BACON, FRANCIS (1909–1992)

British painter.

An epigraph that historians of art often use to see and read Francis Bacon's paintings comes from the mouth of the painter himself: If it can be said, why paint it? All of the artist's canvases stage what cannot be put into words. The philosopher and critic Gilles Deleuze notes that Bacon's oeuvre is based on a "logic of sensation," an ordered, often systematic, but also haphazard creative process that brings to the tissue and webbing of the stretched canvas forms and colors that figure monstrous and unnameable events and things. Flayed bodies, avatars of the skinned oxen in the studios of Rembrandt's imagination, are displayed in isolation in garishly colored arenas that could be in the same glance an installation space, the flat surface of a gigantic potter's wheel, or an uncanny "living room" graced with curvilinear walls. The bodies at the center of the canvases of his great creative period (the 1960s and 1970s) exude sensation, where anatomical shapes blend and bleed into the silken fabric of plasma, twisted flesh, or swaths and blobs of pink and rose.

Often these bodies display evidence of biological complexity: from a clump of entwined legs on a table at the center of a diptych there emerges a mandible studded with bicuspids and molars, teeth attesting to different stages of biological development or regression amid forms of flesh that seem to be without integument. Now and again a robust ribcage displays the vertebrae of a spinal column that arches into what could be at once a face and an anus. Rubbery bodies dressed in black shorts or boxers' shoes—immediately recalling pugilists or sturdy peasants in heroic painting—are so bent and contorted that they bear coy resemblance to a painter's palette. In Study for a Portrait of John Edwards (1982), a figure seated, shown on the canvas as if it were at once a study for a portrait and the portrait itself, becomes, literally, a standing cul-de-jatte (legless person) whose body, a mix of tan and rose, twists into a crown of a Neanderthal's head graced with an elegantly shaped earlobe.

The forms of Bacon's paintings blend into and out of each other, and so also do the paintings themselves in the fifty years of their production. To describe them as monstrous or fraught with atrocity would not do justice to the pleasures—heady, perverse, polymorphous—they arouse. Insofar as it is scarcely productive to write of "phases" in the evolution of his work for the simple reason that the paintings treat of biogenesis and degeneration (in ways that in literature may have parallels only in Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka), viewers grasp them through their styles of ocular effect. Haunting portraits mix shock and familiarity when their photographic sources are juxtaposed with the ways the painter literally defaces them. The same portraits are often doubled in the paintings themselves, such that a picture or a painted version of the picture of the model, already deformed, becomes the object of the sitter's contemplation. The portraits often recur in triptychs that can be read either as any of the many but simultaneous phases of some kind of disintegration or, in the same glance, "studies" within a highly contrasted field of color that isolates them (such are the Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962). They can be seen as fields of tension in which geometrical forms—rectangular panels, oval lines—form implicit canvases within the canvases, circles or cubes set upon or enclosing flesh in congress on beds. The mattresses support the action and at once double and mollify the events being depicted, which might simultaneously include fellatio, copulation, anthropophagia, cunnilingus, ingestion, defecation, such as in Three Studies for Characters in Bed (1972). Yet there often exists in these triptychs a "reporter" looking on the scenes, as in the" Triptych Inspired by T. S. Eliot's Poem 'Sweeney Agonistes' of 1967, who is not exactly a point of reference for the viewer: holding a telephone and ostensibly "speaking" in silence about the scene, he or she brings forward the fact that what is painted cannot be spoken. What we see in the portraits and triptychs is at times a strange geography of solitary life: the triptych of May-June (1972) recalls in the sinister panel Auguste Rodin's "thinker" seated on a toilet in a black rectangle of obscure but utterly flat space behind—but also parallel to—the sienna-colored walls of a living room whose beige floor is marked by a broad arrowhead aiming at him. His contorted shape seems to be in harmony with the contractions and inner fluxions of thought as it is shown, arrested, on canvas. In the central panel the face peers across the black space from the other side and, below a pendent lightbulb (the viewer wonders how many of Bacon's figures are needed "to change a lightbulb"), it seems born of itself in the figure seen to the left. The arrowhead gives way to a shadow, pouring onto the floor, that morphs the silhouettes of Batman and Mickey Mouse. And in the dexter panel the figure reposes against a wash-basin whose bent pipe, indicated by the return of the arrow on the beige floor, seems to lead back to the unseen plumbing of the other panels. The observer reporting about or describing this painting and others ventures into unspoken regions of psychic and bodily drive.

Whether in large or small scale Bacon's paintings are crushing and compelling. Crafted to embody nerve and flesh, the paintings are "monstrous" only where they contort inherited shapes, be they those of classical painting from Rembrandt and Velasquez to Van Gogh, or where they seem to be exercises in anatomy gone awry. They are monstrous in their demonstration of the unnameable forces they draw from their viewers.

See alsoPainting, Avant-Garde.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Bacon, Francis. Francis Bacon. Exhibition catalog, Centre Georges Pompidou. Paris, 1996.

Secondary Sources

Brighton, Andrew. Francis Bacon. Princeton, N.J., 2001.

Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and with an afterword by Tom Conley. Minneapolis, Minn., and London, 2003.

Russell, John. Francis Bacon. Rev. and updated ed. London, 1993.

Tom Conley