[[1C]]
heart of darkness
I
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