Francis Bacon Retrospective
Horny Hefty
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 [ II VI ], 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.
Linda Nochlin
Artforum
October, 1996
