Bacon, Francis

Bacon, Francis (1909–1992). British painter, a descendant of the Elizabethan writer and statesman of the same name, born in Dublin of English parents. As a child he suffered from severe asthma and he had little conventional schooling. His father, a race-horse 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 18 months in Paris (where he was powerfully impressed by an exhibition of Picasso's work at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery in 1928) before settling in London in 1929. Initially he made a living there designing furniture and rugs. He had no formal training as an artist, but he began making drawings and watercolours in 1926 and painting oils two or three years later. In 1933 he began exhibiting in London commercial galleries, and in the same year one of his paintings was reproduced in Herbert Read's book Art Now. However, he destroyed much of his early work and in the later 1930s virtually gave up painting for several years, supporting himself with various odd jobs, including running an illegal casino (he had inherited a love of gambling from his father). He returned to painting seriously in the Second World War (during which he worked for a time in Civil Defence, excused military service because of his asthma), and he burst into prominence in April 1945 when his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (Tate Gallery, London, 1944) was exhibited in a mixed show at the Lefevre Gallery 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 these ‘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 of them were sightless. One was unpleasantly bandaged.’

Bacon's imagery later became more naturalistic, but at 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 protruberances suggestive of slug-like creatures of nightmare fantasy: ‘Art is a method of opening up areas of feeling rather than merely an illustration of an object … 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 cage-like space, and at times accompanied by hunks of raw meat: ‘we are all meat, we are potential carcasses', he said in 1966. 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 (1650), 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, as in Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X (Des Moines Art Center, 1953). Bacon regarded Velázquez as a ‘miraculous’ and ‘amazingly mysterious’ painter who could ‘unlock the greatest and deepest things that man can feel', and he tried ‘to paint like Velázquez but with the texture of a hippopotamus skin'.

From 1946 to 1950 Bacon lived mainly in Monte Carlo and thereafter in London. From 1949 he had fairly regular one-man exhibitions (first in London, then in New York, Paris, and elsewhere). His 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 ninety 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. He thought that ‘man now realizes he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being’ and that ‘art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself'. Peter Fuller was among those who resisted this outlook: ‘Bacon is an artist of persuasive power and undeniable ability; but he has used his expressive skills to denigrate and degrade. He presents one aspect of the human condition as necessary and universal truth … Bacon's skills may justly command our admiration; but his tendentious vision demands a moral response and, I believe, a refusal.’ To David Sylvester, however, ‘The paintings are a huge affirmation that human vulnerability is countered by human vitality. They are a shout of defiance in the face of death.’

Alongside his reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art, Bacon 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; 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.’