Bacon, Francis

Bacon, Francis (b Dublin, 28 Oct. 1909; d Madrid, 28 Apr. 1992). British painter, born in Ireland of English parents, a collateral descendant of the Elizabethan statesman and writer of the same name. His father, a racehorse trainer, was a puritanical figure and sent his son away from home when he was 16 after he was discovered trying on some of his mother's underwear. He spent about two months in Berlin and then about eighteen months in Paris (where he was powerfully impressed by an exhibition of Picasso's work in 1928) before settling in London in 1929. Initially he made a living there designing furniture and rugs, and he had no formal training as a painter. In the 1930s he began exhibiting in London commercial galleries, but he destroyed much of his early work and dropped out of sight until 1945, when his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (Tate, London), painted in the previous year, was exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery, London, and made him overnight the most controversial painter in the country. John Russell (Francis Bacon, 1971) writes that visitors to the exhibition were shocked by ‘images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut snap at the sight of them. Their anatomy was half-human, half-animal, and they were confined in a low-ceilinged, windowless and oddly proportioned space. They could bite, probe, and suck, and they had very long eel-like necks, but their functioning in other respects was mysterious. Ears and mouths they had, but two at least were sightless. One was unpleasantly bandaged.’

Bacon's imagery later became more naturalistic, but at the same time the emotional impact of his work was increased by a change in technique, as he moved away from fairly impersonal brushwork to develop a highly distinctive handling of paint, by means of which he smudged and twisted faces and bodies into ill-defined jumbled protuberances suggestive of formless, sluglike creatures from some nightmare fantasy: ‘I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events as the snail leaves its slime.’ Characteristically his paintings show single figures in isolation or despair, set in a bleak, sometimes cagelike space, and at times accompanied by hunks of raw meat: ‘we are all meat, we are potential carcasses.’ Often his work was based on his own everyday world (he did numerous self-portraits), but he also used imagery from photographs and film-stills as a starting point. In particular he based a series of paintings (begun in 1951) on Velázquez's celebrated portrait of Pope Innocent X, but in place of the implacable expression of the original, he sometimes gave the pope a screaming face derived from a still from Sergei Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin.

Bacon's work was so novel and unsettling that for many years ‘Critics and public vacillated uneasily between the opinions that he was a flashy sensationalist and that he was the most significant painter whom Britain had produced for several generations’ ( John Rothenstein, Francis Bacon, 1967). In 1962, however, a retrospective exhibition of 90 of his paintings was held at the Tate Gallery, London, subsequently touring to several venues on the Continent, and this event firmly established him as a major figure. Thereafter his international reputation grew rapidly, and in the catalogue of a second major retrospective exhibition at the Tate, in 1985, the director of the Gallery, Alan Bowness, wrote that Bacon was ‘surely the greatest living painter; no artist in our century has presented the human predicament with such insight and feeling’. Many critics at the time concurred in this judgement, although others found his despairing vision—his view of life as a ‘game without reason’—hard to take. Alongside his reputation as a painter he built up a sulphurous personal legend on account of his promiscuous homosexuality, hard drinking, and heavy gambling. In spite of the huge amount of attention he has attracted, his work has had comparatively little stylistic effect on his contemporaries, for it is so personal that it has been difficult for other artists to absorb it without producing a mere pastiche. However, his obituary in The Times commented that ‘His influence on younger artists during the 1950s and 1960s was very considerable—not stylistically, for he had few imitators—but through his attitude to his work and the sense he gave of the ultimate seriousness of art.’