broke out, and Bacon again found himself in a torn and violent landscape. Yet the bodies and bombed-out buildings intrigued him. His father died, and the relief Bacon felt after that "release," in addition to the exhilaration of the war, sent him back to his brushes. He began to paint again, and by 1945 his first famous work, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, was on display.

BACON: I've always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion. There've been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death. We don't know, of course, but it appears by these photographs that they're so aware of what is going to happen to them, they do everything to attempt to escape. I think these pictures were very much based on that kind of thing, which to me is very, very near this whole thing of the Crucifixion. I know for religious people, for Christians, the Crucifixion has a totally different significance. But as a nonbeliever, it was just an act of man's behaviour, a way of behaviour to another.

Bacon, an atheist, believed life was futile, a "mere spasm of consciousness between two voids." However, in a perverse way, he was one of the most deeply religious painters of the century.

As Peppiatt puts it, "A fetish force appear[ed] to draw him back repeatedly to religious themes

all through the earlier part of his artistic development, as if he had to make a belief out of his nonbelief, using structures of established religion to proclaim his distance from them." And use them he did. Bacon, notes Peppiatt, pillaged "the central truths of both the Greek and the Christian faith: only there, he was convinced, could he find the structure to convey the extent and the implications of his own drama."

Bacon had reached a position not only of unbelief but also of despair for anything beyond what one can actually see or experience: "Man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without purpose, other than of his own choosing." On another occasion he remarked: "We are born and we die and there's nothing else. We're just part of animal life." His paintings express modern man's condition—a dehumanized humanity dispossessed of any durable paradise, supernatural or otherwise. This outlook, along with Bacon's homosexuality, would greatly affect his canvases.

The importance of Bacon's homosexuality to his life and vision, as Peppiatt recognizes, cannot be overstated: "One might reasonably say that, along with his dedicated ambition as an artist, his sexuality was the most important element in his life." Bacon said he painted to excite himself. And, despite his atheism, he seemed to identify his own suffering from his homosexuality with the anguish of the Crucifixion. "Homosexuality is more tragic and more banal," Bacon said, "than what is called normal love." Indeed, he had always been plagued by an acute sense of guilt "caused," as Peppiatt records, "in part by his homosexuality and the way it had made him an outcast from his own family." Moreover, Bacon "openly regretted it on occasion. 'Being a homosexual is a defect,' was the way he put it in certain moods. 'It's like having a limp.'"

As Andrew Sinclair, another Bacon biographer, notes, "He feared exposure and expulsion and even imprisonment. Especially sensitive and observant, he particularly felt as an adolescent the four crosses of the homosexual at that time—isolation and illegality, insecurity and guilt."

In a hypocritical world that condemned his acts, Bacon could see little hope. Perhaps in this vein, the flesh often crucified in Bacon's paintings may be the great painter's own. Peppiatt muses, it is possible "that Bacon identified with Christ on the Cross." Indeed, Bacon referred to the whole theme of the Crucifixion "as a kind of self-portrait conveying deeply personal truths."

David Farson in his book on Bacon notes of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944): "The forcefulness with which these three Greek Furies... hurl their misery and rage at us proves the extent of his own loss of faith."

Clearly, with Three Studies Bacon's work began to epitomize the nihilistic spirit of twentieth century thinking. He once said: "Nietzsche forecast our future for us—he was the Cassandra of the nineteenth century—he told us it's all so meaningless we might as well be extraordinary."

Several other important subthemes underlie Three Studies. One is sexual, and relates to Bacon's interest in the open mouth. The pleading figure in the middle panel reflects the concept of "penis dentatus." This may be a variation on the Surrealists' concept of "vagina dentata" or the combination of sex and mouth.

In addition, artistic influences may have led to the gloomily phallic Three Studies. Bacon had a good knowledge of art history, and it is logical that Grünewald's crucifixion paintings would have influenced him. There is little doubt that the idea for the cloth bandage above the snarling mouth in the central figure of the triptych was inspired by Grünewald's Mocking of Christ (1503). Grünewald had also influenced Picasso's earlier Guernica (1937).

BACON: One of the pictures I did in 1946, the one like a butcher's shop, came to me as an accident. I was attempting a bird alighting on a field.... I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another.

Bacon's public breakthrough was with Painting (1946). Although it was hardly seen before it was bought for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it is generally the painting by which he is best known all over the world to this day.

At just under 40 years of age, Bacon had arrived as one of the dominant figures in the art of his day. Painting (1946), as art analyst Lawrence Gowing writes, "brought the ominous incongruities, the dramatic fall of light around the umbrella and the catastrophic implication all together for the first time." The scene might be in a butcher shop where the carnivorous protagonist, no more a butcher than a priest or judge, awaits his prey among the sides of meat displayed around him.

Bacon's concern with the human condition may be a clue to this work and his other paintings. As he told David Sylvester, "the greatest art always returns you to the vulnerability of the human situation." Shortly before Painting (1946) was completed, 70,000 people had been slaughtered and approximately that same number died later of the new manmade death, radiation sickness, from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in April 1945. The umbrella looks suspiciously like a mushroom cloud, and the judge or priest with the carnage of meat surrounding him is the perpetrator of mass death.

Painting (1946) also shows Bacon's fascination with blood and carnage. It is a gruesome replacement of the ornate throne of the traditional state portrait. Bacon combines three of the major themes of his time—war, the dictator and dead meat—and suggests the bomb's sinister impact on mankind's future.

While it may be true, as Bacon said, that "you only need to think about the meat on your plate" to see the general truth about humankind in his paintings, no modern artist has hammered at the twentieth century human condition with more repetitive pessimism. Painting (1946) also reflects Bacon's view of life as an accident and a spasm of brutality, "suffering what cannot be explained because it has no meaning."

BACON: I think that man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason.

Bacon was a realist who tried to force viewers to shed their shallow belief in the euphemisms of a glittering neon culture that merely provides a distraction from the reality of nonmeaning.

Bacon's fascination for the irrational is evident in his imagery of the abnormal and the impaired, which underscores a darker view of humanity—a humanity only partially evolved from an ignoble, animal condition.

His paintings after the photos of Eadweard Muybridge such as Study for Crouching Nude (1952) and the more explicit Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge) (1961) reduce human beings to an ignominious animal state and suggest evolutionary regression.

BACON: I realized when I was seventeen. I remember it very, very clearly. I remember looking at a dog-shit on the pavement and I suddenly realized, there it is—this is what life is like. Strangely enough, it tormented me for months, till I came to, as it were, accept that here you are, existing for a second, brushed off like flies on the wall.

Bacon's 1953 Man with Dog, as contrasted with his Study for Self-Portrait—Triptych (1985-86), shows the artist in a hunched, tortured posture with legs coiled. Not only does this reflect the crouching dog but it also seems to imply a connection with his crouching nude of 1952. Bacon himself, thus, is a regressed animal like us all, except that as an artist he was aware of his status and could record it for the world to see.

Bacon's distorted and idiosyncratic images bear eloquent witness to the events of the post-World War II period and more generally to twentieth century humanity's capacity for mass violence. Bacon, the artist as prophet, is the extreme voice of despair in which people are totally dehumanized, blurred, decrepit banshees. Robert Hughes writes: "In his work, the image of the classical nude body is simply dismissed; it becomes, instead, a two-legged animal with the various addictions: to sex, the needle, security, or power."

BACON: I am unique in that way; and perhaps it's a vanity to say such a thing. But I don't think I'm gifted. I just think I'm receptive.

Bacon emphasized the chance element in his work, but when discussing it he unavoidably spoke in religious terms. Like Duchamp and other artists, Bacon saw himself as a "medium": "I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance."

Speaking in much the same way as a painter like Rembrandt, who within the Judeo-Christian tradition could readily accept the divine hand on his work, Bacon would say: "I think that I have this peculiar kind of sensibility as a painter, where things are handed to me and I just use them." It's Bacon's choice of words—"handed to me"—that implies a personal force outside of himself that he was quick to deny.

This is interesting and mystifying when one realizes that much of Bacon's work dealt with religious icons and subjects, such as Velasquez's portrait of the Pope. Bacon did not believe in an afterlife but thought that art gave substance to life. That is how he expressed his chaos of emotions and came to terms with life's confusion.

BACON: I've always thought that this was one of the greatest paintings in the world, and I've used it through obsession. And I've tried very, very unsuccessfully to do certain records of it—distorted records. I regret them, because I think they're very silly... because I think that this thing was an absolute thing that was done and nothing more can be done about it.

Bacon's Study After Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) turns Diego Velasquez's powerful portrait of Pope Innocent X Pamphili into a "screaming Pope." Bacon executed the painting from a photograph. Study introduced an element of dislocation from the primary image, a concept that greatly influenced modern art.

The Pope in Study seems a snare and a threat. He is held in a skeletal cube—a boxed hell without escape. "The picture assaults the power of the Church: it is blasphemous," Sinclair notes. "It represents Bacon's heresy and protests against the rule of the organised religion which he had known in Ireland." This is a derisive view of the Catholic religion that Bacon probably inherited from the Surrealists.

It is clear that the image of the Pope touched a deep division in Bacon. On the one hand, he was fascinated with the man set above all others. On the other hand, there was a desire to tear away at the pomp and pretense of the high office of Supreme Pontiff—a self-protective illusion that Bacon believed was at the core of all religious belief.

Bacon, thus, seems to project anxiety concerning his own mortality as well as rage against authority in his portrait of Pope Innocent X. "Painting," Bacon said, "is the pattern of one's own nervous system being projected on the canvas." Moreover: "One of the problems," Bacon said, "is to paint like Velasquez, but with the texture of a hippopotamus skin."

With his 1962 Three Studies for a Crucifixion, Bacon again returns to the subject of the crucifixion. Three Studies (1962) literally reeks of blood and was painted under a tremendous hangover from drinking. "It's one of the only pictures," Bacon later said, "that I've ever been able to do under drink. I believe that the drink helped me to be a bit freer."

Sinclair notes that the "figures in the three canvases were joined in the theme of the violence that men did to one another by the power of sex and hatred. The body on the right, lying head down, suggested an inverted crucifixion by Cimabue, which Bacon thought was like 'a worm crawling... just moving, undulating down the cross.'"

With Three Studies, a self-generating quality of painting began to emerge, which Lawrence Gowing believes changed the character of art. Until 1962, the date of Bacon's first exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London, most of his paintings had been devoted essentially to simple embodiments. From this point on in his work, figures are more often concerned together in a simple episode or in an identifiable setting—a landscape or a townscape or a habitable interior. The subjects are more often actions, whose purpose we may or may not be allowed to construe. As Gowing writes: "Pictures like this extended Bacon's art and his reading of human drama into a region of instinct and unknowing, nervous awareness, a region seemingly unknown and unknowable, which was quite new to modern figurative art."

BACON: There are very few paintings I would like to have, but I would like to have Rembrandts.

Bacon understood the importance of art history. To this end, he paid tribute to Rembrandt—"abstract expressionism has all been done in Rembrandt's marks."

Rembrandt, however, lived in an age saturated with Christian beliefs to which Rembrandt himself subscribed. This can be seen in his classic crucifixion painting, The Raising of the Cross (1633). Here we see Rembrandt at the base of the cross with his eyes fixed on Christ. The message is that Rembrandt saw himself as one of the many fallible people who had forced Christ to the cross.

Bacon's retort was that Rembrandt painted at a time when people were still "slightly conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities, which man now, you could say, has completely cancelled out for him." In other words, Rembrandt's culture believed in the existence of a personal God who provided a solution—the Crucifixion—for humanity's problems.

That hope, to Bacon, had been lost and man must "beguile himself." "You see," Bacon said, "all art has become completely a game by which man distracts himself." Distracted from what? The futility of existence, of course.

"We are born and we die," Bacon proclaimed, "but in between we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives." Sex, food, body functions, the will to create—these all give some meaning, although varied, to human existence. Maybe this explains in part Bacon's Triptych Inspired By T. S. Eliot's Poem Sweeney Agonistes (1967). Bacon had been reading Eliot's verse dramas and the famous three-part summary of the human situation:

That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.

The center panel, with its lonely futility, was left unpeopled while that on the right, derived from Muybridge's wrestlers, offered Bacon's customary formulation for sexual passion.

In 1988, a few years before his death, Bacon revisited the original Three Studies with a fresh, more defined look at the crucifixion in Second Version of Triptych (1944). The figures are still bound and appear to be only the projections of certain body parts that he had defined in such works as Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981). An uneasy sense of cruelty and despair resonates from these late works. "Anything in art seems cruel," he said, "because reality is cruel."

BACON: We nearly always live through screens—a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.

In the deepest sense, Bacon's paintings are about his knowledge that the inhabitants of his world are alive. To understand Bacon the man, you must know the private damage and demons that drove him to paint his form of despair and that even today drive onlookers to their knees.

Bacon projected his nervous system onto his canvases, and his scream is the scream of twentieth century humanity that has debunked its past, tradition and values. Bacon's crucifixion of himself on canvas expresses the pain and torment of guilt that seems to endlessly plague modern humanity.

Bacon could feel the cold winds blowing across the wasteland and he knew, or believed he knew, the only alternatives. He sincerely believed we are all damned in the slaughterhouse of life.

BACON: I think that most people who have religious beliefs, who have the fear of God, are much more interesting than people who just live a kind of hedonistic and drafting life.... I can't help admiring but despising them.... But I do think that, if you can find a person totally without belief, but totally dedicated to futility, then you will find the more exciting person.

In one of his later interviews, David Sylvester asked Bacon, "Don't you think that any believing Christian who felt that he was damned would prefer not to have an immortal soul than to live in eternal torment?"

Bacon replied: "I think that people are so attached to their egos that they'd probably rather have the torment than simple annihilation."

Sylvester then asked: "You'd prefer the torment yourself?"

Quick to reply, the great painter said, "Yes, I would, because, if I was in hell I would always feel I had a chance of escaping. I'd always be sure that I'd be able to escape."

 

 

The Crucifixion

Commitment and Conflict

Wieland Schmeid 1996

      Crucifixion scenes are among Francis Bacon's earliest surviving pictures. The first work that he himself regarded as successful was a triptych that at least refers to this theme, even if it does not depict an actual crucifixion. He took up the subject in 1933, and returned to it several times: in 1944-46, 1950, 1962 and 1965. Thus the passion was one of his central concerns throughout the formative phases of his work, up to the period when his powers were at their peek.

      After 1965 he ceased to address the theme directly , but not because he had lost interest in it: on the contrary, it had taken on a general significance that made specific reference unnecessary. Permeating into his work as a whole, the crucifixion became an omnipresent element in his art.

Mattias Grunewald  Crucifixion  c 1502

      Bacon often complained that he had been a late starter. It took many years before he began painting on a regular basis- because he said, he had spent so long looking for the right subject, or at any rate, a subject that would sustain his interest. The first theme to capture his attention was that of the crucifixion, which he began to study in dept in 1930. He was then 24, and had mainly worked as an interior decorator and designer of furniture and rugs. His early paintings have an air of hesitancy and uncertainty. They contain formal elements typical of their time: abstract figurations - initially geometric but later tending towards the biomorphic - are arranged in a spatial setting that has a surrealist feel. Despite their considerable aesthetic merits, the works lack any sense of urgency or inner necessity; they are beautiful, but lifeless. By pressing these forms into the service of the Crucifixion theme, Bacon endeavoured to redefine them in terms of an extreme situation, to endow them with a visual tension deriving from the conflict between life and death. But the experiment was not a success: for all his efforts, the pictures were still too decorative. The result was that he abandoned the theme and for many years painted very little. He had not yet found the passion for which he was looking.

      Nevertheless, the early Crucifixions contained one element, at least, that helped to provide a basis for future developments. The aspect in question is to be seen in the elongated and dislocated organic forms of the series of the pictures that Bacon painted in 1933. These shapes subsequently metamorphosed into compact bodies struggling free of the crucifixion pose and rebelling, with teeth bared, against the sufferings inflicted upon them. It was these figures that led to the idea of including the Furies, the Greek goddess of vengeance, in the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944.

      Are the three figures in this work really crouching at the base of a crucifixion, as the title states? This has never been doubted, by critics or by the artist himself, who said in a letter of 9 January 1959 that one day he would paint a large format Crucifixion scene to go with the Furies. But in the 1944 triptych the Crucifixion itself is conspicuous by it's absence: not a trace or shadow of it is to be seen, and there is no place for it in the picture's tightly organised spatial structure.

 Grunewald, Crucifixion c 1502

      Thus the painting flatly contradicts its title. The space seems to say that there will be no Crucifixion. The three Furies have taken the place of Christ and the two thieves who were crucified on either side of him. Their world is empty and closed. The 1944 triptych is a revolt against the very idea of the Crucifixion and everything it stands for. Bacon had to work through his own feelings of rebellion before he could begin to draw on the potential of the Crucifixion as a traditional pictorial form in order to make something entirely contemporary.

      The theme of the Crucifixion exercised a strange and disturbing fascination on Bacon for many years. But its specific impact on his art springs from its confluence with two further factors: on the one hand, the extension of the single picture into the triptych, and on the other, the introduction of the motif of meat, the raw, bleeding flesh of the slaughterhouse and the butchers slab, a sight that affected Bacon like almost no other and was to become his personal metaphor of death.

      Bacon's exploration of the triptych was a slow and gradual process: it was only in the mid-1960's, with the 1965 Crucifixion, that the format took on the complex significance that it was to retain throughout the remainder of his career. In the triptych he brought together a number of elements that were originally unrelated. First, there was the historical dimension of the form and its religious associations as a direct descendant of the medieval winged altarpiece. Even today, these connotations invest the triptych with a certain kind of authority, a specific aura: the art historian Klaus Lankheit once used Aby Warburg's term 'pathos formula' to characterise this pictorial format. A second element derives, by contrast, from a thoroughly modern context. It was an idea that Bacon found in the cinema; more specifically in the curved panoramic screen used for Cinemascope projection, which seemed almost to enclose the audience on three sides.

      Whereas the first element establishes a sense of distance and makes the picture look remote and unapproachable, the second feature is intended to have exactly the opposite effect: the viewer is confronted directly with the work, which encircles him and forces him to engage with it. These contradictions are compounded by a further element which offered Bacon the possibility of breaking down a complex pictorial situation into separate components and dealing with several corresponding figures, while at the same time retaining the option of cutting the narrative thread at will and mercilessly expunging ant hint of narrative coherence that threatened to creep into the picture.

Francis Bacon
Three studies for a Crucifixion, 1962
Right panel

      However, before the form of the triptych became wedded to the theme of the Crucifixion, the latter had already seized Bacon's imagination for quite different reasons. Quite simply, he was fascinated by the sight of raw meat. In conversation with David Sylvester in October 1962 he explained:

      "I've always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me that belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion. There've been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death. We don't know, of course, but it appears by these photographs that they're so aware of what is going to happen to them, they do everything to attempt to escape. I think these pictures were very much based on that kind of thing, which to me is very, very near this whole thing of the Crucifixion. I know for religious people, for Christians, the Crucifixion has a totally different significance. But as a non-believer, it was just an act of man's behaviour to another."

      In a further interview with Sylvester, in Mat 1966, Bacon expanded on this remarkable statement. When asked to comment on the difference between the Crucifixion and other themes, he replied:

      "Well, of course, you're working then about you're own feelings and sensations, really. You might say it's almost nearer to a self portrait. You're working on all sorts of very primitive feelings about behaviour and about the way life is... If you go to some of those great stores, where you just go through those great halls of death, you can see meat and fist and birds and everything else all lying dead there. And, of course, one has to remember as a painter that there is great beauty in the colour of meat."

      Bacon's feelings about meat - about the butchered carcasses of animals, and also about tortured and mutilated human flesh - were ambivalent. On one hand, these things fascinated him by their seductive beauty, yet on the other, they served as a solemn reminder of his own mortality. "Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal."

      Probably the most concise definition of what the Crucifixion meant to Bacon, and of the uses to which he put it, is that offered by John Russell. According to Russell, crucifixion in Bacon's work is 'a generic name for an environment in which bodily harm is done to one or more persons and one or more other persons gather to watch'. Bacon himself is referred to the Crucifixion as an 'armature' serving to make emotions manifest: "Well, there have been so many great pictures in European art of the Crucifixion that it's a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feelings and sensation, it may be unsatisfactory, but I haven't found another subject so far that has been as helpful for covering certain areas of human feelings and behaviour. Perhaps it is only so many people have worked on this particular theme that it has created this armature - I can't think of a better way of saying it - on which one can operate all types of level of feelings."

      With hindsight, it is evident that the Crucifixion theme in Bacon's art evolved in several distinct stages. First, there are his early attempts to address the subject in largely abstract terms, with the aim of modernising it or giving it a contemporary twist. Second, there is the revolt against the motif, which is seen as nothing but a hollow convention: the figures rise up against it, repudiating it and categorically denying its authenticity. This is followed by a transitional phase in which the theme appears to have been abandoned; but in fact, it returns through the back door, in a different and disturbing guise. The crucified body is 'costumed' as a carcass, a piece of butcher's meat. Golgotha has moved to the abattoir.

In the fourth phase the Crucifixion theme is grafted onto the triptych form. This development is ushered in by Three studies for a Crucifixion, painted in 1962 at the end of an eighteen-year period when the triptych was effectively eliminated from Bacon's repertoire. From the mid-1960s onwards, the format was Bacon's most important vehicle of artistic expression: that he should abandon it again became quite unthinkable. At the same time , the theme of the Crucifixion began to recede into the background. It was as if the subject had dissolved into something more general, as a ground or premise underlying all the subsequent triptychs but no longer requiring explicit mention.





Rembrandt Slaughtered-ox 1655

      The figures and shapes that Bacon nails to the cross are always anonymous; there are no redeemers or saviours to be found in his pictures. In the 1950 Crucifixion the wound inflicted on the canvass has even acquired the form of a gaping mouth that flashes its teeth wildly at us. Yet Bacon still seems to have been dissatisfied with his handling of the theme: distorted as it may be, the figure was not close enough to the condition of pure meat for the artist's liking. Instead of continuing his investigation of the Crucifixion motif, he embarked on another set of pictures - the screaming Popes - which, as he stoutly maintained, had nothing to do with religion. Only in one case do these works touch on the theme of the Crucifixion: in the 1954 Figure with meat, the most gruesome of all the papal portraits. The holy Father is seated on his ceremonial throne in the cold room of a slaughter house. Immediately behind his head the splits halves of a beef carcass dangle from the ceiling. The structure of the ribs is faintly reminiscent of angels' wings. Why one wonders, is the Pope screaming? Is he protesting against the fact that the Crucifixion has become part of everyday life, as an endlessly repeated act of torture? Or does he merely wish to be relieved of the burden of witnessing the agony?

      The flesh in the two side panels of the 1962 triptych Three studies for a Crucifixion also seem to have come direct from the abattoir. In the right hand panel it appears to be hung from a hook rather than nailed to a cross. On the left it has a pendant in the shape of the two lumps of meat and bone that Bacon has added in order to emphasise the stench of death, which hangs over the whole arrangement of forms. A further source of inspiration for the right hand panel, by Bacon's own account was the famous Crucifixion attributed to Cimabue. Bacon said that the Christ in this painting had always reminded him of a worm crawling down the cross in a continual wriggling movement, and he wanted to convey at least something of this in the picture. The worm shape is echoed, furthermore, by the blood-spattered creature in the center panel, which is observed by the two witnesses on the left as it writhes on its unmade bed.

      In the 1965 Crucifixion the focus is clearly on the central panel. The three sections of the triptych form a coherent, unified space that - unlike in many of the later triptychs - is not defined as some kind of stage or arena: instead, it is structured by a ground line running straight through the centre of the canvas and connecting the three panels. In contrast to many of Bacon's other interiors, this setting appears almost pedantically clean and tidy. The brown carpet and the monochrome wall covering are entirely free of paint splashes and bloodstains, as if they were scrubbed every day for the benefit of visitors, who are allowed only to see them in immaculate state.

 

 

 

 

PAINT AND SUFFERING: SERIES AND COMMUNITY IN FRANCIS BACON'S PAINTINGS

© Jennifer Dyer
University of Amsterdam
jennifer@sieved.com

1. Introduction: The Visual Aesthetics of Bacon

        Francis Bacon’s paintings are disturbing. His images present active figures who are defined by their activity, but their activity is fraught with violence. I analyze their activity in terms of the activity of actualization itself, which is shown to be a serial process both of construction and destruction in which the viewer participates. It is a process of relating one element to another in the construction of the figure, where each iterative construction differentiates previous constructions. Thus the activity of actualization presented in Bacon’s images is an immanent process of serially iterative constructive activity.

        Bacon’s figures appear to be moving, whether or not they appear to be doing anything. They are both realistically represented and destroyed by Bacon’s representational acts. The figures are situated in mundane places that are also uncanny. They are presented as confined within frames, screaming, or distractedly gazing in reflective concern. While the structure of Bacon’s images is confusing, it encourages the viewer to engage with them. Bacon’s images are often interpreted to be traumatic expressions of the post-war British psyche, where the ongoing destruction of the figure represents the violence, isolation, and pain of modern subjectivity. I argue that the activity of the figure is both its destruction and its emergence: it is an image of the serial activity of actualization as violent and painful process.

        The figures express pain, and thus have the interiority of subjects. But Bacon’s figures do not solicit the viewer’s sympathy, for they gaze into the distance without addressing or engaging with the viewer. Instead, the formal properties of his images, such as skewed perspective and indexical signs, address and engage the viewer’s participation. They tell the viewer where to look and how to look, directing the viewer towards the figure’s activity of actualization. There the viewer is presented with the juxtaposition of realist representation and destructive marks and smears which involve the viewer in constructively relating them in order to actualize the figure. Participation in the activity of the figure is a constructive process of relating one part to another, yet each relational construction both changes or destroys previous constructions and leads to further constructions. Thus the figure’s activity of actualization is a serially iterative process of continual becoming and continual dissolution in which the viewer participates.

        The viewer can never completely realize Bacon’s suffering figures into stable forms because they are defined by the serial activity of actualization. Moreover, by participating in their actualization activity, the viewer is shown to affect the figure: the figure appears to be hurt by the process. Thus my analysis will refer to those by Gilles Deleuze and Ernst van Alphen, who argue that the activity presented in Bacon’s images is that of sensation or affectivity: they show that it is not only the figure that it affected, but also the viewer. By visually enacting the figure’s destruction, the viewer is shown to affect the figure, which leads to the realization that the viewer too is an affective subject. Both Deleuze and van Alphen argue that by making perception a theme which implicates the viewer, Bacon generalizes perception as a model of sensation or affectivity itself. They argue that the activity of actualization is the active process of affectivity; both figure and viewer are uncontrollably made and unmade by the affective process of receiving and responding to sensation. With them, I hold that the subject of Bacon’s image is an affective subject. Yet I contend that the activity of Bacon’s figures is not simply a matter of the interaction of physical forces. The figures’ violence and suffering transcends the physical and places them in an ethical dimension where concern is paramount. In Bacon’s paintings, the serially iterative activity of actualization presents a model of affective and participatory subjectivity.

2. A Familiar Image of Bacon: Tracing the Affect

        Released in1998, the film Love is the Devil offers an interpretation of the famously disturbing works of the modern British painter Francis Bacon. Subtitled Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, the film adopts a biographical approach to understanding the artist’s work which presents perception as a primary theme in his paintings.

        This is first of all because the subtitle plays on a title common to many of Bacon’s paintings, such as Study for a Portrait,1977, Three studies for a portrait of Peter Beard, 1975, Three studies of Figures on Beds, 1972, Two studies for a portrait of George Dyer, 1968, or Three studies for Portrait of Lucien Freud, 1965. Through that allusion, the film claims to present a portrait study of Francis Bacon following the manner of his own portrait studies¹. While the film offers a biographical snapshot of a period in the artist’s life, the subtitle suggests a view of Bacon that is similar to what is assumed to be the artist’s own view of himself and others: Bacon’s paintings are taken as evidence of his perspective on himself, other people, and his environment. In this way, the film attempts to provide insight into the meaning of Bacon’s difficult work by presenting his life from his own point of view. The subtitle also suggests that Bacon’s paintings reveal something true about the people and objects he paints. The belief that his “studies for portraits” are somehow accurate is a presupposition of the film if viewers are to regard the scenes it dramatizes as historically accurate. Bacon is presented under the aegis of his own vision of the world, a vision taken from his paintings. Thus the filmic biography of Francis Bacon is in effect an autobiographical portrait of the artist, recounting events in his life through the supposed perception of the artist and using his art to shed light on the artist’s life and work.

        Secondly, the camera work of the film supports what can be called this self-reflexive objectivization of Francis Bacon. It attempts to suggest if not reproduce the same blurring, deformation and misshaping of figures Bacon presents in his paintings. The “study for a portrait of Francis Bacon” puts Francis Bacon’s studies for portraits into motion, making the film a veritable motion picture by unpacking into a temporal sequence of film frames the “moving quality” of Bacon’s paintings, to use van Alphen’s phrase (11). The Baconesque eye of the camera peers at people in terms of a particular narrative scenario: through bar glasses, dirty windows and drunken blurs, distorting characters’s faces in obvious similarities to their distortion in Bacon’s portraits.

        Yet the point of view not only of Bacon but of other characters is presented as warped and blurred. For example, the objects of Bacon’s partner George Dyer’s gaze are seen through what viewers are led to believe is an alcohol and drug induced haze, showing such things as bathroom sinks and toilet bowls distorted in a manner that quotes many of Bacon’s most famous images. Moreover, Dyer’s vision increasingly blurs as his relationship with Bacon intensifies. The vision of the world found in Bacon’s paintings, which distorts everything it sees, is attributed not only to Bacon but to the people around him. The world of Francis Bacon is presented as both objectively deformed and increasingly deformed by his perception. The film’s story line suggests that the characters’ proximity to Bacon necessarily involves the dissolution of clarity and distinction into deformation and distortion, exemplified by the increasing intimacy between Bacon and Dyer. By presenting Bacon’s vision as already distorted, and showing how it actively infects the vision of others and profoundly changes their lives, Love is the Devil implicitly claims that as a painter Bacon directly represents on his canvases what he sees. He views the world in an unusual, distorted way and paints it as such. The film’s claims to the truth of this interpretation are based on the real effects of his distorting vision on the lives of others; it distorts and deforms their lives. Bacon is actually presented as seeing the world through the distorted perception of his art because the objects of his vision, such as George Dyer, actually becomes distorted, deformed and in some cases destroyed. A causal relation between Bacon’s distorting vision and the subsequent distortions of his environment is explicitly posited in the film.

        The title of the film Love is the Devil presents Bacon as a devilish figure whose love is a destructive, corrupting force. Entering into a relationship with Bacon involves entering the tortured, distorted world evoked in his images. In this way, Bacon is presented as somehow evil. As representations of his destructive vision, his paintings are understood to evince that evil quality. Hence, perception holds ontological primacy in the film because it purports to show how Bacon recreates the world in terms of his own distorted, deformed, and obscure vision of it. The way he sees the world in terms of violent distortions is presented as the way to view his artwork. Otherwise confusing aspects of the artist’s work, such as his use of skewed perspective, his construction of uncanny representational spaces, his inclusion of indexical symbols such as arrows, and his deformations of figures are to be understood in terms of the violence of Bacon’s perception. The basis of this biographical approach is hypothetical: Bacon’s life and vision are considered to be distorted and painful. Francis Bacon’s art is treated as representative of his vision of the world and as directly influenced by what the writer Daniel Farson called Bacon’s “gilded gutter of life”. However, it does open up an approach to understanding what is happening in the images themselves.²

        This is because Love is the Devil presents the experience of viewing Bacon’s paintings as violent. The images are tortuous and confusing to look at, a point on which most commentators of his work agree.³ Figures are warped or mutilated. Shadows are amorphous and threatening extrusions which rarely correspond to the figure shadowed. Depending on where the viewer focuses, light has numerous conflicting sources and tends to obscure rather than clarify what is happening in the images. The frequent presence of light bulbs also acts as an oppressive force on figures, limiting their activities or weighing them down. The perspective structuring the representation of space is often sloppily rendered and skewed, situating the viewer in various and conflicting positions in relation to the image. Figures and parts of figures are enframed, encaged, or boxed into various structures which inexplicably oppress and confine them. The images present mirrors which do not mirror the figures who look into them, or, more perplexingingly, which reflect back to the viewer. The images are marked with arrows and circles which draw the viewer’s attention to details for no obvious reason. Figures are situated in uncanny spaces - familiar yet unknowable – which further confuses a coherent reading of Bacon’s paintings. All subtend the violence of Bacon’s imagery by thwarting the viewer’s efforts to explain it. The ways by which Bacon presents violence are heightened by the ways in which they undermine any rational analysis of it.⁴

        For instance, the 1977 Study for a Portrait is violent and baffling. Seated uncomfortably cross-legged on a chair, the figure of the image transforms under the viewer’s gaze to appear variously like a man in boxer shorts, a grotesque diapered infant, and an ape. Features such as the figure’s eye and nose, ear and neck, and even his knee are rendered with realism. But the realism becomes distorted. Bacon blurs the figure’s face and torso by smearing and wiping the paint, erasing and blurring the realist representation into partial obscurity. The blurring effect makes the figure appear to be caught in motion, but also deformed. Its body appears immobile, while its face gazes passively but warily down the space of the image.

        A bar constrains the lower part of the figure’s legs as he sits within the black space of a wooden box-like structure hovering against a dark iron ceiling and a pink floor-ground. Yet the hovering box also appears to be sliding down both a blue and a yellow rail which extend to the bottom of the canvas. Impossibly, it appears to be simultaneously moving down and hovering in its fixed position. The box also seems to be superimposed over an unseen background, obscuring the horizon line between the pink floor and iron grey space above. Like a mirror, the space of the box projects a space that extends indefinitely within its frame. Not only is the hovering box unlocatable but so is the space within it. The figure is cut off by the lower frame of the box, suggesting his legs continue in a space impossibly larger than the box’s capacity. Furthermore, the space within the box does not exactly correspond to the space the figure occupies, for the bar restraining him within the box is also paradoxically attached to a pole outside it.

        On the pink ground below writhes a thickly impastoed shadow that is dark, substantial and covered with blood-red patches. In virtue of their similar shape and the shadow’s 180° rotation from the figure, it appears to belong to the figure. Yet it also appears to be a lower extension of the figure, oozing out below him, as well as a figure in its own right connected to the main figure by a small charcoal circle. The main figure appears warily to gaze partially at this shadow, partially into the distance. Around the amorphous shadow-figure are patches of white resembling pieces of typewritten paper, like tickets, cigarette packages, or official notices. They are disturbing because, like the shadow-figure, they are ominously covered with streaks of red. However, they also suggest that wherever the figure may be located, it is someplace in the everyday world of litter and garbage.

        Insofar as any one perspective is possible in this image, the viewer’s gaze is situated in the point of view of the main figure because the viewer sees what it can see. Thus the viewer is made perceptually to identify with the figure; not because the figure addresses the viewer, but because their positions in relation to the activity taking place mirror one another. The identification is structural. The figure within the box acts as a mirror image of the viewer. Like the indefinitely extending space surrounding a mirror image, the space of the box presents a realm in which all the space contained within it can never be seen. Given a point of view which reveals as much to the viewer as it does to the figure about the space of the image and what is happening in it, the viewer’s perspective on the scene is mirrored by the figure’s. Yet like a mirror image, the figure remains infinitely far away and isolated from the space of the viewer. Moreover, the figure looks afraid; its expression of pain suggests it has an interiority, thus indicating that it is an individual subject like the viewer. There is a psychic, sympathetic identification with the figure as a subject whose point of view the viewer shares.

        However, this sympathetic identification does not make the viewer any less helpless in understanding or explaining the painful event. As Ernst van Alphen suggests in his critical analysis Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, the conventions of visual representation employed here, such as realistic representation, a perspectival system of representation, and a sympathetic identification with the figure through a shared point of view, draw the viewer into the image. The viewer is led to identify with the painful and confusing event portrayed by becoming entangled in its diverging representational schemes. Made to identify with the figure’s pain, the viewer remains isolated from the figure who doesn’t even address her gaze. Any attempt visually to synthesize the image into a coherent narrative account is thus continually frustrated by the various ways the viewer is led around the image. As the film suggests, violence and vision are intimately related in Bacon’s paintings.

3. Violence, Suffering ,and Freedom
 

        My analysis of Francis Bacon’s paintings maintains that they are indeed violent in the ways articulated by the film. They present the viewer with images of unremitting pain and suffering which lead the viewer to identify with them. For this reason, my analysis seriously considers the argument put forward by van Alphen that perception and affectivity are primary to the presentation of violence in Bacon’s paintings because the perceptive activity of the viewer is affected by and implicated in the violence presented in the images. His analysis of the affectivity defining the viewer’s response to Bacon’s images is similar to that offered by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose work Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation analyzes the sensational affect of Bacon’s images. Deleuze argues that Bacon’s images present affectivity in terms of the structure of the violently deforming sensation. In different ways, both van Alphen and Deleuze interpret affectivity to be a given feature of existence. Van Alphen argues that affectivity is articulated in Bacon’s images in terms of the affected force of the body’s resistance to representational or discursive systems which limit it in stultifying subject positions. Affectivity is seen as dissolving the constrictions of subjectivity, releasing the figures from the constraints of fixed representations. By contrast, Deleuze argues affectivity is articulated in terms of the structure of violent sensation, which he understands to be the universal structure of the activity of becoming. Deleuze claims that Bacon’s images present an account of the activity of the actualization of all things – whether they be perceiving subjects, animals, or sand dunes -- as a violent and continual process of becoming. Although they offer different and often conflicting interpretations of the violence in Bacon’s images, I take the analyses of van Alphen and Deleuze as my starting point and endorse the view that Bacon’s images are violent.

        Yet I contend that Bacon’s images do more than just present violence as an element of the activity of actualization. In the face of violence and suffering, Bacon’s images ask “Is there that which transcends them?”. This question arises because violence and suffering mean much more than the mere relative play of opposing physical forces.⁵ In Bacon, violence and suffering have an ethical dimension, and only for that reason are they offensive. The mere play of opposing physical forces is not suffering, because for there to be suffering there must be something over and above physical interaction. The struggle presented in Bacon’s images is not the physical attraction and repulsion of forces, but the opposition between the physical and that which opposes it: the non-physical, the dimension of freedom that transcends the physical. Violence and suffering in the proper meaning of those terms are nothing other than the struggle of the physical and the non-physical which, as presented in the serial structure of Bacon’s paintings and the viewer’s response that they demand, is the struggle of embodied freedom.

        Van Alphen rightly describes the activity in Bacon’s paintings as the “ongoing fragmentation of the body” that instigates the ongoing fragmentation of its subject (15, 190).⁶ Deleuze interprets it to be the infinite process of becoming-other (1994:177). My analysis complements these views, for I argue that the activity is presented as the serially iterative activity of actualization. Like van Alphen and Deleuze, I hold that the activity of the image is presented in the process of its happening and is located at the site of the figure. However, rather than interpreting this activity negatively as distorting, deforming activity, I suggest it involves an element of construction: the serially iterative activity of actualization is the free activity of constructing differences. That is, the activity of the actualization of the figure is understood in a twofold way. It is destructive because by continually differentiating the figure it continually destroys the figure. The activity appears to unmake the realist representation of Bacon’s figures, which is why they appear to be in the process of dissolving, distorting, or destructing. However, the activity of Bacon’s figures is equally constructive because the viewer is made visually to construct the figure out of the turbulence. For this reason, the activity of actualization is understood to be a differentiating activity because the figure is presented as continually differentiating in relation to the viewer. The viewer’s role in relation to the activity is crucial. When the image is understood to reflect back the viewer’s own acts of looking and thus implicate the viewer in the activity of the image, as van Alphen rightly contends, the viewer performs the activity of the actualization of the figure. The viewer is directed by the structure of the image to enact the figure’s activity according to a serially ordered relational structure. As Bacon’s images present this activity, it is ongoing and centralized at the figure: it is the figure’s free acts of construction out of the continual violence of its destruction.

        A fundamental feature of the activity of actualization as it is presented in Bacon’s images is affectivity. The activity of actualization is a matter of exchange and interaction: it is the reception of affective stimuli that compels a response. Yet as I will show, the suffering nature of the response to affectivity endured by Bacon’s figures and enacted by the viewer is more than a matter of affective stimuli. Bacon’s figures are continually transforming or actualizing differently because they are continually affected differently. This is the basis of the violence they endure: the structure of the activity of actualization is an affective structure which perpetually differentiates the figure from what it was. Yet by presenting the figures as suffering, Bacon’s images show that the physical interplay of opposing forces continually inflicted on and affecting the figures involves something more than physical struggle. Thus the interpretation of Bacon’s images must include something more than a materialist, physicalist or mechanical interpretation of the process of giving and receiving affect. The freedom to respond cannot be reduced to the attractive and repulsive play of forces; rather, it is an ultimate and underivable element in the activity of actualization. It is my contention that in Bacon’s paintings, the underivable element of freedom is always embodied, suffering freedom, and it is this embodied, suffering freedom that is presented in the serially iterative structure of his images and in the contemplative, concerned, pained, or resisting comportment of his figures.

4. The Violence and Suffering of the Serial Figure
 

        Viewing Bacon’s images entangles the viewing subject in them. The analyses of van Alphen and Deleuze show that Bacon’s images are affective images which ensnare the viewer in the violence they present. They destabilize the viewing subject by putting into question what both theorists show to be very basis of the viewer’s subjectivity, namely affective embodiment.⁷ In this way, Bacon’s images take the role of the viewer seriously by making the viewer’s acts of perception crucial to their structure. When perception and affectivity are understood to be the subject of Bacon’s paintings, the perception of the viewing subject is required to be subject to the paintings. Because they are also violent images, the viewing subject is subject to their violence. Yet there is more going on than the violent destabilization of the subject of Bacon’s paintings, whether that subject is understood to be the figure or the viewer. Bacon’s images insist that there is meaning in that infliction of violence which viewers are made to realize when they are drawn into the images.⁸ Because it is presented in the context of violent pain and suffering, this meaning is more than the presentation of subjects as active material objects.

        The violence of the affective exchange enacted between the viewing subject and the figure reveals that the ultimate fact of affective embodiment involves something which transcends the body, something which transcends the affective interplay of physical forces. The violence involves an ethical dimension which the viewer realizes by being made to participate in the conflict enacted in and by Bacon’s images.⁹ The violent structure of his paintings forces the viewer to enact a tragic struggle between freedom and the physical.¹⁰ For the violence of Bacon’s images is presented in terms of suffering: the suffering of the figure and, on van Alphen’s analysis, the suffering of the viewer.¹¹ But there can be neither violence nor suffering in the play of physical forces unless something else is present, namely the freedom to respond which is not reducible to physical force.

        Crucial to an understanding of the violence and suffering of Bacon’s paintings is his presentation of them as active dynamical relations. The fact that the paintings present violence in the process of its happening is fundamental to what I hold to be their ethical meaning. This is because Bacon’s paintings reveal the viewer to be affected, and they compel an affective response from the viewer.¹² They direct the structure of that response in terms of the structure of affectivity. As both van Alphen and Deleuze show, the structure of the viewer’s response is performative: it is a matter of participatorily enacting the activity of the actualization of the figure in terms of its affective structure.¹³ The affective structure of the figure is reflected back to the viewer, who is thus understood to be, not a stable, fixed self, but a self that is constantly in the process of becoming. The viewer is subject to the activity of actualization that continually differentiates perceiving subjects. Deleuze’s critical analysis of this activity reveals that, although not structured by the perceiving subject, the activity of actualization is nevertheless structured by serially ordered acts of construction. I contend that this convincing interpretation of Bacon’s paintings involves the further element of freedom, for the serially iterative act of construction is articulated by Bacon’s images as intrinsically involving a dimension of freedom and it is this which defines what it means to be affected. The freedom of both the viewer’s acts or perception and the figure’s acts of response helps to explain both why Bacon’s figures appear to be suffering and why viewers can find Bacon’s images ultimately uplifting despite their violence.¹⁴

        The structure of serially iterative acts of construction is presented in terms of the affective ways Bacon’s images implicate the viewer’s visual activity. The viewer’s acts of perception are implicated in the images by Bacon’s unorthodox use of traditional pictorial means such as skewed perspectival schemes, indexical signs, isolating structures, lapses in realism, apathetic figures, mundane situations, and an unending narrative sequence of events.

        Bacon’s use of perspective is similar to Degas’: it draws the viewer into the images by positioning the viewer in different points of view in relation to them. For instance, from certain angles the viewer is given the point of view of the main figure and so led to identify with the figure’s position in the violent enactment. But that point of view is always shifted to another, leaving the viewer in an unstable viewing position in relation to the image. Bacon does not hide the fact that the viewer is given an insecure and vacillating viewing position in relation to his images. For instance, the cages, boxes, rails, beds, and chairs on or in which the figure is situated are ostentatiously rendered in a sloppy way. This maintains the uncertainty and mobility of the viewer’s perspective on the image. The viewer is not put in a mastering, directing position in relation to the image. Instead, the viewer is directed around the image with no stable perspectival position in relation to it. Because Bacon’s skewed perspectival structures are centred around the figure, they situate the viewer in a variety of shifting points of view on the figure. In a use of perspective similar to Degas’, the viewer is made to perceive the figure from various angles: from above, below, beside, before, and even behind the figure. Thus the viewer is given visual mobility in relation to the figure.¹⁵

        Another reason for the instability of the viewer’s perspectival position is Bacon’s use of indexical signs, such as arrows and circles, which are set off from the pictorial representation on the canvas. They are flatly painted on top of the picture plane, which emphasizes the fact that the paintings are two-dimensional representations. The signs are not representational features of Bacon’s images but pointers indicating how to move around them. They address the viewer by indicating where to look and directing the gaze from one element to another. Hence the indexical signs make clear that the viewing subject is not a directing subject. Bacon’s signs position the viewer external to the activity presented, participating in it not by adopting the figure’s position within the image but by moving around the structure of the picture plane. Where the perspectival scheme offers numerous angles on the figure, the signs tell where to focus visual attention. They urge the viewer semiotically to engage with the image by signposting potentially meaningful pictorial elements. Thus they have the further effect of suggesting there is meaning to be made.

        Within the skewed perspectival structures, Bacon isolates his figures on circumscribing structures that also focus the viewer’s attention on the figure as the locus of activity. Excepting some of his portrait studies which tend to isolate the figures in empty black space, Bacon situates his figures in cages, beds, boxes, chairs, raised floors, platforms, rings, swings, strings and tracks. This has a number of effects. The first is the centralization of the figure, which not only directs the viewer’s visual attention to the figure as a main element in the image, but also suggests that the meaning of other elements should be interpreted in relation to it. Secondly, these structures accentuate the structured nature of the activity happening in them. For instance, the circular structure around Figure at a Washbasin, 1976, emphasizes the curved convulsions of the figure’s movement; the flatly planar and undulated bed of Sleeping Figure, 1974, enhances the flattening activity of the figure’s sleep; the vertical lines of the cage in Head VI, 1949, emphasize the dissolving, vertical descent that is happening; both the strings looped across the canvas and the rings of the tires on which the figure rides in Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle, 1966, heighten the precariousness of his balance and focus the activity on the turns of his pedalling movement. These circumscribing devices emphasize and guide the viewer’s perception towards the structure of the figure’s activity. Thirdly, the circumscribing devices have the iconographical suggestion of sacrificial altars, especially when they are beds, tables, crucifixes, and raised platforms on which the figure is outstretched. In the context of the violent deformations to the figure’s representation and the violent iconography, situating the figure on an isolating structure sets the figure off as a particularly significant event of suffering.

        As indicated above, Bacon’s stylistic lapses in and out of realist representation incite the viewer to participate in the activity presented in his paintings. Initially, they can be understood to complicate the viewer’s participation in the image, giving the viewer the role of either constructing or destructing the figure. On the one hand, Bacon’s use of realism urges the viewer to see the image realistically and discern real portraits out of his studies by visually reconstructing the wipes and smears that deform the realism. In order to do this, the viewer must engage in the figure’s activity of actualization and perform it with the figure. The viewer must construct the missing and unclear parts of the figure’s representation. On the other hand, Bacon’s blurring swipes at the realism force the viewer to reconsider her representational expectations. By highly gestural sweeps with his brush, blobs, dots or thrown streaks of paint, and random markings, Bacon’s acts of representing the figures ravage their representations by erasing, deforming or negating them. The ravaged areas are where the activity of the image is most perspicuous and they are usually where the indexical signs direct the viewer to look. From this perspective, the viewer is made visually to move with the deforming blurs and smears and to destruct the figure, revealing that the realism presents the figure as incomplete.

        Two primary effects emerge out of Bacon’s lapsing realism. First, whether viewers perceive the figure in terms of the realism or the blurring deformations, the figure is presented as incompletely realized. It is either always in the process of realization or always in the process of dissolving; both ways present the figure in the process of differentiation. Secondly, Bacon’s explicit facture or acts of representing his figures are presented as part of the figures themselves. Even the most minimal presence of realist representation indicates that all the marks articulating the figure are the actualization of the figure. The artist’s activity of representing the figure is transferred to the figure, which means the figure is presented in the process of differentiating or continually actualizing itself as different. The incompleteness of the figure is related to its continual process of actualizing differently. It is not completely realized because it is undergoing its activity of actualization. Furthermore, because there is nothing in the presentation which indicates an end point or telos to its activity of actualization, the figure’s activity of actualization is presented as ongoing.

        For this reason, the viewer’s constructive or destructive visual engagement with the activity of the figure can be understood to be an activity which actualizes the figure. By visually following Bacon’s differentiating articulation of the figure under the direction of the indexical signs, the viewer is led visually both to construct the figure and to destroy it. Thus the viewer’s engagement neither deforms nor reforms the figure but transforms it. The viewer continually transforms the figure’s representation by relating Bacon’s blurs, marks, and streaks of paint. Each mark leads into another to actualize the figure anew. The process of relating these marks is an iterative process because each act of relation differentiates what came before. The process is serial because each new iterative act changes the order of relation that constructs the figure. The viewer is implicated in a process of serially iterative acts of construction that continually actualizes the figure differently. In this way, Bacon’s overt acts of painting implicate the viewer’s acts of perception. The viewer is involved in the process of differentiating the figure from what it was as she moves through the image, actualizing the figure by serially relating elements to other elements and moving through different perspectival angles around the figure. The viewer’s activity is the serially iterative differentiation of the figure as she is directed around it by Bacon’s facture, perspective, signs and contours.

        For instance, looking at Figure at a Washbasin, presents the viewer with a male figure who appears to be in the process of heaving into a sink. Like most of Bacon’s figures, this one is vertebral, but seems to be held together not by a formative skeletal armature but by the spasms and stimuli of its nervous system, as Bacon himself insists (Bacon, in Sylvester, 58). The figure is a writhing, convulsive organism, constructed of unstable areas of disturbance. His back contorts in a flux of arcs that result, on the right, with his tautly held head and, on the left, with a spasm of legs. Clear delineation is produced through Michelangelo-like thick musculature: the figure’s upper arms and shoulders strain to support him and appear to emerge out of the fluctuating arcs of his back’s vigorous convulsions. This can only be seen, however, by visually relating together the various lines and tonal values of Bacon’s articulation of the figure. The arrow directs the viewer to look at the figure’s back and move from one faded outline to the next and then to the next. The shifting tones of grey, pink, and brown move the viewer’s gaze onto the figure’s body, in and out of spinal recesses and raised muscles, always moving. From one area to another, the viewer constructs what she sees, but each construction changes what was made before. Moving down his back, the heavy curved arc is seen to be the figure’s buttock. Moving down further, that arc is related to the next and reconfigures it into a shudder of his lower torso, while the next arc is seen to define the figure’s buttock.
 

5. Violence, Suffering, and Concern
 

        This serially iterative constructive activity is performed throughout the viewer’s visual movement around the figure’s body. It is a matter of constructing the form of the figure in terms of the articulation Bacon’s acts of painting give. Yet constructing the figure involves continually differentiating and destructing what was already constructed. The figure can never be completely realized because, as one part is related with another to form a specific area of the figure’s body, that part then relates to another part differently and changes how the figure was previously perceived. For instance, the curve under the figure’s shoulder looks like its knee. Yet when that knee is related to the leg extended behind it, the curve under the knee also appears to be the knee. There is no way to synthesize the figure’s form into a completed whole because the visual activity which viewers are directed by the image to perform is an ongoing process of serially iterative acts of constructing the figure anew. Participating in the figure’s activity of actualization means continually differentiating the construction of its body. The violence of the image is not only due to the narrative of sickness suggested in the imagery. It is also the violence of the transformations the figure undergoes as the viewer perceives it. The figure suffers through a continual destruction and reconstruction of the stability and security of form.

        While Bacon’s figures continually differentiate or actualize anew in terms of the viewer’s process of looking, Bacon is nevertheless careful minimally to maintain their recognizable form. Viewers can recognize the concentration of activity in the main figure, and can recognize whether it is more human or animal, male or female, in more or less pain. Yet the figure’s form is a matter of the continual actualization of its form. It is presented in the process of coming-to-be and perishing simultaneously, which is to say the activity of the actualization of the figure is the activity of its differentiation from what it was. The making of the figure implies its unmaking. Paradoxically, it is not the areas of realism which are found to shape the figure, but the areas of Bacon’s dynamic deformations of those areas. The figure’s body is held together by the acts of Bacon’s fluid contour delineations, scrubbing, rubbing, and dynamic facture. In this way, the figure’s body is constructed by the acts which dissolve it. Construction and destruction are interrelated features of its activity of actualization.
 

        It is in this context that Bacon’s paintings are seen to be physically violent. The figure’s bodies are painful to look at because they are presented in the process of their destruction. And as I have explained, even when the viewer interpretively enacts this activity as constructive it is still destructive on account of the very nature of the activity of actualization as a differentiating activity. The violence Bacon’s figures undergo is most forcefully expressed through their bodies, even in the figures who scream. The figures rarely look towards the viewer, and in the images where they do, such as the centre panel of Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1980, or Study for Portrait (Michel Leiris), 1978, they appear to look through rather than at the viewer, as if preoccupied with something else. The figures do not address the viewer visually to plea for help or sympathy, for instance. The address to the viewer is performed by Bacon’s indexical signs. The figure’s pain is presented through the continual destruction of its body. Twisting, writhing, and mutating, it physically reacts to forces which continually ravage it.¹⁶

        However, Bacon’s figures are not just presented as bodies in the process of their destruction. They are presented as suffering bodies, bodies which experience pain on account of the continual acts of violence they endure, especially in the context of threatening imagery. This is because Bacon’s figures unexpectedly appear contemplative or distracted. The screaming faces of some of Bacon’s figures and the contemplative attitudes of others differ from the physical violence they sustain. This indicates there is more being presented than physical destruction. In their states of ceaseless actualization, Bacon’s figures do not appear oblivious to the activity of actualization which continually makes them different. There is violence and suffering because in various ways the figures appear to reflect on the destructive activity happening on and in their bodies.¹⁷

        The reflective comportment of Bacon’s figures manifests the suffering of concern. In the face of such violent, physical transformations, this reflection transforms the physicality of the violence itself. For where there is listening, waiting, watching, contemplation, distraction, and repose, there is concern, and concern belongs to a dimension that is other than the physical. The scream is pained; the apathetic look is the resigned concern about the inevitability of what is happening. The reflective attitude of Bacon’s figures shows that the affective is distinct from and more than that which affects. The violence they endure is not entirely physical because it is recognized by them as violence.

        The nature of the figures transcends the physical because their reflective comportment indicates that their pain cannot be reduced to mere materiality. For example, in the triptych Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, 1973, Bacon is shown in three different representations of the process of transforming. Yet Bacon’s face appears concerned or preoccupied with something else. While the viewer’s gaze is busy with the activity concentrated and enframed in his face by the heavy contours which set it off from the background and the canvas edge which foreshortens it, Bacon’s gaze is directed away, with all the apathy of a mug-shot. The response suggested in his expression does not correlate with the violent undoing of his face. The process of deformation happening to the distractedly contemplative face in Study for Portrait (Michel Leiris),1978, is a process of grotesque mutations rather than gentle differentiations. Yet Leiris’ expression is contemplative to the point of resignation. Similarly, the figures in the first panel of Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962, appear to accept the ongoing process of their deformation. The figure on the left appears to gaze in resignation while the figure on the right seems to glance in acknowledgement. In the central panel, the figure reclines on the bed, as if Manet’s Olympia, 1863, were drawing up her legs, and the figure grins spitefully during the self destruction of its own body. In the right panel, the array of meat on the inverse crucifix yells out of the mouth in its stomach. The screaming pope in Bacon’s Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X,1953, grips his chair and screams as not only he, but the entire image, either disintegrates into the modulating void of black lines in a rapidly descending fury from the top down, or emerges in a rapid ascension from the foreground white robes up into the modulating void. Although the figure screams, it does not get up. The figure sufferingly stiffens and endures. All of these are responses to the physical force of the figure’s destruction which cannot be explained by force alone.¹⁸

        The reflective responses of the figures also suggests that while the destruction is violent and causes suffering, it is not entirely extraordinary. The figures do not react with horrified surprise; they endure the violence done to them. Bacon’s figures are presented performing mundane, ordinary acts, such as turning their heads, vomiting, defecating, copulating, wrestling, walking, sleeping, sitting, or screaming. Even when the figure screams it continues sitting. The fact that Bacon’s figures continue to perform everyday, routine activities while their bodies are in the process of coming apart suggests that the activity of actualization they endure is not extraordinary but the very order of the mundane: it is the ordinary. The painful process of actualization is manifested differently throughout the different routine activities the figures perform, but it is not presented as a pain the figures can either do anything to stop or from which they can escape. Some scream in response, others carry on with what they are doing, but none of Bacon’s figures can disentangle themselves from it. For instance, the seated Figure Writing Reflected in a Mirror, 1976, appears preoccupied with what he is doing and less concerned with his pain than the screaming pope in Head VI, 1949, who appears to brace himself in order fully to face the pain of the violent activity that continually differentiates his body. In both extreme instances, the figures appear to live with their ongoing pain as a feature of what they are.

        The uncanny setting in which Bacon’s figures are situated further emphasizes the everyday nature of figures’ violence and suffering. The very reason the settings are uncanny is that although isolated from any familiar environment, they still appear to be familiar, mundane places. The familiar aspect of the setting, the figures’ performance of mundane activities, and their contemplative attitudes help to identify the viewer with the figures by identifying with the everyday nature of their situations. Furthermore, the everyday settings and activities, as well as the distracted concern of the figures, characterize the violent activity of actualization that transforms them as mundane. It is not violent in the sense of exceptional. The violence of the activity of actualization is not out of the ordinary.

        The mundanity of the event encourages a narrative reading of it. Given figural characters performing everyday acts in a minimally familiar setting, the viewer can treat the image as the representation of everyday events. The presentation of contemplative and suffering figures in ordinary situations who undergo violent transformations makes the images intriguing; the viewer is compelled to figure out the plot.¹⁹ For this reason, van Alphen argues that

                              Bacon’s paintings display many signs which traditionally signify narrativity,
                              and thus stimulate a narrative reading, [however] by the same token any
                              attempt to postulate narratives based on the painting is countered (30).

By juxtaposing a violent event in the process of its happening with representations of mundane activities, the image draws the viewer to speculate on the nature of the event without giving the viewer an actual storyline.²⁰ As Andrew Forge argues, the narrative can never be discerned because the “boundaries of a story are refused” (Forge, 31).

        The mundane familiarity of the suggested narrative is another way by which the viewer is led to identify with the distractedly deforming figures. While violently distorted, the figures appear to be situated in the everyday world. Yet Bacon’s images do not present traditional narratives with a beginning and an end to a sequence of episodes. The event is ongoing, always in the process of its happening, and the viewer’s unfolding series of relationally constructive acts that actualize the figure endow the activity happening in the image with a sequential structure. This underscores the viewer’s role in the enactment of the activity of actualization. The viewer’s activity does not unfold a chronicle of events, it performs the events. The viewer’s activity is thus crucially involved in the activity presented, for the viewer’s process of enactment is the serially iterative process of the activity of the actualization of the event of the figure. Only in terms of the viewer’s performance of the activity of actualization can the images be said to be narrative.²¹

        Further, part of the uncanny nature of Bacon’s settings is their timelessness. Bacon’s diptychs and triptychs, which traditionally would be read as a narrative of events continued through each panel, instead isolate their figures from one another and present neither narrative movement nor temporal development of the figure. Bacon’s imagery neither indicates day or night nor includes readable clocks and calendars. The only temporal suggestion in the images is found in the iconography, such as the figures’ clothing, hairstyles, furniture, light bulbs, cameras, cigarettes, and pens. This iconography situates the events approximately in middle-class, mid-twentieth century Western culture. However, the provision of the setting with an era only reinforces its mundane familiarity by situating the events presented in the everyday world. It provides an historical link between the figures and the viewer by presenting the figures in terms of a historical, culturally specific narrative. Yet, once again, this narrative is confounded because, despite the historical time-frame, there is nothing of historical importance being presented. The activity of actualization the figures endure is not presented as specific to that historical epoch but as underlying the everyday activities particular to that period. It is an ongoing feature of the world. Thus the viewer is given suffering figures who undergo transformative events without the structure of a plot or storyline, a cause, or a resolution.

        The ways in which Bacon presents the violent exchange of affectivity in his images and through his figures implicate the viewer in the activity of the images. The viewer is affected by the images, directed to assume various perspectival relations and visually concentrate on various areas of the images in order to understand them. Moreover, the viewer is led to focus on the activity concentrated at the figure and, ultimately, to actualize the figure out of the maelstrom of marks which articulate its presence. The viewer visually actualizes the figure by performing the serially iterative process of relating one part to another in order to articulate the figure’s body. Each act of serial iteration constructs a part of the figure in relation to a previous part; each act always leads to another and differentiates the construction from what it was. The viewer’s process of visually actualizing the figure is ongoing and relationally structured in a serially iterative order of events.²² However, it is not solely directed by the image because the viewer is free within the structure of the figure to decide where and how the serial relations will be constructed. Thus the very structure that Bacon’s images present the viewer reveals that the affectivity of the viewer involves more than the interaction of physical forces. This is true of the figure as well, for the figures response to the activity of its ongoing destruction is reflective. Suffering is shown to be underivable from the physical forces of affectivity, and it is on this basis alone that Bacon’s images can be understood to be what they are: violent images of suffering figures. Bacon’s figures suffer because they are shown reflectively to respond to the forces that destroy their bodies with acts that transcend physical reaction, such as repose, resignation, waiting, and sleep. Thus their suffering is also put in the context of everyday activities and scenarios; they live with their pain. For these reasons, the activity of actualization of the figure in which the viewer is participatorily implicated is to be understood as ordinary, familiar, ongoing and concerned. In Bacon, the ordinary is not reducible to material forces. It is the empathically affected world of concern.
 

Violence, Suffering, and Community
 

        In Bacon, the varying intensities of colour and his acts of deforming his figures are so rendered that looking at a figure in one particular way, for instance from a certain angle or along a certain contour, leads to something new. The figure in Portrait of George Dyer Crouching, 1966, for instance, appears to be moving because the viewer serially relates elements of the figure’s articulation with other elements, such as one contour with another contour, a tonal value, a smear, or an area of realism. Each element articulating the figure iterates into another; each act of serially iterative actualization performed by the viewer constructs it anew and therefore differentiates the presentation of the figure from what it was. Because the viewer serially iterates the ongoing activity articulating the figure, the viewer’s acts of iteratively constructing the figure are ongoing, which means the activity of actualization of the figure is ongoing. Yet while the serially iterative acts of constructing the figure differentiate how it is seen continually, no individual act of construction is lost in the process.

        This is the active, moving quality of the figure: visually enacting the serially iterative process of actualizing the figure constructs an order of relations that shapes the figure in a certain way. With each new serially iterative act of construction, the order of relations changes, and therefore the structure of the figure changes. It transforms before the viewer’s eyes in terms of the viewer’s serially iterative and constructive acts of perception. For example, the uppermost contour of the figure’s back remains exactly that when it is related to the contour beneath and seen also to be the farthest shoulder blade. Related to the head, the contour is also the muscular tension of a neck, and also the heaving arc of a torso in a rigorous inhalation of breath. Each contour remains the same and each perceptual construction of it remains the same. The viewer’s perception of the figure does not radically differentiate the figure but cumulatively differentiates the order of relations that structure it. With each new serially iterative act of visual construction, the significance of previous acts is altered. The figure is a relational whole because the connected parts compose what is easily distinguished as the main figure. In this way, the structure of Bacon’s figures is similar to the structure of Edgar Degas’ figures, for it implicates the viewer’s visual activity and directs the viewer performatively to enact the serially iterative, constructive activity of the figure’s actualization.²³ In the work of both artists, the figure is understood in terms of the activity that makes it what it is. Moreover, in both cases the figure is never completely realized. However, in Bacon’s images the fundamental incompleteness of the figure which derives from its becoming-process is presented as painful. Each act of differentiating the figure is an act of constructing and of destroying the figure. Each deformation and intensity is preserved as it leads into another, differentiating the presentation of the figure without being subsumed in the relational transformation. The figure is a serially iterative differentiating unity.

        The differential structure of sensation, which is Deleuze’s activity of actualization, is in Bacon one of cumulative, serially ordered acts of free construction. Hence the structure of Bacon’s images can be understood in relation to the structure of Mondrian’s images as well, for they are both open structures which the viewing subject freely actualizes. Yet Bacon’s images do not situate the viewer in relation to the image as its principle of actualization, for the activity of actualization is in Bacon presented in the process of its happening. The viewer is drawn to identify with the figure and to participate in its becoming-process. But the viewer’s identification with the figure is a matter of affectivity: the viewer’s acts of perception are affected by the structure of the figure and drawn to participate in the violence the figure sufferingly endures.

        Violence and suffering are presented in both the theme and structure of Bacon’s images. They inform the iconography of his subject matter; Bacon’s ravaged figures are isolated, naked, distracted and concerned, sometimes all in the same image. When the figures are not alone in a single image, they are put in relation to other figures who are often sinister, indifferent, or voyeuristic. The figures are surrounded by the iconography of pain, such as sickness and malaise, blood, swastikas, crucifixes, or syringes, and they are presented trapped in and sometimes screaming because of the violence they endure. There is neither jubilance nor serene relief in Bacon’s images. Because the activity of actualization is ongoing, the figures are in a permanent and devastating state of destruction. The viewer’s participation in the figure’s activity of actualization ravages the figure as it represents it, revealing the violence of both the viewer’s and the figure’s responses to affectivity. In this context of violence, the significance of the free act in Bacon becomes crucial.

        Freedom is what ultimately distinguishes the figure from the viewer who participates in its actualization. The activity of the figures in the paintings is more than the activity of actualization performed by the viewer. Van Alphen argues that the viewer participates in the violence inflicted on the figure, for the viewer’s acts of perception are made relevant to the activity performed in the matrix of the figure. The viewer’s acts of perception are directed by the affective structure of the figure freely to actualize it. But the viewer does not freely actualize the figure’s response to that affective activity. The independent suffering of the figures, shown in their contemplative, distracted, screaming, or resigned but never jubilant or peaceful comportment, is part of the activity of the images. Their concern is independent of the viewer, something more than the viewer’s performance of their activity of actualization. This is why we are able to say that Bacon’s figures are suffering figures and that Bacon’s paintings are violent: there is that in them which is independent of the physical interplay of forces and which is not only enacted by the viewer but presented in the images.

        Furthermore, the serially iterative structure of free acts of construction presented by Bacon’s images reveals the structure of the affected subject to be communal. The serially iterative free act of construction which the viewer performs and by which the figure is actualized defines the relation between the two. Because the activity of actualization is serially iterative, viewer and figure share a history. That is, the structure of affectivity is one by which one subject participates in another. This is not a form-bestowing but rather a communal relationship; in Bacon, the structure of the affective subject is shown to be open and public. As constituted by their own acts of construction, both figure and viewer are indeed independent centres of response. Yet because the serially iterative constructive activity that relates the viewer to the figure is not merely mechanical, the communal nature of affectivity is not merely a relationship of opposing forces. It is a relationship of openness and sympathy, of being affected by and participating in the activity of the other even in the most adverse situations.

        On these terms, the viewer of Bacon’s images is brought into a serially iterative relation of affectivity with the figure by iteratively experiencing the affectivity of the other. That is, the viewer sympathizes with the figure. The disturbing violence of Bacon’s paintings brings the viewer to a communal and sympathetic exchange with the other which rises above both the form-bestowing relationship of representational subjectivity and the mere mechanism of the physical by affectively iterating the pain of the other. The iterative interdependence of free individuals transcends their physical constraints and suffering. This is not the interdependence of essentially atomic centres of activity. It is the interdependence of beings whose affectivity, far from being a matter of opposing forces, is a matter of sympathy and concern. Here, affectivity transcends the merely physical and transforms it into a dynamical relation of reciprocity in which we find ourselves to be members of one another.²⁴ The shock of Bacon’s work lies not in its dismemberments but in the discovery of our embodied sociality.
 

NOTES

1. On the presupposed veracity and iconicity of portraiture, see Brilliant (chs. 1,3) and Lejeune (109-118).

2. See Farson. The film Love is the Devil is partially based on Farson’s book.

3. See, for instance, van Alphen, Deleuze (1981), Schmied, Gowing and Hunter, and Russell.

4. This is why Kuspit claims they are “hysterical paintings” (1986).

5. Kuspit sees something over and above physical violence in Bacon’s work, even if he does not see it as anything more than “energy and emotion” (1986:57).

6. Nochlin (2001) also argues that Bacon’s paintings are about fragmentation. She calls the fragmentations “deliberate destructions”, and argues that Bacon’s images express the fragmentation of modern subjects, linking fragmentation to historical events and social conditions.

7. Deleuze’s analysis of sensation is his account of the active, moving quality of Bacon’s images and how it implicates the viewer. Understood as paintings of sensations, Bacon’s images are events of the violent affectivity of the figure. They are its activity of actualization presented in the process of its happening. Bacon’s figures are not stable objects of perception, but sensations presented as sensible aggregates which affect the viewer. Viewers’ acts of perceiving the figure are continually affected by what they perceive because they continually perceive the figure differently and are compelled not merely to receive the affect of the figure but to respond to it. Viewers are made to perform the figure’s activity of actualization. The  viewer’s response is directed by the structure of the sensation, the structure of the becoming process or activity of actualization of the figure. That is, the viewer is made to experience the image as a sensory affect: perceiving it demands being affected by it. This is what makes Bacon’s paintings strike “immediately onto the nervous system” (Bacon, in Sylvester, 58). Like van Alphen’s “mechanical process” of affective perception (47), Deleuze’s sensation is a composition of forces structured according to the intensive synthesis of differential relations. Hence sensation is the process of sensation. Sensation is what it does. To understand Bacon’s paintings is to understand what they do, for to perceive them is to enact their affectivity or activity of actualization. This, van Alphen and Deleuze claim, is the basis of the active, moving quality and of the violence in Bacon’s images, for these forces are not caused by will but are necessary.

8. For instance, Kuspit claims “Bacon’s paint spontaneously presents us with an authentic, compelling image – an image to which we feel committed, inescapably bound” (1986:57).

9. The claims that Bacon’s violent images present the dignity of the body, the trauma of war, or the existential internal conflict of the human subject do not fully explain them. Yet they are important because they recognize that there is meaning in the images and that it is something more than the physical brutality of what happens in them. See Russell; Gowing and Hunter; Kuspit (1986).

10.  John Hatch’s analysis of fate as the theme and the method of Bacon’s paintings makes a similar point. Basically, Hatch reads Bacon’s paintings as presenting the struggle between individual will and the physical forces of ‘fate’. Thematically, this is understood as the struggle between individual desires and social convention, the drives of the unconscious, religious doctrines, and public laws. In relation to Bacon’s painting practice, it is the struggle between Bacon’s painterly intentions and the spontaneity of the paint. Hatch’s analysis hints at freedom without ever fully explaining how it is worked out in either Bacon’s subject matter or his practice.

11. This is the starting point of van Alphen’s analysis, which begins with the claim that “Seeing a work by Francis Bacon hurts” (9). It is also where Deleuze’s analysis begins, for he claims that Bacon paints a new type of relation between figures and figures to the world, namely “ces nouveaux rapports matters of fact, par opposition aux relations intelligibles (d’objets ou d’idees)”, where matters of fact are analyzed as given sensations (1981:10). It is also the basis of Michel Leiris’ analysis. He claims “What Bacon offers in most of his paintings ... are ... depictions of living people or normally banal objects – endowed, or at least apparently so, with a certain figurative veracity directly referential to phenomena experienced through the medium of the senses or, more generally, the sensibility ... so that they exist more forcefully than any simple representation (6). Similarly, John Hatch begins his analysis by seriously considering Bacon’s claim that “I want very, very much ... to give the sensation without the boredom of conveyance” (Hatch, 164; Bacon, in Sylvester, 65). There seems to be little disagreement about the theme and effect of affectivity in Bacon’s images.

12. Van Alphen explains that in Bacon’s images, “ the human figure is not the subject of [a] narrative of perception. The human figure is rather the locus of the events, the scene of action. Perception happens in and on the human figure ... Perception, then, is not an activity directed by the human subject, but a mechanical process happening to the human figure” (47, 48). Here, perception is not “the distanced mastery of the modernist and positivist gaze, which dominates the world while leaving the subject of looking uninvolved” (55). Rather, perception is implicated in the world and defined by what it sees. It is constructive and relationally oriented. Van Alphen understands it as sensory activity or the affectivity given to subjects in virtue of their embodiment. In Bacon’s images, figures are affected by their perceptions inasmuch as they are affected by any sensory stimuli and the activity of perception makes the subject “the subject of perception” (48).

13. Deleuze argues that Bacon’s paintings are themselves sensations: they can only be felt or sensed or perceived. This is clearly shown to be the case when we try to describe one of Bacon’s paintings; it is impossible to relay the visual affect without visually experiencing it. Hence Deleuze argues that Bacon throws over representation by presenting sensation rather than reproducing visible forms. The images present the viewer with the activity of the actualization of sensible forms, namely the active process of perception, affectivity or sensation itself. For this reason, Deleuze interprets the viewers’s affective implication in the figure not in terms of its representation but in terms of its actualization. Bacon’s figures are events of the actualization of the figure, understood as a body of sensations in the process of their actualization. In virtue of their affect on the viewer, Deleuze’s analysis ultimately claims the this structure of actualization applies to the viewing subject as well. Like the figure, viewers are sensational bodies. Daniel Smith gives a clear account of Deleuze’s concept of sensation (35-36).

14. The unexpectedly uplifting aspect of Bacon’s images is where van Alphen concludes his critical analysis and where Hatch begins his. Van Alphen finds the uncontrollable mechanism of the affected body an escape route from the stultifying identity structures imposed on subjects. Hatch’s analysis interprets the violent struggle in Bacon’s paintings to be the rallying call for individuals to always assert themselves and “take control over their own life” (173). As I indicate in note 10, Hatch does not clearly explain how this is supposed to happen.

15. The isolating structures can also be understood to support the structuring activity of the figure’s vectors. They frame the figure, as Deleuze claims, in a specific “operational field”. The frame never fixes the figure in a static position, just as the springboard extension and focalizing ring does not in The Portrait of George Dyer Crouching. Rather, the frame limits the figure’s relational activity within specific configurations. The warped or sloppily rendered perspective of the frames, such as the Escher-like cage structures or the wires on which the figure is balanced in perpetual imbalance, also function both to isolate the figure and to situate it in permanent mobility. From the perspective of the viewer, seeing the figure in one situation, for instance contained in the cage or balanced at one point on the wire, opens up a new way to see it, such as escaping from the cage or balanced at another point on the wire. It isolates the structure of differentiating activity that enacts the figure’s structure (Deleuze, 1981:96).

16. Van Alphen understands the images themselves to return the viewer’s gaze. In this way, the viewer’s acts of perception are explicitly thematized in the image. Yet the viewer does not receive the self-assurance she expects from this returned gaze. In his chapter “Bodyscapes”, van Alphen points out that while, theoretically, the viewer’s sense of self is confirmed by the look of the other, for the other sees her as whole and returns that view to the subject, this is not the case with Bacon. In Bacon’s images, intersubjective wholeness is denied because not only is it the viewer’s own acts of perception that are returned, but they are returned without a completely realized image of the body (ch. 4). I argue that Bacon’s images draw in the viewing subject with an offer of this self-other relationship, but then reinterpret the relationship in terms of the participatory structure of the concerned, communal nature of the images.

17. Kuspit provides a striking account of the figure’s expressions: “This defiant unhappiness is customarily understood as an anguished sign of autonomy, a subversion of worldly appearances to construct the integrity of art in spite of the world. But Bacon forces us to read it not as willful transcendence of the world but as a hysterical, and invariably histrionic, effort to recollect it in all its anxiety-arousing absurdity” (55). In my view, however, Bacon is less interested in autonomy than in community and his suffering figures do not present hysteria but involvement and participation.

18. It should be also noted here that the figures’ reactions differ between images according to who or what they are, and so cannot be explained merely in terms of physical response. Popes, crucified figures, and monstrous flesh-like figures mostly scream in response to the physical violence. The figures in portraits tend contemplatively to gaze, while others are preoccupied and continue with everyday activities. John Hatch’s analysis argues that those figures whose freedom is most confined usually suffer more than those who are not so confined, such as the screaming popes who are (in his view) confined by the conventions of the church and the crucified figures who are (in his view) confined by the iconology of the cross (171). More plausibly, the female figures who appear contemptuously to grin through their pain are, in van Alphen’s analysis, determined by the tradition of the female nude (174). The howling meat and fleshy, limbless creatures can be added to this list, as confined by their crippled inability to do more than flail. Throughout all the differences in response, none of the figures are wholly determined by the physical force that affects them.

19. For an exciting analysis of intrigue in terms of the viewer’s role in a narrative of detection, see van Alphen, Chapter Three, especially the section called “Mystery Portraits”.

 20. In fact, van Alphen claims, the viewer is drawn into the story, acting it out with the figures as they perform it. For this reason, he claims the images are not “conveying” a “pre-existing story” ; they tell a story in the sense that the images present a process of unfolding events (28). In my view, they can also be understood as dramatic enactments in which the viewer plays a crucial role.

21. This is van Alphen’s point in Chapter One of his analysis. Bacon’s paintings do not provide the viewer with a narrative understood as a product or representation of events. Rather, they involve the viewer in the process of narrative, where the viewer is implicated in the activity presented in the image. See the preceding note.

22. The viewer’s participation in the ongoing, relational structure of Bacon’s figures is the point of Deleuze’s analysis of it as a sensation, namely a differential, relational structure. See also Smith (1996). For analyses of the viewer’s constructive participation in Bacon’s images, see van Alphen (ch.2), Leiris (6-8), and Kuspit (57).

23. Bacon also admired Degas’ late pastels, such as After the bath, 1903, National Gallery London, specifically for the “grip and twist” of the figure’s spine which gives her body the “vulnerability” of meat (in Sylvester, 46-7).

24. I hold this to be the case even with Bacon’s inorganic figures, like the sand dune or jet of water, because they not only have the shape of animate figures but move with the specificity of their own activity. Comparing the sand dunes and water figures with one another reveals them to have their own unique modes of response to that which affects them. For instance, the 1981 Sand Dune undulates diffusely while the 1983 Sand Dune oozes out of its transparent box. So even here it is not simply a matter of forces acting on figures; rather, they seem to move on their own and in their own way, and the viewer is made to participate in and experience their activity with them. Although only a small number of Bacon’s images are inorganic, his presentation of natural objects as centres of action and reaction correlates them with his treatment of human figures as themselves independent centres of action and reaction. The difference in the case of Bacon’s human figures is that their turbulence is more than the interplay of forces. Violence and suffering are involved.

 

WORKS CITED

van Alphen, Ernst. 1991. Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self. London: Reaktion Books.

Brilliant, Richard. 1991. Portraiture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1981. Francis Bacon:   Logique de la sensation, 2.vols. Paris: Editions de la Différence.

Forge, Andrew. 1985. “About Bacon”. In Francis Bacon by Dawn Ades and Andrew Forge. New York: Abrams.

Gowing, Lawrence, and Sam Hunter.1989. Francis Bacon. London: Thames and Hudson.

Hatch, John G. 1998. “Fatum as Theme and Method in the Work of Francis Bacon”. Artibus et Historiae XIX (37):163-    175.

Kuspit, Donald. 1986. “Hysterical Painting”. Artforum.  XXL (5/January):55-60.

Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. On Autobiography. Trans. K. Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon. 1998. Dir. John Maybury, Prod. Chiara Menage. United Kingdom: Strand Releasing.

Nochlin, Linda. 1996. “Francis Bacon, Centre Georges Pompidou”. Artforum. 35 (October):108-110.

—. 2001. The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity. London: Thames and Hudson.

Russell, John. 1997. Francis Bacon. London: Thames and Hudson.

Schmied, Wieland. 1997. Francis Bacon: Commitment and Conflict. New York: Prestel.

Smith, Daniel W. 1996. “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality”. Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Ed. P. Patton. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 29-56.                            

Sylvester, David. 1995. The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon. London: Thames and Hudson.

 

 

 

Reclaiming the Body: Francis Bacon’s Fugitive Bodies and Confucian Aesthetics on Bodily Expression
Eva K. W. Man

Abstract
Recently there has been a cry in Western academic and artistic circles for reclaiming the body and repositioning its locus and identity. Body theories and body art have become topics of attention as well as subjects of philosophical discussion. This article looks at the issue from a comparative perspective, focusing on representative cases in Chinese and Western portrait paintings. It first discusses Francis Bacon’s works of human bodies and identifies their philosophical and psychological loci. It then outlines the Confucian discourses on the body, their related metaphysical grounds, and their relations to traditional Chinese portrait paintings. Representative Chinese portraits like those of Ku K'ai-chih are introduced. In comparing these, the following questions are addressed: How are body discourses related to different bodily expressions? In what ways do the Confucian ideas on the body shed light on recent discussions in the West on reclaiming the body? Are the problems with the dichotomies of mind and body solved in the Confucian tradition? Can active engagement through the process of reworking artworks create new possibilities of bodily expression?

Keywords

reclaiming the body, exhilarated despair, loss of self, moral masochism, psycho-physical dualism, bodily ego, chin sheung miao te, ch'i, four beginnings, liang-chih, hao-jan chih ch'i,
yi, thinking greatest-component

1. The Case of Francis Bacon: Fugitive Bodies
Whenever I look at the distorted bodies in Francis Bacon's figure paintings, I take a breath and try to enjoy the bodies by thinking of the comments of one of his critics, Andrew Brighton. Brighton suggested the following questions when looking at a Bacon painting: What ideas and values does our view of the work oblige us to have and defend? How does it work for us now? How does it relate to the work of others and other images? Why has it been celebrated, condemned or ignored by critics, historians and institutions? [1] It is difficult not to articulate these questions with various theories of the body.

1.1 "Exhilarated Despair," Sexuality and Violence

When Bacon attained major public recognition at the end of World War II, despair was in fashion. Art critics and editors announced at the time that the modern movement's struggle happened “between men, betrayed by science, bereft of religion, deserted by the pleasant imaginings of humanism against the blind fate. It was closing time in the gardens of the West and an artist would be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.” [2]

Bacon's early paintings have been seen as reflecting the war itself and in particular the images of concentration camps that emerged as the Allies liberated Europe in the latter part of 1944. Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (http://www.francis-Bacon.cx/triptychs/three_studies.html) was one of his works completed in 1944 before the pictures of the camps were released. This painting was supposedly one of the resources for Bacon's visual articulation of a culture of pessimism, but in fact it formed the context and not the pre-text of his rhetoric of despair. Bacon himself confirmed in an interview that his paintings were concerned with his own kind of psyche, which he described as "exhilarated despair."

It is natural for people to take Bacon's personal history into account when looking at his work. Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents at the time when Ireland was in the violent process of becoming a state independent from Britain, and during his childhood his family was under threat of attack. This experience is described as crucial to the reception of Bacon's paintings, linked both to his masochistic homosexuality and to the violence and pessimism attributed to his work. The fact that in the late 1920s Bacon lived briefly in Berlin, a city that accepted his sexuality, might well have provided him courage in asserting his particular form of sexuality, which he made the core of his paintings. [3] We might agree with critics that Bacon seeks to “come immediately onto the nervous system,” to “unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently,” and that his works are convulsive and physiological.

1.2 Loss of Self

Bacon's bodies also impress people as "fugitive" as well as expressing "exhilarated despair," masochistic sexuality and violence. [4] As Ernst van Alphen suggested, Bacon's bodies hinder any attempt to derive from them a sense of existence, identity, or solidity, but these are also the reasons that bodies may well be central to an aesthetic and philosophical understanding of his paintings. [5] Van Alphen further suggested that Bacon's representation of the body is partly affiliated with, and partly opposed to, current Western philosophies. In these philosophies, the body is what others see but what the subject does not. The subject becomes dependent on the other in a way that ultimately makes the body the focus of a power struggle with far-reaching ramifications.

What does this point indicate when we look at Bacon's images? It means that we see bodies as a series of fragments dangling on the string of the inner sensation of self, and lacking the wholeness that the self/other relationship would produce. Van Alphen specifically refers to this lack in Self Portrait(1969) (http://www.francis-bacon.cx/self_portraits/self_69.html), in which faces are fragmented in such a way that we cannot decide whether formless elements belong to the faces of subjects or not.

Subject and non-subject thus become one flat visual field constructed on contiguity, making it impossible to speak of a subject or self. Van Alphen said that this is the way Bacon represents the inner experience of self, which ends by deconstructing the idea of self according to the self/other binary. [6] Further readings based on this assumption help engage the ambiguities and complexities of Bacon's bodies. For example, Bacon always avoids putting more than one figure on the same canvas because such togetherness would suggest the becoming of a self through the other. His work would rather fragment the subject or close out the possibility of a unified self.

Critics have also pointed out that the lack of a visual relationship between self and other can explain the isolation of Bacon's subjects in terms of the space that surrounds them. There are elements in his paintings that isolate the subject in space: the boxes, platforms, cage structures and so on. Many critics have seen these as means of short-circuiting the development of an action or a relationship; e.g. Head IV (1949) (http://www.francis-bacon.cx/figures/headiv.html). [7]

How about those works of Bacon that involve desire between two parties? One interesting interpretation of the play of desire in Bacon is that the self may become indistinguishable from the other, and the outer body of the subject would then disintegrate, becoming no more than an aspect of the body of the other. In Two Figures in the Grass (1954) (http://www.francis-bacon.cx/figures/figuresingrass.html), the two naked men meld. Their bodies are blurred and fragmented. One critic argued that the sexual desire of the two men may destroy the distance between them and fragment their selves. It was also suggested that love-making was an assault on the self's boundaries, with, according to Bacon, sexual desire leading to loss of self and sexual relations as essentially masochistic. [8]

In addition to the loss of self, another question that has been raised about Bacon's bodies is, how can the fragmented experience of self be preferable to the experience of the self as whole? In Bacon's paintings, there is no space in which the body can be framed or embedded according to the conceptual categories of the interior and the exterior. One example is Painting (1978) (http://www.francis-bacon.cx/figures/1978.html), in which a naked figure tries to lock (or unlock) the door with his foot. The extremely artificial posture seems to express the danger and anxiety involved in this simple act. It remains unclear whether the danger is caused by something inside or outside, or by the act of drawing a line between inside and outside. Another example, Self Portrait (1970) (http://www.francis-bacon.cx/self_portraits/self_1970.html) repeats this effect, as van Alphen clearly described: the viewer focuses first on Bacon's head, which seems to be a straightforward view of the artist. When the viewer looks at the sides of the painting, however, it becomes apparent that he or she has been looking at a painting of a painting of Francis Bacon. Yet the lower side of the painting appears to be a painting of Francis Bacon in front of a painting. We can see that Bacon seems to consistently deny the possibility that subjects can be defined by the space that surrounds them, and he provides no representation of subjects within a meaningful world, hinting that this is paradoxically the only way that the idea of self can be felt and kept alive, instead of being defined by others or by the surrounding space. [9]

1.3 Freudian Concepts of the Mind and the Body

What kinds of Western thought or philosophies contributed to Bacon's rebellious body of work? We can trace the way back to the Greek binaries of mind and body, subject and object, essence and appearance, inside and outside, and so on; and more relatively recently to Freud and Nietzsche. Bacon loved to read – and was strongly influenced by – Freud and Nietzsche. Freud's essay, “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” available in English translation in 1924, sketched what he called "moral masochism," arguing that the child translates a sense of guilt into a wish for parental punishment, a wish expressed in fantasies of beatings by the father and of having “a passive (feminine) sexual relation to him.” Freud's essay is crucial in interpreting Bacon's work. [10] Yet we need to pay attention to the psychoanalytic conceptions of the body. Elizabeth Grosz has said that although psychoanalysis is largely concerned with the analysis and interpretation of psychic activities, and the psyche in Western tradition is generally allied with the mind and opposed to the body, Freud and a number of other psychoanalysts have devoted considerable attention to the body's role in psychic life. [11]

But Freud is not that far from Western philosophies. It is known that he remained committed to a form of psycho-physical dualism inherited from Cartesian philosophy, in which chemical and neurological processes are neither causes nor effects of psychological processes but are somehow correlated with them. Freud's biological body is overlaid with psychic and social significance accounts; that is, Freud talked about a socially, historically, and culturally sexed body that displaces what was once mythically known as the natural body. Yet he also claimed that the ego must be considered a “bodily ego,” a “surface projection” of the libidinal body.

Grosz is correct in her reading that for Freud, the ego is an internalized image of the meaning that the body has for the subject, and also for others in the social world and for culture as a whole. The ego is described as a shared and/or individualized fantasy of the body's form and modes of operation. And also, one's psychic life history is written on and worn by the body. Oral, anal and phallic drives are not biologically determined stages of human development (this would reduce the drive to a form of instinct), but are the result of processes of libidinal intensification that correlate with the acquisition of various meanings for various body components. Thus emerged the belief that psychoanalytic theory has enabled feminists and other counter-hegemonic groups reclaim the body from the realms of immanence and biology in order to see it as a psycho-social product, open to transformations in meaning and functioning, capable of being contested and re-signified. [12] We, as well, can understand Bacon's bodies from all these perspectives.

1.4 Nietzsche's Notions and Influences

It is known that Bacon also read Nietzsche seriously. He echoed Nietzsche's existential argument that after the death of God man must create himself, despite having a sense of the self and existence as being without value or meaning. Bacon's work demonstrates the effort in re-defining one's self and reclaiming one's self from its relations with others.

It is necessary to review Nietzsche's thoughts on the mind and the body to see his alternative position in the recent history of Western thought and to track his influences on Bacon's figuration of bodies. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche destroyed the mind/body dichotomy through the notion of “self.” He said:

"What the sense feels, what the spirit perceives, is never an end in itself ... behind them lies the Self.... Behind your thoughts and feelings ... stands a mighty commander, an unknown sage – he is called Self. He lives in your body; he is your body."[13]

For Nietzsche, soul or mind is "only a word for something about the body" and human beings are "simply bodies, and nothing else."

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche read philosophy as a misunderstanding of the body and emphasized the decisions of individuals. He said:

"The popular medical formulation of morality ..., “virtue is the health of the soul,” would-have to be changed to become useful, at least to read, “your virtue is the health of your soul.” For there is no health as such, and all attempts to define such a thing that way have been wretched failures. Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul .… Only then would the time have come to reflect on the health and illness of the soul, and to find the peculiar virtue of each man in the health of his soul. In one person, of course, this health could look like its opposite in another person. Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can really dispense with illness – even for the sake of our virtue – and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge in particular does not require the sick soul as much as the healthy, and whether, in brief, the will to health alone is not a prejudice, cowardice, and perhaps a bit of very subtle barbarism and backwardness."[14]

We can now see Nietzsche's phantom on Bacon's bodies, and also the influences of his notion of Dionysian man, as outlined in Twilight of the Idols:

"It is impossible for Dionysian man not to understand any suggestion of whatever kind, he ignores no signal from the emotions, he possesses to the highest degree the instinct for understanding and divining, just as he possesses the art of communication to the highest degree. He enters into every skin, into every emotion: he is continually transforming himself...."[15]

"... one first has to convince the body. The strict maintenance of a significant and select demeanour, an obligation to live only among men who do not “let themselves go,” completely suffices for becoming significant ... It is decisive for the fortune of nations and of mankind that one should inaugurate culture in the right place - not in the “soul” (as has been the fateful superstition of priests and quasi-priests): the right place is the body, demeanour, diet, physiology: the rest follows." [16]

While others in the Western tradition see the subject as part of the world, and one who needs the perspectives of others in order to feel part of the world one inhabits, Bacon's bodies choose instead to escape from and deform these perspectives. [17]

In this way and in the concern of sexuality, Bacon's artistic choice echoes the effort of some feminist scholars. To take Judith Butler as an example, one finds in her writings disruption of the continuity between sexed anatomy and gender and sexuality, which privileges the sexed anatomy as the origin of a singular, sexual identity, that is, heterosexuality. The way to disrupt it is to demonstrate that bodies are not the prepared site or space for a pre-existing performance, or the raw material over which the social or cultural mask is hung, but are brought into being through the performance itself. Butler asserts that there is no body that pre-exists discourse, and therefore, no sexuality that is natural to bodies. [18]

Bacon's bodies also remind us that the body is not an originating point or yet a terminus; it is the result or an effect. Some philosophical writings now hint that the body does have the status of a realm of underlying truth, and try to recover it from medicine or sociology by making it vivid again. The works of Bacon's contemporaries (Jacques Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and others) theorize that a body is not properly a human body, a human subject or individual, unless it has an image of itself as a discrete entity or as a gestalt. [19] This enables the orientation of one's body in space and in relation to other bodies that provides a perspective on the world and that is assumed in the constitution of the signifying subject. [20]

Distinct from all these notions, Bacon's bodies are reconstituted in new forms, which is outstanding with respect to the normative bodies and its related histories in his culture. It would be interesting to look at an alternative in another tradition or historical discourse. Since this alternative should not be read by way of a parallel comparison but rather related through cultural differences to the theories of the body we have discussed, I feel comfortable in introducing the artistic principles of Ku K'ai-chih (c.344-406), who was famous for his portraits in traditional China.

2. The Case of Ku K'ai-chih and Principles of Chinese Figure Painting

Ku K'ai-chih (c.344-406) captures his portraits not merely the appearance but the very spirit of his subject. His teachings have been followed for a long time and have become the main school of Chinese portraiture. Here is a summary of the features of his artistic practice: [21]

1) The linear, articulated and calligraphic line is combined with broken interior ink washes to produce a richly integrated texture. The brushwork is delicate with little modulation.

2) The main figures provide formal structure, supported by an environment that plays on human interaction, confrontations and encounters, in the development of which the artist effectively uses pictorial concepts of emptiness and fullness, always suggesting a slowly unfolding activity.

3) Most human expressions are restrained and delicate; there are few extremes of either emotion or gesture, and the figures seem to combine humanness and a certain ethereal quality.[22]

4) The depiction of human subjects is related to its naiveté, its air of grace, its restraint, and its humanistic spirit.

Confucian thoughts about body and mind are reflected in Ku's theories of painting, stated in his own writings and records of his followers. His theories incorporated Confucian thoughts as follows:

1) The first principle of painting portraits is to grasp the particular spiritual rhythm of the subject, so-called "Chin Sheung Miao Te", which has to be attained through good imagination.

2) The excellent manifestation of the spirit of the subject is achieved through form. Ku emphasizes the subject's head and face, particularly the eye or the pupil of the subject, which he believes can speak for the subject's soul or spirit.

3) He reminds people of the importance of depicting in portraits how subjects relate to their environments. Things an artist needs to care about include the personality of the subjects (especially historical or legendary figures), social classes and the subject's relation to other characters in the painting. Things of equal importance are the reactions the subject expresses, the social constraints or rituals that affect the subject's bodily behaviors; the positions or places where the subject and other characters are situated, and finally, the related setting or environment.

4) In order to achieve the realistic effects of the above principles, Ku suggests that artists should make the effort to observe, study, analyze and understand. Only through one's hard study can one grasp the essence of the subject and related artistic transformations. Ku admits that it is easier to paint animals than landscapes, but painting humans is the most difficult.

One should not miss the moral implications of Ku's theories, for his discussion of spiritual rhythm mainly refers to the moral qualities of his subjects, and those of the artist as well, which enable one to grasp and understand what is important. Examples: The Fairy of the Lo River (http://uccor.digilib.sh.cn/art/ysjs/images/big/49381003.jpg)., and (http://www.hanaga.com/gbjc/zh/hs.jpg) for details, an illustration after the time of Ku K'ai-chih, preserves the archaic style of his time and demonstrates these principles. In the scene a fairy bids farewell to the young scholar, who had fallen in love with her, for his good fortune and future, and sails away in her magic boat. The flying sleeves of the clothing and the setting of willow trees are said to have grasped the spiritual rhythms of the characters, in praise of love, and virtues of sacrifice. [23]

Another example is one of Ku's very few surviving famous paintings, The Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies(http://ceiba.cc.ntu.edu.tw/fineart/database/chap18/18-03-06x.jpg and (http://www.guoxue.com/nl/syxy/007.jpg) for details), which tells Confucian stories in praise of four groups of famous virtuous women of antiquity. This painting shows the emperor gazing doubtfully at a concubine seated in her sofa bed. The text accompanying the illustrations echo the woman's saying, "If the words that you utter are good, all men for a thousand leagues around will make response to you. But if you depart from this principle, even your bedfellow will distrust you." [24] The figures, the setting and the postures and spiritual expressions of the subjects are all executed in Ku's best effort and are illustrated according to his suggested principles in recounting folk legend, which is also a Confucian educational text for women. We should note that Confucian teachings greatly influence Ku's principles, in particular the Confucian theories of mind and body, which should be discussed for the purposes of this paper.

3. Confucian Theories of the Body

It is generally believed that at least three theories of the body are found in the early Confucian school in the pre-Ching dynasty before 2 B.C. They are Mencius' relational theory of the body and the mind, Hsun Tzu's social theory of the body, and the ancient natural theory of the body. All these theories imply the inseparable relation of body and mind. No body is without the implication of the mind and no mind is without its embodiment. While each Confucian theory emphasizes a certain aspect, the conclusive contemporary connotation is that the body is a compound of one's conscious, physical, social and cultural dimensions. These theories are influenced by two traditions: the Confucian one of rituals – the human body is always ritualized or socialized; and the traditional ancient natural theory of the vital force (ch'i).

I would like to focus on Mencius’ (371-289 B.C.) ideas of the body and mind, as his work not only discloses materials crucial to an understanding of a theory of the body in the Confucian tradition but is itself also a representative discourse. Some citations and readings that have significant implications for Chinese figure painting, are offered below.

"Every human being possesses these four beginnings just as he possesses four limbs. Anyone possessing these four and claiming that he cannot do what they require is selling himself short. If he claims that his prince cannot do what they require, he is selling his prince short. Since, in general, the four beginnings exist within us, it remains only to learn how to enlarge them and bring them to a fullness. This may be compared to the first flicker of a fire, or the first trickle of a spring."[25]

The "Four Beginnings"  are the four fundamental feelings and sentiments that constitute forms of moral knowledge, the so-called liang-chih. These are feelings and sentiments of compassion, shame, modesty and reverence, and include the distinction between right and wrong. These feelings and sentiments are believed to be natural, and can be immediately accessed when a person is situated in proper circumstances. The feelings and sentiments can produce virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom respectively, and the inclination to act accordingly when the moral subject interacts with others. Mencius considered liang-chih the ontological foundation of virtues, and its relation to the body is that it needs to be nurtured and preserved. He said,

"Do not seek in your heart for what you do not find in your words. Do not seek in your Vitality for what you do not find in your heart. The second of these statements I find to be all right; the first, I disapprove. For will is commander over the Vitality, while Vitality is what fills our persons. Will is of the highest importance; Vitality stands second. That is why it is said, 'There is no disorder in the Vitality where will is maintained….If the will is unified, it becomes a motor for the Vitality. If the Vitality is the unified one, it becomes motor for the will....'” [26]

Vital force refers to bodily substance, matter and desire, and the Chinese word is ch'i. We should point out that ch'i is different from will (the moral mind), but both are interrelated in the sense that the moral mind should govern ch'i, or virtue will fail, and this is a crucial point for humanity. Ch'i is different from the "strong, moving power," which in Chinese is the hao-jan chih ch'i ( ). In the latter, ch'i is guided by righteousness (yi) in the fullest sense and has been compared to "flood breath." It is believed that in hao-jan chih ch'i, yi is the ontological foundation of bodily action. Through one's conscious effort to act according to moral principles, yi will naturally lead to the ontological extension of oneself and will transform the world into a universe of significance integral to the individual self. The bodily ch'i that lacks moral nourishment will not only easily weaken but will also subvert the moral self when violent. Mencius again:

"... There is not an inch of his skin that he does not love, so there is not an inch of it that he does not take care of. Its good and bad parts are derived from no other source than the man himself. In the body there are both honored and despised parts, big and small parts. One does not harm the big with the small; and one does not harm the honored with the despised. The one who takes care of the small parts first is a petty man; he who takes care of the big parts first is big man."[27]

"By following one's bigness one becomes a big man; by following one's pettiness one becomes a petty man....Since the senses of hearing and sight do not think, they become obscured by things; they are beguiled by the contact occurring between things. The sense of heart-and-mind, however, thinks. If there is thinking, that sense is achieved; but without thinking it is not achieved. It is something given to us by Sky. If it is first established in bigness, pettiness will not be able to snatch it away. And such an individual will become simply a big man."[28]

We note that the mind is the noblest and greatest component of the body, and it is more than simply physical because of its moral consciousness or innate knowledge of goodness. Smaller components are the physical ones that have basic functions like hearing and vision. Physical needs or desires of the smaller components have to be subordinated to the control of the "thinking greatest-component," which constitutes the center of moral principles and will. As we mentioned, moral knowledge and its capabilities need to be developed and preserved in order to transform the human subject into a "great person" or sage. According to traditional Confucian school, what a person should do – through moral practices – in one's personal life and in one's social intercourse with others, is the central and ultimate concern of human activity. This famous saying of Mencius demonstrates the significant exercise of the mind in dominating and repressing the smaller components of the body:

"... Therefore, when Sky is going to confer great responsibility upon an individual, his heart-and-mind and his determination must first be made to suffer, his sinews and bones must know toil, the skin of his body must show the ravages of hunger, his person must be reduced to the last extremity, all his undertakings must be upset. In this way his heart-and-mind are touched, his nature is provided with endurance, and aid is provided for his incapacities...."[29]

This idea of repression, practices or transformation results in an important Confucian idea present in traditional Chinese figure painting, which believes that one's virtues or moral mind would finally manifest and transform one's appearances, "in one's face, back and four limbs, without saying." The following is another conclusion:

"The desirable is called approved; and to contain within oneself is to inspire confidence. When filled fully with both of these, one is called handsome. When filled fully with them to the point of being glorious, one is called great. When out of greatness one produces changes in the world, one is called a sage. What remains unknown despite the fact that one is a sage is called divine...." [30]

The interpretation is that a sage or a beautiful man full of spirit in figure painting is one who genuinely practices moral virtues, whose appearance is in contrast to a "small man."

4. Some Comparative Considerations

The works of Bacon and Ku belong to different cultures in different times. Though the interpretations in this paper should not be seen as a direct comparison, the contrast between the artistic works of these two great portrait masters includes the following:

1) While Bacon's subjects are associated with "exhilarated despair," sexuality and violence that seem to violate the moral norms of his times, Ku's subjects celebrate Confucian virtues, and his works are regarded as tools of moral education.

2) The theme of Bacon's figures is the "shattering of the subject" or the replacement of a unified self by a fragmented self, which has been read as "loss of self" with psychoanalytic implications. Ku's subjects are not elusive or subconscious; rather, they assert a moral self from the figures and through the viewers, and first of all from the artist, himself. The contrast is also represented artistically by Bacon’s blurred and rough brushes, and Ku's delicate and linear style.

3) There is no visual or reciprocal relationship among Bacon's subjects, and he intentionally avoids any storytelling among his subjects. The bodies of his figures always merge and hardly differentiate from one another. Ku is famous for emphasizing the pupil of a subject's eye, and he believes that it manifested the rhythm of one's spirit. There is often mutual gazing: That between the emperor and his good lady, or the fairy and the scholar she loves, for example, is filled with compassion and moral expectation.

4) There is no absolute distinction between the inside and the outside in Bacon's space, as critics point out, nor is it defined by a surrounding space. Ku's space is consciously both natural and social. He grasps the exactitude of natural environment and also takes into account the subject's social position in related social space.

5) Bacon's loss of self implies a real self behind the scene, whose subjectivity is marked by artistic choices or forms. This self, according to Nietzsche, is a bodily self beyond the so-called mind and spirit, which are socially and culturally constructed. Ku's self is basically a morally constituted being of the will, the mind and the body: the moral will and mind cultivate the body and the body, in turn, nurtures the will and the mind through progressive practices.

The contrasts just discussed should be seen as sketches of the body theories we have been discussing. So now can we say one is better than the other and conclude that the problems of the mind and body split are resolved in the Confucian tradition? Can we go further and ask how the recovery of the body in contemporary Western discourse can learn from Confucian theories of the body? Can we propose that active engagement through the process of reworking the body in art is able to create other possible expressions of the body? Maybe only the answer to the last question is positive, as we see from the radical attempts that Francis Bacon made.

Confucians discuss their theories of the body as something ontological and natural, as do some theories in Western tradition. However, contemporary discourses stress that the difference does not have to do with biological “facts” but with the manner in which culture marks bodies and creates specific conditions in which they live and recreate themselves. This marking is enabled through discourses that cannot be deemed “outside” or apart from the various forms of power relations operating through languages or signifying practices. As Moira Gatens has said, what is crucial in our current context is the thorough interrogation of the means by which bodies become invested with differences, which are then taken to be fundamental ontological differences. [31] Judith Butler's point is also noteworthy, that a bodily norm is assumed, appropriated and taken on as not undergone by a subject, but rather that the subject is formed by virtue of having gone through a process of assumption. [32]

These sorts of contemporary rethinking call into question the model of construction whereby the social acts on the natural and invests it with its parameters and meanings. The reflection applies to both the Western and Eastern discourses discussed in this paper, where the natural relinquishes itself as the natural. As I have claimed, there is no reference to a pure body that is not at the same time a further formation of the body, where the practice of signification, of demarcating and delimiting are inevitable. [33]

Endnotes

[1] Andrew Brighton, Francis Bacon (London: Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd, 2001), p.8.

[2] Ibid., p.9.

[3] Ibid., p.16.

[4] Nick Millet, "The Fugitive Body: Bacon's Fistula," in Andrew Benjamin, ed., Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts: The Body (London: The Academy Group, 1993), pp.40-51.

[5] Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (London: Reaktion Books Limited, 1992), p.114.

[6] Ibid., pp.115-116.

[7] Ibid., pp.117-8.

[8] Leo Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" October 43 (Winter 1987), pp.197-223.

[9] van Alphen, p.160.

[10] Brighton, p.15.

[11] Elizabeth Grosz: "Psychoanalysis and the Body," in Janet Price & Margrit Shildrick, eds., Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p.267.

[12] Ibid., pp.267-270.

[13] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book For Everyone And No One, translated with [a new] introduction by R.J Hollingdale, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), I.4, p.62.

[14] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science with a Prelude in Rhymes and Appendix of Songs; translated with commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 3.120, pp.176-177.

[15] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Twilight of The Idols and The Anti-Christ; translated with an introduction and commentary by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 9.10, p.73.

[16] Twilight of the Idols, 9.47, p.101.

[17] van Alphen, p.118.

[18] Barbara Brook, Feminist Perspectives on the Body (New York: Pearson Education Limited, 1999), pp.116-117.

[19] Denise Riley: "Bodies, Identities, Feminisms," in Price & Shildrick, pp.221-223.

[20] Moira Gatens: "Power, Bodies and Difference," p.228.

[21] Michael Sullivan, The Arts of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) p.131.

[22] "Li Kung-lin's Use of Past Styles," in Christian R. Murck, ed., Artists and Traditions:Uses of the Past in Chinese Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum, 1976), pp.51-71.

[23] Sullivan, pp.90-91.

[24] Sullivan, pp.91-92.

[25] The Sayings of Mencius, trans. James R. Ware, (Taipei: Confucius Publishing Co., 1970), 2A: 6, p.52.

[26] Ibid., 2A: 2, p.42.

[27] Ibid., 6A: 14, p.188.

[28] Ibid., 6A: 15, p.190.

[29] Ibid., 6B: 15, p.210.

[30] Ibid., 7A, 7B: 25, p.234.

[31] See Price & Shildrick, pp.230-231.

[32] Judith Butler, "Bodies that Matter," p.235.

[33] Ibid., p.238.

Eva Kit Wah Man
Hong Kong Baptist University
evaman@hkbu.edu.hk

 

 

                                                          

 Study for Innocent X    1965   Francis Bacon

 

 Bacon's Velázquez' Innocent X

 

"Bacon's fascination with Velázquez's portrait of Innocent X must surely be without parallel in the history of art: as an instance of obsession with a specific picture by another major artist, it surpasses even Van Gogh's preoccupation with Delacroix or Picasso's variations on Grünewald. Yet Bacon never saw the original portrait. Although he spent three months in Rome in 1954, he carefully avoided visiting the Galleria Doria Pamphilj. he seemed afraid of encountering the original, as if he were insufficiently prepared for the experience of seeing it with his own eyes, or he felt unworthy of the privilege. It is also possible that he was afraid of being disappointed: perhaps his mental image of the painting was so powerful that he was  unwilling to risk a first-hand encounter which might diminish its stature...that Bacon never saw the original  Velázquez portrait is regrettable for several reasons. A direct confrontation with the work might have incited him to produce further variations, perhaps with a different emphasis. But it would also have validated his own work in a specific way by allowing him to appreciate the freedom of  Velázquez's painting technique. This cannot be conveyed by reproductions, which tend, for example, to suggest that the reflections of light on the Pope's red cape are exactly calculated and executed with meticulous attention to detail. In fact, however, Velázquez painted them quite spontaneously, with the confident fluency of a master whose aim is to evoke the appearance of things, rather than to describe them naturalistically."

Wieland Schmid, The 'Popes': Bacon's Grand Obsession; Francis Bacon - Commitment & Conflict,  Prestel, 2006.

 

 

"What is left is helpless raw being. Bacon takes such authoritative historical figures as Pope Innocent X and Vincent van Gogh and reduces them outrageously to clots of paint. They are overwhelmed by paint, into which they sink as if in quicksand. Is the scream of Innocent X recognition of his dissolution? Bacon repeatedly 'misinterprets' the strength of character he seems to find in the 1650 Diego Velázquez portrait of the Pope as sheer monstrousness, brutality. More than Picasso in his historical paintings, Bacon destroys  what creates in the very act of recreating. The destruction no doubt has world-historical import - the sadistic character of the Pope is brought home by the sadistic way paint is applied to him, as if it were acid - but the key point is that paint triumphs over human reality, becomes the dominant expression of being."

Donald Kuspit, Hysterical Painting,  Art Forum, January 1986.

 

 

"Not all the 'Popes' have open mouths. Furthermore, not all of the 'Popes' are based on the portrait of Innocent X, though most of them are. Bacon had a tremendous drive to make variation after variation on this image. Velázquez was his preferred painter, and this particular portrait could have been expected to have an especial appeal to him in that the paint is freer and looser and the whites more flickering than in any other Velázquez, almost as in Gainsborough...Was Bacon, then, drawn to this particular Velázquez by its subject?  The Pope is il Papa, and Bacon had very strong feelings about his father. 'I disliked him, but I was sexually attracted to him when I was young.  When I first sensed it, I hardly knew it was sexual. It  was only later, through the grooms and the people in the stables I had affairs with, that I realized that it was a sexual thing towards my father.' Painting popes in their isolation could well have been, among other things, a way of bringing back his father, of spying on him, of demolishing him. Bacon always resisted any psychoanalytic interpretation of his passion for the picture. On one occasion he let down his defences enough to tell me that his obsession with it was 'like schoolboys having a crush on their housemaster or something', then immediately corrected any hint that he was drawn to something paternal in the image by affirming the work's aesthetic qualities:  'I've always thought that this was one of the greatest paintings in the world and I've has a crush a crush on it.'  So he generally explained his involvement with it by speaking, for example, of  'the magnificent colour of it' - a phrase he used in our first interview, which was recorded in October 1962."

David Sylvester, Looking back at Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson, 2000.

 

 

"During the long period when Francis Bacon returned again and again to the compulsive task of painting  a shouting Pope, many people found it  difficult to come to terms with the fact that he is one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century. Since then the artist himself has come to their aid by giving the paint a certain narcissistic demonstrativeness, almost as if it were a personage in its own right...He now likens his many paraphrases of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez to a schoolboy's crush on his housemaster. 'I've always thought that this was one of the greatest paintings in the world, and I've had a crush on it,  and I've tried very very unsuccessfully to do certain records of it. Distorted records. Of course I regret them because I think they're very silly.'  I think it might be true to say that after a time he went on painting them almost as if it had become a habit difficult to break, and the last one, painted in 1965, was probably his worst, totally out of touch with the spirit in which the earlier versions were conceived. At the time it was exhibited I mentioned that it has gone dead and looked like something stuffed. The critics who never had a good word to say about any of them will be congratulating themselves on having been right all along, bit it never occurred to me that he might be attempting to emulate Velázquez. His Popes are not really paraphrases, but deliberate travesties. There was an element of collage in them....Bacon was doing the same sort of thing to the Velázquez that Duchamp did to the Mona Lisa when he added a moustache. From this point of view, Bacon's Pope's are Dada's greatest triumph. They exploit the allure of the insulted masterpiece with a brilliance which carries its own intimations of grandeur, and recall the spirit in which Caravaggio debunked Michelangelo's superhuman nudes in his Nude Youth with Ram. Since then, the emotional and intellectual climate in which he works seems to have assumed a weird peacefulness. Some of the paintings in his present exhibition would look at home beside the Velázquez, for he has somehow come to a kind of neutrality. The paint has never looked more authoritative and voluptuous, and it gives what people think of as his 'tragic awareness' an almost ingratiating blandness. Pulling vicarious flesh this way and that, he has settled into a macabre serenity."

Robert Melville,  Francis Bacon;  Studio  - International Journal of Modern Art,  April, 1967.

 

 

"The relationship to Velázquez developed after Bacon had reached artistic maturity and had more to do  with subject matter than with style, as Bacon claims to have been 'haunted and obsessed by the image' of Pope Innocent X, 'by its perfection'. It was as if having recognized himself to a figurative painter, Bacon had decided to compete with or measure his achievement against the greatest portrait study he knew and at the same time to connect with and extend the artistic chain of succession going back to the first cave paintings. Hence I see Bacon's papal variations as his attempt to reinvent or reinterpret Velázquez's image of the pope in a way that would be valid and factual for the twentieth century in much the same spirit that Velázquez  went to Rome determined to vie with the state portraits of Titian and to remake them in the image of his own time...In the fall of 1951 Bacon revived the idea of a series of papal variations and executed the three paintings that represent not only his first completed series of a pope, but also his first series showing the successive actions of the same figure...The three studies viewed in chronological sequence reveal a progressively more agitated subject, which several contemporary critics have interpreted as the result of the pope's being in an electric chair; 'Bacon places the pope in a chair that has been wired to the mains; in the second picture the current has come on, and in the third His Holiness is in the last extremes of agonized galvanization'.  [Andrew Hammer, 1952]. Bacon, however, claims he never thought of the pope as being electrocuted (Interview with bacon, April 3, 1973, London)...Thus the theme or the subject of the scream, which entered Bacon's imagery with the Tate painting of 1944, dominated his work for the next ten years and became defined in the form of the screaming pope of 1953, appeared increasingly infrequently over the next four years. In fact, none of the subjects of the studies or portraits of 1956 have opened mouths..."

Hugh M. Davies, The Screaming Popes: Past and Present Reality; Francis Bacon, Museum of Modern Art, Lugano, May 1993.

 

 

"In a way, the great pope of  Velázquez was such a masterpiece that there was nothing to be done. He had tried to do something about it, something even further, but it was impossible. Yet at the time, he was obsessed by his subject, and he admitted that he was expressing his revolt from the authority of his dead father and constricted childhood...He had joined the painterly formula which Velázquez had inherited from Titian and Raphael to the creation of photography in the nineteenth century. Yet 20 years on, Bacon would declare his paintings of the Pope 'a great failure. I was hypnotized at the time by the sheer beauty of it.'  His paintings 'were overstatements, too obvious and too cheap'..."

 Andrew Sinclair,  His Life & Violent Times, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1993.

 

 

        

       Figure with Two Owls 1965  Francis Bacon

 

     The Popes

                                                        Bacon's Negative Hero

      Bacon painted the portrait of Pope Innocent X after Velazquez in 1951, and immediately followed it up with two [ I II ] further pictures based on the same image. But the subject-matter was by no means exhausted with the completion of this three-part series: over the next fourteen years Bacon returned to the same motif again and again, in a total of forty-five works.

      He seemed almost incapable of tearing himself away from the theme, which occupied him for longer than any other. In 1965 the series came to an end whose abruptness suggested an almost violent act of liberation - a view corroborated by Bacons comments in his interview of May 1966 with David Sylvester.

      Only once, 1971, did Bacon use the motif again, but this time, instead of taking Velazquez as his model, he based the work on one of his own previous pictures: the 1962 Study from Innocent X.

      Bacon never saw the original Velazquez. And although he spent three months in Rome in 1954, he carefully avoided visiting the Galleria Pamphilij.

      He seemed afraid of encountering the original, as if he were insufficiently prepared for the experience of seeing it with his own eyes, or as if he felt unworthy of the privilege. It is also possible that he was afraid of being disappointed: perhaps his mental image of the painting was so powerful that he was unwilling to risk a first hand encounter which might diminish its stature.

      Over the years he had acquired a large collection of books, catalogues and postcards with reproductions of the portrait, which he had studied over and over again, to the point where he knew every last detail of it like the back of his hand. In his mind Velazquez's portrait had taken on a life of its own. This life he wishes to preserve. If he were exposed to the painting's reality and saw the details of its technique, the effect might well be to destroy the inner vision that he had so often cited and varied. As a result, he left Rome without ever setting foot inside the Palazzo Doria.

      That Bacon never saw the original of the Velazquez is regrettable for several reasons. A direct confrontation with the work might have incited him to produce further variations, perhaps with different emphasis. But it would have also validated his own work in a specific way by allowing him to appreciate the freedom of Velazquez's painting technique. This cannot be conveyed by reproductions, which tend, for example, to suggest that the reflections of light on the Pope's red cape are exactly calculated and executed with meticulous attention to detail. In fact, however, Velazquez painted them quite spontaneously, with the confident fluency of a master whose aim is to evoke the appearance of things, rather than to describe them naturalistically.

      In this respect, his approach to painting anticipates one of Bacon's central tenets: that the artist should leave sufficient scope for the intervention of chance, while at the same time striving for the highest possible degree of precision.

      From the outset, Bacon combined his personal interpretation of Velazquez's Pope with two further motifs whose fascination never waned and which recur in various combinations throughout his oeuvre. The first of these is the gaping, screaming mouth, the second is the human figure elevated above the crowd and set on a kind of stage, which renders it especially conspicuous. The first motif refers, on the one hand, to the image of the screaming nurse maid in the Odessa steps sequence of Eisenstein's film 'Battleship Potemkin', and on the other, to the illustrations of diseases of the mouth in a medical textbook that Bacon found in a second hand bookshop in Paris.

      The second motif owes its inspiration to a photograph of Pope Pius XII swaying above the heads of the faithful as he was carried through the Vatican in the processional throne. The emphasis on the individual, in visual rather than hierarchical terms, was the aspect that particularly intrigued Bacon in traditional depictions of the Crucifixion.

      These three ideas - the Velazquez portrait of Innocent X, the photograph of Pius XII on his throne, and the image of the screaming nurse in the midst of pre-Revolutionary chaos - merged into a composite whole that remained intact for many years and only began to disintegrate in the later works from the Velazquez series. The image that paled first was the most recent of the three: the image of Pius XII.

      Initially this had been the dominant model: in Head VI the first painting to link to the three motifs, its central importance is obvious.

      This work does not properly belong to the series of Pope pictures; its significance is that of a precursor or a point of departure, and although the image of Innocent X governs in the background, it has not yet become the main force shaping the picture as a whole.                                                                                     

      A further two years elapsed before the Velazquez motif asserted full control over the picture. However, the 1949 Head already anticipates the spatial device that was to become such a characteristic feature of Bacon's work: the figure is enclosed in a transparent cage, a structure of fine lines that marks out a space within a space.

      Most, if not all, of Bacon's Pope paintings seethe with aggression, with anger and hatred. Some interpreters have also detected irony in them, although most find this view impossible to share. A further aspect, apparent to any viewer, is the sense of commitment and passion. Bacon is an artist for whom painting invariably means conflict and struggle: he is fighting all the time, even though he keeps a cool head and retains full control over what is happening on the canvas. This partly stems from the fact that he is pitting his own technique against the abilities of one of the great classical masters. Yet the real target of Bacon's struggle is not Velazquez's canonical standing, but the philosophy on which the Spaniard's art is based. Bacon rejects Velazquez's entire vision of the Pope. He opposes the principals of hierarchical order and spiritual authority that the Pope embodies, and regards the static world-view underpinning the portrait of Innocent X as fundamentally false.

      Though he acknowledged its consummate mastery of the means of expression , Bacon saw Velazquez's art as deeply flawed, insofar as the world it depicted was obsolete and decayed. Bacon raises the Pope to an impossible height in order to knock him down all the more dramatically from his pedestal. His aim is to subvert the traditional conception of the world handed down via the Church and the artists acting on its behalf. But the Pope resists the maltreatment of his image and tries to halt the impending collapse of the established world order. The pope is Bacon's negative hero. He screams and grimaces, clutching at the arms of his throne or raising his fist and threatening to strike back at his opponent. Thus the pictures in Bacon's Pope series are painted in the face of palpable resistance.

      Bacon needed this resistance, especially at the beginning of his artistic career. To him, it was a precondition of working, for it established the necessity of his art. He painted against the crucifixion, against the triptych form, against Velazquez. And through his very opposition to these models, he made use of their possibilities. He needed canonical themes, canonical forms and masters, as targets, in order to focus his own energies. It was only by addressing challenges that he could mobilise the resources at his disposal. He had to find his own images, his own vision, his own style, by confronting his ideals with those of others and allowing them to prove their worth in open competition. He could find himself only through questioning. His own ideas could take shape only by departing from the time-worn traditions of painting and establishing specific differences of principal. This is why he needed the background of tradition in which the art of Velazquez was a central element.

      In opposing Velazquez's picture, Bacon was not only attacking a masterpiece by an individual artist; he was launching a general assault on five centuries of European easel painting. But in order to do this, his study of Velazquez's portrait on Innocent X had to engage with the traditions that it sought to criticise and accept their basic framework of assumptions. The result was that Bacon wrote himself into the history of classical art precisely by rebelling against it.

      Bacon suppressed his first Studies after Velazquez. This is characteristic of his temperament and method of working, as a tireless seeker after perfection whose suffered periodic attacks of crippling self-doubt, forever taking colossal risks and promptly despairing at their outcome. It was for this reason that he referred to so many of his paintings as studies, as if a definitive solution to the problem lay beyond the limit of his abilities. In bacon's view Velazquez was definitive: conceiving their works in necessarily fragmentary terms, modern painters were fated to remain aware of a discrepancy that could never be resolved. However, there were two sides to the coin: on the one hand, the realisation that the masters were unsurpassable forced the modern artist to acknowledge and accept his own limitations, but on the other, it represented a continual challenge, spurring him to renew his efforts in the pursuit of an impossible goal. And what goal could be more impossible than that of emulating Velazquez's portrait on Innocent X?

      In the summer of 1950 Bacon began to paint a series of variations on Velazquez's portrait for his second exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in London. He had often worked this way in the past, making pictures with a specific exhibition in mind; the knowledge that the opening date was fast approaching had a particularly galvanising effect on him. The Pope series was originally supposed to comprise three pictures, but only two of the planned works were executed before Bacon abandoned the project in a fit of dissatisfaction. When the exhibition opened in September 1950 not one of the Popes was on display. Many years later Bacon described his study of Velazquez as a 'failure' and categorically condemned its results. Referring to Portrait of Innocent X, he said he had tried 'very unsuccessfully to do certain records' of the painting, but these had been 'distorted... I regret them, because I think they're very silly.' When his involvement with the Velazquez portrait came to an end, the picture seemed more remote and perfect than ever. Thus, Bacons obsession with Velazquez heft a bitter after taste, a lingering sense of futility. This throws a curious light on his interest in Velazquez. Bacon evidently regarded his study of the portrait of Innocent X as a struggle. Nut what or who was he struggling with, and what was the purpose of the conflict?

                                   

                                                                                      

          

       Study for Pope  1953     Francis Bacon

 

THE PAPAL PORTRAITS OF 1953

                                                                                                                    Hugh M. Davies


        Throughout his long career, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) steadfastly focused on the human figure as the subject of his paintings. Unlike other major artists of his time who reveled in abstraction, such as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Bacon never deviated from his commitment to making images of people. Yet while extending the timeless tradition of figuration, he invented profound and startling new ways of portraying people as he distorted the inhabitants of his painterly world in order to “unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently. Bacon’s most recognizable image, and hence most famous painting, is the screaming pope of Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953. As the title states, this picture was inspired by Diego Velázquez’s extraordinarily lifelike portrait of a powerful and unscrupulous pope who duplicitously took the name Innocent.

        Painted in 1650 at the height of the Baroque period, shortly after his arrival in Rome from Spain, it was Velázquez’s eminently successful attempt to rival the portraiture of Titian and the great painters of Italy. The subject of the painting is unquestionably the most powerful man in the world. He sits confidently on the papal throne, fully at ease ex cathedra -literally from the cathedral seat-as God’s representative on earth. The true brilliance of Velázquez’s accomplishment in this painting is to have satisfied his demanding papal client with a flattering, beautifully rendered portrait while at the same time passing on for the ages the unmistakable hint of corrupt character and deep-seated deceit behind that well-ordered and stern facial façade. Haunted and obsessed by the image . . . by its perfection, Bacon sought to reinvent Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X in the papal portraits that form the focus of the current exhibition. In the great Des Moines painting, the Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Bacon updates the classical image by transforming the Spanish artist’s confident client and relaxed leader into a screaming victim. Trapped as if manacled to an electric chair, the ludicrously drag-attired subject is jolted into involuntary motion by external forces or internal psychoses. The eternal quiet of Velázquez’s Innocent is replaced by the involuntary cry of Bacon’s anonymous, unwitting, tortured occupant of the hot seat. One could hardly conceive of a more devastating depiction of postwar, existential angst or a more convincing denial of faith in the era that exemplified Nietzsche’s declaration that God is dead.

        Haunted and obsessed by the image . . . by its perfection, Bacon sought to reinvent Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X in the papal portraits that form the focus of the current exhibition. In the great Des Moines painting, the Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Bacon updates the classical image by transforming the Spanish artist’s confident client and relaxed leader into a screaming victim. Trapped as if manacled to an electric chair, the ludicrously drag-attired subject is jolted into involuntary motion by external forces or internal psychoses. The eternal quiet of Velázquez’s Innocent is replaced by the involuntary cry of Bacon’s anonymous, unwitting, tortured occupant of the hot seat. One could hardly conceive of a more devastating depiction of postwar, existential angst or a more convincing denial of faith in the era that exemplified Nietzsche’s declaration that God is dead.

        In Bacon’s words: Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence-a reconcentration...tearing away the veils that fact acquires through time. Ideas always acquire appearance veils; the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils.

       In much the same spirit that Velázquez went to Rome determined to vie with the state portraits of Titian and remake them in the image of his time, Bacon’s papal variations are his attempt to reinvent or reinterpret Velázquez’s image of the pope in a way that would be valid and factual for the mid-twentieth century. To accomplish this reinvention, Bacon essentially replaced the grand, official state portrait with an intimate, spontaneous, candid camera glimpse behind the well-ordered exterior. While Velázquez portrayed the pope ex cathedra, Bacon might be said to have captured him in camera-as if behind the closed door or through the one-way mirror. While Innocent directly confronts his papal audience with a confident, almost contemptuous gaze, Bacon’s pope would seem oblivious to observation since preoccupied by pain.

       In achieving his updated portrait, Bacon essentially grafted a very graphic photographic or filmic image onto the staid Baroque prototype. The specific source for the pope’s screaming mouth, shattered pince-nez glasses, and blood-dripping eye is a black-and-white still from Sergei Eisenstein’s classic 1925 film, Battleship Potemkin. Bacon had first seen the film in 1935, viewed it frequently thereafter, and throughout his career kept the photographic still like a touchstone in his successive studios. The particularly vivid scene in the film depicts the nurse’s panic at the instant when she loses control of the perambulator that holds her bourgeois charge. The accident occurs as she is shot in the eye while descending the long flight of steps leading from the upper town to the working-class dockland. For Eisenstein-and later Bacon-the nurse’s spontaneous reaction becomes the compellingly apt metaphor for a world turned upside down. Nothing could be further from the supremely confident composure of Innocent X

        A further art historical source for Bacon’s depiction is Titian’s Portrait of Filippo Archinto (circa 1551-62). This picture, which in pose anticipates the Velázquez portrait of 1650, is unique for the mysterious veil or transparent curtain hanging across the right half of the painting. The diaphanous veil bisects the cardinal’s right eye and gives a blurred or smeared appearance to the hand and side of the face visible through the transparent curtain. Bacon, in photographic fashion, duplicates this blurred, smeared appearance in his portrait as if the curtain had been drawn or hung across the entire painting, and explains the effect by claiming, “I wanted to paint a head as if folded in on itself, like the folds of a curtain. It also gives Bacon’s painting the very contemporary feeling and insubstantial appearance of a film image projected onto the folds of a closed curtain. A personal source for the ubiquitous scream and oppressive evocation of claustrophobia in Bacon’s art of this time may well be the asthmatic condition that exempted him from military service during World War II and continued to affect him throughout his life.

       The historic significance of the present exhibition resides primarily in the fact that the eight papal portraits that comprise the stunning Study for Portrait series, the longest series of Bacon’s career, have never before hung in the same room. The paintings were made in the summer of 1953 in anticipation of Bacon’s first exhibition outside England that took place at Durlacher Brothers gallery in New York City in October and November that year. Although all eight studies were sent to New York, only five were included in the show.

       Study for Portrait I began as a portrait of Bacon’s friend, the art critic David Sylvester, but at about the fourth sitting the figure turned into a pope. Over the next two weeks, working feverishly and with great spontaneity and confidence, Bacon completed the seven additional variations that form the series, Studies for Portrait I - VIII. The very similar settings of these eight pictures can be characterized as spare, deep, dark interior spaces defined by sketchy white recessional lines that culminate in rear walls parallel to the picture plane. The papal throne is distilled to the bold, broad strokes of gold paint that describe a tubular structure more reminiscent of a brass bed frame, were it not for the familiarly paired ornate finials of the chair back that bracket the papal head in every picture. While the lower third of Study for Portrait I is left virtually bare, unprimed canvas, the remaining pictures in the series have uniformly dark backgrounds upon which the cursory construction lines of golden railings variously demark enclosing, coffinlike boxes that conceal the respective popes below the waist.

 

 

 

       In Study for Portrait I, a surprisingly calm pope, who has been coaxed into being with exceptional economy of means by large brushes and thin paint, stares benignly out at the viewer from behind his wire-rim spectacles. Apart from his Potemkin pince-nez, he quite logically resembles the David Sylvester we recognize from contemporary photographs. Subsequent pictures in the series appear to capture various moods and aspects of the pope’s personality as if we were looking at an enlarged contact sheet of a prolonged portrait photo shoot. It is also possible that the series represents a collection of eight distinct papal portraits, a picture gallery of popes, as it were, rather than sequential images of the same subject.

       Bacon declared at the time that he painted in series partly because he saw the images in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences. The pictures are clearly painted one after the other, with the last one suggesting the next.

       To summarize the series: following the formal benignity of the first study, the pope turns to his right to offer a profile view in the second, appears guarded in confronting the painter in the third, apparently sneezes or guffaws in the fourth, laughs heartily baring his teeth like Teddy Roosevelt in the fifth, begins to open his mouth as if to speak in the sixth, delivers a full-blown scream in the seventh, and dismisses the painter with an Italian salute in the final frame. Apart from the first study, a string ending in a tassel (like a blind cord hung from above the proscenium) irritatingly hangs across or beside the pope’s face in every frame. This surrealist detail of the dangling tassel-like a fly annoying the popes-becomes a staple in Bacon’s subsequent work of the 1950s as does the hanging, naked lightbulb for his paintings of the 1970s and ‘80s.

       The inspiration for Bacon’s technique of serial portraits is undoubtedly photography. While film footage and contact sheets might have triggered his use of seriality, most likely his crucial model was the collection of multiple-image photographic studies of the 1880s contained in Eadweard Muybridge’s famous book, The Human Figure in Motion. Muybridge’s photographs intrigued Bacon, and many of his paintings throughout his career closely relate to the photographer’s seminal work. Shortly after the series was completed, Sam Hunter wrote incisively of these portraits: “Technically, Bacon has been audacious enough to try for one continuous cinematic impression in his popes-an entirely new kind of painting experience. He combines the monumentality of the great art of the past with the ‘modernity’ of the film strip.

       While the core of this exhibition is the nine papal portraits of 1953, we are also pleased to have been able to include two recently found papal paintings that predate 1953. Study after Velázquez and Study after Velázquez II, both painted in 1950 if not earlier, are marvelous anticipations of the Des Moines papal portrait that share the screaming subject and curtained setting. The first study was thought to have been destroyed by the artist in 1950 and is documented that way with a black-and-white photograph in Alley and Rothenstein’s definitive catalogue raisonné of 1964. History is indeed fortunate that this masterful and spontaneously charged precursor of the Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X has survived. While both setting and figure are sublimely resolved in the later Des Moines picture, the earlier and larger Study after Velázquez has a raw power and rare intensity centered about the screaming mouth. The earlier and previously undocumented Study after Velázquez II, while not aesthetically the equal of Study after Velázquez, is nevertheless a wonderful discovery and art historically of great importance. The mouth and head of the figure are beautifully rendered while the papal vestments are only briefly suggested in the now familiar starched white collar and hint of purple. In this pivotal picture, one can trace the transitional hanging curtain back to the figure in the shower of Painting, 1950, while the red foreground shape in Study after Velázquez looks forward to the composition of the Sphinx pictures of 1953 and later.

       Why did these paintings remain hidden for almost fifty years? One can only speculate that Bacon neither felt sufficiently confident to exhibit them at the time of their making nor did he feel the need to destroy them, as was the fate of so many other paintings early in his career. Perhaps he stored them and forgot about them or perhaps someone else was entrusted to dispose of them and, in Shakespearean or Moses-like fashion, could not bring themselves to the task. In 1950, before Bacon had pressing demands to produce pictures for the number of gallery exhibitions he enjoyed by 1953, it is easy to imagine that a less confident painter would be more self-critical in destroying and setting aside paintings.

       The only non-papal image in the present exhibition is Sphinx I. In addition to sharing a similar formal composition, color palette, spare paint application and enigmatic disposition, this masterful picture was made during the intensely creative summer of 1953 that produced its papal siblings. The sphinx as a subject undoubtedly stems from when Bacon had spent time in Egypt during a journey of 1950-51 to visit his mother in South Africa. He was greatly impressed by the antiquities he saw in Cairo and, some twenty years later, in expressing his admiration for Velázquez by comparing him to Cézanne, Bacon alluded to the power of Egyptian art:

       I don’t think Cézanne’s people are very intense, his apples are more intense than his people, his apples are some of the greatest apples ever painted [laughing here]. His power of invention in forming an apple has never gone into his forming of human beings, he tends to make them inanimate objects, he doesn’t extend his invention into the psyche of the human being.

       Yet if you look at Velázquez, his greatness is his interest in people...Velázquez came to the human situation and made it grand and heroic and wasn’t bombastic. He turned to a literal situation and made an image of it, both fact and image at the same time. The Pope [Pope Innocent X] is like Egyptian art; factual, powerfully formal and unlocks valves of sensation at all different levels.

       Finally, Bacon always wanted his paintings to be mounted under glass and surrounded by traditional, heavy gold frames. In so doing, he sought the connection this drew to his painterly predecessors, the seriousness it brought to the endeavor and, above all, he reveled in the fortuitous reflection of the viewer superimposed in the painting, as each of us becomes complicit with the painter as both protagonist and voyeur.

       Always wanted his paintings to be mounted under glass and surrounded by traditional, heavy gold frames. In so doing, he sought the connection this drew to his painterly predecessors, the seriousness it brought to the endeavor and, above all, he reveled in the fortuitous reflection of the viewer superimposed in the painting, as each of us becomes complicit with the painter as both protagonist and voyeur.



Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953    

Study for Portrait I, 1953

Study for Portrait II, 1953

Study for Portrait III, 1953

Study for Portrait VI, 1953

Study for Portrait V, 1953

Study for Portrait VI, 1953

Study for Portrait VII, 1953

Study for Portrait VIII, 1953

On February 6, 2002, the High Court in London dismissed the claims brought by Brian Clarke against the Marlborough Gallery, on behalf of the Estate of Francis Bacon, who had decided not to pursue the matter. The Judge, Mr Justice Patten, was told that the parties had managed to resolve their differences, and would not require the court to conduct an estimated three month trial of the issues, which had been set to start on February 18,2002.

Bacon died in 1992 and his will named Clarke as one of two executors of his Estate, responsible for managing his affairs and ensuring that Bacon's friend John Edwards received the artist's assets remaining; after all expenses and taxes had been paid.

The first legal issue arose when the High Court ordered the removal of Clarke's co-executor, who was a Director of the Marlborough Gallery. There was an apparent conflict of interest between the duty of the executors (to maximise the value of Bacon's estate) on the one hand, and the duty of Marlborough's Director (to act in the best interests of the Gallery), on the other hand. It would have been unfair to both the Gallery and the Estate for the Director to continue to act in both capacities. This decision left Clarke as sole executor, and he had no such conflicting interests, being a friend of Bacon in his later years and wishing merely to do his best for the Estate.

As the nature and extent of Bacon's dealings with the Marlborough Gallery over five decades (from around 1956) began to emerge, Clarke's concerns over the artist/gallery relationship began to develop. Eventually, Clarke's concerns drove him to launch proceedings against Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art (Liechtenstein); he sought clarification of the nature and extent of the contractual relationship between the artist and gallery over 40 years. The Gallery resisted Clarke's claims that it had dealt with Bacon inappropriately.

One of the major issues in the case was whether or not Bacon was subjected to undue influence by the Gallery, and this and other issues were complicated by the paucity of clear documentary evidence of the terms of the contract between them. The particulars of claim served by the Estate asserted that 'the artist was bohemian lacking in business and financial
experience without the benefit of any independent advice'; which claim the Gallery disputed.

The Estate also asserted that the Gallery owed the artist a high duty of care, attention and transparency in its commercial dealings with him, and had failed in these respects; for example; by paying Bacon £6,000 for a work and re-selling it for seven times as much; the absence of clarity as to whether works were 'bought in' by the Gallery and then re-sold for a profit it determined, or were sold by the Gallery on behalf of the artist as his agent; and that many paintings were unaccounted for. Marlborough strenuously resisted all such claims, and contended amongst other things that Bacon's works were purchased 'in arm's length' transactions.

Late last year the case took a dramatic turn when the High Court allowed Clarke to include in his claim a specific allegation: that, when Bacon was considering changing his dealer (from Marlborough to the Pace Gallery, New York), Marlborough unduly influenced the artist to continue with it by suggesting that he might then experience difficulties both in accessing money in his Swiss bank accounts and in his future dealings with the UK's Inland Revenue (see AM 253).

This latest assertion appears to have flowed from a recent dialogue between Clarke and the well-known art historian Michael Peppiatt (a friend of Bacon), in which they had discussed Peppiatt's recollections of his liaising with Arnold Glimcher, the Chairman of the Pace Gallery, New York around 1978. Peppiatt had evidently acted as honest broker, relaying to Bacon that Glimcher was interested in representing him and attending a meeting which was then arranged between the artist and Glimcher at which sale prices and Bacon's shares thereof were discussed. Nothing came of this exchange and Bacon remained with Marlborough.

Days before what became the final High Court hearing on February 6, Peppiatt formally clarified to Marlborough's solicitors that in his discussions with Clarke he had not encouraged Clarke to believe that there was any substance in the suggestion that Bacon had been blackmailed by Marlborough. And it was this event which triggered the settlement of the dispute and the formal dismissal of the Estate's claims; the terms of the settlement are not public knowledge.

At the heart of this sorry saga lies the absence of clear documentation recording the nature and extent of the respective contractual duties and obligations of artist and gallery. For the past 25 years or so (and throughout roughly half the length of Bacon's contractual relationship with Marlborough) this column and other informed commentators have increasingly and continually stressed the need for such clear documentation between artist and gallery; covering, amongst other things:
• parties' names and contact data
• dealer's engagement (exclusively or otherwise) to promote and represent the artist by one or any combination of:
i) selling work
ii) arranging commissions
iii) arranging showings
iv) arranging lectures, talks and media appearances
v) publications
• which works are included: all; only paintings; only works on paper; sculpture alone, and so on; existing and/or future work
• copyright: who owns it, manages and licenses reproductions and on what terms
• moral rights: who can allow works or reproductions of them to be altered or amended in some way
• geography: the limit of the dealership's territorial representation (worldwide; only EU; EU and North America and so on)
• length of representation: whether for a fixed term (normally no more than two years) or periodically renewable with written notice on either side
• sales: pricing strategy: timing of release into primary marketplace; gallery's commission; VA1 arrangements
• consigned works: details of finished or future works to be deposited with (consigned to) the gallery for sale/not for sale
• bought-in works: how many and which ones will or may be bought in by the gallery; prices including discount to the gallery.

Crucially, such deals also need to clarify: when and how the artist will be paid, and for statements of account to be given by the gallery; details of all transactions including names of purchasers, prices, commission, and so on, and whether cash advances or stipends are to be set off against future income: the artist's rights to have access to the gallery's accounts and records, for the purpose of independent auditing (if ever required by the artist).

Finally, agreement as to what should happen to the works, benefits and obligations covered by the deal in the event of the artist's death or the dealer's bankruptcy or ceasing to trade. Sadly, the creation and regular updating of such documentation or similar records continue to be avoided by many artists and their dealers/galleries - often in the belief that they are unnecessarily bureaucratic and time-consuming matters. In truth, they are necessary 'good housekeeping' chores; every good home should have them.

© Henry Lydiate 2002

Confidential

MINUTES OF A MEETING OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE TATE GALLERY HELD ON

WEDNESDAY 17 SEPTEMBER 2003 AT 2.15 PM IN THE BOARD ROOM AT TATE BRITAIN

ACQUISITIONS  

6.3.1  Francis Bacon 1909-1998

Study after Velázquez  1950

oil on canvas

1980 x 1370 mm (78 x 54 in)

Offered for purchase by the Estate of Francis Bacon for the sum of.......................................

(Information has been exempted under s. 43 (2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000).

Nicholas Serota reported that this painting had re-emerged in 1998 and was of such

significance that Tate had immediately registered an interest with the Francis Bacon Estate.

In 2001 an application for an export license had been submitted to DCMS, which had later

been removed, but in June 2003 a further application had been lodged, the painting having

secured an American buyer. Since the submission of this second application, Tate had been

in contact with the Francis Bacon Estate and subsequently the picture had been offered to

Tate for............(Information has been exempted under s. 43 (2) of the Freedom of Information

Act 2000). Tate was required to indicate in principle whether it wished to acquire the painting 

by the end of November and apply for an export stop.

In Nicholas Serota's view, this represented an opportunity to acquire a major work of

historic importance which would complement Tate’s holdings by adding a Pope work,

without which Tate’s Bacon collection would always remain partial. However, in view of

the financial situation, it would not be a work for which Tate could draw on reserves and the 

imperative would therefore be to fundraise. Discussions had begun with a number of

potential donors and Nicholas Serota was looking to Trustees to indicate a potential wish to

acquire as endorsement to continue these conversations. This was given and Trustees

welcomed the opportunity to acquire this work.

National Galleries of Scotland

UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM

WEDNESDAY GUEST LECTURE/RESEARCH SEMINAR SERIES

LOIS FITCH (Postgraduate, University of Durham)

6 FEBRUARY 2002

'Art is the truth of the sensible'; The Logic of Sensation in the work of Francis Bacon and Brian Ferneyhough

Sensation in the work of art - a painting for example, is, according to Gilles Deleuze, a question of capturing on the canvas, of making visible, making sensible, forces that are normally invisible or taken for granted. As Paul Klee has put it, the artist's job is 'not to render the visible, but to render visible'. Whilst Deleuze and others have largely based their arguments and theorising on examples from the visual arts and literature, there seems to be no obvious reason why the same thesis should not apply to musical examples, provided that the notion of 'rendering visible' is accordingly transposed; a context for 'rendering audible' normally inaudible or imperceptible forces can be found in the work of the composer Brian Ferneyhough. 

This paper will discuss the concepts of sensation, figure and force as explored in the aesthetic writings of both Deleuze and Ferneyhough, asking not what they mean in a piece of music or a painting, but how they work and, ultimately, how we can define the work of art in a post-representational context, where the figure of the work of art is the form connected to a sensation, rather than the form representing a figurative object.

The Death of the Soul: Art in the Age of Francis Bacon

Association of Art Historians, Martin Hammer, Department of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh, 19 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD. Tel: 0131 650 4119; Fax: 0131 650 6638;    Martin.Hammer@ed.ac.uk.

During his lifetime and since, the art of Francis Bacon has been highly visible and esteemed, but the literature remains repetitive and limited in its perspectives. The aim of this session to bring together new ways of thinking about Bacon's work and its place within the wider culture of the second half of the twentieth-century, both in Britain and internationally. 

Contributors may wish to focus on individual works by Bacon, on the relationship between practice and his articulated ideas, or on lines of interpretation which illuminate some particular theme, tendency or phase in his work. Several contexts for considering Bacon's affinities or influence seem to require more searching scrutiny: the image of the body, Existentialism, the School of London, gay identity, the history of photography, film etc. 

The session includes reinterpretations of Bacon's work, and of the diverse ways in which his art has been understood and appropriated within the artistic practice, criticism and theory of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Andrew Brighton (Tate Gallery, London): Bacon and Original Sin: the de Maistres Roy and Joseph

Professor Andrew Causey (University of Manchester): Bacon and the Primitive in the 1940s

Martin Hammer (University of Edinburgh): Bacon and Graham Sutherland in the mid 1940s

Brian Hatton (Royal College of Art): Trait and Trace: Design and Violence in Bacon's Scenes

David Mellor (University of Sussex): Phantom Africa: Bacon's Over-Drawing of Michel Lieris' 'L'Afrique Fantome

Simon Ofield (Middlesex University): Wrestling with Francis Bacon

Richard Calvocoressi (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art): Bacon and the School of London

Prof Jean Duffy (University of Edinburgh): Losing the Plot: the Subversion of Narrative in Francis Bacon and Claude Simon.

Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in 

The Logic of Sensation
Daniel W. Smith

 

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is a remarkable text in which Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), one of the most original French philosophers of the twentieth century, confronts the work of Francis Bacon (1909–1992), one of the most original painters of that century. The book originally appeared in 1981, when Bacon and Deleuze were both at the height of their powers. Although already well known at the time, Bacon was hardly a canonical painter and was even suspect in certain circles for his figural leanings. When Deleuze’s book appeared, it received a number of favorable reviews but then was largely passed over in silence. Today, The Logic of Sensation has come to be recognized as one of Deleuze’s most significant texts in aesthetics. It was the first book Deleuze published after his decade-long collaboration with Félix Guattari on the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972, 1980). In the following years, Deleuze would publish a number of works on the arts, including the two-volume Cinema (1983, 1985), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988), and the writings on literature collected in Essays Critical and Clinical (1993). The Logic of Sensation can thus be read not only as a philosophical study of Bacon’s paintings but also as a crucial text within Deleuze’s broader philosophy of art. The original French version of Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation was published in Paris by Éditions de la Différence as a two-volume set. The first volume contained Deleuze’s essay; the second volume consisted entirely of full-page reproductions of Bacon’s paintings, allowing readers to view and study the reproductions directly alongside Deleuze’s text. Regrettably, it has not been possible to include reproductions in the present edition. Images of Bacon’s paintings, however, are widely available both on-line and in catalogs, and it goes without saying that Deleuze’s book is best read with such images on hand. The paintings cited by Deleuze are designated by a number in brackets, which refers to the chronological list of Bacon’s paintings at the end of the volume. Deleuze has frequently insisted that he writes on the arts not as a critic but as a philosopher, and that his works on the various arts must therefore be read, as he himself says, as works of “philosophy, nothing but philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word.” In What Is Philosophy? (1991), Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as an activity that consists in the creation or invention of concepts. “One can very easily think without concepts,” Deleuze writes, “but as soon as there is a concept, there is truly philosophy.” Yet art itself is an equally creative enterprise of thought, but one whose object is to create sensible aggregates rather than concepts. Great artists are also great thinkers, but they think in terms of percepts and affects rather than concepts: painters think in terms of lines and colors, just as musicians think in sounds, filmmakers think in images, writers think in words, and so on. None of these activities has any priority over the others. Creating a concept is neither more difficult nor more abstract than creating new visual, sonorous, or verbal combinations in art; conversely, it is no easier to read an image, painting, or novel than it is to comprehend a concept. Philosophy, for Deleuze, can never be undertaken independently of art (or science); it always enters into relations of mutual resonance and exchange with these other domains, though for reasons that are always internal to philosophy itself. As a philosopher, then, Deleuze’s aim in his analyses of the arts is to create the concepts that correspond to these sensible aggregates. In The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze creates a series of philosophical concepts, each of which not only relates to a particular aspect of Bacon’s paintings but also finds a place in “a general logic of sensation.” The text is organized in quasi-musical fashion, divided into seventeen sequences that each develops concepts as if they were melodic lines, which in turn enter into increasingly complex contrapuntal relations and together form a kind of conceptual composition that parallels Bacon’s sensible compositions. In a similar manner, Deleuze’s two-volume Cinema can be read as “a book of logic, a logic of the cinema” that sets out “to isolate certain cinematographic concepts,” concepts which are specific to the cinema but which can only be formed philosophically. Strictly speaking, there is no “philosophy of art” in Deleuze: “art” is itself a concept, but a purely nominal one, since there necessarily exist diverse problems whose solutions are found in heterogeneous arts. Hermann Broch wrote that “the sole raison d’être of the novel is to discover what only the novel can discover,” and each of the arts, and each work of art, can be said to confront its own particular problems, using its own particular material and techniques. The cinema, for instance, produces images that move, and that move in time, and it is these two aspects of film that Deleuze sets out to analyze in The Movement-Image and The Time-Image: “What exactly does the cinema show us about space and time that the other arts don’t show?” Similarly, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, as its title indicates, is not only a study of Bacon’s paintings but also an inquiry into a more general logic of sensation. Readers who approach this book expecting a work of art criticism will thus be disappointed. There is little discussion of the sociocultural milieu in which Bacon lived and worked; nor of his artistic influences or contemporaries, such as Lucian Freud or Frank Auerbach; nor of his personal life (his homosexuality, his lovers and friends, his drinking and gambling, his nights at the Colony Room Club), which played such an evident role in Bacon’s work and in his choice of subjects. Even the secondary sources are sparse. Apart from two short texts by the French writers Michel Leiris and Marc Le Bot, the only secondary book Deleuze refers to is John Russell’s 1971 now-classic study, Francis Bacon. The links Deleuze establishes with Bacon’s work are as often as not with writers (Conrad, Proust, Beckett, Kafka, Burroughs, Artaud) and musicians (Messaien, Schumann, Berg) that figure prominently in Deleuze’s other writings, but whom Bacon may or may not have been influenced by or even read. In this sense, The Logic of Sensation is a highly personal book, though it is hardly written in a personal style. Deleuze wrote his study of Bacon at the suggestion of Harry Jancovici, the editor of the series in which the book first appeared, which was titled La vue le texte. The aim of the series was to explore the resonances between the visual arts and domains such as philosophy and literature, and it would come to include texts by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and the writer Michel Butor. Deleuze never explains why he chose to write on Bacon in particular. Bacon, however, had a strong presence in Paris during the 1970s and 1980s. He maintained a studio near the Place des Voges and was close friends with Leiris, whose portrait Bacon painted several times and who in turn wrote several important texts on Bacon. It was the Grand Palais exhibition of 1971 in Paris that had cemented Bacon’s international reputation, and the exhibition at the Galerie Claude Bernard in 1977 further solidified his position in the late 1970s. Deleuze undoubtedly encountered Bacon’s work at some point at an exhibition in Paris—in a later interview, Deleuze says that he frequently went to art exhibitions and films on weekends, on the lookout for precisely this kind of “encounter.” The book itself attests to the profound resonances Deleuze found between his own work and Bacon’s paintings. The relationship between the two men, however, was not personal. Deleuze and Bacon met only once, sometime after the book was published. Deleuze had sent the original manuscript to Bacon, who was intrigued by the book and delighted with the attention. The two arranged to spend an evening together, and Deleuze arrived with what Bacon described as a little “court” of admirers. Michael Peppiatt, in his biography Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, reports that “although there was a perceptible sympathy and admiration between the two men, no friendship evolved.” Deleuze later recollected some of his impressions in an interview: “One senses in him a power and violence, but also a very great charm. After he is seated for an hour or so, he contorts himself in every direction, as if he were himself a Bacon painting....When I met Bacon, he said that he dreamed of painting a wave, but dared not believe in the success of such a venture. It is a lesson of the painter, a great painter who comes to say to himself, ‘It would be nice if I could trap a little wave...’ It’s very Proustian; or Cézannian: ‘Ah! If only I could manage to paint a little apple!’” According to Peppiatt, the two would never meet again. Deleuze said that he wrote this book primarily with two things in front of him: reproductions of Bacon’s paintings and the texts of David Sylvester’s interviews with Bacon, which had been published in 1975 under the title The Brutality of Fact. This approach reflects the tension between percept and concept: how does one talk in one medium (concepts) about the practices of another (percepts)? The dictum that one should heed what artists do, not what they say, is no less true for Bacon than for other artists. “I have often tried to talk about painting,” he cautioned, “but writing or talking about it is only an approximation, as painting is its own language and is not translatable into words.” Nonetheless, Bacon’s interviews contain penetrating discussions of the practice of painting, and have been favorably compared with Delacroix’s journals and da Vinci’s notebooks. Deleuze himself insists that we do not listen closely enough to what painters have to say. “The texts of a painter act in a completely different manner than the paintings,” he notes. “In general, when artists speak of what they are doing, they have an extraordinary modesty, a severity toward themselves, and a great force. They are the first to suggest the nature of the concepts and affects that are disengaged in their work.” Deleuze thus uses the interviews not as definitive statements on Bacon’s part but rather as the starting point for his own conceptual inventions. Deleuze once wrote: “We dream sometimes of a history of philosophy that would list only the new concepts created by a great philosopher—his most essential and creative contribution.” The Logic of Sensation is perhaps best approached in the same manner: as a book of philosophical concepts. The concepts Deleuze develops are sometimes drawn from everyday language, sometimes from specific scientific and art historical traditions, sometimes from Bacon’s interviews, sometimes from Deleuze’s own philosophical vocabulary. But the concepts themselves enter into multiple resonances and interactions, such that it is possible to trace numerous trajectories through the “rhizome” of the book: the brevity of the text belies its complexity. The remarks that follow attempt to isolate three such conceptual trajectories, which respectively concern Deleuze’s formal analyses of Bacon’s paintings, the general “logic of sensation” that underlies the book, and the techniques through which painters can be said to participate in such a logic of sensation (the “coloring sensation”). The first trajectory concerns the concepts Deleuze uses in his formal analyses of Bacon’s work, which, he says, move “from the simplest to the most complex” aspects of Bacon’s paintings. The question Deleuze poses to an artwork is not “What does it mean?” but rather “How does it function?” Deleuze thus treats Bacon’s work as a multiplicity (although he does not use this term in the book) and attempts to isolate and identify the components of that multiplicity. Deleuze frequently returns to the three simplest aspects of Bacon’s paintings—the Figure, the surrounding fields of color, and the contour that separates the two—which taken together form a “highly precise system” that serves to isolate the Figure in Bacon’s paintings (chapter 1). But a first level of complexity immediately intervenes: the fields of color tend to curl around the contour and envelop the Figure, but at the same time the Figure itself tends to strain toward the fields, passing through washbasins, umbrellas, and mirrors, subjected to the forces that contort it, that deform or contract it in a kind of “derisory athleticism,” revealing the intensive “body without organs” beneath the extensive organic body (chapter 3). In some cases, the Figure is dissipated entirely, leaving behind nothing but a sand dune or a jet of water—a pure Force that replaces the Figure (chapter 5). A second level of complexity appears in the works in which Bacon paints coupled Figures that nonetheless resonate together in a single “matter of fact” (chapter 9). A third level of complexity emerges in the triptychs, where this “matter of fact” includes not only the distances that separate the distinct panels but also the forced movement or rhythms that constitute the true Figure of the triptychs: the steady or “attendant” rhythm; an active, rising, or diastolic rhythm; and a passive, descending, or systolic rhythm (chapter 10). Deleuze not only identifies these three fundamental rhythms found in Bacon’s triptychs, he also shows that even the simple paintings already function like triptychs, with their complex movements and combinatorial variability. A final level of complexity arises with regard to Bacon’s handling of color (chapter 16), and his construction of a properly “haptic” space, since it is primarily through the use of color (relations of tonality) that he brings about all these effects in his works (isolation, deformation, coupling, rhythm...). Deleuze’s book is marked throughout by extraordinarily specific and detailed analyses of individual paintings. The fundamental concept in all these analyses, however, is that of the Figure. Modern art and modern philosophy can be said to have converged on a similar problem: both renounced the domain of representation and instead took the conditions of representation as their object. Deleuze suggests that twentieth-century art remained far ahead of philosophy in this regard, and that philosophers still have much to learn from painters. But he also suggests that there are two general routes through which modern painting escaped the clichés of representation and attempted to attain a “sensation” directly: either by moving toward abstraction, or by moving toward what Lyotard has termed the figural. An abstract art like that of Mondrian or Kandinsky, though it rejected classical figuration, in effect reduced sensation to a purely optical code that addressed itself primarily to the eye; by contrast, an abstract expressionism, like that of Pollock, went beyond representation, not by painting abstract forms, but by dissolving all forms in a fluid and chaotic texture of manual lines and colors (chapter 14). Bacon in effect followed a “middle path” between these two extremes, the path of the Figure, which finds its precursor in Cézanne. Whereas “figuration” refers to a form that is related to an object it is supposed to represent, the “Figure” is the form that is connected to a sensation, and that conveys the violence of this sensation directly to the nervous system. In Bacon’s paintings, it is the human body that plays this role of the Figure: it functions as the material support or framework that sustains a precise sensation. This is Bacon’s solution to the problem he shares with Cézanne: How to extract the Figure from its figurative, narrative, and illustrational links? How to “paint the sensation” or “record the fact”? This brings us to the second trajectory, which concerns the nature of the “logic of sensation” that constitutes the object of Deleuze’s analyses in this book. The notion of “sensation” one finds in Deleuze is taken initially from the phenomenological tradition. Erwin Straus, in his classic book The Primary World of the Senses (1935), had established a fundamental distinction between perception and sensation. Perception, he argued, is a secondary rational organization of a primary, nonrational dimension of sensation (or “sense experience,” le sentir). Earlier in the century, Marius von Senden had recorded the experiences of congenitally blind people who were given sight after the operation to remove cataracts was developed. Initially such patients were afflicted by a painful chaos of forms and colors, a gaudy confusion of visual sensations within which they could distinguish neither shapes nor space. They would acquire a perception of the world only after an often-painful process of learning and apprenticeship, during which they developed the schemata and “Gestalten” capable of providing this prereflective sense experience with the coordinates familiar to ordinary perception. Studies of infants have revealed in them a similar sensory world populated by pure intensities (of sound, light, hunger, etc.) in which the baby cannot yet distinguish between itself and its world. “In sensory experience,” writes Straus, “there unfolds both the becoming of the subject and the happenings of the world. I become only insofar as something happened, and something happens (for me) only insofar as I become....In sensing, both self and world unfold simultaneously for the sensing subject.” This prerational world of sensation is not prior to the world of perception or representation, but strictly speaking is coextensive with it. It is precisely this world, the world of “lived experience,” that phenomenologists have attempted to describe. Straus, for instance, drew a distinction between what he called geography and landscape. The geographical world, the world recorded on maps, is perceptual and conceptual; it is an abstract system of coordinates with an unspecified perspective. A landscape, by contrast, is sensory; it is a perspectival world, enclosed by a horizon that moves as our body moves. In a landscape, we do not so much move in space as space moves with us. Similarly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, following Kurt Goldstein, distinguished between “touching” and “pointing”: a patient who is able to scratch his nose at the point where a mosquito is biting him is unable, a moment later, to point to his nose with his finger. The former takes place within the “intentional” system of bodily space (sensation), whereas the latter requires an abstract coordination of points in external space (perception); in certain pathological cases the transition from the first to the second is blocked. It is often difficult to separate sensation from perception, landscape from geography, since conceptual perception is such an integral part of our everyday experience of the world. For all his indebtedness to thinkers such as Straus, Merleau-Ponty, and Henri Maldiney, however, Deleuze is not a phenomenologist. Phenomenology is insufficient because it merely invokes the “lived body.” But the lived body, says Deleuze, is still a “paltry thing in comparison with a more profound and almost unlivable Power,” which is precisely the power of rhythm in its confrontation with chaos. Sensation is itself constituted by the “vital power” of rhythm, and it is in rhythm that Deleuze locates the “logic of sensation” indicated in his subtitle, a logic that is neither cerebral nor rational. This linkage between sensation and rhythm can perhaps best be illustrated by means of a somewhat lengthy detour through Deleuze’s reading of Kant’s theory of perception, which forms a kind of complementary text to The Logic of Sensation. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that perception requires a synthesis of what appears in space and time. In the first version of the transcendental deduction, Kant identifies three operations that make up a synthesis: apprehension, reproduction, and recognition. Since everything is a multiplicity and has a multiplicity of parts, perception begins when I synthesize these parts successively in an act of apprehension. I must also reproduce or “contract” the preceding parts when the following ones occur if a synthesis is to take place. These two aspects of spatiotemporal synthesis—the apprehension and reproduction of parts—are activities of the productive imagination and no longer sensibility. But a third moment is required for a perceptual synthesis to be complete: this sensible complex of space and time must now be related to the form of an object (recognition). To be sure, one can imagine numerous sensations in which the diversity of space and time is not related to the object-form, such as hallucinations. It is rather perception as such that is constituted in such a manner that a sensible diversity is related to the form of an object. In other words, it is not so much that I perceive objects; it is rather my perception that presupposes the object-form as one of its conditions. Kant invented a famous formula for this object-form: the object x. The object x is a pure form of perception, just as space-time is the pure form of sensation. The object x will receive a concrete determination (e.g., as a lion-object) only when it is related to the synthesized parts of a spatiotemporal diversity (a long mane, a loud roar, a heavy step...), such that I can say, “So it’s a lion!” But the multiplicity of sensations that appear to us in the manifold of experience would never be referred to an object if we did not have at our disposal the empty form of the object x, since there is nothing within sense experience itself that accounts for the operation by which I go beyond sensible diversity toward something I call an object. Where does this form come from? The object in general, Kant tells us, is the correlate of the “I think” or the unity of consciousness; it is the expression of the cogito, its formal objectivation. “Therefore the real (synthetic) formula of the cogito is: I think myself, and in thinking myself, I think the object in general to which I relate a represented diversity.” The predicates that are attributed to the object x are what Kant calls the categories or the pure a priori concepts of the understanding; and the subsumption of a sensible diversity under a concept is what Kant calls an act of judgment. The Critique of Pure Reason thus presents us with an analysis of the edifice of perception: the apprehension of successive parts, the reproduction of preceding parts, recognition by means of the form of the object in general. Kant’s analysis in effect moves from the form of space and time (the pure form of sensation) to a determined spatiotemporal form (apprehension and reproduction as syntheses of the imagination) to the form of the object x (the pure form of perception). The philosophical adventure Deleuze explores in The Logic of Sensation begins at this point. The post-Kantians such as Hegel took as their starting point Kant’s theory of the “transcendental unity of apperception.” But Deleuze moves in the opposite direction, breaking with the form of recognition that grounds that unity. There are neither categories nor mediation in Deleuze, and one of his most insistent themes is “to have done with judgment” (Artaud). Deleuze effectively pushes to its limit a trajectory inaugurated in the Critique of Judgment, in which Kant explored the role of the imagination freed from the legislation of the understanding. Four elements of his analyses are particularly relevant to the themes of The Logic of Sensation. 1. Aesthetic comprehension. The first is the theme of “aesthetic comprehension” (measure). In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant tells us that the act of synthesis begins with the apprehension of successive parts. In the Critique of Judgment, however, he in effect starts over and asks a question that went unformulated in the first critique: what counts as a part? To determine what constitutes a part, the imagination must have at its disposal a constant, or at least common, unit of measure. To be sure, the understanding could intervene and provide a mathematical evaluation of magnitudes in the fixed form of a concept of number (this object is “ten meters high” or “four inches wide”). But the imagination does not have recourse to concepts, and in the nature of objects there is no such constant measure. The imagination can thus begin to carry out its syntheses only by choosing a sensible or qualitative unit of measure. Kant notes, almost in passing, that such a unit of measure is found primarily in the human body: “A tree judged by the height of man gives, at all events, a standard for a mountain.” In other words, I can use the height of a human being as the unit of measure to apprehend the parts of a tree (“this tree is as tall as ten men...”); in turn, I can then use the height of the tree to measure the mountain behind it (“that mountain is as high as twenty trees...”). Even at the level of simple perception, apprehension already implies something like a “lived evaluation” or “aesthetic comprehension” of a unit of measure, and, as Derrida notes, “this primary (subjective, sensory, immediate, living) measure proceeds from the body.” This is the moment of phenomenology in Kant: aesthetic comprehension presupposes the situatedness of our bodies in the world, our “being-in-the-world.” In the Phenomenology of Perception (1962), Merleau-Ponty analyzed in detail the manner in which our body provides us with such a “corporeal or postural schema” on the world. 2. Rhythm. This leads to a second theme, that of rhythm. What Kant is saying in the Critique of Judgment (§26) is that even the most elementary act of the synthesis of perception presupposes a logical act (though Kant here gives the term logic a new meaning). Beneath the successive apprehension of arts, there is a kind of logical synthesis that requires a purely aesthetic comprehension of the unit of measure. “All estimation of the magnitude of objects of nature is in the last resort aesthetic (i.e., subjectively and not objectively determined).” Because the measure is subjectively determined, it is subject to constant evaluation and reevaluation, and is therefore in constant variation. The unit of measure varies in each case depending on the thing to be perceived, just as the thing to be perceived depends on the chosen unit. I may evaluate a tree in relation to the human body, but at night I may evaluate the rising moon in terms of a coin held at close range. From the viewpoint of aesthetic comprehension, I am continually in the process of changing my unit of measure according to my perceptions. Following Maldiney, Deleuze describes this aesthetic comprehension of units of measure as the grasping of a rhythm (though Kant himself does not use this term), which takes place without a concept. Aesthetic comprehension is the grasping of a rhythm with regard to both the thing to be measured and the unit of measure. Beneath both the measure and the units, there is rhythm. In this sense, concepts are metrical: they give one the beat, but beneath the concept there is the rhythm. “Rhythms are always heterogeneous, we plunge into them in a sort of exploration,” an experimentation; even if you have a concept, “you do not yet have the rhythmicity of the things which are subordinated to it. A concept, at best, will give you the beat or the tempo.” Beneath concepts, one always finds rhythmic blocks or complexes of space-time, spatiotemporal rhythms, ways of being in space and in time. The foundation of perceptual synthesis is aesthetic comprehension, but the ground on which this foundation rests is the evaluation of rhythm. 3. Chaos. But once we have reached this point, we cannot stop. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant finally becomes aware of an impending catastrophe, as if the ground (rhythm) upon which the foundation of the synthesis rests were starting to tremble. Kant presents a disconcerting scenario: I look at something, but my imagination wavers, I become dizzy, vertiginous. First catastrophe: I seek an appropriate unit of measure, but I cannot find one; or I choose one, but it is destroyed. I choose another, but it too proves to be inadequate, as if what I am seeing is incommensurable with any unit of measure. Second catastrophe: In my panic, I can perhaps see parts, completely heterogeneous parts, but when I come to the next one, my dizzy spell only becomes worse; I forget the preceding part; I am pushed into going ever further, losing more and more. Third catastrophe: What is striking my senses is unrecognizable; it is something that goes beyond any possibility of aesthetic comprehension. My entire structure of perception, in other words, is in the process of exploding: I can no longer apprehend the successive parts, I cannot reproduce the preceding parts as the following ones arrive, and finally I can no longer recognize what the thing is. I can no longer qualify the object in general. Why does this happen? Because my aesthetic comprehension, that is, the evaluation of a rhythm that would serve as a foundation of measure, has become compromised, threatened. This is what Kant calls the experience of the sublime. The sublime takes place when the edifice of synthesis collapses: I no longer apprehend parts, I no longer reproduce parts, I no longer recognize anything. Instead of rhythm, I find myself drowned in a chaos. What Kant discovers in the Critique of Judgment is that the synthesis of the imagination (apprehension, reproduction, recognition), which constitutes the edifice of knowledge, rests on a basis of a different nature—namely, an aesthetic comprehension of both the thing to be measured and the unit of measure. Aesthetic comprehension is not part of the synthesis, it is the foundation on which the synthesis rests, its soil. But at the same time that Kant discovers this foundation, he also discovers the extraordinary variability of its ground (rhythm) and its fundamental fragility (chaos). Between the synthesis and its foundation, there is the constant risk that something will emerge from beneath the ground and break the synthesis. Why this fundamental fragility? According to Kant, it is because there are infinite phenomena in space and time (such as the immense ocean or the starry heavens) that risk overturning the aesthetic comprehension of the unit of measure. The imagination finds itself overturned, blocked before its own limit; it discovers its own impotence, it starts to stutter. We here reach the point that Deleuze calls the “bend” in sufficient reason: it is at one and the same time that we discover both the ground of the synthesis (rhythm) and its ungrounded nature (chaos). Fortunately, we are not caught up in the sublime all the time, which would be a terrible experience; normally we manage to hold on to our perception, and to relate spatiotemporal diversities to the object-form. The sublime, however, entails a suppression of perception, an experience of the formless or the deformed. Yet chaos itself can also be a germ of order or rhythm, and it is this rhythm-chaos couple that lies at the heart of The Logic of Sensation. When Deleuze was asked if the aim of The Logic of Sensation was to make readers see Bacon’s paintings better, he conceded that it would necessarily have that effect if it succeeded. “But,” he continued, “I believe that it has a higher aspiration, of which everyone dreams: to approach something that would be the common ground [fond] of words, lines, and colors, and even sounds. To write on painting, to write on music always implies this aspiration.” This “common ground” is, precisely, rhythm: “Rhythm appears as music when it invests the auditory level, and as painting when it invests the visual level. This is a ‘logic of the senses,’ as Cézanne said, which is neither rational nor cerebral. What is ultimate is thus the relation between sensation and rhythm, which places in each sensation the levels and domains through which it passes.” In painting, it was Cézanne and Klee who best exemplified this complex relation between chaos and rhythm. Cézanne said that the painter must look beyond a landscape to its chaos: he spoke of the need to always paint at close range, to no longer see the wheat field, to be too close to it, to lose oneself in the landscape, without landmarks, to the point where one no longer sees forms or even matters, but only forces, densities, intensities. This is what Cézanne called the world before humanity, “dawn of ourselves,” “iridescent chaos,” “virginity of the world”—a complete collapse of visual coordinates in a universal variation or interaction. Afterward, in the act of painting, the earth can emerge, with its “stubborn geometry,” its “geological foundations” as “the measure of the world”—but with the perpetual risk that the earth in turn may once again disappear in a second catastrophe, in order for colors to arise, for the earth to rise to the sun. Similarly, Paul Klee, in a famous text in Modern Art, wrote of how rhythm emerges from chaos, and how the “grey point” jumps over itself and organizes a rhythm, “the grey point having the double function of being both chaos and at the same time a rhythm insofar as it dynamically jumps over itself.” Translated into Kantian terms, both Cézanne and Klee mark the movement by which one goes from the synthesis of perception (apprehension, reproduction, recognition) to aesthetic comprehension (rhythm) to the catastrophe (chaos), and back again: the painter passes through a catastrophe (the diagram) and in the process produces a form of a completely different nature (the Figure). 4. Force. But there is a final moment to this Kantian trajectory. Kant himself presents us with a kind of consolation: at the very moment the imagination discovers its impotence, it makes us discover within ourselves a higher faculty that is stronger than the imagination: the faculty of Ideas, which is like a faculty of the infinite, of the supersensible. What is this faculty of Ideas? Kant famously identified two types of the sublime: the mathematical sublime and the dynamical sublime. For Deleuze, the latter is more profound than the former because the dynamical sublime finds its figure in the “unformed” or the “deformed” (the undoing of the object-form). The forces of Nature are unleashed: a flood, a fire, an avalanche, a hurricane at sea. What do I experience? The fact that I am nothing! It is all too much for me, too strong, too overwhelming, and I experience a kind of terror. As a mere human, I am nothing compared to the might of Nature: my intensive power is reduced to zero faced with the unformed or deformed power of Nature. But at the same time, what is thereby awakened in me is a new power, a spiritual power, a faculty of Ideas that Kant identifies as the faculty of Reason, and by which humanity is revealed to be superior to Nature, pointing beyond Nature toward our spiritual destiny as moral beings (the noumenal as transcendent). But this is where Deleuze breaks with Kant and inverts the critical philosophy. For Deleuze, the faculty of Ideas is no longer identified with Reason; rather, Deleuze posits Ideas within sensibility itself and defines them not by their transcendence to Nature but rather in terms of their immanence to experience itself (the noumenal as immanent). Ideas remain suprasensible, but they now reveal the forces or intensities that lie behind sensations, and which draw us into nonhuman or inhuman becomings. In Deleuze, in other words, the power of Nature in the unformed or the deformed appears in the form of the nonorganic life of things: “The non-organic life of things, a frightful life, which is oblivious to the wisdom and limits of the organism....It is the vital as potent pre-organic germinality, common to the animate and the inanimate, to a matter which raises itself to the point of life, and to a life which spreads itself through all matter.” Bacon’s primary subject matter is the “body without organs” that lies beneath the organism, the body insofar as it is deformed by a plurality of invisible forces: the violent force of a hiccup, a scream, the need to vomit or defecate, of copulation, the flattening force of sleep. In Cézanne, similarly, mountains are made to exist uniquely through the geological forces of folding they harness, landscapes through their thermal and magnetic forces, apples through their forces of germination. Van Gogh even harnessed as yet unknown forces, such as the extraordinary force of a sunflower. Klee’s famous formula echoes through Deleuze’s writings like a kind of leitmotif: not to render the visible, but to render visible. Sensations are given, but it is force that constitutes the condition of sensation. The artistic question then becomes: How to render sensible forces that are not themselves sensible? How to render the nonvisible visible in painting, or the nonsonorous sonorous in music? This leads us, finally, to the third line of concepts in Deleuze’s book, which concerns the way in which painters, and Bacon in particular, produce this “logic of sensation.” The aim of the book, Deleuze tells us, is not only to build a “general” logic of sensation, but to show how, in Bacon’s work, its summit is found in the sensation of color. In arriving at this conclusion, Deleuze once again takes us through a kind of deduction of concepts. The first is the concept of the cliché. Clichés, Deleuze writes elsewhere, are anonymous and floating images “which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each of us and constitute our internal world, so that everyone possesses only psychic clichés by which we think and feel, are thought and felt, being ourselves one cliché among others in the world that surrounds us.” If Deleuze’s philosophy is a genetic philosophy, the cliché is precisely what prevents the genesis of an image, just as opinion and convention prevent the genesis of thought. In this sense, one of the fundamental questions of Deleuze’s philosophy is, What are the conditions for the production of the new (an image, a thought...)? Hence the essential role of the catastrophe: the condition for the genesis of the image (or the sensation) is at one and the same time the condition for the destruction of the cliché. How then does the painter pass through the catastrophe and destroy the cliché? This is the role of what Deleuze calls the diagram or graph (chapter 12), a term he derives from the semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce. Peirce had noted the important and often overlooked role that diagrams play in mathematical thought. Although mathematics is usually presented as a purely deductive or axiomatic science, theorematic reasoning often involves the construction of diagrams and a kind of “ideal experimentation” with schemata consisting of points, lines, surfaces, and relations: “points are made and stretched...pins are stuck in maps...pages are covered in scribbles.” Mathematics, Peirce insisted, is as experimental as physics or chemistry, except that its experiments necessarily take on an ideal or “diagrammatic” form. In his semiological theory, Peirce had classified the diagram as a special case of the icon, “an icon of intelligible relations.” Although Deleuze admits his indebtedness to Peirce, he rejects the iconic status that Peirce assigned to the diagram, since it tends to conceive the diagram simply as a “copy” or graphic representation of intelligible relations or coordinates. Deleuze, rather, prefers to assign to the diagram a much more strongly creative or genetic role: “the diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality.” As Deleuze explains in chapter 13, the diagram acts as an analogical modulator, a conjunction of matter and function. Painters, Deleuze argues, have their own type of diagrammatism. What he terms a painterly diagram (an operative set of nonrepresentational and nonsignifying lines and colors) is the means by which painters, in their own way, pass through the experience of catastrophe. The painter’s diagram undoes the optical organization of the synthesis of perception (clichés), but also functions as the “genetic” element of the pictorial order to come. Every painter, Deleuze suggests, will pass through this process in a different manner. “The diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe,” he writes, “but it is also a germ of order or rhythm.” Using Wittgensteinian language, Deleuze says that the diagram constitutes a “possibility of fact,” out of which the Fact itself will emerge. Plateau 11 of A Thousand Plateaus analyzes, in a more general manner, this complex emergence, out of chaos, of the elements of rhythm, with its territories and milieus. The struggle against chaos in art, philosophy, and science is also one of the central themes of What Is Philosophy?, notably in its final chapter, “From Chaos to the Brain.” If the summit of Bacon’s own logic of sensation is found in the “coloring sensation,” it is because it is primarily (though not exclusively) through the use of color that Bacon effects his diagrammatic procedures. In this regard, Deleuze identifies two fundamental uses of color in the history of painting. The first, more traditionally, emphasizes relations of value between colors, that is, the contrast of shadow and light (chiaroscuro). It has as its correlate the construction of what Deleuze calls a tactile-optical space, that is, the representational space that was inaugurated by Greek art and refined in the Renaissance. Figuration is itself a consequence of this tactile-optical space. In such a space, bodies are not merely perceived optically but take on a sculptural or tactile quality (depth, contour, relief, etc.), producing the illusion of a three-dimensional space behind the frame. In chapter 14, Deleuze shows how, in the history of art, this tactile-optical world would subsequently be broken and develop in two different directions: toward the exposition of a purely optical space, in which space is freed from its references to even a subordinate tactility (Byzantine art); and toward the imposition of a violent manual space, in which the hand begins to express itself in an independent way, producing a line that delineates nothing, and which the eye can barely follow (Gothic art). Deleuze’s analyses of these developments draw heavily on the German art historical tradition of Aloïs Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Wilhelm Worringer, though without the last’s appeal to a “will to art” (Kunstwollen). These developments, in turn, would be recapitulated in their own way in modern art: abstraction would develop a purely optical code (Mondrian), whereas expressionism would move toward the extraction of a purely manual line (Pollock). In chapter 15, however, Deleuze will define Bacon’s novelty in a twofold manner that breaks with these earlier conceptions of colour and space. On the one hand, in his use of colour, Bacon follows Cézanne and Van Gogh in replacing relations of value with relations of tonality, that is, with pure relations between the colours of the spectrum. Following Gilbert Simondon, Deleuze calls this a technique of modulation that relies on the relations between colors or the juxtaposition of tints. “The formula of the colourists is: if you push colour to its pure internal relations (hot-cold, expansion-contraction), then you have everything.” For the colourist, everything in painting—form and ground, light and shadow, bright and dark—is derived from pure relations of color. In this regard, Deleuze sees Bacon as one of the great colorists in the history of painting. Chapter 16 analyzes how the three formal elements of Bacon’s paintings—the Figure, the contour, the structure—are all constructed by means of colour: the internal variations of intensity in the structure, the “broken tones” of the Figures, the coloured line of the contour. Thus, each element of Bacon’s paintings converges in color, and it is modulation (the relation between colours) that explains the unity of the whole, the distribution of each element, and the way each of them acts upon the others. This is why Deleuze says that it is the “coloring sensation” that stands at the summit of Bacon’s logic of sensation. On the other hand, this use of color claims to bring out a peculiar kind of sense from sight: a haptic vision of colour, as opposed to the optical vision of light. What Deleuze calls haptic vision is precisely this “sense” of colours. The tactile-optical space of representation presents a complex eye-hand relation: an ideal optical space that nonetheless maintains virtual referents to tactility (depth, contour, relief). From this, two types of subordination can occur: a subordination of the hand to the eye in optical space (Byzantine art), and a strict subordination of the eye to the hand in a manual space (Gothic art). But what Deleuze, following Riegl, terms haptic space (from the Greek verb aptõ, to touch) is a space in which there is no longer a hand-eye subordination in either direction. It implies a type of seeing distinct from the optical, a close-up viewing in which “the sense of sight behaves just like the sense of touch.” Riegl argued that haptic space was the invention of Egyptian art and bas-relief, in which form and ground are experienced as being on the same plane, requiring a close vision. Deleuze in turn suggests that a new Egypt rises up in Bacon’s work, this time composed uniquely of colour and by colour: the juxtaposition of pure tones arranged gradually on the flat surface produces a properly haptic space, and implies a properly haptic function of the eye (the planar character of the surface creates volumes only through the different colours that are arranged on it). In this regard, Deleuze will place Bacon in the great tradition of Turner, Monet, Cézanne, and Van Gogh—the great modern colourists who replaced relations of value with relations of tonality. We have attempted to distinguish three conceptual trajectories in The Logic of Sensation, which respectively concern aspects of Bacon’s paintings (isolation, deformation, coupling...), the nonrational logic of sensation (rhythm, chaos, force...), and the act of painting itself (clichés, the diagram, modulation...). Obviously, the three trajectories are interlinked: painting has its own manner of experimenting with the logic of sensation, and Bacon’s path has a validity of its own that does not negate other paths such as abstraction or expressionism. In turn, each of these trajectories points beyond itself toward linkages with other arts such as music, cinema, and literature, such that The Logic of Sensation can itself be seen as an entry point into the conceptual proliferation of Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole, and his other writings on the arts.

                                                                                 Abattoir Angel

"I happen to be very, very full of images."
-Francis Bacon in interview with David Sylvester


Bacon speaks here as if he were gorged with images, the casual metaphor expressing a kind of gourmandise, a plenitude resulting from an uncritical devouring of images. "I'm greedy for life; and I'm greedy as an artist." His work touches on the theme of this exhibition, antropofagia at several points. He absorbed images from numerous visual sources both "high" and "low": not only the paintings of van Gogh, of Rembrandt and Velazquez, which he confronts, absorbs and reformulates, but also photographs, including those of Muybridge, plates from medical and natural history textbooks, and newspaper pictures. All were capable of engaging him, nourishing his imagination and prompting responses in his paintings. Many crucial aspects of Bacon's painting can be related to this theme: the physical fact of the human body, the reality of flesh and the violence of sensation, which he continually reworks through paint; the fragmentation of the body, the fusion of bodies in desire, their tension in the extremity of feeling, bodies revealed through x-ray and stripped for sacrifice (as in the Oresteia triptych).

Most of Bacon's images, in his teeming imagination, were of the body, usually human, sometimes animal. A small proportion were probably realized, and of those many were destroyed. Bacon painted himself, dozens of small self-portraits, busts or half-length, and more rarely, from 1956, about seventeen full-length self-portraits; he painted his close friends and lovers, nudes male, female and sometimes of indeterminate gender, and occasionally and shockingly, coupling bodies. The body, its flesh and its openings are Bacon's great subject, as they were Picasso's, and there are significant comparisons and differences in their respective distortions of the human figure. Picasso's manipulations and re-tellings spring from physical desire and fear of another's body, and from a love of formal rhythms. For Bacon there is a desire to intensify and almost consume the living presence of the body, whether his own or another's, to render the physical as a fact in paint. "I'm just trying to make images as accurately of my nervous system as I can."²

He painted himself in a mirror or from photographs; his friends he painted from photographs. He preferred these, together with memories and associations, to the living presence in his room. He was freer that way: "They inhibit me because, if I like them, I don't want to practice before them the injury that I do to them in my work."³ The injury, the distortion is to the painted image, but if it were not an image there would be no visible distortion. It is not, in other words, just a matter of the violent handling of paint, a willingness to allow chance gestures, gougings, smears and slashes of paint free rein on the canvas: his painting is neither expressionist nor abstract in that sense. "The image," he said, "matters more than the beauty of the paint."⁴ It is crucial that the "damage" is done to the image, because the real that Bacon was after is that of the human body in its entirety and the mystery of what we call "human nature." The human body, that is, simultaneously veiled and revealed in paint.

"When talking about the violence of paint, it's nothing to do with the violence of war. It's to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself. And the violence of reality is not only the simple violence meant when you say that a rose or something is violent, but it's the violence also of the suggestions within the image itself which can only be conveyed through paint."⁵

Robert Melville, one of the first critics to recognize Bacon as a major artist, linked him in an early essay in Horizon to the cubism of Picasso and Duchamp of 1910-12, which was "far and away the most beautiful and moving achievement of 20th century painting."⁶ Melville was not implying that Bacon's painting was an anachronism, for he held, with considerable justice, that since then there had, strictly speaking, been "no new developments in painting"-until Bacon. What Picasso and Bacon had in common was a concern with "the ambiguity of the boundaries of the figure in space"-a concern which, as we shall see, was as much philosophical as formal. Bacon did not share the linear/planar configuration of that moment of cubism, but sought to represent through new means the interpenetration of the body with its surroundings, creating similar fluctuations of space and indefinable forms. In the paintings of which Melville speaks, those depicting a man passing through curtains (like the magnificent Study from the human body of 1949), heads half consumed, with open mouths, or with piercing gaze, figures trapped in spare linear boxes, it is impossible to "divorce the facture from what it forms." Melville eschews the opinion, which was becoming increasingly current, that Bacon was the painter of alienation and horror.

Melville also recognises that, as with cubism, it is not a question of an "increasing tendency towards abstraction," as Michael Fried wrote in Arts Magazine. Fried, as a critic in the Greenberg tradition, for whom the purity of the pictorial means, the avoidance of "theatricality" were of absorbing importance, was much more ambivalent about Bacon. He argued that the interlocking of paint and image often does not happen; he felt that figure and setting pull against each other, and, given his predisposition to abstraction, naturally preferred the latter: "broad fields of stained black or blue over which Bacon has painted with a dragging brush simple but elegant railings in bright, dry yellow [. . .]"⁷

Fried noted that the group of paintings after van Gogh’s The painter on his way to work (1888), the Study for portrait of van Gogh, marked some kind of a turning point, which he saw in terms of the increased density of paint which encouraged an overall configuration. While it is true that the landscape/background enforces itself in an unprecedented way here, with brilliant colour bands or slashes of paint by comparison with the hitherto dark grounds: curtains, shutters, cages or voids which absorb or contain the figure, the relationship is still one of tension and struggle. Although now in a sense reversed, in that the figure is dark against the colours, this is still the heart of the drama: the black spidery shadow cast by the painter on his way to work in van Gogh’s picture devours Bacon’s figure.

If anything, however, the paintings which followed this sudden explosion of colour magnify the spatial ambiguity, and simultaneously simplify it, while the bodies are isolated, pressed and squeezed by space.

Bacon’s attitude to the human body, and to the very idea of "being human" has much in common with that of the group of dissident surrealists gathered at the end of the 1920s round Georges Bataille and the review Documents. Bacon was, much later, to become a very close friend of one of them, the writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris, and it was Leiris who published an extraordinary essay in Documents in 1930: "L’homme et son intèrieur," in which certain aspects of Bacon’s "images" are prefigured.

Leiris moves the question of the body’s ambiguous boundaries, discussed above in connection with cubist fragmentation and distortion, into a challenging philosophical arena; however, in asking the questions what is man, and what is human nature, he places the problem of the body’s representation at the very center. His ostensible subject—and one which is wholly in keeping with Documents’ use of the bizarre to question the idea of a norm—are a series of 17th century anatomical prints by Amé Bourdon from a medical textbook. Recalling an anecdote of a woman watching, repelled, a butcher eviscerating a beef carcass, and exclaiming "Do we have such horrors inside our body?" Leiris by contrast, describes the extraordinary beauty of these plates of bodies flayed to reveal muscles and sinews, dissected to uncover nerves and veins. He celebrates their irresolvably paradoxical nature: skinned and cut in half, these figures pose jauntily as living, caressing their own body or casually holding an ear in one hand. Leiris proposes that the clean surfaces of the conventional nude of academic painting dehumanizes the body, leaves it bereft of any sense of its mysterious reality.

1. David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London: Thames & Hudson, 1980, p.166.

2. ibid. p.41.

3. ibid. p.41

4. ibid. p.41

5. ibid. p.81. I have always doubted whether by "the violence of a rose" Bacon just meant it had thorns; an anecdote told by Michael Peppiatt in his biography of Bacon throws light on this. At the house of one of his London hostess friends Bacon disliked the bowls of artificial flowers. When told they didn't die like real flowers, he protested: "But the whole point of flowers is that they die." Like Georges Bataille in "The language of flowers," Bacon found the poignancy of flowers precisely in their mortality ("tatters of aerial manure"). He did not of course paint flowers, except at the very beginning of his mature years as a painter, in the Figure Studies of 1945-46, where the oddly formal bouquet stands in, in a sense, for a face.

6. Robert Melville, "Francis Bacon," Horizon, December 1949/ January 1959, p.421.
7. Michael Fried, "Bacon’s achievement," Arts Magazine.

There are parallels at several levels with Bacon: his love of the interior of the mouth, his paintings of carcasses, recalling Rembrandt, his defiant stress on the beauty of the colour of blood. But it is also in the materialist challenge Leiris deliberately poses here to the conventional values placed in human nature that an echo is found in Bacon. Leiris suggests that the only pledge man has that he is not alone in a glacial and strange "nature" is the existence of a "human nature," that is, human creatures other than ourselves; but it is not companionship or society that matter, but the physical fact of the body, the sight of which, whether one feels solidarity or enmity towards it, is what touches us most closely. "Masochism, sadism, and almost all vices in the end are only ways of feeling more human because of being in deeper and more abrupt relationship with the body."⁸ It is the body, entrails and all, that constitutes human nature.

In many different ways the bodies in Bacon’s painting are pushed to an extremity: sometimes literally in the grip of a violent sensation, sometimes with internal organs exposed through x-ray, as in the central panel of Triptych 1976, sometimes through the pure manipulation of the paint. Particularly striking are those works where the brute fact of the body is brought into relation with the grandeur of ancient myth, as in the Triptych inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981), where the headless, naked figure of Agamemnon in the center is not just naked but his interior is exposed. Here we might recall also George Bataille’s notion of debasement, of continual "bringing down in the world" of man in his aspirations. The oscillation between man’s elevation, erection, verticality and his fall, reduction to the earthly horizontal is often enacted in Bacon’s paintings.

Although Bacon did occasionally, as in the Oresteia triptych, draw upon literature for his subject matter, it was never to draw out a narrative, to tell a story. Sometimes there is a spectator in the painting, watching a couple, as in Triptych inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem "Sweeney Agonistes." (1967) In Eliot’s "Sweeney Agonistes," subtitled "fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama," louche and menacing characters exchange threats and seductions against a background invocation of a paradise "crocodile isle":

"doris: You’ll carry me off? To a crocodile isle?

sweeney: I’ll be the cannibal.

doris: I’ll be the missionary. I’ll convert you!

sweeney: I’ll convert you! Into a stew.

A nice little, white little, missionary stew."⁹

There is nothing, Sweeney says, on this isle except three things: "Birth, and copulation, and death." He tells of a man who murdered a girl, and the final lines are a jazz age version of a Greek chorus, evoking a nameless hunted terror. Bacon’s triptych in no sense illustrates the poem, but conveys a similar haunted world of couplings and annihilation. As Michel Leiris said in his 1983 study of Bacon, in his canvases there are "incandescant parts, seething with energy, in contrast to neutral parts where nothing is happening."¹⁰ In this triptych there are three concentrated centers of energy; in the right and left panels, two couples—one male, the other female—are contained on plinth-like supports within a cage set against virtually identical neutral spaces. In each, there appears to be a mirror, one of which reflects a casual observer, on the telephone. In the center, there is no mirror but a window open onto a void, behind a terrible mass of flesh and clothes. Bacon, like Eliot, transposes into the rhythms of the modern world—its language and imagery, the tragic impulses of Greek drama.

Despite his occasional references to mythological, religious or poetic subject matter, Bacon denied that he was affirming a traditional hierarchy, which placed history painting at the top, then portraits, landscape and finally still life. Agreeing that "as we are human beings, our greatest obsession is with ourselves," he suggested a different order, in which, as "things are so difficult, portraits come first." ¹¹

In both the 1971 Self portrait and the 1976 Portrait of Michel Leiris, a strange and seductive ghostly likeness hovers, of calm and familiar features, behind the powerful thrusts and smears of paint. This uncanny remnant haunts the image like a memory just below the surface, but also works with the marks that have destroyed it to convey a likeness beyond that of mere "photographic" resemblance. The likeness incorporates physical stance, structure, movement, but there is also more at stake. Bacon talked of wanting to get at the essence of the thing, but he didn’t mean by that some transcendental, disembodied self: quite the reverse. It is rather that he wanted to grasp the impossible material whole, of the body in whose flesh our strongest sensations and passions are registered.

But what of the many unidentified figures, often called Lying figure or Reclining figure? These are sometimes of uncertain gender, or appear androgynous. In the catalogue to the recent exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, David Sylvester makes the observation that in Triptych—Studies of the human body of 1970, the left hand figure is androgynous, while that on the right, despite its emphatic breasts, has a face that is very like Bacon’s own. This remarkable instance of entering or absorbing another’s body and even gender is linked by Sylvester to Bacon’s extraordinary capacity to switch between roles: "At moments he was one of the most feminine of men, at others one of the most masculine," and this leads him to Tiresias. In Eliot’s "The waste land," for Bacon the most resonant of poems, Tiresias, the "old man with wrinkled dugs" is the spectator, in whom "the two sexes meet":

"And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed [...]" ¹²

The ambiguous boundary of the body, of the self and other is triumphantly transgressed in Bacon’s paintings.

The transformation here enacted between bodies is also a consequence of pursuing, as Bacon said, "the suggestions within the image itself." The wrestling figures from Muybridge’s photographs, for instance, become coupling males. The process of alteration has an almost cinematic quality. Bacon described seeing "every image all the time in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences," and comparisons could be made with the type of montage that is nowhere more powerfully achieved in film than in Dalí and Buñuel’s Un chien andalou.

Bacon cannibalised photographs in a much more dramatic way than anyone in his lifetime realized. Salvaged from his studio are scores of newspaper and magazine photographs, plates from medical textbooks and other sources which were "worked over," sometimes violently erased, defaced, or collaged together, sometimes lines and marks added to pinpoint and exaggerate what had excited him in them. A news photograph of a cricketer, for instance, has had the top half of the body rubbed out, leaving the lower half of the body with legs encased in cricket pads, their tops curving like buttocks; this must be one source of the torsos in the early 80s paintings like Study of the human body 1982. These were in a sense his sketch pads, and what he did to them and how they relate to the paintings will be a complicated matter to resolve.

What seems to be violent distortion in Bacon’s painting thus has several causes and effects. In the absence of the consoling religious myths and the loss of any notion of progressive modernity, Bacon put it for himself as a kind of internal dialectic: "Ah well, 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." ¹

12. ——, Francis Bacon: the human body, London: Hayward Gallery, 1998, p.38

13——, Interviews with Francis Bacon, op. cit

A PICKLED NOSE   By ZINOVY ZINIK   

Before Francis Bacon's portrait of Muriel Belcher was put up for sale, the auctioneers from Christie's arranged a private viewing for the press and regular patrons at the Colony Room. It was a clever idea, really, to bring the picture back to its birthplace. The late Muriel Belcher had owned Bacon's favorite watering hole (little water, much whiskey). The viewing was a cunning publicity stunt. Newspapers are constantly on the lookout for gossip, and Christie's people rightly recognized that a painting from Bacon's Belcher period, shown in the Colony, couldn't fail to attract attention.

    Muriel Belcher had arrived in London after the war, having run away from both her native Birmingham and authoritarian father, who was a prosperous Jewish impresario of Portuguese extraction. Muriel was accompanied by her lesbian lover, a Jamaican named Carmel, whose colonial origins may have influenced the naming of the club when it opened in 1948. Britain's then retrograde licensing laws forced pubs to shut their doors in the afternoon, so heavy-drinking Sohoites would be forced to move next door with their glasses to private establishments such as the Colony. In those days Francis Bacon was neither rich nor famous. He made up for this shortcoming with a wide variety of rich and famous friends whom he introduced to the Colony, which got him free drinks in perpetuity. Bacon called Muriel "mother," and Muriel reciprocated by referring to Bacon as her daughter. A close and cozy family, indeed. Soon, they were joined by the entire London school of painters—or, rather, the drinkers of that school. A love of booze was the only artistic thing they had in common.

    Soho is the very embodiment of all that is seedy and sensual, clandestine, illegal and brutally exhibitionist. It has long been the cognate of my tormented émigré soul. This square-mile magic island has for generations attracted to its shores all kinds of shipwrecked refugees and undesirables—French Huguenots and Spanish Jews, Italian anarchists and Marxist philosophers have all happily coexisted alongside the peddlers of sleaze and neighborhood nuns. Among this motley collection of outlandish types and sexual minorities, my displaced Muscovite-Londoner persona has always been perfectly at home.

    Within the magic island of Soho, the Colony Room is a separate state municipality, with its own borders, laws, and rituals, totems and taboos. Pretty much every drunk among the Soho diehards has a story to tell about the Colony, although many have never been inside. First, one has to find the entrance. This mysterious limen is squeezed between two nondescript restaurants (whose names and owners are constantly changing). The green door that leads to the Colony is usually camouflaged behind restaurant tables. This door opens onto a badly lit staircase, painted racing green. Climb two breakneck flights of stairs that pose mortal danger to life and limb, and one comes to another green door. Open it, and enter something very much like a theater set. Time has stood still for generations.

    The walls and ceiling are quite predictably green. To the eyes of an Irishman, green is both the color of shamrock and race tracks. For the English, it is probably most like a snooker table. I don't know what the symbolism of this green signifies for the Chinese, but in the minds of Russian alcoholics like myself, it is the spitting image of the Green Dragon of vodka delirium. But whoever you are, the moment you enter the room, you are lost to the outside world as if hijacked to the green woods of some enchanted forest.

    Every capital city in every civilization has a bar like this: a hidden entrance for the chosen few, a barroom crammed with dusty memorabilia, its row of tattered rickety stools taking up a third of the inevitably cramped room. The walls are plastered with photographs, paintings by "our great geniuses," old posters and pinups, framed newspaper cuttings referring to famous disturbances of the peace and public quarrels, old fan letters and postcards on the mantelpiece, pictures of "the inner circle" celebrating acts of outrageous behavior, crimes and misdemeanors, framed and unframed fragments of a glorious past—all of them like omens of a no-less exciting and scandalous future.

    The window box looks like the frame for a work of pop art: From its arch hangs Muriel's patent leather bag and her lacquered walking stick. Her pale, ravenlike features and piercing gaze look down on the drinkers from numerous photos. Long since dead, she still manages to dominate the room. In her day, she was notorious for cutting short any cant utterance or snobbish gesture, and drowning the sacrificial tippler in a torrent of obscenities of such force that he or she often didn't dare turn up again. Ever since the days of her fierce reign, the Colony Room has upheld its shock-tactic tradition with newcomers, as if testing their moral rectitude and spiritual resistance by subjecting them to all manner of verbal abuse. It is the Soho version of Darwinism. Anarchists may be egalitarian, but even they have their own passport systems, hierarchical orders, and seats of privilege, not to be sullied by riffraff. Having said this, the Colony Room crowd would never have anything to do with Democracy.

    Those accepted by the Colony Room never again feel lonely on this island. While the rest of England has fired of any general notion of human bondage, this enclave of incorrigible drunks, it seemed to me, managed to maintain a sense of belonging—to a tribal community, a secret society, or clandestine order of the chosen few. As a result, their sense of history has always been of a home-brew, samizdat variety, quickened with a taste of moonshine. Denizens of Soho---that separate nation—often express their sense of history through apocryphal accounts of drunken antics that eventually acquire the symbolic significance of state business. This was more so in the case at the Colony Club.

    Part and parcel of those chronicles was, of course, the Francis Bacon myth. This myth could only have been created amid the feverish atmosphere of Soho during the postwar years. During that period, some of Soho's habitues, nourished on a diet of undercooked Marx and raw Freud marinated in champagne, were discovering the Nietzschean abysses of the human spirit in a whiskey glass. Others, like the atheist and iconoclast Bacon, were trying to rescue man from his own depths—tearing apart the body, grabbing his genitals to pull himself out from the abyss of his spirit.

    Human anatomy has always played a major part in the Soho oral tradition. Every member of the Colony knows by heart the story of Bacon's fall down the stairs in the last throes of inebriation. Some stories say his eyeball popped out, but he shoved it back with a thumb. Others insist that it was not his eye but his nose that was put out of joint, but that he pushed it back into place with a single blow of his fist. He himself was so drunk that he couldn't remember whether it was his eye, nose, or right nut. Still, the details of the story matched the style and spirit of his paintings, disfigured bodies the color of raw ham in a nod to the origins of his name. (The rentboys of Soho called him "Eggs.")

    Incidentally, Bacon's favorite book was an illustrated manual entitled Diseases of the Mouth. To my mind, these shocking anatomical obsessions concealed a passion to prove that we are nothing but self-made machines, and his sole desire was to break us open—to see the mechanism and how it works. Like all idealistic materialists, Bacon was anxious to lay bare the human soul to show, as if in an anatomy lesson, how spiritual muscles make emotional tissues move.

    Bacon couldn't stand the sight of his own features. Those puffed-up cheeks made him look like a fat toad. The haunted expression of his eyes transformed the toad into a charming monster. He was one of those artists who spend their lives trying to discern their own image in alien things. Maybe homosexual cravings include the desire to see oneself in the mirror of another's eyes.

    When we came face-to-face for the first time (ahead of his Moscow exhibition), our hectic conversation, lubricated by a bottle of Famous Grouse, left me feeling that he wasn't talking to me but through me—to himself—as if he was reacting not to my words but to the echo of his own thoughts. I might just as well have stood up and walked away, leaving him with a tape recorder.

    I confused his defensiveness with the indifference of a dictator.

    Every artist is a despot of a kind, like all tyrants. Bacon was particularly sensitive regarding his image in the eyes of others. He seemed almost to have a mortal fear of being taken for someone he didn't want to be, and of being unmasked as someone he didn't suspect he was. Paradoxically, that Godlike terror of a clearly defined identity made a ferocious atheist of him. The person who believes in his own uniqueness cannot believe in the existence of an afterlife. The existence of an afterlife implies that your life will be reshaped all over again in a similar vein. That, in turn, means that your life in this world, as a work of art, was a flop. After all, how can a work of art be regarded as unique and perfect if it can be repeated somewhere else, re-created and emulated by someone else, even if by the hand of God?

    Bacon coaxed my own fear of being watched by cold and curious eyes. Yet as soon as the formal interview was over and the tape recorder switched off, his mood changed. I began speaking about my own idiosyncratic experiences as a Russian living in London, and witnessed the eighty-year-old tyrant with his childish tantrums transform into an inquisitive and clever child. He listened intently, laughed at every joke, and we quickly put away two-thirds of the Famous Grouse. The rest was polished off en route to the Colony Room, where we were to meet James Birch, who had organized Bacon's retrospective in Moscow. Birch was also known as "the Prince of Darkness" in Soho's nightlife. Birch was sensational in both roles. He was also the one who put me up for membership in the Colony.

"It almost looks like Bacon could see the future of Ian's nose in Muriel's face," I declared boldly. Ten years had passed since my first (and last) conversation with Bacon. The portrait of Muriel was on an easel standing next to the bar. It was positioned so the picture's background matched the wall, where there hung an enlarged photo of the real Muriel staring defiantly down at her painted image. The original clearly disliked the bulbous growth on the copy's face, which looked like an old shoe. It was, in fact, a dead ringer for Ian Board's nose.

    Ian was Muriel's darling former barman. He had inherited the Colony Room, along with the unofficial title of Master of Ceremonies, or, better still, Master of the Unceremonious. Muriel had always used the Colony's chatterers as a multifaceted prompter, which gave her free rein to blurt out the most inventive obscenities. Some would say it was her own sophisticated way of entertaining her guests, rather than an outright humiliation, Ian, on the other hand, needed no prompting. He insulted the customers indiscriminately.

    During my first few years in London, I used to visit the Colony for a kind of shock therapy: After withstanding the terrors of Ian's unpredictable verbal abuse at the club, I could embrace my estranged and depressing London existence like a homecoming. It took me years to realize that Ian Board had ingested all the bile and bitterness circulating among Soho's old-timers and metabolized it into the foul-mouthed persona of tetchy punkdom.

    He used to sit on "Muriel's throne," a high stool situated not behind the bar but in front of it. It was tatty and worn-out, like the rest of the furniture at the club. Against the backdrop of the green-as-envy walls, Ian was the only spot of color. He used to dress like a flamboyant American beach bum, with his baseball cap, unthinkable jumpsuit pants, and a T-shirt. The tawdry colors matched the parrot in the toy cage by the window. But whereas the stuffed bird was quite dead, Ian was both alive and kicking—his customers, that is—and parroting their bawdy exchanges with horrible shrieks.

    Perhaps the most striking resemblance between Ian and the parrot was something that anatomy books call a beak and a nose, respectively. The bizarre colors of Ian's proboscis made his jumpsuits look drab. That boiled mush of a nose was the stuff of legend, purple and porous, like a rotting eggplant. Shift your eyes to avoid the horrible sight, and you might pick out one of the numerous photos of Ian on the walls. The progress from decadent youth to semi-invalid debauchery reveal the passing years measured out by his mutating nose. He must have possessed a strong masochistic streak to put up with its daily decay. The mirrors duplicated the catastrophic changes. I wonder if Ian's merciless stance toward himself caused his legendary impatience with others.

    "Hello, Miss Russia," he would blurt from beneath the peak of his cap, nostrils trembling (Ian's nose was a sensor for detecting newcomers). At such moments its scarlet colors reminded me of the Soviet flag. In fact, Ian had started to acknowledge my presence in the Colony only after a sharp exchange I had with Bacon on the subject of Eisenstein's Stalinist politics and his cinematic genius. Only then did Ian seem to realize that I was the only Soviet-born member of the Colony Room. Not as red as his nose, though. The nickname he invented for me—Miss Russia— contained the inevitable sexual innuendo. I wasn't the only one to suffer in this way. Even the Spectator's cartoonist, Michael Heath, was dubbed Hampstead Heath, as if he had something to do with that infamous hot spot of gay activity in London. No one came near Ian without being exposed as a queer, an easy lay, a bum, a coward, or a pervert. Part of the family, that is. It was my dream, wasn't it? To become one of the family. A dream fulfilled. So every time he called me Miss Russia, I swallowed the insult with a faint smile,

Almost a year had passed since my last visit to the Colony, when we celebrated the anniversary of Ian's death. Drunken tears, shouts, hysterical laughter, songs sung out of tune. Now, the place was quieter. Otherwise, it was not much different. The crowd that came for the private viewing of Bacon's portrait gradually dispersed. Only the regulars were hanging on. Not unexpectedly, I was greeted by two familiar backs. One belonged to the bearded Malcolm, a producer of avant-garde and radical porn videos, and the other to the bulky Bill Greenberg, editor of the avant-garde and radical monthly journal Engagement. With his backside draped over the barstool, Greenberg looked like an exhibit from one of Malcolm's experimental porn shows, which, in turn, might have become the subject for an analytical review in Greenberg's radical magazine. Ostensibly dedicated to East—West dialogue during the Cold War, Engagement was subsidized by a number of the world Intelligence services (or so it was rumored), while its editor was engaged with Malcolm in the study of the human race, Eastern and Western, at nearby bars and parlors. The helix of their activities was a reflection of the local topography. Greenberg's offices were right next door to Malcolm's studio on Windmill Street. From time to time, respectable, bookish contributors to Greenberg's Engagement would absentmindedly get the wrong entrance. Afterward they would wonder why lining up to support freedom of expression had to make them party to the staging of alternative sex fests at their publisher's editorial offices. Greenberg was too busy to answer this burning question, because he spent most of his working hours with the Colony mob, smoking his anti-American Cuban cigars (evidently mandated by the name of our club).                                                                                             Copyright © 2001 Zinovy Zinik. All rights reserved.  Context Books  ISBN: 1-893956-04-0  

The Post-Human Clay

David Garcia's essay, originally published in Nettime, analyses Francis Bacon's paintings as forms of photography. To contextualise such painterly works thus, provides a useful context for understanding the photographic basis of other material arts.

Post-human Clay

David Garcia's essay, originally published in Nettime, analyses Francis Bacon's paintings as forms of photography. To contextualise such painterly works thus, provides a useful context for understanding the photographic basis of other material arts.

'The active locus of science, portrayed in the past by stressing the two
extremities, the mind and the world, has shifted to the middle, to the
humble instruments, tools, visualization skills, writing practices,
focussing techniques and what has been called "representation." Through all
these efforts, the mediation has eaten up the two extremities: the
representing mind and the represented world. The shift has had the enormous
advantage of multiplying the connecting points between art history and the
history of science......'

Bruno Latour; How to Be Iconophilic in Art, Science and Religion. 1998

 'I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between
them, like a snail, leaving a trail of human presence and memory trace of
past events, as the snail leaves its slime.'

Francis Bacon; catalogue notes, 1955

 'Modern art aspires to the condition of photography'

Susan Sontag (quoted from memory, I think from "Against Interpretation")

 In most reflections on the post-human, the work of Francis Bacon is seldom
mentioned. This would be particularly true of postings on this list where
insights provided by the visual arts into technological culture are often
(as in the case of net-art) seen as necessarily embedded in the
technologies themselves. The idea that a practice as archaic as painting
might illuminate aspects of human transformation in and through
technological media, might be regarded with suspicion.

 This is even more likely to be the case with an artist like Francis Bacon,
a white, male, figurative painter whose important work was made  in the
40s', 50s' (trailing off into the formulaic during the 60s', 70s' and 80s).
He is all to easily mistaken for that familiar figure the 'brilliant
English eccentric'. At best a hysterical version of continental European
existentialism, which from the perspective of the visual arts, someone like
Giacometti embodies with so much more "authenticity".

 To begin with there is just so much to dislike about Bacon. The stagy
backdrops, in which his figures are trapped, appear contrived and in the
worst sense theatrical. The writhing figures can seem histrionic, cheap
bohemian thrills, to decorate the walls of the super rich with endless
screaming popes.  

So why is it that his images continue to reach out beyond little England?
 Why is it that when most English artists who are rooted in the 40s' and
50s' now seem hopelessly dated, part of a literary age, does  Bacons's
work, with all its apparent weaknesses still feel urgent, contemporary,
necessary?

My proposition is that the answer can be found in the way he straddles the
technological divide.. His real achievement lies not his explicit
expressionism, but in the way his work reconnects us to the way photography
has changed us. It reminds us, that the nature of photographic perception
(hence our perception) is violent. Literally a violation.

"...one's sense of appearance is assaulted all the time by photography and
by film. So that when one looks at something, one is not looking at it
directly but one is also looking at it through the assault that has already
been made on one by photography and film........I think its the slight
remove from fact which returns me onto fact more violently."
 (Bacon interview: 75)

 We no longer have any direct recollection of the merging of the camera's
way of seeing with our own. It requires an act of historical imagination to
reconnect us to a time when the brute facts of the photographic process
were still fresh, not yet blurred by the processes of image manipulation.

So we look back to moments when the photographic image was present but not
ubiquitous, and if we are lucky we might have access to an imagination like
Bacon's, when he began to paint seriously it was a moment when mass
communication was redefining reality as itself. But the process was in its
early stages and therefor more visible. Numbness in the face of mass,
industrial scale mediation was still a generation away. The anaesthetised
aesthetic must wait for Warhol.  Although Bacon was in no way a pop artist
he was fascinated, in a suspicious way, by Warhol, his mirror (mirror as in
inverted reflection).

 Bacon's first and most enduring influence was Picasso, the violence of
Picasso. The dismembering cruelty of Picasso.  Unlike his fellow cubists
Picasso exploited the discoveries of cubism to open up new ways of
expressing the extremes of human sensation including tenderness. But only
Duchamp's interpretation of Cubism matches Picasso's violence. It was the
violence of Picasso that Bacon wanted to make his own, but he had none of
Picasso's facility as a draughtsman.

 The salvation of Bacon, a self taught artist, lay in the fact that he
couldn't draw. A late starter, although again like Warhol he was already
successful in a more commercial field of art. Armed with his priceless
arrogance he didn't have the patience to learn to draw from life (extreme
impatience is one of the many unsung mothers of invention). So he took a
short cut. From the outset his figures are drawn directly and shamelessly
from photographs. But rather than simply using photographs as a reference
or a substitute he made photography itself the subject.  Photography's
peculiarities, distortions and revelations; but above all the structural
violence of the photographic was Bacon's discovery.  He succeeded in
transposing and amplifying the violence that drew him to Picasso,
reinterpreting it from the perspective of photography; that aspect of
photography that wrenches a moment out of the flow of time.
  
 But he did not transpose Picasso's warmth, he was wedded to the cold
rhetoric of medical science (Bacon used medical photography as a continuous
reference) it was a particularly contemporary objectifying violence he
sought. J.G.Ballard's novels have a similar quality of medicalised pain.
But in Ballard the connection of these sensations to the blurring of the
boundaries between ourselves and our technologies is more conscious, more
explicit.

 Although Bacon's subject was the rooted in the photographic he could never
be mistaken for a photorealist but the comparison between his achievement
and theirs is instructive. Unlike the photorealists he emphasised the
materiality of his means, reminding us that photography's power lies not so
much in optical verity but in the fact that it is based the physical. it is
a material trace, a memory trace. It is as much a material record as a foot
print (or a death mask) a photograph is a physical imprint of our shapes on
light sensitive surfaces. It may not be our soul but it is indeed part of
us snatched from the flow of time. The use of chance that is a key aspect
of gestural painting amplifies this characteristic of photography and
Bacons quest is somehow to use painting to replicate the photographic
process.
 'I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between
them, like a snail, leaving a trail of human presence and memory trace of
past events, as the snail leaves its slime.'

 Bacon's carefully prepared stage settings suggest a painterly equivalent
of the photographic plate, a trap or snare for the fleeting aspect of
photographs. In the end it is this functional, questing, essaying aspect of
Bacon's repetoir of mannerisms that make them bearable.   

 "...the difference from direct recording through a camera is that as an
artist you have to, in a sense, set a trap by which you hope to trap this
living fact alive. How well can you  set this trap? Where and what moment
will it click?" (Interviews with Francis Bacon: David Sylvester 1975)

 I am aware of how much a short text like this leaves out about an artist
as complex as Bacon. But that is the value of a list, that hybrid of
private and public discourse. So perhaps our statements can be more
extreme, less measured than in other more public contexts.
 I confess it was written out of frustration with a new biography of Bacon
by David Sylvester. Sylvester's reputation as an art critic in England is
considerable. It is partly based on his gift for befriending important
artists, most notably Bacon and Giacometti. The aquisition of the Tate's
important collection of Giacometti was greatly facilitated by this
friendship. But most of all his reputation as the wise old owl of English
art criticism rests on a justly famous series of extended interviews with
Bacon and published in the 70s'. But once out of the company of lucid minds
Sylvester's own prose invariably slides into pedantic descriptions,
anecdotes and commonplaces occasionally lifted by quotations by the artists
themselves.  

 I hoped that his latest "Looking Back at Francis Bacon" would prove the
exception but it continues to represent him (and it is true that Bacon
himself sought this) as that cliché the painter of the human condition. On
the contrary it is in Bacon's highly charged articulations of our
transformation through a specific technology, that embody, most vividly,
the post-human condition.

 David Garcia

The State of Naratological Studies on Francis Bacon 

and Notes Toward a New Theory.

Cynthia Costanzo

Critical approaches and intellectual movements reverberated throughout Francis Bacon's long career, including biography, iconography, surrealism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism. Considered chronologically, the ideas' applicability and utility are brought to bear against the paintings with particular attention to the issue of narration.

Post World War II critics categorized Bacon's works as expressionistic or surreal and assumed an implicit narrative quality in Bacon's works. These early interpretations claimed that Bacon was telling "war stories."

Criticism on Bacon regarding narration bifurcated with existentialism in the 1950's. Michael Leiris argued for the "absence" of narration in Bacon's paintings, changing the course of writing on Bacon by necessitating that other critics, likewise, explicitly examine their assumptions about narration.

A major challenge to Leiris' argument arose from psychoanalytic approaches applied to Bacon's painting, particularly evident with Donald Kuspit. Kuspit invoked Bacon's own phrase: "the violence of representation," arguing that Bacon's project was to reinstill in modern art the possibility that pictorial signs could signify reality. Kuspit's emphasis on representation reopened the potential for narration in Bacon's paintings.

A pivotal point occurred with Gilles Deleuze's poststructuralism in the 1960's. Deleuze critiqued the very system of representation relied upon by Kuspit and others for their psychoanalysis and narrative interpretations. Deleuze applied his critique in his 1981 homage, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation. Deleuze argued that Bacon avoided narration, a significant turn in Bacon criticism. After Deleuze articulated his view on the role (or lack thereof) for narration, based on his subversion of the structuralist paradigm of representation, subsequent critics necessarily contended with the interrelated issues of figuration, representation, and narration.

Ernst Van Alphen's Francis Bacon: Loss of Self (1993) discounted previous analyses of Bacon's works and argued for a "narrative or perception." Although Deleuze, too, presumes, at least, a two-way interaction between the viewer and the painting, Van Alphen ultimately argues against the Deleuzian approach and asserts the importance of narrative.

Contemporary scholars Dawn Ades and Andrew Forge, as well as Lawrence Gowing and Sam Hunter, all nod to Deleuze, if not directly supporting or refuting his theory, suggesting the current import of the narration question. Additionally, Bacon's posthumous biographers Daniel Farson and Andrew Sinclair acknowledge their critical stance with particular references to Deleuze. Based on the collective assessment of the main trajectories of scholarship on Bacon, the thesis concludes with points of departure for new inquiries into con's rich and enigmatic oeuvre.

Gorgeous slathers and oozes of paint

Gay gutter paintings by Francis Bacon are in-your-face

Pink Triangle Press  1999 by Gilbert Gignacs

There is no denying it, that to many people, Francis Bacon was a shit. Most people feel an ice cold shiver run right up their spine when they see his pictures .Their minds instantly snap shut.

Nevertheless, in his own lifetime, he was recognized as one of the 20th Century's greatest paintersand a very homosexual one at that. As a gay man and artist Bacon was out with a vengeance, before it was even thinkable. His work was gloriously celebrated in huge exhibitions throughout Europe, including Moscow and New York, and eventually everywhere else on the globe. In April of 1992, at age 83, he died of a heart attack, alone in a hospital in Madrid.

A fragment of Bacon's long life is now the subject of a recent film: Love Is The Devil. Bacon is played by (look-alike), Sir Derek Jacobi. The film is directed by John Maybury, a protégé of the late Derek Jarman of Edward II fame. The film is loosely based on Daniel Farson's 1993 intimate biography of Bacon: The Gilded Gutter Life. This almost-experimental film visibly claims him as part of 20th century gay life, and proclaims it for the entire world to see. I can't help but feel that Bacon would have loved the book, but would have been furious about the movie. Definitely not because both honestly discuss that nasty and cruel kernel about him, but simply because the film excludes his paintings.

Unfortunately, this is due to complications with the estate, which was left to his last lover, John Edwards. Perhaps because the film was about Bacon's relationship with his previous lover, George Dyer, rather than about him. Still, for anyone to pay that much attention to his life rather than to his work would have annoyed the irascible Bacon no end. In short, to Bacon, painting was his life. As for the rest, he often said dismissively: "When I am dead, put me in a plastic bag and throw me in the gutter. That about sums it up, don't you think? Cheerio!"

Just as with all of his paintings, the pronouncement had the desired effect: people realized he was deadly serious and got upset.

Ottawa faggots do enjoy a special privilege when it comes to the work of this famous/notorious homosexual painter. It remains astonishing that the National Gallery of Canada is the only public collection in Canada to own and exhibit an original oil painting from his hand. The painting is one of a series most often referred to as "the Popes", entitled: Study for Portrait No 1, 1956. Allan Jarvis, then gay director of the National Gallery, acquired it from Bacon's gallery in London in 1957. The work has been on public display in Ottawa for 32 years.

Bacon was born on Oct 28,1909 of English parents in Dublin, Ireland, just round the corner, as it happens, from where Oscar Wilde was born on Oct 16 in 1854. He was a direct descendant of the brilliant and illustrious Sir Francis Bacon, renowned philosopher/statesman and a pre-eminent Elizabethan faggot. In his lifetime, the artist Bacon refused several proffered decorations, because he intensely disliked the society they symbolized.

In the beginning, his family went back and forth between England and Ireland. During his childhood, he spent the war years in England. A lifelong asthmatic prevented Francis from getting a formal education. Back in Ireland, he was sexually abused at age 15 by the grooms and stable-hands of his father's horse-training farm. A year or so later, in 1925, his father caught him in make-up and dressed in his mother's underwear. Francis was subsequently thrown out of the house, and on a weekly allowance of 3£ paid by his mother, he went to live in London where he took on odd jobs.

For a while in 1927, he lived and played in the gay world of Berlin and especially Paris, which was to remain his favorite city. His first encounter with French culture marked him significantly; he learned the language. Later, he owned an apartment in Paris and lived there for awhile. In the late '20s while in Paris he had the intense experience of an exhibition of Picasso charcoal drawings which kindled the raging fires of his own creativity.

Back in London, he refused to attend art schools. Instead, he had the good fortune of learning his craft by becoming the protégé of the now obscure Australian painter Roy de Maistre, who was surrounded by a small coterie of young artists. All were to become famous: painter Graham Sutherland, sculptor Henry Moore, and writer Patrick White, among others. Bacon was highly intelligent and a voracious reader of French and English literature, with a strong penchant for Greek drama which inspired most of his work.

He spent the next decade or so trying to understand ideas surrounding drawing and paintingbut he systematically destroyed everything he produced at that time, which included hundreds of canvases and thousands of drawings. Ten years later, at a group show after the war, he exhibited the now famous triptych: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). The world had never seen such astounding painting of such a horrid image. People who understood and appreciated painting immediately purchased his work. Bacon had arrived.

Almost 30 years later, he considered the 1972 exhibition of his work at the Grand Palais in Paris to be the crowning achievement of his career. On opening day, his then-lover George Dyer committed suicide by drug overdose in a hotel just down the street. The incident was kept quiet for fear that the press would give more attention to the drama of the suicide, than to the man who was being celebrated as one of the world's greatest living painters. The horrid tragedy of that ribbon cutting was that more than half of the paintings at the exhibition were of figures inspired by Dyer.

If you have seen or intend seeing Love Is The Devil, then you owe it to yourself to take the time to go to the National Gallery to see the painting. The image is familiar but the painting is beautifully-strange. The work is a large midnight-blue canvas under glass in a bright gold frame. At its dark center hovers the image of an enthroned Pope, faintly but precisely caged in.

Bacon has transformed the magnificent portrait of Pope Innocent X, painted in 1649 by the great Spanish painter Diego Velasquez. It is one of the most enduring images of Western art and hangs to this day in the Palazzo Doria in Rome. Bacon was enthralled by this image, but only in a small postcard reproduction. Later, when briefly in Rome, he said he couldn't take the time to look at the actual portrait. I sympathize, for the hours of access to this exceptional but private collection do not invite spontaneity. By then, he had made consummate use of the portrait in his own paintings for almost 20 years.

To this day, the significance of his treatment of this famous painting has been greatly debated. Bacon would have a hissy fit when people asked him to explain his paintings. He would often impatiently answer: "If I could say it, then I wouldn't have to spend an entire lifetime painting it, don't you think?" He hated it when any one meaning was given to any of his paintings. He was not a religious person; he despised the very notion. Although the pictures have a definite subject that is given to us in paint with the precision of a surgeon, to look for a fixed narrative or literal meaning in any of his pictures is pointless. He invites us to accept their mystery and to continually reconsider how we feel about them.

He was his own most severe critic and would become enraged when he later chanced upon any of his Pope studies. He felt that they were ghastly and should all be destroyed, claiming that he could now do them much better.

The painting in Ottawa remains filled with the dark poetry of menacing shadows. It is undeniable that the unimaginable carnage of two world wars left inner scars and Bacon seems to have had no illusions as to what a dictator or tyrant felt like, even when one was hypocritically dolled up in religious drag. It amazes me how the Catholic Church has not protested its assaulting presence. Now, more than ever, with the opening up of war archives all over Europe, the implication of the Vatican's acquiescence to the Third Reich is undisputed. The image of a Pope, in its prefigured Eichmann-like glass box is wonderfully unforgettable.

The National Gallery has hung Bacon's large picture on a tiny wall at the end of the small gallery of mostly 20th century English paintings. It also happens to be installed right outside of what can only be described as the "holy temple" of late 20th Century American Art, where solemnly hangs the controversial stripe painting Voices Of Fire. What makes this all so amusing is the well-known fact that Bacon simply loathed abstract art. Always of strong opinion, he loved to state quite categorically that he thought it all to be merely decorative rubbish and boring as hell. To mischievously introduce the Bacon into that gallery would undoubtedly eclipse all of the others and certainly contaminate and ruin the purity of what he saw as their infinite boredom. One can easily imagine a huge grin sweep across his face revealing immeasurable delight at the very thought of letting the jackal into that temple.

In 1975, Bacon showed his recent works (1968-74) in New York at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I remember walking away from this exhibition feeling that, unlike any other painter, Bacon's paintings came into the world seemingly thrust whole. His is a unique alchemy of drawing and paint, where it is impossible to separate the paint from the drawing of the image on the canvas. Although the image looks like it has simply been flung there, no painter worked with more diligence to make it look like it was all so simple. It is the rigorous structure of the image which is magnificent and which usually trips up any foolish imitator. His in-your-face gorgeous slathers and oozes of paint are guided by a profound architecture of drawing and by an impeccably classical if risky sense of composition. He surpasses all the more because the paintings are uncontestably constructed with the energy and passion for painting the human figure. Nothing can detract from that.

Ten years ago, a Russian viewer who was attending an exhibition of Bacon's more recent work at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow entertained an acerbic opinion that circulated swiftly. Bacon considered it a compliment of the highest order, no doubt because of its discriminating, yet unflinching honesty. The visitor stated emphatically: "I don't like it! I don't think it's possible for great art to be so unpleasant!"

The National Gallery's painting certainly lives up to that!