As the Tate mounts its third exhibition of his work, Rebecca Daniels uncovers the ruthless artistic vision beneath the seeming chaos of the artist's life

In the summer of 1963, a young photographer called Jorge Lewinski knocked nervously on the door of Francis Bacon's studio in South Kensington in London and asked whether he could take the artist's portrait. 

After flicking through a portfolio of his work, Bacon invited Lewinski in and allowed himself to be photographed sitting amid the chaos, with a damaged circular mirror and numerous tins of paint brushes and pots of pigment behind him.

Bacon's art permeated his studio. He used the walls and doors as a palette. Newspaper articles and images ripped from books and Sunday magazines that had inspired him were scattered across the floor.

(Bacon boasted that he knew where everything was: at one photography session, the artist asked Lewinksi if he had seen a recent magazine article, before pulling a copy from the detritus.)

The point of his photo sessions with Lewinski was clear: Bacon wanted the public to see the sources of his creativity.

Today Bacon is considered one of thegiants of 20th-century art, even though his violent paintings are misunderstood as much as they are revered.

Earlier this year, his Triptych (1976) sold at Sotheby's for more than $86 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a post-war work of art. Next month, Tate Britain hosts a major retrospective of his work for an unprecedented third time.

Nearly two decades after his death, there is something about the genius of Francis Bacon that we continue to find compelling.

After settling in London in 1929, Bacon set up as an interior designer, but he soon began painting. The reception of his early work was largely disappointing.

He took part in the 1937 group exhibition "Young British Artists", but was so dispirited by the response (one headline read "Nonsense art invades London") that he destroyed his unsold paintings and abandoned art.

After spending the war years in the artistic wilderness, however, he catapulted himself to centre stage again with the spectacular triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, first exhibited in April 1945.

An outspoken atheist, Bacon chose to depict the attendants at one of the most important moments in the story of Christianity not as pious mourners but as ancient Greek Furies, blindfolded, screaming and writhing in anger, their emotions intensified by the vivid orange background.

The work concentrated on man's inhumanity to man, a theme that would prove central to Bacon's subsequent vision. Contemporary reviews described the triptych as "alarming" and "sinister".

Bacon said that he wanted his art to record life in the 20th century, and throughout his career, he pushed his painting to the boundaries of what was socially acceptable. But while many 20th-century artists ignored the grand tradition of Western art, Bacon embraced it, combining references to the Old Masters with images he found in magazines, photography and film.

This strange coupling can be seen in his series of paintings of the Pope, a subject he returned to frequently throughout the Fifties and into the Sixties

Head VI (1949), from a series of studies of male heads that he had begun in 1948, is Bacon's first Pope. It reworks Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650), which Bacon considered to be one of the greatest ever portraits; he knew it only through reproductions, but collected those obsessively.

He based the mouth, however, on the screaming grimace of a nurse in Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin. By fusing two powerful images from different eras, Bacon had fashioned a new and highly disturbing vision.

He returned to the Crucifixion as a subject in 1962, with Three Studies for a Crucifixion, which he completed for his first Tate Gallery retrospective that same year. When it was first shown, people were shocked by its extreme violence, but equally admired it as an astonishing painting.

Once again, Bacon ignored the spiritual elements traditionally associated with Crucifixion paintings, to focus on flesh, decay, and violent death. The central panel shows a mutilated person lying on a bed. On either side are carcasses, which held a particular fascination for Bacon.

"We are meat. We are potential carcasses," he told the art critic David Sylvester when discussing this triptych.

As a boy, he was fascinated by the raw flesh that he saw hanging in a butcher's shop in Ireland, while in the months before Three Studies for a Crucifixion was finished, he became obsessed by a magazine feature about an abattoir.

Bacon wanted to paint the human figure because he felt that abstraction, the dominant trend in post-war art, was superficial - although he also believed that traditional figurative art had been superseded by film and photography.

His solution was to depict human character at a level that penetrated much deeper than the camera: to "get on to the nerve", forcing his viewers to confront brutality.

Bacon's emphasis on the raw qualities of his subjects was reflected in his practice of painting on the unprimed reverse side of the canvas, the "raw" side. Today such subject-matter has entered the mainstream: artists such as Damien Hirst, who acknowledges his debt to Bacon, and the Chapman Brothers have experimented with similar themes.

There is a tendency to see all of Bacon's art as violent, but he also created some very tender paintings. In 1949, he completed the extremely sensual Study from the Human Body, which shows the back of a naked man, with a curtain caressing his body.

Bacon was openly gay, and some of his paintings, many of them triptychs, are extraordinarily explicit for their period; homosexuality remained illegal until 1967. His studies of entangled male bodies were inspired, in part, by the late-19th-century motion photographs of Eadweard Muybridge.

Bacon claimed the triptych format enabled him to depict things in "shifting sequences" like a film.

Photography was fundamentally important for Bacon's art: he even used pictures of his own paintings as sources for later work.

"I've always been haunted by them [photographs]," he once said, and he used photographs instead of preliminary drawings, often folding them or sketching on them before painting directly on to canvas.

Bacon had a reputation for bohemian living. He drank heavily and gambled compulsively, telling a friend that gambling was "intimately linked" to his work. Chance, he said, played an important part in his painting.

Yet his penchant for risk did not mean that he was undisciplined, and he retained a ruthless sense of what worked artistically. If a painting went too far or just did not work, he destroyed it, seldom with any regret.

From as early as the late Forties, international collectors and dealers who had noticed his work wrote to Bacon, begging for his paintings. The first museum to purchase one was New York's Museum of Modern Art, in 1948.

Bacon maintained a furious schedule of exhibitions in commercial galleries and museums (the new Tate show will be his third retrospective there). But the way in which he judged and destroyed his work meant that demand always seemed to outstrip supply.

His reputation continued to rise. In 1971, when the French art journal Connaissance des Arts conducted a survey of experts to identify the 10 most important living artists, Bacon was voted number one.

In a long, successful career, the only thing that Bacon misjudged was whether he would be remembered after his death (he was uncertain that he would). Today, his relatively small output of about 600 paintings continues to generate an ever-increasing frenzy, with new generations of wealthy collectors desperate to own one of his masterpieces.

More than any other artist, Bacon captured the contradictions, anxieties and frenetic energy of the 20th century in all its brutality and tenderness.

·  Rebecca Daniels is working on Francis Bacon: the Catalogue Raisonné, to be published in 2011, and is has contributed to Francis Bacon: Incunabula, to be published next month

·  Francis Bacon, sponsored by Bank of America, is at Tate Britain, London SW1 (020 7887 8888), from Sept 11

The Real Francis Bacon

Brutal, brilliant and passionate, 

Peter Conrad on the life of an iconic artist

Cover Story    The Observer Review 

The power and the passion

Peter Conrad, The Observer, Sunday August 10 2008

                      Francis Bacon by John Minihan  Paris 1977

I saw Francis Bacon once in passing 30 years ago, on the gilt and velvet staircase at the Royal Opera House. Even if I hadn't known who he was - the most celebrated painter of his time, all the more famous for the diabolical whiff of sulphur exuded by his alcoholic binges, his homosexual promiscuity and his voluptuous taste for pain - I would have found him unforgettable.

His face was a painting. Boot polish had been applied to his teased hair, with a quizzical wisp of a fringe fixed over his forehead; a thick application of make-up gave his cheeks a feverish heat. His eyes kept watch from inside asymmetrical craters, mementoes of drunken tumbles or of beatings administered by the East End bruisers with whom he consorted. His smile showed off teeth scoured with Vim, and inside his oddly circular mouth his tongue darted as if it were a lizard jabbing at its prey. He looked eruptive, like the popes who scream on their thrones in his early paintings.

As the novelist Paul Bowles wrote, Bacon's head always seemed liable 'to burst from internal pressures'. Or perhaps that head was likely to liquefy, melted like wax by some combustible fantasy within. I could imagine a puddle of boot polish, mascara, rouge and granulated ammonia on the plush Covent Garden carpet.

After a few more years of furious creativity by day and self-destructive indulgence by night, Bacon died of a heart attack in 1992 in Madrid. As his centenary approaches, oligarchs and arms dealers compete for possession of paintings in which feral, rutting men and mutant women reel through life in a mood of what Bacon thought of as tragic gaiety, exhilarated by their lack of hope: last May, Roman Abramovich broke the record for contemporary art auctions by spending $86 million on Triptych, 1976.

A few surviving acolytes and cronies - veterans of stupefied afternoons in Soho clubs, resilient victims of Bacon's vitriolic temper - cling to their memories of revelling with him, though as time goes on it becomes harder to separate the man from the mythic figure he has become. The French critic Michel Leiris likened Bacon to a pantheon of legendary heroes: Orestes guiltily pursued by the furies, Hamlet grappling with a censorious ghost, Don Juan driven by sexual demons.

Hoping to demythologise him, I talked to two fellow artists he encouraged, Peter Beard and Michael Clark; to his biographer Michael Peppiatt, who was a 19-year-old student when they first met in 1963; and to the Irish photographer John Minihan, who, after snapping Bacon in 1971 outside a magistrate's court where he was facing a trumped-up drugs charge, became obsessed with documenting his irregular existence. What I found was that even those who knew Bacon well were unsure who or what he was: a human being or a self-fashioned artefact? A bilious ogre or a suffering god?

As Peppiatt recalled: 'Francis used to say, "I'm the most artificial person you'll ever meet." He followed the example of an old whore in Paris, who said to him, "Je me fais jeune" - I make myself young.' 'He did a lot of work on himself,' Clark agreed, hinting that Bacon's jowls had been tidied away by cosmetic surgery. Peppiatt likened him to a devil, an irresistible tempter, and Clark described him as a phantom, a noctambulant wanderer noiselessly circulating on crêpe-soled shoes. 'I'd say he was a sacred monster,' smiled Minihan. 'He was Prometheus,' said Beard, 'with the eagle picking at his liver every day. He had a mantra that he got from Nietzsche. He was always repeating it: "Since everything's so meaningless, we might as well be extraordinary."'

One thing they don't deny is Bacon's centrality to their lives. 'I had my best times with Fran,' Beard told me. 'The drunker he got, the more sense he made.' 'That was a life-determining encounter for me,' said Peppiatt about buttonholing Bacon in a Soho pub to interview him for a Cambridge student journal. 'Francis immediately became essential to you, like an addiction. It was so exciting, so exalted to be with him.'  

                                                                                            WITH MINIHAN  

'I love talking about him,' Minihan burbled, before leading me off on a nostalgic tour of Bacon's South Kensington haunts - the mews studio where he painted in a swamp of composted squalor, the cornershop where he bought his smoked salmon, the automated booth in the tube station where he took the grimacing photographs he used for his self-portraits, the bus stop where he was patiently standing when Minihan saw him for the last time.

In all these relationships, adoration was mixed with anxiety, even dread. Valerie Beston, the Marlborough Gallery employee who looked after Bacon's chaotic business affairs, once said to Peppiatt, 'I can't think of a worse fate than being loved by Francis.' An early partner, Peter Lacy, fantasised about keeping Bacon chained to the wall and buggering him with a gang of accomplices; when they split up, Lacy sullenly drank himself to death in Tangier.

Bacon's East End boyfriend George Dyer, a petty crook whose intimates included the Kray twins, died in 1971 of an overdose of sleeping pills in a Paris hotel two days before the opening of Bacon's retrospective show at the Grand Palais: the doomed relationship is the subject of John Maybury's 1998 film Love is the Devil, with Daniel Craig as the befuddled Dyer and Derek Jacobi as an evilly epicene Bacon. Clearly, Bacon was dangerous to know.

For both Peppiatt and Clark, to enter the dives he frequented was like descending into an underworld, a realm of arduous tests and trials where young lads were despoiled of their innocence. Or perhaps it was a dizzier, more vertical rite, climbing into a rarified atmosphere of bohemian decadence.

Clark remembered the staircase that led up to the studio in Reece Mews, with a rope to clutch instead of a banister. 'It was as steep as a ladder, and so narrow that his paintings had to be squeezed out with not an inch to spare, so the edges always got scuffed. He'd leave the downstairs door open for me. I'd haul myself up with one hand on the rope, preparing for some great experience when I got to the top.'

The initiation could be hazardous. Peppiatt was at first rebuffed by Bacon's pet photographer John Deakin, who flapped his wrist and - using the feminine pronouns that were obligatory for Bacon's camp courtiers - said 'Oh no dear, she's become so famous she wouldn't deign to meet a student!' In 1977 Muriel Belcher, the dragon-like proprietor of the Colony Room in Soho, told Clark he was a 'cheeky cunt' when he gatecrashed her drinking club; another of Bacon's witchy guardians said, 'You're too young and pretty, you'll need to get your face bashed in a bit before my daughter takes an interest in you'.

'I was a bit naïve,' Clark primly added. 'Valerie arranged for me to make a portrait of Francis, but I wasn't a lackey - maybe that's why he trusted me.'

'Yes, I was playing with fire,' Peppiatt admitted. 'There was always some foreboding when I went to meet him, I knew I'd be X-rayed down to the bone. You remember in that South Bank Show when he keeps on pouring out red wine and says to Melvyn Bragg "Are you real?". You can feel Bragg flinching off-camera. Francis probed you like that, but it was more fun than studying for my Cambridge exams. I suppose he was attracted to me: he liked the challenge of a strapping young heterosexual. But I felt protected by him, never exploited. With George Dyer, it was trickier. He enjoyed the idea of luring me out of my respectable background into something criminal.'

Peppiatt brilliantly mimicked Dyer's adenoidal, glottal-stopped cockney grunt: '"Fuckin' college boys, ain't got the guts for a proper job." He dared me to turn up at some midnight rendezvous to rob a house or something. I was there on the dot, it was George who didn't keep the date! Francis had a subtler way of corrupting people. He loved to be ripped off, he'd leave bundles of money lying round to see if the rough trade he picked up took the bait - and they always did. He wanted to prove people to be rotten, himself included. "Rotten to the core," he'd say about himself, and he said it with pleasure and a kind of pride.'

Knowing Bacon enabled Peppiatt to walk on the wild side, trifling with illegality; for Clark - a fey, slightly haunted character, who told me in a paranoid whisper that he was 'breaking silence for the first time after 30 years' by discussing Bacon - the experience was an induction into mysteries that resembled the arcane ceremonies of a religious cult. 'He gave me access to everywhere in the studio. There'd be underwear strung up to dry in the bathroom, and frying pans full of pigment in the kitchen. For me, it was like those labs where the alchemists conducted their experiments - a cabbalistic place. There was a charm on the door, a secret symbol to warn that you were entering somewhere hallowed. He had a mirror that was smashed when someone threw an ashtray at it; it was pitted all over, and the silver backing had corroded. It was a black mirror, like seers use. It didn't reflect reality, it showed you visions. You can say it's all hocus-pocus, but what Francis did was esoteric: he was playing with very powerful, violent forces when he made those images.'

Peppiatt too acknowledges that he was 'spellbound' during his time with Bacon. Hero-worship usually compensates for some psychological need in the eager worshipper, and in Peppiatt's case, as he said, 'Francis was a father-substitute. I didn't get on well with my actual father, and here was this charming, devious replacement. In return he told me about his problems with his own father. He hated him, yet felt sexually attracted to him. And Eddie Bacon so despised this effeminate son that he got the stablehands on their horse-breeding farm in Ireland to flog Francis to toughen him up! Trust Francis to combine pleasure with pain by having affairs with the grooms who were told to whip him.'

The lurid Oedipal scenario may explain one of Beard's reminiscences. 'Fran loved his Shakespeare, and he was always reciting that song from The Tempest, "Full fathom five thy father lies, / Of his bones are coral made".' It sounds like a joyfully lyrical revenge, on behalf of wishfully patricidal boys. Yet when Peppiatt's father died, Bacon was tenderly solicitous. 'He took me out to dinner to console me, and we ended up at Annabel's having a second supper at one in the morning. "Why don't you dance?" he said, but I told him I didn't feel like it. So he went over and told a girl I'd had an eye on that I was too shy to ask her to dance. He pimped for me! When we got on to the dance floor, I looked around and he'd gone - he'd left me to enjoy myself. That was so healing: it reintroduced me to the fun of life.'

While Bacon supplied Peppiatt with an alternative father, to the homesick Minihan he represented a lost fatherland. 'I was born in Dublin, like Francis, though his family was grand and mine didn't have a pot to piss in. My mother went off to England and gave me to her sister to be reared. Francis was sent away by his father when he was 16; a friend of the family took him to Berlin, so he completed his education in the gay bars and cabarets that Auden and Isherwood went to. I was even younger when I escaped. I left school at 11, came to London and got a job as an office boy in Fleet Street. You could say I finished school at El Vino!

'It wasn't fashionable to be Irish in London in the 1970s, as the IRA were blowing the place up, but I always wanted to photograph my own people; I was working for the Evening Standard in the Seventies and I volunteered to go to the magistrate's court because they told me some Irish painter was up on a cannabis charge. That's all I knew about him. He let me take his photograph, and after they acquitted him - it was Dyer who planted the drugs and tipped off the police after some tiff they'd had - we walked off to Soho together. He was very gracious and kind, that was one of his Irish qualities.'

Bacon's grace and hospitable generosity are evident in Minihan's photographs of him squiring William S Burroughs around town: upstaged for once in his life, he fusses over his frail, bewildered companion. Minihan's photographs also capture a sociable exhibitionism that counteracts tales about Bacon's maniacal rages and his morbid gloom.

Michael Clark's portraits of Bacon emphasise the sad preoccupation of his sagging face, with eyes deep in concussed hollows grimly contemplating mortality; Minihan's Bacon, by contrast, looks quite different: dapper, dandified, irrepressibly larky. In one photograph, he preens in a PVC mac, no doubt relishing the snug feel of the female panties and fishnet stockings that he customarily wore as undergarments. 'Ah yes,' said Minihan, 'that's Francis throwing me some shapes, as we say in Ireland. He loved clothes, and so did I. He liked to pose and swagger when he had something fancy to show off, just like Oscar Wilde with his green carnation.'

Perhaps there was more to this fashionable flaunting than Minihan suspected. 'His clothes were always so tight,' Peppiatt remembered. 'Pegged trousers, leather jackets with epaulettes, those belted macs - he liked the sense of constriction, as if he was in bondage. And he wore a necklace that was so tight it often seemed to be choking him.'

Clark also recalled the choker, and wondered whether it had anything to do with the self-asphyxiating games of those who seek the perfect orgasm. In Bacon's paintings, a live, captive being often writhes in a steel cage; he created the same agonised entrapment for himself when he got dressed. The fetishistic gear also disciplined him. His afternoons and nights may have been devoted to the sloppy satisfaction of desire, but his mornings in the studio were a triumph of the strict, self-punishing will. Peter Beard noticed Bacon's weakness for uniforms made from animal skins and polished to a high shine, and drew the obvious conclusion: 'Fran sure as hell loved the Third Reich!' Bacon once gave a figure he painted a swastika armband; he disingenuously claimed that he liked the crooked shape and had no interest in what it signified.

Minihan, chatting to Bacon about home, enrolled him in his own nostalgic psychodrama. 'My great ambition was to introduce Francis to Samuel Beckett, so I could photograph the meeting of two great Irish exiles. But Beckett was a recluse, and eluded me for years. And Francis wasn't keen, he said he couldn't see what the two of them had in common: he was nervous of meeting someone whose view of things was even bleaker than his own. I suppose it's true that he'd listen to me rattle on about Ireland, without contributing much himself. Most of what he said about it was dismissive. In 1977 I showed him some photographs of a wake that lasted two days and three nights in a village in the west of Ireland. I was so proud of this work: it was a family of Beckett characters, and the whole thing demonstrated, like Bacon's paintings, that death is the only reality. But Francis screeched "Aaargh!" and looked away. He didn't like the photographs, but wouldn't give a reason. He was consumed by himself, in his own world.'

Like all who knew Bacon, Minihan had come up against a barrier, concealed by his boozy conviviality. Peppiatt's biography is subtitled Anatomy of an Enigma. When I asked Peppiatt what the enigma was, he immediately replied, 'His secretiveness. He had an almost magical gift for slipping away, for suddenly becoming someone else. And if you got too close, he warned you off by turning nasty.'

The pub crawls, the sessions in casinos, even the bouts of sadomasochistic sex were all a diversion and an evasion. Bacon was only himself when he was alone in his studio, accompanied by the private incubi he painted. Even if he was painting a friend or a lover, he worked from photographs and debarred the living model: his solitude could not be shared, and the secrets of the image-making that contorted and even crucified reality were never imparted.

'No one was allowed to see him at work,' Peter Beard remembered. 'The process had to remain out of sight. Once when he was drunk he spilled a bit too much. He said he added texture by sweeping up the mess on the studio floor and blowing it on to the wet painting: it was a kind of blow job! Then he got annoyed with me, because he regretted telling me.'

Michael Clark saw the shutters drop when, invited to look at a new painting, he noticed a patch of pastel and asked Bacon how he had fixed it. 'There was a pause, then he said "By the usual method". He wasn't about to give away a technical tip; I realised I'd gone too far.'

Confronted by this disappearing act, Bacon's friends were free to see him as whoever they wanted him to be, or as an ideal projection of themselves. This, I found, had happened to Bacon in the befogged memory of Peter Beard. 'My mind is fucked,' bawled Beard when I arrived to talk to him in Cassis, the resort near Marseille where he lives in a seaside villa. 'It's my attention deficit disorder - and the drink! Hey, that reminds me, can I get a kir? Then I can claim I was drunk during the interview. You gotta try one too, it's the local specialty.'

While waiting for his solicitous young wife to bring the sweet blackcurrant cocktail, he ripped open a can of beer, chomped on a steak sandwich known as an Al Capone, and treated me to a hallucinatory anecdote about leafing through a book of Bacon reproductions while on an LSD trip in New York during the 1960s.

'I'd recommend it,' he said. 'When you're full of the magic mushroom, you can see all those clouds of gaseous, tumultuous air that Fran painted.' Had I come to the south of France, I wondered, to talk about Bacon, or to meet Bacon's staggering reincarnation?

Beard, now 70, inherited a fortune from a clan of American railway entrepreneurs; he spent his youth cavorting with supermodels and rock bands, and possesses the eroded remains of a handsome profile that Bacon often painted. When not lolling beside the Mediterranean, he lives on a property in East Africa, fondly named Hog Ranch. His Kenyan connections make him a Hemingwayesque character, boisterously virile - although, unlike Hemingway stalking big game, his obsession is protecting imperilled species rather than gunning them down.

As a photographer, Beard has documented the slaughter of elephants and rhinos, which he sees as rehearsals for our human fate. 'Yeah, mankind is doomed,' growled Beard. 'I often talked to Fran about population dynamics, about how we were going the way of the elephants.' I wasn't sure about that meeting of minds: Bacon certainly thought that men were beasts, but he hardly shared Beard's ecological conscience.

Nevertheless, Beard considers Bacon - whose mother and sisters moved to South Africa and Rhodesia after his father's death, and who went on a photographic safari to Kruger Park in the early 1950s - to be an honorary African. 'He was always planning to come stay on the ranch in Nairobi. He never made it, but the realities in his paintings are primitive, primordial, so to me they evoke Africa. All that bleeding meat, and the dry grass: he's the greatest painter of grass, and it's African grass, not a wet English lawn.

'He was really into my dead elephants, and we had plans to collaborate on some sculptures. He was gonna mould the corpses and twist them over these immaculate chrome rails - he liked chrome because it reminded him of the car JFK was riding in when he was shot in Dallas - but there was a problem with the gallery in New York, some crap about keeping Brits out, and the dealer cancelled the show.'

Beard's own work pays homage to Bacon's carnivorous art. On the roof of his Mediterranean villa samples of elephant blood coagulated in the sun, waiting to be smeared on photographic collages that include snapshots of Bacon, transcriptions of his talk, and excerpts from Beard's African diaries, speckled by vulture shit. Images, as in Bacon's paintings, emerge from an abattoir, and paint - which Bacon once likened to the slimy track of a snail - is one of the fluids that spurt from a live, dying body. According to Beard, a thug Bacon once picked up in Monte Carlo stumbled into an unfinished painting in the middle of the night on the way to the bathroom. 'He decided he wanted to add something to it, so he whipped out his prick and jerked off on the canvas. You can still see the jism dripping down it. Fran didn't mind sharing the credit!'

A tough guy himself, Beard attributes the same machismo to Bacon. 'I hate the way Derek Jacobi minces about in that movie. I never saw one homosexual bone in Fran's body!' (At the very least, this counts as an original view.)

'He was strength on strength,' bellowed Beard. 'He was the Rock of Gibraltar, the best of British. Hell, he wasn't camp, the guy used to take a leak in the sink! One time when we were walking through Paris, a car ran over his foot. The driver jumped out to help, but Fran just shrugged like the stoic he was. Next day his foot was so swollen he could hardly walk: that's what Hemingway called grace under pressure. It's like Andy Warhol when he was shot in the guts by that nutty feminist [Valerie Solanas]. When they carried him out on the stretcher, all he said was "Now don't make me laugh!" Of course they were different guys. Andy was an idiot savant, but Fran was a fucking genius.'

The genius was a generator, transmitting an electrical charge to those around him. 'Francis used to say that 99 per cent of people weren't activated,' Michael Clark recalled. 'He switched you on.'

Near the end of our long lunch at Green's, a fish restaurant in St James's that Bacon often patronised, Peppiatt gave me an example of how this vitalising influence worked. A morose waiter brought us our coffee, then wearily retreated. 'You see what an automaton he is?' asked Peppiatt. 'Francis would have twinkled at him, flirted with him, made him a player. I remember once in Paris he ordered, as usual, a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine. The waiter poured it out with tremendous care, and Francis offered him a glass. "Oh no, monsieur," he said, looking over his shoulder, "la direction!" But Francis wouldn't allow the management the right of veto. He gave the waiter a glass and told him to sneak into the kitchen with it and drink it later. After a while, the door from the kitchen opened, the waiter peeped out, raised the glass and toasted us. That was Francis: he created excitement, mostly by transgressing the rules. That's what's missing from Love is the Devil. Jacobi doesn't convey Francis's geniality, his love of fun.' Our waiter eventually returned with the bill, hoping to speed our departure; I decided to leave him unactivated.

Bacon could deactivate people just as abruptly. 'He thought that friendship gave people the right to lacerate each other,' said Peppiatt. 'He did that to me once. He spent an entire night doing down Hockney, going on and on. "Leave it alone," I said. "Well of course," he shrieked back, "you with your pathetic taste would think Hockney was worth something." I told him off for it when he sobered up the next day.'

Beard witnessed another gratuitous outburst, directed at Jerry Hall during a party in a gay disco in Paris. 'I'd introduced Fran to Mick [Jagger] and that was fine, but when Jerry turned up he aimed this thunderball at her. "You fucking old cow," he said, "you grotesque cunt, you hideous bloody witch." He just wouldn't stop; it was this wave of bad vibes. The rest of us went down into some dark pit behind the dancefloor and hid. You can imagine what was going on there, but it was better than being within range of Fran.'

When Bacon died, the critic David Sylvester paid him a provocative tribute. Quite apart from Bacon's achievements as an artist, Sylvester described him as 'the greatest man I've known, and the grandest', and listed his staunch moral virtues: honesty, generosity, courage.

'I think that's a bit solemn,' said Peppiatt. 'He was mostly wonderful, but his shenanigans could be a pain in the arse. Yet he played up superbly, and he could be very suave when he took the piss. His rudeness was a by-product of his searing determination to tell the truth. He was a great possessor of people, and some of them were swallowed whole.'

Or else they swallowed Bacon whole and can still disgorge him on demand, which happened when Michael Clark staged a creepily vivid simulation of his antics in my London sitting room. Clark, channelling Bacon, primped his forelock with a non-existent comb, and freshened his makeup with sideways glances at an imaginary pocket mirror. Having titivated himself, he then nimbly removed an unseen £50 note from his pocket to press it into an open, needy hand that supposedly belonged to Jeffrey Bernard. Groping towards a bar that wasn't there, he wheeled across the floor in a re-enactment of Bacon's swooping gait, which made him look like a dipsomaniac question mark. Clark, in common with Beard, thinks of Bacon as a shaman who painted in a state of trance; during this impersonation, Clark was the shaman who conjured Bacon up before me. The spectacle was ghoulish but somehow touching: by such performances, Bacon's loyalists keep him alive.

Even in Bacon's absence, his images retain their terrifying power, a vampirish capacity to imbibe life from those who look at them. For a while, Peppiatt had a portrait that Bacon gave him hanging above his desk. 'It stared at me, and I could never face it down. Nothing in the head had settled, there was unfinished business going on inside the frame. It was so incredibly alive, and it made me feel - how can I say this? - so static. It seemed to be asking me if I was real, and I never knew what to answer.'

Peppiatt eventually sold the painting, and ever since has felt an aching regret, combined with relief at having escaped its mute interrogation. The story sums up the impact of Bacon's personality and his art. To know him was to be enraptured, to lose contact with the safe, stable norm; it made the rest of your existence, when you had to return to it, a mournful anticlimax.

Biography: From furniture to fine art

Early life
Born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents. Caught wearing his mother's clothes, he is banished from home aged 16. Settles in London in 1929. Chronic asthma causes him to evade enlistment for the Second World War.

Career
1929 Works briefly as an interior designer. A first exhibition of his work features mainly furniture but includes one painting, Watercolour. Meets Eric Hall, who becomes his patron and lover.
1934 Holds his first solo show. Disappointed by the reviews, he destroys most of the work.
1945 Shows Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, now considered his masterpiece, in a group show in London. Later donated to the Tate by Eric Hall.
1948 Erica Brausen represents Bacon. She sells Painting (1946) to MOMA, New York, for £280.
1949 One-person exhibition at the Hanover Gallery is a commercial success. Robert Melville writes an influential article about Bacon in Horizon
1952 Lucian Freud paints portrait of Bacon.
1953 First solo exhibition in the United States features eight Studies for Portrait after Velazquez's Innocent X. Bacon represents Britain at the Venice Biennale, alongside Freud and Ben Nicholson.
1962 Bacon paints Three Studies for a Crucifixion for his first retrospective at the Tate Gallery, a career-defining show.
1971 Lover George Dyer dies. Bacon begins the first of his 'memorial' triptychs.
1985 Major survey at the Tate.
1992 Dies of a heart attack, aged 82, while holidaying in Spain. Leaves entire £11 million estate to his friend Jonathan Edwards who in turn, donates Bacon's studio contents to Dublin's Hugh Lane gallery.
2007 Bacon's old studio junk, salvaged decades earlier by a contractor, fetches almost £1m at auction. The paintings, diaries and photos had been destined for the skip until electrician Mac Robertson persuaded Bacon to give them to him.
Imogen Carter

Winning streak: The rising price of Bacon

£200, 1946
The dealer Erica Brausen, introduced to Bacon by artist Graham Sutherland, buys Painting, 1946 for £200 and shows it at the Redfern Gallery.
£280, 1948
Brausen sells on Painting, 1946 to MOMA, New York, where it remains today.
£10,558, 1967
Sotheby's London sells Seated Figure.
£67,067, 1975
Sotheby's London auctions Study for a Pope.
£33,979 (US $66,371), 1984
It is alleged that Marlborough Fine Art, the gallery that represented Bacon, pays him $66,371 for Statue and Figures in the Street; it had valued it earlier at
$250,000.
£3.53mn (US $6.3m), 1989
Bacon becomes the world's most expensive living artist when his Triptych, May–June, 1973 sells at Sotheby's in New York.
£26.6m (US $52.7m), 2007
Study From Innocent X, 1962 breaks Bacon's record at auction in New York.
£44m (US $86.28m), 2008
Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich buys Triptych, 1976 making it the world's most expensive work of contemporary art. Art market monitoring agency Artprice declares Bacon to be the top-selling painter on the planet.

· The Francis Bacon exhibition is at Tate Britain from 11 September to 4 January, sponsored by Bank of America. The Observer is media partner. Observer readers can book two tickets for the price of one. Call 020 7887 8998 and quote 'Observer Offer' before 6pm on 31 August 2008. A booking fee will apply per transaction; the offer is only available on full-price tickets (usually £12.50 each).

Pre-order your copy of Francis Bacon the accompanying exhibition catalogue now, for the exclusive price of £29.99 (RRP £35) with free UK p&p. To order call Tate Enterprises on 020 7887 8869 (during office hours) and quote 'Observer Bacon offer'. Offer ends 31 August 2008. (Orders dispatched September 2008.)

The Fan: Damien Hirst on Francis Bacon

'He's one of the greatest painters of all time'

Interview by Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, Sunday August 10 2008  

I think Bacon is one of the greatest painters of all time. He's up there with Goya, Soutine and Van Gogh: dirty painters who wrestle with the dark stuff. He's complicated. It's not essentially about formal skill or technique or dexterity. It's about belief. I believe! And the struggle, the sense that you somehow grunt your way though it by sheer will. That's what's inspiring to me, alongside the sheer bravery of confronting the dark side, the shadows, the full force of the human psyche.

If you compare him to Lucien Freud, say, it's obvious that Freud is the more technically accomplished painter. He can read what he sees, and render it. Bacon couldn't do that. If you look at the feet in his paintings, they're bloody awful. He can't do boots. [Laughs] But it's so bloody powerful. His work always veers into the imagination. There's always this raw, dark power, this visceral energy that is compelling. The paint is alive.

Great art comes from nowhere. In a way, I think Bacon said 'fuck off' to what went before. He didn't go the traditional route that the great painters went. He didn't have the patience to be like Velasquez or Ingres or whoever. He used to look to these guys, but he just didn't have the patience to be like them and do what they did. He painted from photographs, he stuck bits of corduroy in there, bits of glass, whatever it took to get there.

He talked about the brutality of fact. It's incredibly brave to take that on, to face up to the horror and stare it down. Over and over. I mean, I've made maybe four good pieces and the rest are, you know, sort of happy. He wasn't like that. He was his own worst and best critic. He pushed himself to the edge every time. They give you the shivers, his best paintings. He looks into the room that no one wants to look in. He looks in the mirror and he sees meat. He shuns tenderness. He wants to sleep on a hard bed. I think he saw the brutality early on and he decided to take it on.

I saw him a few times in the Colony but I avoided him, because he was my hero. And I saw him be cruel and abusive to people around him. He was a bad drunk. He was wrestling with the darkness all the time. The idea of putting yourself into your art is a weird one. It makes for a hard life. The fears, the dread, the hopes even; you have to stand naked. I once made this work called Standing Alone on the Precipice and Overlooking the Arctic Wastelands of Pure Terror. It's from a book I read. I actually think Bacon lived like that. There's a nasty, angsty, brutish edge to his work that is somehow about the nasty comedown side of things, the horrific hangover, the psychic fallout of the heavy drinking, the shadowy things you glimpse at the edge of your vision, the existential terror. It's like you can surround yourself with things that give you comfort or you can live an animalistic life. He chose the latter, leaving his animal tracks in the snow.

I went around to his studio one night when I was on the charlie [cocaine]. John Edwards took me around. John was really upset about his death and we were all off our heads, but you could feel this huge presence. And this huge absence. It was palpable.

I was obsessed with him as a young painter. I was into punk and I was into Bacon. He was out there on his own. You had the Surrealists, the Impressionists, the Pointillists and all the other ists, and you had Bacon. I gave up painting at 15 because of him. I was just doing bad Bacons. I saw his work and I stopped wanting to be a painter. I stepped aside into sculpture. I've gone back lately, though. For the last two years I've been in the shed slapping paint on canvas. Big and small paintings. Skulls, crows, tryptichs. Dark blue. Baconesque. He's a supreme colourist. Beautiful colours. He seduces you with colour.

I have five Bacons now. They'll end up in the Manor [Hirst's country estate in Toddington]. I have one on the wall by the TV. I watch it more than I watch the TV. You can't not look at it. It demands your attention, pulls you in. It's just unbelievable to me that I own them.

He popped into the Saatchi once to look at my work. They called me and said, 'Bacon's been in, he was here for about an hour.' I didn't really believe them but then here's this letter he wrote to Louis Le Brocquy, the Irish painter, where he says, 'I saw this Hirst fly piece and it really worked.' I still can't quite believe it.

  Usual Boys and Girls Sell High at Sotheby’s

    By Judd Tully, ARTINFO  July 2, 2008

       Bacon’s Figure Turning; the bidding flopped at £7.75 million.

LONDON—The contemporary art market boomed at Sotheby’s on Wednesday evening in a marathon two-and-half hour sale, achieving a total of £94,701,550 ($188,853,831), just shy of its £96.6 million pre-sale high estimate.

Only four of the 75 lots offered failed to sell, translating to rates of 5 percent unsold by lot and 10.5 percent unsold by value.  

Three works sold for over £5 million pounds, 27 for over £1 million, and 48 for over $1 million. The average lot price was £1.33 million, the firm’s highest ever in Europe in the category. In terms of the global breakdown of buyers, 49 percent were European, 39 percent were American, 3 percent were Asian, and 8 percent were other.

“I think the market is continuing its onward march, blissfully ignorant of all the turmoil in the financial markets,” said New York private dealer Christopher Eykyn. “It certainly hasn’t been a bad investment so far.”

Not surprisingly, the evening’s top lot was Francis Bacon’s small-scaled but potent Study for Head of George Dyer from 1967, which sold to a telephone bidder for £13,761,250 pounds ($27,442,685). The pre-sale estimate was in excess of £8 million, and the work was guaranteed. The seller acquired the work from Marlborough Gallery in London in March 1967 for £2,000, according to Gilbert Lloyd, head of Marlborough in London.

One of the evening’s few casualties was Bacon’s underwhelming Figure Turning from 1962 (est. £10–15 million), which was not guaranteed; the bidding flopped at £7.75 million.

       Bacon Portrait Fetches 13.76 Million Pounds at Sotheby's London

      By Scott Reyburn  Bloomberg  July 02, 2008

                     Study for Head of George Dyer 1967  Francis Bacon

July 1 (Bloomberg) – A Francis Bacon painting of his lover sold tonight for 13.76 million pounds ($27.4 million) with fees at a  Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art in London.

The 14-inch-high oil work, Study for Head of George Dyer, dated from 1967 and had been expected to fetch at least 8 million pounds, said Sotheby's. The picture was bought by Cheyenne Westphal, Sotheby's European chairman of contemporary art, taking telephoned instructions from a client, against four other bidders.

Last night at Christie’s international contemporary-art auction in London, a 1975 triptych of self-portraits by Bacon fetched a top price of 17.3 million pounds with fees.

Bacon and the East London petty criminal Dyer became lovers in the autumn of 1963. The tempestuous relationship ended on Oct. 24, 1971, when Dyer committed suicide in a Paris hotel suite 36 hours before the opening of a retrospective exhibition devoted to Bacon's work at the Grand Palais.

  Bacon Is Again a Top Draw at Auction 

      By CAROL VOGEL

    The New York Times  July 2, 2008

      Study for Head of George Dyer 1967  Francis Bacon

LONDON — A 1967 portrait by Francis Bacon fetched $27.4 million at Sotheby's here on Tuesday night, becoming the 10th work by this artist to bring more than $25 auction in the last year and a half.

Top honours belonged to the Bacon. Five would-be buyers vied for the work, Study for Head of George Dyer, a portrait of Bacon's companion, who committed suicide in 1971. Cheyenne Westphal, the chairwoman of Sotheby's contemporary-art department in Europe, representing a client on the phone, made the winning bid, which was well above the auction house's $15.5 million prediction before the sale.

Although 129 photographs of Dyer were discovered in Bacon's studio after the artist's death in 1992, this portrait was one of only two Dyer images he painted in a 14-by-12-inch format. The inspiration was a photograph taken by John Deakin. While Sotheby's wouldn't say who the sellers were, experts said the work had belonged to Ian and Mercedes Stoutzker, London philanthropists who bought it from the Marlborough Gallery two months after it was painted.

The recent auctions of Bacon works have included a record-setter, the sale in May of a 1976 triptych at Sotheby's for $86.3 million. At Christie's on Monday night here, his Three Studies for Self-Portrait from 1975 was the top seller, at $34.4 million.

(Final prices include the commission paid to Sotheby's: 25 percent of the first $50,000, 20 percent of the next $50,001 to $1 million, and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

But not every Bacon draws a stellar price; the market is still selective. One of the evening's biggest casualties was Figure Turning. That 1962 oil on canvas, depicting a twisted naked man clutching an empty glass, his reflection visible in the red foreground, did not sell. Though Sotheby's predicted that it would bring $19.8 million to $29.7 million, bidding stopped well short, at $15.4 million.

 Prices continue to soar as a Bacon earns £17.28 million at Christie's sale

  By Souren Melikian 

 International Herald Tribune  1 July, 2008

    A panel from Francis Bacon's triptych Three Studies for Self-Portrait, which set the tone at a Christie's sale on Monday that totaled £86.24 million.

London: The art market rolls on in a seemingly endless boom regardless of subject, period or medium. On Monday night Christie's sold 48 works of contemporary art for £86.24 million, or $171.87 million.

  Bacon Self-Portraits Fetch $34.5 Million at London Art Auction

    By Scott Reyburn  Bloomberg  July 1st, 2008

      A Christie's employee cleans the glass covering Francis Bacon's Three Studies for a Self Portrait, from 1975.

July 1 (Bloomberg) - A 1975 set of three self-portraits by Francis Bacon fetched 17.3 million pounds ($34.5 million) in London, the most expensive lot at Christie’s International sale of contemporary art.

At least four bidders competed for the 14-inch-high, gray-hued oil canvases Three Studies for Self-Portrait, featuring faces that are twisted, sliced and gorged. The lot, with a presale estimate of more than 10 million pounds and seen in public for the first time, went to an anonymous phone bidder. The record for Bacon was set in May when Triptych, 1976, depicting a headless corpse eaten by vultures sold for $86 million.

Christie's 58-lot auction last night netted 86.2 million pounds, against the company's own low estimate of 80 million pounds. Eighty-three percent of the lots were sold. Bacon's piece was one of four trophy works - the other three are by Lucian Freud, Jeff Koons and Lucio Fontana - whose combined estimates represented half the auction's value. The Bacon was the only one that sold for much more than its top estimate.

Guaranteed Minimum

The Bacon and the Koons were among 14 lots whose sellers received guaranteed minimum prices, according to Christie's catalog. When auction houses guarantee items, they usually share a percentage of the amount above an agreed price; If the lot doesn't sell, the auction house - or a third-party guarantor - pays for the work and owns it.

"When estimates are high, people won't bid,'' New York dealer Jose Mugrabi said in an interview. Mugrabi said the market was otherwise "better than ever.''

"Christie's estimate was very aggressive,'' said Heinrich zu Hohenlohe, director of the dealers Dickinson, Berlin, in an interview. "Even in the current market there is a limit.''  

According to Christie's, 42 percent of purchases came from the U.K. and Europe, 48 percent from the Americas, 8 percent from Asia, and 2 percent from other regions.

Prices include a buyer's commission of 25 percent of the hammer price up to $50,000, 20 percent of the price from $50,000 to $1 million, and 12 percent above $1 million.

  Bacon Triptych Sells for $34.4 Million in London

    By CAROL VOGEL

   The New York Times  July 1, 2008

  Christie’s London Bests Own Contemporary Record

     By Judd Tully, ARTINFO  July 1, 2008

Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Self-Portrait (1975) sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for £17,289,250 ($34,319,184; est. in excess of £10 million).

LONDON—Powered by a trio of artworks that exceeded £10 million apiece, Christie’s Postwar and Contemporary Evening sale reached £86,241,600 ($171,879,508), its highest tally for a European auction in that category. The result fell within its pre-sale estimate of £80–115 million.

“Almost all of our guarantees were profitable,” said Marc Porter, president of Christie’s. “The market ended up being as strong as we hoped it would be.” The evening's top three lots all had guarantees.

Eighteen lots exceeded £1 million, and 30 made over $1 million. Only ten of the 58 lots offered failed to find buyers, for a svelte 17 percent buy-in rate by lot and 16 percent by value.

The casualties included Lucio Fontana’s fantastic but pricey celestial Concetto Spaziale from 1964, for which bidding cracked at £8 million pounds (estimate on request, in excess of £8 million). The work last sold at auction at Christie’s London in December 1996 for £397,000.

But the huge price for Francis Bacon’s small-scale but power-packed and uber-distorted triptych Three Studies for Self Portrait from 1975 sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for £17,289,250 ($34,457,475) against an estimate on request in excess of £10 million, making it the seventh-most expensive Bacon sold at auction. Tonight’s seller bought the work from Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris in 1976, and it carries the pedigree, rarity, and quality that this market responds to.  

The action resumes tomorrow night at Sotheby’s.

Judd Tully is Editor at Large of Art+Auction.

  Is Bacon in more demand than Picasso?

   CITY A.M.  27/06/2008

             Study for Self-Portrait 1975  Francis Bacon

AS Sotheby’s and Christie’s gear up for their famously extravagant summer contemporary art sales, the mood is mixed.

Last October’s evening sales at Christie’s saw earnings of £34.87m for the auction house and the art world was paddling about in a Frieze-Week sea of champagne; last June the credit crunch was a distant rumour and the sales at Sotheby’s made £72.43m.

Now, despite the credit crunch, experts at the two auction houses maintain that the market is stronger than ever — indeed, the February 2008 Contemporary Evening sale made Sotheby’s a whopping £95m.

Both houses have got their hands on paintings by Francis Bacon, the most sought-after artist on the market at the moment. Christie’s has Three Studies For A Self-Portrait, the first time the work has been seen at auction. Sotheby’s has been trumpeting its Study For Head Of George Dyer for weeks — so hot is this haunting, enigmatic portrait set against a solid green background, that the catalogue says the price estimate is only available on request. Figure Turning from 1962 should go for between £10m and £15m at Sotheby’s.

Of the Baconian frenzy, Oliver Barker, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, says: “In many people’s minds, Bacon is now surpassing Picasso. A Bacon is a very strong blue chip.”

The positive spin churned out by the big houses at sales time should be taken with a very large pinch of salt; for example, results from the recent Russian sales were mixed at best, despite glowing tributes from Sotheby’s and Christie’s. As the record-breaking February figures show, it does seem that contemporary art operates independently of economic cycles.

It may seem contrary to the spirit of the times, but collectors are seizing the opportunity to sell to a keen market. Barker adds: “The mood is very good. Yes, there’s a credit crunch, but there’s also a lot of wealth in the world.” 

And he says supply has never been better in contemporary art: “There is a steady flow of fresh works coming to the market and great opportunities for collectors putting together superb portfolios.”

One reason is the increasing globalisation of the art world — artists from hitherto less-known areas are being noticed, too. “Indian and Iranian art has become more collectible,” Barker says. “This is the first time we’re selling it so prominently — there’s a growing demand in terms of interest and collectors.”

Biography of Bacon

Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of De Kooning: An American Master, are to write a major biography of Francis Bacon - due for a blockbuster show this autumn. HarperCollins has bought rights after a heated auction. 

The pair has interviewed the artist's surviving sister and will research in France and Morocco, as well as London. Bacon rarely discussed his art; this book will draw on material discovered since his death to bring both the artist and the work to life.

Monet grabber?

The Guardian. Thursday June 26, 2008

Abramovich was "particularly interested" in the impressionists, and among them is Monet's 1919 work Water Lily Pond - a companion to Tuesday's record-breaker. But the billionaire Chelsea owner's eye was most drawn to Francis Bacon's Seated Figure. Having bought Bacon's £44.2m Triptych, Abramovich "got very excited when he saw a Francis Bacon and called all his men over for a discussion".

                                            Seated Figure 1960  Francis Bacon  Albertina Gallery

Bacon biography to HarperPress

Jo Young, The Bookseller,  25.06.08 

Arabella Pike of HarperPress has beaten off competition from six other publishers in an auction for the rights to a new biography of artist Francis Bacon.

Pike finalised the deal for UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada), exclusive Europe and serial rights to the biography, co-written by Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens, from agent Clare Conville of Conville and Walsh.

 Sotheby's

  Contemporary Art Evening Auction

    Sale: L08022  |  Location: London, New Bond Street
    Auction Dates: Session 1: Tue, 01 Jul 08 7:00 PM

                        Figure Turning 1962  Francis Bacon

LOT 34   UNSOLD at £7.75 million.

PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTOR
FRANCIS BACON
1909-1992

FIGURE TURNING

10,000,000—15,000,000 GBP

MEASUREMENTS

measurements
197.4 by 141cm.

alternate measurements
77 3/4 by 55 1/2 in.

DESCRIPTION

titled and dated 1962 on the reverse

oil on canvas

Executed in April - May 1962.

PROVENANCE

Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London
Private Collection, New York

London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1962, no. 91, illustrated
Eindhoven, Stedelijk van Abbe-Museum, Contemporary Paintings in London, 1962, no. 1, illustrated
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Francis Bacon, 1963, no. 72
London, Marlborough New London Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1963, no. 5, illustrated (incorrectly titled Figure Turning (with glass))
Florence, Mostra Mercato Nazionale d'Arte Contemporanea, Francis Bacon, 1964
Paris, Galerie Nationales du Grand Palais; Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle, Francis Bacon, 1971-72, p. 116, no. 42, illustrated
São Paulo, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Francis Bacon, 1998

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, p. 147, no. 203, illustrated
Lorenza Trucchi, Francis Bacon, London 1976, no. 79, illustrated
Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1998, p. 56, illustrated

CATALOGUE NOTE

"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"
The artist cited in: David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1993, p. 26

Capturing in paint an exceptional convergence of the artist's passions and talents, Figure Turning could not be more representative of Francis Bacon's phenomenal painting of the early 1960s, which was critical to both his breathtaking career and immense contribution to modern and contemporary art. From the especially decisive year of 1962, which witnessed the first major international retrospective of his work, this painting both summates the period of experimental investigation that preceded it as well as presciently anticipating several stylistic strategies and the increasingly autobiographical nature of his subsequent work. Indeed, it was only from the breakthrough year of 1962 that Bacon adopted this specific large-scale canvas format exclusively, alongside a fourteen by twelve inch canvas for his more intimate works. Here it provides a fitting arena for his execution of one of the most focused and intense studies of the existential nature of the Human Condition. The creation of a self-assured fifty year old, Turning Figure exhibits all the technical mastery and painterly genius that is characteristic of Bacon's very best mature output. The fulcrum of the composition, a naked human being, is offered up to the viewer primarily by the corporeal essence of its body rather than by traits of physiognomy or other identifying signifiers such as clothes or hair. This is in stark contrast to Bacon's contemporaneous series of Popes, which he had initiated back in 1951 and in which pontiffs are described via the vestments and trappings of their office. Indeed, comparison with Study from Innocent X, which was finished just months earlier in January 1962 and is thus an immediate predecessor for Figure Turning, affords rich insight to the present work. Between these two paintings, the placement and anatomical arrangement of the figures and the shapes of the semi-abstract linear frames that contain them are highly comparable. For a moment, it almost seems as if Figure Turning reveals the Pope without his clothes, rid of the accoutrements of that station, and left clutching a mere glass as a raw and more exposed portrayal of the human psyche.

This turning figure is caught in a symphony of simultaneous movement; its representation comprised all of shadows and flashing motion and evolving in constant flux through a series of states. This recalls the photography of Edweard Muybridge, which used multiple cameras and an elaborate trigger device to capture successive stages of motion. Bacon possessed many illustrations of Muybridge's images and comparison of this human form with Muybridge's photograph series 'Striking a Blow with the Right Hand', a fragment of which was found in the artist's studio, offers close parallels and should be considered a source contributing to the painting. Indeed, Hugh Davies and Sally Yard have described a Bacon adaptation of Muybridge figures that perfectly suits Figure Turning: "Calling to mind naked men locked away in anonymous, windowless cells, this figure conveys the introspection, regression, and withdrawal associated with... the quintessential posture of man divested of civilisation" (Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon, New York, London and Paris 1986, p. 29).

However, in Figure Turning Bacon subjugates all bodily stasis, including that fixed by a photograph, with painterly violence in an attempt to get bene