The Turbulent Life of Francis Bacon
The same day that
Francis Bacon’s landmark retrospective opened at the Grand Palais in Paris, in
1971, his longtime boyfriend and muse George Dyer died on the toilet in their
hotel. It was unclear whether the cause of death was an accidental overdose of
sleeping pills or suicide. The day before, Bacon had returned to the Hôtel des
Saints-Pères to find Dyer drunk in bed with a young man. The couple argued.
Bacon stormed out to spend the night in another room. Faced with the prospect
of Dyer’s death overshadowing his triumphal exhibition, Bacon asked the hotel
manager to postpone notifying the authorities—an amenity apparently available
only to the famous. The bathroom where Dyer’s body still slumped on the toilet
was discreetly locked, and Bacon went off to be feted by France’s cultural
elite. This episode suggests
ruthless careerism, but as the Pulitzer Prize–winning critics Mark Stevens and
Annalyn Swan write in their new biography, Francis Bacon: Revelations,
the reality turned out to be more haunting. Beginning in 1972, Bacon regularly
checked into the hotel room where Dyer died. He slept in the same bed where
Dyer had cheated on him; he sat on the toilet where Dyer took his last breath.
Bacon wasn’t spiritual, but these private rituals, which could last up to two
weeks, had the intimacy of a séance. It was the closest Bacon came to
sentimentality.There’s a dreamlike gravitas
to Bacon’s art that matches his do-it-yourself ghost hunt. He gave to the
twentieth century a visual repertoire—screaming popes, deformed heads,
distended bodies, crucifixions—that symbolizes a universal if often inscrutable
anxiety, while still imparting the psychic drama of Bacon’s own
self-contradictions. “What I’ve always wanted to do is to make things that are
very formal yet coming to bits,” he once said, and the tension between control
and breakdown is the subtext of his life and paintings. The Bacon who emerges
in Stevens and Swan’s biography has the clammy decorum of a proper Englishman
cut with the tragicomic wit of the Irish. He erased or denied parts of his
history he didn’t like; he destroyed canvases that fell short of an impossible
perfection; he couldn’t speak about himself without getting drunk first. He was
an S&M enthusiast who lived with his childhood nanny. He painted disturbing
vignettes but was an effervescent fixture at London bars. His states of
betweenness, of paradox, make him that rare artist who actually rewards 900 infatuated pages.Bacon was born in
Ireland in 1909, descendant of an illustrious bloodline of military adventurers
and rich industrialists. His parents were recent arrivals from England. “When I
think of my childhood, I see something very heavy, very cold, like a block of
ice,” Bacon told an interviewer. There was much to detest in his early years:
the asthma that confined him to a sickroom and necessitated medicinal
candles and occasional hits of morphine; his father, an ex-soldier and horse
trainer disappointed by his weakling son; the outbreak of World War I, which
drove the family back to England (Stevens and Swan suggest that searchlights
may have inspired the “ghostly white” stripes that appear in some later
paintings); and, after the war, the Irish Republican Army, which terrorized
aristocratic families like Bacon’s. “It was both magical and
unnerving—thrilling and dreadful—to go to bed knowing that somewhere in the
dark field beyond the window there might be strangers waiting and watching,
phantoms who lit flares and sang songs,” Stevens and Swan write, noting that
“watchers would appear decades later in many of Bacon’s pictures.” (“Thrilling”
and “magical” perhaps overstate the whimsy of partisans threatening to torch
the neighborhood.)Francis Bacon erased or denied parts of his
history he didn’t like; he destroyed canvases that fell short of an impossible
perfection; he couldn’t speak about himself without getting drunk first. There was also the
matter of Bacon’s burgeoning homosexuality. Like many young gay boys, Bacon was
conflicted by an attraction to his own father. He also—facetiously or
not—claimed to be aroused by the smell of horse manure, which would have been
in rank abundance given his father’s profession. When he was 15, Bacon was
raped by a groom in his father’s stable, a story Stevens and Swan treat
skeptically. Many of Bacon’s claims buttressed a self-mythology designed to
make him seem more feral and less calculated than he actually was. He later
said he didn’t read serious books or take art classes, although each assertion
was a lie. He alleged that his father kicked him out of the house after he
discovered Bacon wearing his mother’s panties. Whether the anecdote is true or
not, it’s the kind of tawdry provocation Bacon relished. “What was certain,” Stevens
and Swan write, “was that some unstable sexual compound—father, groom, animal,
discipline—gave Francis a physical jolt that helped make him into the painter
Francis Bacon.”In his late teens, he drew
inspiration from the “gilded squalor” he found in London, Berlin, and Paris. A
visit to Berlin in 1927 introduced him to Europe’s sexual and artistic vanguard:
prostitution, drag shows, sex clubs, and drugs. (The trip may have also kindled
his connoisseurship of seedy bars and lowlifes, a taste he shared with his
friend William S. Burroughs, another intermittent expat who rejected his
family’s bourgeois pieties.) Bacon may have first seen Battleship Potemkin in
Berlin; his fascination with mouths and screaming subjects can be traced to the
film’s “indelible image of the nurse caught in the massacre on the Odessa steps
… her pince-nez bloodily shattering as she opens her mouth in a scream.” It was in Paris, though,
that Bacon the artist first emerged. His discovery of Picasso in the late 1920s
was an “epiphany.” Although Bacon sometimes downplayed Picasso’s influence, the
older artist’s biomorphic figures and scrambled anatomies are an obvious
precursor to Bacon’s figures. In a pattern that was consistent throughout his
life, Bacon also rebuffed other artists with whom he was certainly familiar and by whom he was perhaps even inspired, including Otto Dix and Chaim Soutine. Dix’s elongated
bodies and harsh figuration and Soutine’s garish expressionism are natural
referents for Bacon. Equally important were the illustrated books Bacon bought
from dealers along the Seine—books about diseases of the mouth, big game
animals, supernatural emanations, and other esoteric subjects. (His library of
oddities eventually totaled more than 1,200 volumes.) Later, he was drawn to
the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge and to Nazi propaganda. In the early 1930s, Bacon
found a creative outlet in rug and furniture design. Encouraged by several
women—including Madge Garland and Dorothy Todd, the powerhouse lovers who led
British Vogue—Bacon envisioned a career creating modernist decor. His
prospects were buoyed when he met Eric Allden, a bureaucrat 23 years his senior
who became Bacon’s first male companion. (Peter Lacy and Dyer were Bacon’s two
other great loves; both died on the brink of major Bacon exhibitions.) Allden
spoiled the young artist with expensive haircuts and tailored clothing, and
with outings to the theater and museums. With Allden’s help, Bacon opened a
design showroom in London, with living quarters in the back for the two men and
Bacon’s nanny, who served as cook and housekeeper.Despite his modest
success as a designer, Bacon was determined to be a serious artist. “A thing
has to arrive at a stage of deformity before I can find it beautiful,” he told
his cousin Diana, and in his early canvases he not only depicted deformed
subjects—the crucifixion was an obsession—but also deformed the paint itself:
“He added … whatever amounts of oil, water, and probably dust he thought
might awaken the flesh or help generate a powerful image,” Stevens and Swan
write. A crucifixion from 1933, showing a spindly ectoplasmic figure with
raised arms against a black background, remains one of Bacon’s eeriest works and is a thematic rehearsal for his later notable triptych Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Three Studies of Lucian Freud, 1969Copyright the Estate of Francis Bacon, 69-07. All rights reserved. Bacon’s career through the ’30s followed a jerky trajectory of acclaim and failure. He made an uneasy
companion to the other stalwarts of British art at the time: Henry Moore, John
Piper, and, especially, Graham Sutherland. Bacon and Sutherland had a
competitive influence on each other, although Sutherland was fundamentally more
provincial than Bacon and championed the English tradition—and Englishness as
a virtue—in a way Bacon never did. (Bacon and Lucian Freud had a similarly
fraught relationship.) As Stevens and Swan write, Bacon’s art was torn between
opposite impulses: “Explosive or restrained; bestial or civilized; naked or
revealed; raw or cooked.” He wasn’t a surrealist, although his desolate
geometric architecture and nightmarish creatures recall that movement’s dreamlike
juxtapositions. Nor was he a cubist, despite his discordant faces. He didn’t
seem to belong to any school or ism of contemporary art. Stevens and
Swan invoke a lineage of old masters such as Rembrandt, Titian, and Velázquez,
and Bacon himself aspired to such grandeur. Yet he also understood
the essentially moral, Manichean universe of the old masters as a farce. Bacon
isolates and aestheticizes the human condition—a phrase he would have mocked—as
a series of elemental traumas. Head I, from 1948, presents a necrotic
head disintegrating into yolky runoff, the exposed teeth reminiscent of certain
deep-sea predator fish. “Human control, vested in settled human features, is an
old-master illusion,” Stevens and Swan write of the painting. The same can be said
of one of Bacon’s most iconic works, Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of
Pope Innocent X, from 1953, which remakes Velázquez’s original as an
eruption of luminous distress. Velázquez’s pope is regal and indomitable;
Bacon’s looks as if he’s mid-sizzle in an electric chair. Head VI, from
1949, also reworks the Velázquez, this time framing the pope’s screaming head
behind both a phantasmal cube and a gauze of oxidized drapery. The artist
Lawrence Gowing wrote that “the paradoxical appearance at once of pastiche and
iconoclasm was indeed one of Bacon’s most original strokes.”Stevens and Swan extend
that idea to the literal presentation of Bacon’s art. By putting his canvases
in heavy gold frames, Bacon employed a “kind of satirical costume—the old
masters in drag.” Bacon was a deadly serious artist, but not humorless. There’s
a whiff of camp in his bombast and even in his public persona—the suit and glossy
leather jacket that gave the impression of a gentleman fetishist. The notion of
a gay, irreligious man painting flamboyant popes and crucifixions, and then
framing them in a way that self-consciously evokes the canon, is more amusing
than most critics acknowledge. (John Berger initially and unfavorably compared
Bacon to Walt Disney.) For Bacon, the sober traditions of Christian iconography
and Western art were suitable subjects for art but never for veneration.Stevens and Swan’s
biography is also the story of interwar and midcentury gay British culture:
discretion and code-speak, confirmed bachelors rooming together, followed
gradually by the sordid vivacity of Soho nightlife. The book paints a vivid
portrait of the Colony Room, the bar in London where Bacon (and Dylan Thomas)
spent many obliterated hours. The place was presided over by Muriel Belcher, a
mordant lesbian who lingered “like a musk” amid her regular gay
clientele: The freedom inside the bilious green room, while naughty, funny,
and subversive, also included the darker liberties. You could wound and be
wounded. You could choose to drink yourself to death. Veneers were stripped;
masks were picked up in pieces. Sloppy drunks often fell down the narrow
staircase. By the next day the performances were forgiven or forgotten—or
perhaps not.Queer life was still
scandalous in that era. In the 1950s, police routinely cracked down on gay
offenses: In 1952, the code-breaker Alan Turing was convicted of gross
indecency and opted for chemical castration instead of prison. (He committed
suicide two years later.) The 1954 trial and imprisonment of conservative
politician Edward Montagu, landowner Michael Pitt-Rivers, and journalist Peter
Wildeblood became a cause célèbre. Homosexual acts remained officially illegal
in Britain until 1967. In this environment, circumspection was the rule,
although Bacon pushed both his romantic life and his art to the edge.“Until late in his life
Bacon was attracted to beautiful but suppressed men in whom there lay—somewhere
between weakness and power—a seductive but dangerous line that he could test,”
Stevens and Swan write. In Peter Lacy, a former fighter pilot, Bacon found the
perfect collaborator. Lacy beat and raped Bacon, and once threatened to chain
him up in a corner, where Bacon would have to sleep and shit on a bed of straw.
During one particularly violent exchange, Lacy threw Bacon through a
window. This hard-knock eroticism
pervaded some of Bacon’s paintings, as well. Two Figures, from 1953,
depicts two naked men grappling on a disheveled bed. The men’s skin has the
mottled plum undertones of a bruise, while their faces are mostly blurred,
almost rinsed out, aside from one man’s bared teeth. It’s an ambiguous image
that suggests both rapture and violence. (Lucian Freud hung the painting over
his bed and refused to ever lend it to museums.) Bacon explored similar themes
in Two Figures in the Grass, from 1954, and The Wrestlers After
Muybridge, from 1980. Bacon understood life as a zero-sum proposition: There
are no winners except death; we are all meat; in a world without meaning, you
might as well do what you want. Bacon’s Men in Suits series
may be his most cohesive rejoinder to the stifled sexuality of British culture.
In 1954, Bacon lodged at the Imperial Hotel in Henley-on-Thames, about an hour
west of London. It was a faded pit stop for businessmen and commuters, some of
whom were there to drink their lunch and some to have hurried trysts, and some
of whom agreed to model for Bacon. The resulting series is a monochromatic blue-and-black
frieze of solitary men seemingly trapped inside spectral cages. Stevens and
Swan argue that the figures are stand-ins for “the tormented everyman of
postwar corporate culture.” The figures also represent a performance of
masculinity—broad-shouldered, hefty, on a payroll—alienated from itself. The
unanimous darkness of the backdrops evokes the darkness of the closet. The
paintings suggest how isolating queerness can be, and also how banal its
self-deception is, symbolized here by conformist wardrobes and dreary
routine. Performance is the
flip side of homosexuality, and for Bacon, that meant playing the roles both of bitchy bon vivant—heir to the tradition of his fellow Irishman Oscar Wilde—and of dissipated artist. Neither role was a perfect fit. “It was Bacon’s
secret that he was not just a radical master of the twentieth-century stage who
exulted in the dark arts,” Stevens and Swan write. “He was simultaneously an
Englishman suffused with longing for the ordinary patterns of joy and solace
denied him as a child and young man.” Bacon was a conservative at heart—when
drunk, he’d sometimes lambaste poor people for their supposed weakness—but his
art, as channeled through his queerness, cast a critical, if oblique, eye on
the prevailing culture. Bacon understood life as a zero-sum proposition: There
are no winners except death; we are all meat; in a world without meaning, you
might as well do what you want. He once observed about the Nazi imagery that riveted
him, “Amid the clatter of Hitlerism you saw shadows in the process of becoming
substantial.” The opposite is true of Bacon’s art; there you see once substantial
figures in the process of becoming shadows.
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