Francis Bacon in Graffiti by Show Media Ltd

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heart of darkness

t is said that the eyes are the windows to the soul, but for Francis Bacon it was the mouth that acted as a portal. His paintings of maws stretched taut in terrible screams are less windows than crude doorways carved out of flesh. But where do they lead? If you look past the stretched purple-blue lips and sharp white teeth and deep into one of Bacon’s mouths you find only a black nothingness, an empty void. This is what Bacon saw when others went looking for a soul. Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents. His father was an unsuccessful trainer of racehorses with a volatile temper; his mother was independently wealthy and aloof. The young Francis was forced to take up riding and hunting but his hatred of country pursuits – exacerbated by the asthma that would plague him throughout his life – led his parents to shun him and he to despise them. His only solace was his nanny who would end up living with him for many years afterwards. Largely tutored at home, Bacon claimed to have discovered that he was homosexual following

an incident with the grooms in his father’s stables when he was in his teens. But it was his being caught by his father dressing up in his mother’s underwear that saw him expelled from the house. Bacon travelled to London with a small allowance from his mother and tried a succession of odd jobs, including being a cook and working in a woman’s clothes shop, but he was quickly bored and kept getting fired from his positions. What he found interesting and excelled at was attracting older married men to pay his way for him. This led to tours of Weimar Berlin at the peak of its sexual and cultural excess, as well as trips to Paris. It was here, in 1927, that Bacon saw a Picasso exhibition that inspired him to take up painting. It was also during this trip that he saw Nicolas Poussin’s ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ (1626-7), in which a screaming mother tries vainly to prevent a soldier from killing her child. It was, Bacon said, ‘probably the best human cry ever painted.’ Back in London he began designing furniture and rugs in the International Style popularised by Le Corbusier, but while his work was featured in The Studio magazine it was not successful and his reliance on his lovers increased.

These were not hard to come by. Bacon had charm and wit, he looked young and made himself seem even younger by wearing make-up. Often, however, Bacon needed to wear this for other reasons than seduction. His sexual tastes were decidedly masochistic and he regularly needed to cover up his bruised face with thick layers of foundation. Bacon had no art school training – a fact he would be eternally thankful for – but he was gradually moving from interior design into painting. In 1933 he made his first sale with ‘Crucifixion’, a ghostly disintegrated figure, painted a translucent white on a flat black background, with the slim lines of a box radiating out around it. It was evidently influenced by Picasso, but seemed to prefigure key facets of Bacon’s later work. Indeed, by the mid-Thirties, Bacon’s lifelong artistic obsessions were beginning to congeal. He became fixated on Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin (1925), in particular the scene of the bloodied nurse screaming on the Odessa Steps. He began painting false teeth compulsively and bought a large book of colour plates showing the diseases of the mouth. All of these would inform his pictures for years to come. But his artistic

David Montgomery/Getty Images

arguaby Britain’s greatest 20th century artist, Francis Bacon was also probably this country’s most troubled – and troubling. George pendle examines a painter who looked at humanity and saw horror

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career suffered a setback when in 1934 a show of follow-up paintings to ‘Crucifixion’ sold poorly and received bad notices. When he applied to be featured in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 he was turned down as being ‘insufficiently surreal’. Angered and embarrassed he destroyed almost all his work to date. The disappointment saw Bacon drift into heavy drinking, increasingly violent affairs and gambling, although this last vice provided his only regular income. Invalided out of the army in World War II (it was said that he had rented a dog to sleep in his bed the night before his medical test in order to exacerbate his asthma), Bacon turned back to painting with a ferociousness not seen heretofore. Unable to afford canvas, he painted on board and, in the midst of the war, created the work that finally signalled his arrival as a unique artist. ‘Three Studies For Figures at the Base of A Crucifixion’ (1944) was shown in an exhibition in April 1945 alongside works by Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland. It caused total consternation. The picture was a triptych, the typical format for altar paintings, but the contents were anything but holy. In front of a putrid orange background, three soft-bodied monsters writhed and leered, snapping faceless mouths at the viewer. These are not your archetypal monsters with scaled wings and leathery tails. These awful phallic worms gnashing and howling were without precedent. ‘We had no name for them,’ recalled the critic John Russell upon seeing the work, ‘and no name for what we felt about them.’ This was something entirely new – and terrifying in its newness.

renowned and fury Bacon’s 1944 triptych ‘Three Studies For Figures at the Base of A Crucifixion’, top – based on the avenging Furies in the Greek Oresteia play series – shocked the art world. Bacon, above, with two panels from ‘Three Studies for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes’ (1963). Opposite, ‘Study for Head of George Dyer’ (1967). Prevous page: portrait of Francis Bacon with ‘Study for Portrait of John Edwards’, taken in 1989 by David Montgomery

It is notable that Bacon did not use the definite article in his painting’s title. The crucifixion here was not Christ’s but, as Russell described it, ‘a generic name for an environment in which bodily harm is done to one or more persons and one or more persons gather to watch.’ It seemed that these monsters Bacon had painted, whom he likened to the Furies of Aeschylus, were waiting for us all, and there would be no resurrection after they had their way with us. It was only the beginning of what sometimes seemed like an identity parade from hell, in which every picture looked different but was guilty of the same crime. A series of heads appeared in the following years, terrifyingly blurred visions of animal-human hybrids until, with ‘Head VI’ (1949), Bacon created the first of what would be his most iconic images. Based on Velázquez’s ‘Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ (1650), Bacon portrayed the pontiff in a sensuous purple cape, trapped in a transparent white cube. The top of the Pope’s head is lost in the darkness that surrounds him, his mouth is wide open and he is screaming. Why was Bacon obsessed with the scream? Was it because it held within it the uttermost expression of both orgasmic joy and fathomless despair? Did Bacon see it as the silent scream of the asthmatic gasping for breath? Or was it simply that vision of a black void at the centre of a human’s being? Whatever the case, its conjunction with the figure of the pope was sensational. The powerful pontiff of Velázquez’s painting was now rendered a helpless prisoner in a desolate, godless chamber.

Bacon’s popular fame grew exponentially and he lived long enough to be given the rare privilege of two retrospectives at the Tate Despite Bacon’s infamy, or rather because of it, no gallery would represent him. ‘Head VI’ was originally priced at £125 pounds (approximately £3,500 in today’s money) and proved hard to sell. He still struggled for money, and began using the backs of canvases to save money, although he found that he liked the way the coarse canvas backs held the paint and continued to paint that way for the rest of his life. Despite his lack of sales he was at the centre of a hard-drinking Soho crowd that included the figurative painters Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. Among a welter of artists, drifters, criminals and the shabby genteel, Bacon’s jowly countenance and mockney whine could be seen and heard every day amid popping champagne corks at the infamous Colony Room. He bitched and slandered, disparaging the American Abstract Expressionists as being mere pattern designers and singling Jackson Pollock out as a maker of ‘old lace’. In one of his most infamous incidents, he single-handedly booed Princess Margaret off the stage as she sang at a London ball, explaining, ‘Her singing really was too awful. Someone had to stop her.’ For a man who depicted so many open mouths in his artworks, in waking life Bacon preferred it if others kept theirs tightly shut. Despite his often appalling behavior, there was a reason Bacon remained the center of attention. As the art critic and friend of Bacon, Daniel Farson, suggests in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, the daringness of being a homosexual at a time when it was still a crime seemed to lend Bacon an unhinged daring in his art. The paintings that flowed from him were sui generis. He did not belong to a school, he was without precursors and seemingly had no disciples. This was not to say he acted in a void. On the contrary, he tapped a myriad of sources – Velázquez, Van Gogh, the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, medical textbooks, pornography. Nevertheless he was indifferent to the varying status of his inspirations. One was much like another. They simply acted as catalysts for his own unique vision. ‘Michelangelo and Muybridge are mixed up in my mind together,’ he told the critic David Sylvester. Damaged forms in particular inspired him: images of disease, conflict or dismemberment, yes,

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but creases and tears in the pictures themselves too. His studio in South Kensington was so coated in dried paint and dust, and held so many crumpled photos, sketches, and scrawls, that in many ways it seemed like an extension of Bacon’s psyche. (After Bacon’s death, the studio was kept intact and is now housed at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.) As recognition of Bacon’s genius grew, he began to paint portraits, usually of his friends, and based on photographs he commissioned Vogue photographer John Deakin to take of them. Bacon deformed and reformed these subjects, bruising and slurring faces, colouring flesh in sickly hues, letting tumorous shadows leak across the floor. ‘Some people think that my paintings are horrible. Horrible!’ said Bacon in an interview, ‘But

then you only need to think about the meat on your plate.’ If you think my paintings are horrible, Bacon seemed to suggest, you’re just not looking at the rest of the world closely enough. Part of the unease Bacon’s portraits cause is down to his placing them in front of backgrounds that have barely any ground in them at all. These puce geometrical cells, with putrid green walls and pitch black doorways, confine many of Bacon’s subjects – be they lovers, flanks of meat, or puddles of gore. To add to the claustrophobia, Bacon liked to place his paintings behind glass, further entrapping the images. At times, he seemed as much a sadistic prison warden as an artist. Yet whatever control he bore over his subjects in his paintings, his dealings with them

in real life remained chaotic largely because of Bacon’s own mercurial temper. One muse and lover, Peter Lacy, a former Battle of Britain pilot, died of alcoholism in Tangier the day of Bacon’s first retrospective at the Tate in 1962. Another, George Dyer, a petty East End criminal whose distorted features appear in many of Bacon’s most famous paintings, committed suicide on the eve of a Bacon exhibition at the prestigious Grand Palais in Paris. Nevertheless Bacon’s popular fame grew exponentially and he lived long enough to be given the rare privilege of two retrospectives at the Tate. While his vision remained resolutely unforgiving, his style became ever more refined, and in the portraits of his last companion, John Edwards, you might be shocked to find something that looks remarkably akin to affection. It was extraordinary, considering the ferocity of Bacon’s artistic vision and personality, that, when he died in 1992, he was accorded the honours of a national treasure. And by the time ‘Tryptych, 1976’ (1976) sold for $86.3 million in 2008, Bacon had taken his place alongside Picasso and Pollock as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. Bacon never cared much for money, and he never made any moral claims for his art. He told the Beat writer, William S Burroughs, ‘I paint to try and excite myself, which doesn’t often happen.’ This brutal honesty about his aims was one of Bacon’s greatest qualities not only as a painter but as a person. The excitement in showing the human condition stripped bare of all metaphysical and physical comfort was a masochistic thrill to be sure, but it was one that rested in an ultimately noble search for truth. A real scream indeed.

pope and despair For ‘Head VI’ (1949), left, painted in 1946, Bacon took the image of Diego Velázquez’s ‘Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ and twisted it into a cry of hopelessness