Bacon

No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because I think it takes at least 75 to 100 years before the thing begins to sort itself out from the theories that have formed about it.”

Thus said Francis Bacon in 1966, at the height of his powers and ambition, to his amanuensis, the distinguished critic David Sylvester. Aged 57, Bacon had recently completed the pair of triptychs which marked the emergence of his mature, electrifying, shocking style: the Guggenheim’s bloody-orange-black “Three Studies for a Crucifixion” of 1962 (pictured above), with its mutilated seeping body on a bed, fringed by a fleeing young man and a howling slit-open figure twined upside down round a plinth, and Munich’s 1965 “Crucifixion”, where the central crucified form is trussed up/pinned down by a butcher’s frilled rosettes like an animal carcass, and a murderer sports a swastika.

Why did Bacon, a militant atheist who, as Sylvester recalled, “always seemed to be looking for pretexts to issue a reminder that God was dead and to bang a few nails into his coffin”, make his great breakthroughs by depicting the Crucifixion? These two important loans at Tate Britain’s sombre, persuasive centennial retrospective look back to the revolutionary canvas which Bacon considered the start of his career, Tate’s own 1944 “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion”, and even to a ghostly small “Crucifixion” of 1933, painted on the young artist’s return from a visit to a Berlin of rent boys and Nazi officers. Juxtaposing them all, Tate dramatises the procession of Bacon’s imagery from Picasso-like, writhing biomorphic forms to his own pictorial language of savage lone or coupling figures, distorted by the blur which recalled their photographic sources, dissolving in pools of liquid paint as if identity, existence, were collapsing into nothing.

Bacon gambled: he wanted his pictures to end up in “either the National Gallery or the dustbin, with nothing in between”. He knew that, post-photography, post-Holocaust, the stakes for an art of human figuration were high; while other artists fled to abstraction or mimicked photography in pop styles, he subsumed the blur and all-over texture of photography and film into his own work while painting like an Old Master. His yelling caged popes – he did 45 altogether – have the silk-and-velvet grandeur of their inspiration, Velazquez’s “Pope Innocent X”, combined with the instant, rushing horror of a modern urban nightmare as expressed in their other source, the shrieking nurse in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Several Popes, including one privately owned masterpiece of condensed white and flesh-coloured strokes against a luxurious vermilion from 1965, are here; so is Frankfurt’s grimly expressive “Study for the Nurse from Battleship Potemkin”, setting the naked curled figure in a sumptuous deep green ground whose painterliness rivals the purple and gold harmonies of the pontiffs.

In each case, formal splendour lends weight to the ugly panic which makes Bacon, with Giacometti, the arch visual exponent of existentialism. What is a man? One of the strengths of this exhibition is the inclusion of almost a zoo – MoMA’s “Study of a Baboon”, Stuttgart’s “Chimpanzee”, Buffalo’s “Man with Dog”, all from the 1950s – whose screaming, squatting beasts underline the infantile desperation and animal violence of Bacon’s businessmen (“Man in Blue”), lovers (“Two Figures in the Grass”, derived from Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s “Wrestlers”) and crouching quasi-embryonic nudes.

Similarly, it is as a symbol of humanity’s reversion to barbarism that the Crucifixion served Bacon’s purposes – along with the long art-historical tradition that made it “a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation”. The 1962 and 1965 triptychs paraphrase the sinuous body in Cimabue’s “Crucifixion”, which reminded Bacon of a worm crawling down the cross, as well as referencing Soutine and Rembrandt in the bravura impasto passages depicting dying flesh as meat.

Bacon’s crucifixions are, of course, without redemption – the more so because their horror is charged, as Michael Peppiatt suggests in a superb new volume, Francis Bacon, Studies for a Portrait (Yale £18.99), with autobiographical impulse. “It’s nearer to a self-portrait,” Bacon admitted. In this reading of “Three Studies”, the young man clothed almost entirely in a black stocking is the 16-year-old Bacon traumatically expelled from the parental home for surreptitiously donning his mother’s underwear, the jowly, harsh, older figure behind him is his violent horse-dealer father and the bleeding body on a bed his own sexualised crucifixion; Bacon told Peppiatt that his homosexuality was “a defect – like being born with a limp”.


‘Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer’, 1968
Bacon loathed narrative, but, like Picasso in the half century before, he became the greatest artist of his generation by transforming the events of his life into modern mythic images through paint. Those events have a legendary quality anyway – the expulsion from home; the death of his aggressive alcoholic lover Peter Lacy in Tangier just as the first Tate retrospective opened in 1962, commemorated in a little-known, ferociously painted “Landscape near Malabata, Tangier”, with a black shadow rising up through ochre-sunflower tones; the suicide of his equally cruel/pathetic successor, George Dyer, in a Paris hotel on the eve of Bacon’s Grand Palais opening nine years later.

On the showing here, these triptychs mark Bacon’s last great period. Although this exhibition dutifully continues through the next 20 years, much of what follows is self-pastiche, with broad flat areas often dully painted, sometimes in fast-drying acrylic. Like T. S. Eliot, the modernist writer Bacon most admired and whose brilliant early distillation of nihilism into a rhythmic formal language he echoed – the Smithsonian’s 1967 “Triptych – Inspired by T. S. Eliot’s Poem ‘Sweeney Agonistes’” is another highlight here – he was perhaps too bleakly reductive an artist to develop a great late style. Among repetitive portraits, “Blood on Pavement” and “Jet of Water”, both 1988, stand out as paintings of absence, set against pared-down industrialised backgrounds, human life swept offstage. Like the best work here, they seem inevitable yet astonishing, concluding a show which, although it carries no revelations, steers clear of theory and gives us “the thing itself” – Bacon as the most raw, physical, urgently affecting and intellectually convincing painter of the second half of the 20th century.