Double Silence | Silencio Doble

There are some qualities —some incorporate things,
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of that twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.
There is a two-fold Silence —sea and shore
—Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places,
Newly with grass o'ergrown; some solemn graces,
Some human memories and tearful lore,
Render him terrorless: his name's "No More."
He is the corporate Silence: dread him not!
No power hath he of evil in himself;
But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!)
Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf,
That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod
No foot of man,) commend thyself to God!

Edgar Allan Poe, "Silence," sonnet, 1839



Francis Bacon
Two Figures | Dos Figuras
1961


Hay algunas cualidades, algunas cosas incorpóreas,
Que tienen doble vida, que muestran
Una especie de doble entidad que emana,
De materia y luz; sólido y sombra.
Hay un Silencio doble— mar y costa—
—Cuerpo y alma. Habita en lugares desolados,
Reciente la hierba sobre ellos; algunas gracias solemnes,
Ciertos recuerdos humanos y llorosa erudición,
Quítale el terror: su nombre es "No Más”
Él es el corporativo Silencio: ¡no le temas!
No tiene el poder del mal en sí
Pero de llevarte alguna veloz suerte (¡inoportuno lote!)
Al presentarte su sombra (anónimo duende,
Que se hizo sentir en solitarias regiones donde no anduvo
Hombre ninguno), ¡encomiéndate a Dios!

Edgar Allan Poe, "Silencio," poema, 1839
Traducción libre de Mariano Akerman

Zissou on Bacon

"As I flicked through the big book of Bacon’s works I felt a spark of something I had never felt before – a style I had never seen, a sense of mystery, of subversion, even menace – and yet the forms and flow of the lines felt so elegant and natural to me. It felt as if Bacon discovered a way to visually expose, even for just a fleeting moment, the inner soul of the sitter, it felt honest.
His works, particularly in the middle years of his career, have always managed to draw me in. I am regularly seeing them in different ways. The same painting can often drum up a completely different emotion each time I view it. I spot another technique or another form. They have made me think about art and life probably more than any other works that I have encountered." - Zissou

These words reflect with admirable precision what Francis Bacon's art keeps on producing in myself too. Thank you Zissou for such significant words. - M.A.

By the way, Zissou's work is fascinating.

Notas sobre Francis Bacon en Español

El poder de la palabra es un sitio serio dedicado a la cultura -literatura, arte, música, arquitectura, cine- y por ello altamente apreciado. Acerca de Francis Bacon: "Pintor británico de origen irlandés, cuyo personalísimo estilo expresionista, basado en un simbolismo de terror y rabia, le ha convertido en uno de los artistas más originales del siglo XX. Nació en Dublín, de padres ingleses, el 28 de octubre de 1909 y llegó a Londres a finales de la década de 1920. Entre 1927-1928 pasó algún tiempo en París y Berlín, donde hizo trabajos de decoración y comenzó a realizar dibujos y acuarelas, tras la impresión que le produjo una exposición de Pablo Picasso. En 1929 volvió a Londres y se inició como autodidacto en la pintura al óleo. En 1944 ante el escaso éxito de sus obras destruyó casi todas las pinturas que había hecho hasta entonces. El Tríptico Tres estudios de figuras junto a una crucifixión (1944) marcó el reinicio de su carrera sobre unas bases totalmente nuevas. En 1948 el Museo de Arte Moderno (MOMA) de Nueva York compró una obra suya y en 1949, año de su primera pintura inspirada en el cuadro de Velázquez, Inocencio X, comenzaron una serie de exposiciones individuales. Una buena parte de su obra está constituida por autorretratos y retratos de amigos suyos como el Retrato de George Dyer en un espejo (1968, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid). Fiel a la idea de que el arte más grande te devuelve siempre a la vulnerabilidad de la situación humana, su obra es una constante reflexión sobre la fragilidad del ser. En cuadros como Cabeza rodeada de carne de vaca (Estudio después de Velázquez) (1954, Art Institute of Chicago) y en una serie pintada en 1952 sobre perros que gruñen, Bacon intentó impactar al espectador al hacerle tomar conciencia de la crueldad y violencia" (ME).

Francis Bacon, Tres estudios para una crucifixión, 1962
Panel central, óleo sobre lienzo, 198.1 x 144.8 cm
Museo Guggenheim, Nueva York

Baconiana 1

Francis Bacon, Figure Study, c. 1987-90
Oil on canvas
Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 2005 (artshooter)

"You can't be more horrific than life itself." Francis Bacon

Self-taught, Francis Bacon emerged in 1945 as a major force in British painting. He rose to prominence over the subsequent 45 years, securing his reputation as one of the seminal artists of the 20th century. With a predilection for shocking imagery, Bacon's oeuvre was dominated by emotionally charged depictions of the human body that are among the most powerful images in the history of art. His artwork is well-known for its bold and austere, often grotesque imagery.
In his work, Bacon explores his philosophy about mankind and the modern condition with visually arresting examples. The earliest group of works, from the 1940s and '50s, focuses on the animalistic qualities of man, loneliness and couplings, mortality.
In the 1960s, working in his style much looser and colorful, Bacon showed the human body exposed and violated. In the following decade he increasingly used narrative, autobiography, and myth to suggest ideas about sensation and violence
Central to an understanding of the artist's working methods his archival materials, which have only become available since Bacon's death (especially the contents of the artist's famously cluttered London studio). These include 65 items from the studio, his estate, and other archives, pages the artist tore from books and magazines, photographs, and sketches—all of which are source materials for his paintings.

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion "seems derived from Picasso's Crucifixion, but further distorted, with ostrich necks and button heads protruding from bags - the whole effect gloomily phallic, like Bosch without the humour. These objects are perched on stools, and depicted as if they were sculpture, as in the Picassos of 1930. I have no doubt of Mr Bacon's uncommon gifts, but these pictures expressing his sence of the atrocious world into which we have survived seems [to me] symbols of outrage rather than works of art. If peace redresses him, he may delight as he now dismays" (Raymond Mortimer, New Statesman and Nation, 14 April 1945).

Study for a Portrait, Man Screaming, 1952. Christie's catalog: "On great occasions human life is concentrated bestially in the mouth, anger makes one clench one's teeth, terror and atrocious suffering make the mouth the organ of tearing cries." (Georges Bataille, reproduced in Documents, no. 5, Paris 1930, pp. 299-300).
Bacon often claimed that his paintings, which to many seemed macabre distortions of reality, were purely the result of his "trying to make images as accurately of my nervous system as I can". Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming) clearly illustrates that Bacon was evidently a more sensitive and responsive to the raw end of his 'nervous system' than most. In a remarkable piece of understatement, Bacon once explained that Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming) was part of a series, "done of somebody who was always in a state of unease," and that, "in attempting to trap this image, as this man was very neurotic and almost hysterical, this may possibly have come across in the paintings."(Francis Bacon, reproduced in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p. 82).
"I've always hoped to put over things as directly and rawly as I possibly can,' Bacon told David Sylvester, "and perhaps, if a thing comes across directly people feel that that is horrific. Because, if you say something very directly to somebody, they're sometimes offended, although it is a fact. Because people tend to be offended by facts, or what used to be called the truth." (ibid. p. 82).
The present work is one of the most powerful examples from an important series of portrait heads that Bacon painted in the early 1950s. A dramatic and intense depiction of a tormented and almost bestial man screaming into the face of the viewer, it is a remarkable painting that conjures a unique vision of a man at his most primal and, Bacon would probably have argued, at his most real.
With its paint smeared, scrawled, smudged and pasted into a striking and surprising unity, this work is also a haunting expression of the 'heart of darkness' that lay at the centre of Bacon's own psyche. For as well as being an evocative and powerful portrait, Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming) also coordinates many of the artist's key obsessions into one concentrated image.
Chief among these obsessions is the image of an almost autonomous screaming mouth, which here forms an eerie kind of vortex at the centre of the painting. For Bacon, the screaming mouth was an image of peculiar and disturbingly sensual beauty. "I've always been very moved by the movements of the mouth," he recalled. "People say that these have all sorts of sexual implications, and I was always very obsessed by the actual appearance of the mouth and teeth, and perhaps I have lost that obsession now, but it was very strong at one time. I like, you may say, the glitter and the colour that comes from the mouth, and I've always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset." (ibid. pp. 48-50).
As a young man he had been mesmerized by a book on diseases of the mouth in which there were a number of detailed hand-coloured illustrations. These obsessed him for many years. Similarly, he also became fixated on the mouth of the screaming nurse shot through the face in Sergei Eisenstein's epic film Battleship Potemkin. This particular image was, for Bacon, the ultimate expression of the human scream and one that in the early 1950s, along with Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, he directly sought to emulate by using as source for his own work.
Begun in 1951, his famous series of screaming Popes were an attempt at combining these two obsessions into one united and 'true' expression of humanity. In Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming), the figure of a Pope has been transplanted by that of a suited businessman. For Bacon, the two figures were interchangeable; each an impressive symbol of authority, power and worldly distinction who in Bacon's hands was brutally reduced to a raw and base animality. At the heart of all these works is the scream, which in the present work is evoked so powerfully that it seems almost audible. With the shimmering grey veil of the painting's curtain-like background acting as a visual echo, the piercing resonance of this man's silent scream seems to vibrate everything around it, save the cold, impersonal and solid metal armature of his papal-like throne.
The radiating flicker of this grey vibrating enclosure creates a sense of transience and motion reminiscent of ghosting effects found in photographs and X-rays - both of which were another obsession and important source in Bacon's art. Photography, had a shadow-like quality that for Bacon, often revealed the essence of an image - a trace of the subject's 'aliveness' that struck at the true reality of his sitter far more closely than any outward feature. "I think it is (photography's) slight remove from fact which returns me onto the fact more violently", Bacon once observed.
Working indirectly from photographs of his subjects, rather than from directly within their presence was normal practice for Bacon. His aim in portraiture was to capture the enigma of the raw and violent essence that he saw resonating at the heart of his subjects. "I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them like a snail," he told David Sylvester, "leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime... When I look at you across the table I don't only see you but I see a whole emanation which has to do with personality and everything else. And to put that over in a painting, as I would like to be able to do in a portrait, means that it would appear violent in paint. We nearly always live through screens - a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two screens." (op. cit, p. 82).
The ambiguous curtain-like enclosure which seems to flicker and resonate from the scream of the tormented man in Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming) is like a literal realisation of the screens that Bacon mentions "clearing away". Yet in this work, as in many of his portraits of screaming Popes, these transparent screens which may originate with Titian's Portrait of Archbishop Filippo Archinto seem to enclose and imprison the figure at the very same time that they reveal him in his true state of being. Like hospital curtains from some Orwellian isolation chamber they are the sterile and impersonal apparatus of a terrifying mental landscape of fear and anguish.
Using thick strokes of black paint that pass both in front of and behind the figure whose features also seem blurred by the shimmering motion of this veil-like curtain, Bacon stresses the spatial ambiguity of the scene and adds to the psychological power of the painting. For, while the tormented animation and quivering flesh of the man are deliberately contrasted with the inanimate stillness and cold impersonal emptiness of his surroundings, as a whole, the surface of the painting seems to have been activated by the scream into a corrugated wave that threatens to penetrate even the viewer's space.
Huddled and shaken on his golden throne, seemingly trapped within the painting and sealed off from all possibility of communication, this authoritarian figure crouches in a dark alienatory space emitting a terrifyingly primal scream. In one of his most unforgettable images Bacon captures a full range of human emotions that combine a sense of anger, fear, violence, and erotic intensity into a single haunting portrayal of a human scream which through the magic of Bacon's artistry seems to have actually burned itself onto the canvas to reveal the tormented essence of one human life.

Although Francis Bacon is best known for his alienated and often hideously distorted human figures, animals are the subject of at least a dozen of his canvases. He rarely worked from nature, preferring photographs, and for images of animals he often consulted Eadweard Muybridge’s Animals in Motion, Marius Maxwell’s Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa, and pictures from zoological parks. Intrigued by the disconcerting affinities between simians and human beings, he first compared them in 1949 in Head IV (Man with a Monkey), in which a man’s averted face is concealed by that of the monkey he holds.
Like his human subjects, Bacon’s animals are shown in formal portraits or candid snapshots in which they are passive, shrieking, or twisted in physical contortions. The chimpanzee in the Peggy Guggenheim work is depicted with relative benevolence, though the blurring of the image, reflecting Bacon’s interest in frozen motion and the effects of photography and film, makes it difficult to interpret the pose or expression. In composition and treatment it is close to paintings of simians executed in the fifties by Graham Sutherland, with whom Bacon became friendly in 1946. The faint, schematic framing enabled Bacon to "see" the subject better, while the monochrome background provides a starkly contrasting field that helps to define form (Lucy Flint, Guggenheim Museum).

In Figure with Monkey from 1951, a man and monkey are separated by a fence painted from a blur of diagonal hatching marks in brilliant purples and deep blues. The man reaches up for the animal, and the hand and mouth meet in a confusing few swaths of fleshy colored paint. Is this gentle touching or biting? And, for that matter, who is caged, man or monkey? (Mary Louise Schumacher, "Screaming in Paint: Exhibit Plumbs Depths of Bacon's Unsettling Works," Journal Sentinel, 2007).

There's a picture of a screaming chimpanzee -a simian form with bared mouth- that goes to the core of Bacon's work. If you then look at Head 1 from 1948 and Head 2 from 1949, say, both are half-animal, half human, as if morphing between forms. There was no difference to Bacon. He knew humans were animals: primal and confrontational. You see it also in his figures of screaming popes. He always saw the animal in man, even in in the supreme pontiff. There's that ambiguity with Bacon: you don't know if you're witnessing a scream of pain, anger or release. I think probably that's why Bacon was such a great artist (Michael Peppiatt, "Great British Bacon," Radio Times, 19-25 March 2005).

"The question Deleuze poses to an artwork is not What does it mean? but rather How does it function? Deleuze [...] attempts to isolate and identify the components of [a Bacon painting ... and he thus] frequently returns to [...] three simplest aspects—the Figure, the surrounding fields of color, and the contour that separates the two—which taken together form a "highly precise system" that serves [Bacon] to isolate the Figure" (Daniel Smith).

What Bacon’s painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility, or undecideability between man and animal. [...] It is never a combination of forms, but rather the common fact: the common fact of man and animal. Bacon pushes this to the point where even his most isolated figure is already a coupled figure, man is coupled with his animal in a latent bullfight (Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation, 1981).

Triptych Studies of the Human Body, 1979. Sotheby's auction catalog, 2001: "[This work] sees the confluence of two of Bacon's greatest inspirations, Eadweard Muybridge and Michelangelo in one of his most beautiful and erotically charged compositions. Through its slight ambiguity of content, this work teems with sexual energy and tension, born of Bacon's deep instinctual understanding of the painterly language which he so uniquely manipulated. [...] Against this calm and spare background, the players fidget and buzz with energy. [...] Bacon frames his figures as if in a spectable: we are watching them and they seem to know it. They are cognizant of our attention, the left-hand figure turns away to bare the gash on his back whilst the right-hand figure turns toward us to flex his biceps. The triptych format seems to hint at a narative between the panels, but that narrative remains ambiguous. [...] Here the nature of the human form, which has been mediated through a number of representative media is adapted through Bacon's mind and hand to be at once amorphous, yet totally real. Through moments of magic, Bacon coagulates color and form to achieve a heightened sense of figurative reality, which leaves the viewer thrilling to the sensations of his subjects. This is nowhere more dramatic than in the present composition."

Forerunner of Post-modernity. Post-Modernism doesn't reject Modernism and can be seen to be in critical dialogue with it (reassessing Modernist ideas). Modernism sought to create something entirely new, breaking from traditions and moving towards abstraction. The idea of "art for art's sake" become prominent.
Post-Modernism first gained use in the art world around the 1980s, when an economic boom allowed graet investments in art. Art had become big business and big money. Movements such as Minimalism and Conceptualism had pushed artists to the limit, the aesthetics were extremely simplified and ideas were the focus. The exploration into the nature of art during Modernism was developed in such a way that when Post-Modernism came about artists felt the exploration of the new was exhausted and started to look back at pre-Modern art traditions.
Post-Modernism allowed art to refer to past traditions and concepts, rather than having to create something entirely new and original (S&A).
Bacon was in a sense a pionner of Post-Modernity. Yet, paradoxically, his approach and modus operandi lead him to created something that is new and original too.

Bacon Affinities Gallery


Scattergood-Moore, Bending Figure after Muybridge, 1966. Oil on canvas. Private Collection, Boston


Co Westerik, Schoolmaster and Child (Schoolmeester met kind), Holland, 1961. Oil and tempera on canvas, 88,5 x 110 cm. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag


Timothy Jacob Fuller, The Yellow Bull. Los Angeles, United States


Mariano Akerman, Three Figures before the Window, mixed media, 1989


Yue Minjun, You're So Bacon, 2001


Alberto Petrò, Bacon's Eggs, 2008. Silver gelatin print, 60 x 50 cm.


Matt Thomases, Francis Bacon, bronze, 2008


Alex Wolff, Reinterpretation of Francis Bacon's Study from the Human Body 1949, collage, 2010


Tim Hancock, Fury 1, 2011. Oil on canvas, 58 x 84cm.

Georges Bataille: The Mouth

The mouth is the beginning or, if one prefers, the prow of animals; in the most characteristic cases, it is the most living part, in other words, the most terrifying for neighbouring animals. But man does not have a simple architecture like the beasts, and it is not even possible to say where he begins. In a strict sense, he starts at the top of the skull, but the top of the skull is an insignificant part, incapable of attracting attention and it is the eyes or the forehead the play the significatory role of an animal’s jaws.

Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait, 1953
oil and sand on canvas, 88 x 77 cm
Tate Gallery, London

Man is the animal whose nature has not yet been fixed.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Among civilized men, the mouth has even lost the relatively prominent character that it still has among primitive men. However, the violent meaning of the mouth is conserved in a latent state: it suddenly regains the upper hand with a literally cannibalistic expression such as mouth of fire, applied to the cannons men employ to kill each other. And on important occasions human life is still bestially concentrated in the mouth: fury makes men grind their teeth, terror and atrocious suffering transform the mouth into the organ of rending screams. On this subject it is easy to observe that the overwhelmed individual throws back his head while frenetically stretching his neck so that the mouth becomes, as far as possible, a prolongation of the spinal column, in other words, it assumes the position in normally occupies in the constitution of animals. As if explosive impulses were to spurt directly out of the body through the mouth, in the form of screams. This fact simultaneously highlights the importance of the mouth in animal physiology or even psychology, and the general importance of the superior or anterior extremity of the body, the orifice of profound physical impulses: equally one sees that a man is able to liberate these impulses in at least two different ways, in the brain or in the mouth, but that as soon as these impulses become violent, he is obliged to resort to the bestial method of liberation. Whence the narrow constipation of a strictly human attitude, the magisterial look of the face with a closed mouth, as beautiful as a safe.

Georges Bataille, "La Bouche," Critical Dictionary, as published in the journal Documents, c. 1930

To consult
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Bacon by Akerman: Best of Google Knol

"The Grotesque in Francis Bacon's Instinctive Paintings" is an article by Mariano Akerman. It was initially published as "a unit of knowledge" in Knol (30.10.2009).

URL was http://knol.google.com/k/the-grotesque-in-bacon-s-instinctive-paintings

Akerman's Knol was chosen among "The Best of Google Knol" by the Knol Publishing Guild on June 28, 2011. The KPG included Spiros Kakos, Gust Mees, Garry Jenkins, Peter Baskerville, Norman Creaney, Jag Nambiar, Krishan Maggon, and Murry Shohat. Source: The Best of Google Knol, Scoop.it!, 6.7.2011, p. 1


Murry Shohat: "The Best of Google Knol."

Now the original article can be found online as The Grotesque in Francis Bacon's Paintings

Love is the Devil

Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

Derek Jacobi as Bacon

Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon is a 1998 film made for television by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It was written and directed by John Maybury and stars Derek Jacobi and Daniel Craig.

A biography of Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon (Jacobi), it concentrates on his strained relationship with George Dyer (Craig), a small time thief. The film draws heavily on the biography of Bacon, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon by Daniel Farson.

The year is 1971 and controversial British artist Francis Bacon is welcomed as the "greatest living painter" by officials and the press at the Grand Palais in Paris. As the ceremony takes place, George Dyer (Daniel Craig), Bacon’s model and lover of seven years, takes a cocktail of pills and alcohol in their hotel room. Slumping into blackness, Dyer recalls the fateful day in 1964 when he attempts to burgle Bacon’s house, but meets Bacon instead. From then on his life takes on an entirely different course. A powerful and dangerous relationship develops between the flamboyant artist and the man who becomes his lover and the model for some of his most intense and celebrated paintings. SBS

Daniel Craig as Dyer

The powerfully complex relationship between the flamboyant artist and the man who became his lover and muse (for some of his most intense and celebrated paintings), explores the territory where art, love and sex dangerously collide. Cannes Festival 1998

Maybury’s biopic tells the story of the troubled relationship between painter Francis Bacon and his East End lover George Dyer. An impressive and disturbing look at the internal life of an artist. Indie

This British biographical drama probes the life of painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992), critically acclaimed as the outstanding British painter of the latter half of the 20th Century. This unsympathetic portrait of Bacon begins when George Dyer, a small-time criminal from working-class East End environs, drops through a skylight to rob Bacon's studio--and is ordered into bed by Bacon. The two become a familiar couple at Bacon's hangout, the Colony Room in Soho. Bacon's sexual interests lean toward S&M, but as the cruel Bacon loses interest in Dyer and begins to look elsewhere, the couple splits. Left to his own devices, Dyer turns to drugs and alcohol--and a tragic suicide. Visual grotesqueries and a trancelike Ryuichi Sakamoto music score capture the essence of Bacon's work (although paintings by Bacon are not seen onscreen here). The film is told in the form of a flashback from Bacon's successful 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris to a period in the mid-'60s. Bacon biographer Daniel Farson (The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon) served as consultant on the film. Bhob Stewart

A short but suitably warped account of the love affair between the painter Francis Bacon (Derek Jacobi) and a small-time criminal named George Dyer, who was to model for some of Bacon's most convulsive works. The action, for what it's worth, starts in 1963 and ends in 1971, but the director, John Maybury, is only fitfully tempted by the demands of plot. He prefers to function in impressionistic bursts; we get a series of flickering, semi-linked scenes in which Bacon gambles, brushes his teeth with bleach, drinks with his appalling cronies, braces himself for masochistic sex, and even occasionally begins to paint-although, since the film was forbidden to show any authentic Bacons, he never gets very far. What rescues the enterprise from indulgence is, first, the audacity of Jacobi's performance, with its blend of caution and abandonment, and then Maybury's honorable attempt not so much to mimic the blurting violence of Bacon's imagery as to suggest the ways in which it was triggered by ordinary life. Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

Photographs and clippings recalling those Bacon once kept in his South Kensington atelier.

"Francis_Bacon_Inspiration_Sources_Muybury_Reconstruction" by Mariano Akerman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

A thief breaks through a skylight and lands in the middle of an artist's studio. His flashlight shows paints and brushes and canvas, and scattered thick on the floor pictures and newspaper photographs of carnage, accidents, executions. Peering at him from a slightly open door is the artist. "Not much of a burglar, are you?" the artist says. "Take your clothes off. Come to bed. Then you can have whatever you want."
The artist is Francis Bacon, one of the great painters of the Twentieth Century. The burglar is a working class, not-too-bright man 30 years younger than Bacon named George Dyer. Love Is the Devil tells of Bacon's relationship with Dyer from 1964 until Dyer commits suicide in 1971.
People probably react to this movie much the same way they react to Bacon's paintings and his life. Fascinated or repelled. Or both. Bacon's view of life is certainly there for all to see. He was an aggressive masochist where pleasure is pain and degradation is arousal. On the way to a boxing match with George, he says that "boxing is such an aperitif for sex. Like bull fighting, it unlocks the bowels of feeling." Bacon's circle of friends are brittle, obnoxious, clever queens, whether or not they are gay. They may accept George as Francis' plaything but not as a serious lover. Bacon is aroused and energized by the perversity of life. "We all have nightmares," he says to George unsympathetically one night. "They can't be as horrific as real life." His paintings are usually grotesque manipulations of the human body, where the body can look like an opened side of beef and a face can look like its been turned inside out. One critic called him the morbid poet of the world of evil. That seems to me to be superficial and ignorant. A person may not like Bacon's work, but his stuff is powerful and fascinating. C.O. DeRiemer

John Maybury provides viewers with a creative portrayal of the English painter Francis Bacon. Bacon was fascinated with violence both in his paintings and in his personal life. This is evident from the very first scene in which Bacon confronts George Dyer, the inept burglar who has fallen into his studio. Jacobi's chilling, yet mesmerizing, portrayal of Bacon is seen as Maybury closes in on Jacobi's face as he deliciously anticipates being bedded and dominated by this strange young man. And while the film's frank portrayal of lust and sexual dominance is clearly evident it also explores the life of a man who consciously chose the dark side of life. The performances of both Jacobi and Daniel Craig, as Dyer, are outstanding as is the inventive camera work of Maybury, who mimics the surreal images of Bacon's paintings. Jacobi's performance and voice-over narration help to illuminate this disturbing and fascinating man. Disturbing because he revelled in the violence and pain that most of us abhor and fascinating because Bacon was so unabashedly honest in his approach to life and his work. Brenda Griffey

One character in this film describes Francis Bacon's art as "portraitures of pain," also an apt description of this movie [...]. John Maybury, the director, obviously wants the viewer to be reminded of Bacon's paintings since there are many distorted and fragmented shots. Additionally, many of the artist's friends from the bar have very unsymetrical faces. Bacon makes himself up in front of three mirrors. There are several shots where the characters are so close to the camera so as to give a fish-eye effect. There is also a scene where victims of an auto accident are lying in positions similar to those of figures from Bacon's art. For the most part these "portraits of pain" work. H.F. Corbin

In the 1960s, British painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) surprises a burglar and invites him to share his bed. The burglar, a working class man named George Dyer, 30 years Bacon's junior, accepts. Bacon finds Dyer's amorality and innocence attractive, introducing him to his Soho pals. In their sex life, Dyer dominates, Bacon is the masochist. Dyer's bouts with depression, his drinking and pill popping, and his satanic nightmares strain the relationship, as does his pain with Bacon's casual infidelities. Bacon paints, talks with wit, and, as Dyer spins out of control, begins to find him tiresome. J. Hailey

Maybury's Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon is undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's most celebrated artists. His bleak, disturbing paintings display an intimate relationship with the darker side of life – a constant probing of the horrors of existence that most men and women shy away from. Bacon's brilliance lies in his ability to unflinchingly depict the most grotesque aspects of the human experience. In attempting to bring a segment of Bacon's life to the screen, writer/director John Maybury has adopted a cold, distant tone that effectively captures the painter's world-view while keeping the audience at arm's length. (Curiously, none of Bacon's paintings appear during Love Is the Devil since the artist's estate refused permission for them to be used.) However, despite brilliant performances by both lead actors, Love Is the Devil is paradoxically both intriguing and uninvolving. It's what I like to call an interesting failure.
Love Is the Devil transpires in London during the late-1960s and early-1970s. It tells of the unlikely seven-year affair between Bacon (Derek Jacobi) and a lower-class burglar named George Dyer (Daniel Craig), and, in its best moments, echoes Stephen Frears' brilliant Prick Up Your Ears. The overall story – about how the homosexual relationship with Bacon destroys Dyer – is relatively static, but there are several interesting subtexts, such as the connection between art, obsession, and cruelty, and the ability of love to manifest itself in such a damaging form. Unfortunately, there's not a great deal of new material in Love Is the Devil. We've seen this kind of story – about the sordid life of a great artist – many times in the past, so much of this movie seems to be covering familiar ground.
The first image presented to us is of Bacon smelling the pillow where a lover slept. It is perhaps the most evocative moment of the film. Soon, the artist is surprising Dyer in the act of breaking into his studio. Instead of summoning the police, Bacon orders Dyer to undress and join him in bed, promising that he can take anything he wants later. Once in Bacon's life, Dyer never leaves. For a while, the painter treats his new lover with respect and affection, but, eventually, he begins to tire of him, and the less Bacon needs him, the more desperate Dyer becomes, resorting to suicide attempts. The end is perhaps inevitable.
One of the film's greatest detriments could easily have been one of its greatest assets, if director John Maybury had exercised a little restraint. His visual style is distinctive, but he doesn't know the meaning of the word subtlety, and a provocative approach turns into overkill. Maybury is fond of using odd camera angles, quick cuts, and distorted views of the characters to emphasize how skewed Bacon's world is. Good idea; bad execution. In the end, it seems like Maybury is more interested in advertising his uniqueness and versatility as a director than in making a stirring movie. He's showing off, and it hurts the film.
The thing that almost saves Love Is the Devil is Derek Jacobi's performance. Jacobi, the only actor capable of challenging Ian McKellan as the best Shakespearean thespian of this generation, is so good as Bacon that it's frightening. Jacobi is mesmerizing, and, when he's on screen, it's difficult to turn away. Daniel Craig is frequently lost in Jacobi's shadow, but never fully eclipsed. Craig does a credible job portraying Dyer as he traverses the uncertain emotional territory from a tough burglar to a weak-willed, clinging parasite. Tilda Swinton has a supporting role as the proprietress of a drinking club that Bacon frequents.
Love Is the Devil is constructed almost like an impressionist painting: it's comprised of numerous vignettes that, when pieced together and viewed from a distance, represent a larger image. However, what works well on a canvas doesn't necessarily translate to the screen, and this method occasionally makes the movie seem disjointed. Combined with Maybury's stylistic flourishes, it's enough to prevent the viewer from ever connecting with either Dyer or Bacon. We watch them from a detached perspective, observing their actions with curiosity, but never identifying with them or being drawn into their world. Although, considering Bacon's nihilistic perspective of life ("I'm optimistic about nothing," he says more than once, and he means it), perhaps that, like the movie as a whole, isn't all bad. James Berardinelli

Three Studies for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

This film will insinuate itself into the images under your closed eyelids. Meat, blood, cuts, scars, wounds, assassinations, executions, dismemberments, car accidents, beatings, and burnings will all rush together in an explosion of pain, longing, and unsatisfied hungers. Homosexual sado-masochism, not gay love. The absolute evil of pure genius. A paint brush slashes the spirit as a razor, the body. The tormented torments; the masochist punishes the sadist. Flesh is set aflame with a cigarette, not a kiss. Francis Bacon is the one true artist of the postwar era. He understood that humanity had irrevocably crossed the barrier between reason and madness. This film casts us into the abyss of the collective unconscious where we may swim or be burned to a crisp. Hold your eyelids open with sharp orange toothpicks and suck on the bloody images. Watch the film five times and then seek out Bacon's work, at least in books, if not in museums.

Visual imagery. Only missing are Bacon's pics of wild animals, vaudeville actors and reproductions of Velázquez's paintings and Muybridge's photos.
"Francis_Bacon_Inspiration_Sources_Muybury_Reconstruction" by Mariano Akerman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Pope with Owls, 1958

Francis Bacon, Pope with Owls, 1958. Oil on canvas, 198 x 142 cm. Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels

La série d'études de têtes de 1949, caractérisées par les bouches criantes laissant apparaître les dentiers articulés, est annonciatrice de la série, la plus connue des années cinquante, inspirée par le portrait du Pape Innocent X, peint par Vélasquez. Dans la version bruxelloise, réalisée à Tanger en 1958, le Pape est assis sur un trône dont le dossier supporte, aux extrémités, deux hiboux. En dépit de tout protocole, le souverain pontife, apparemment inquiet, regarde attentivement vers sa droite, dans la même direction que les hiboux ; il est plongé dans le noir absolu et comme isolé dans une cage de verre à la perspective curieusement déformée. Certaines interprétations veulent y voir une ressemblance avec Pie XII, dont le silence face à l'Holocauste fut une source de controverse après la guerre. Il faut sans doute y voir d'abord le plaisir de l'artiste à subvertir une représentation vénérée par un traitement violemment expressionniste.
La force des portraits papaux réside dans les contorsions expressives du visage, dénué de toute sérénité et de toute splendeur baroque. L'arrière-plan est réduit à une surface monochrome noire permettant de mettre en valeur un espace géométrique schématisé. L'artiste déforme le visage et les vêtements papaux par de sauvages et gestuels coups de pinceau. Ce sont surtout le visage et les mains qui sont transformés en une sorte de masse de chairs torturées. La monture des lunettes est tordue et cache un regard énigmatique et distant. Bacon va plus loin que Edward Munch, qui exprime avec "Le cri" l'agonie névrotique humaine. Avec cette traduction picturale de l'image humaine oppressante, Francis Bacon est le principal interprète de l'angoisse existentielle de l'après-guerre (Jacques Lust, Musée d'Art Moderne: Oeuvres choisies, Brussels: MRBAB, 2001, p. 208-209).

Realism in extremis

Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962, oil on board, each panel 198.2 x 144.8 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Bacon, letter to Michel Leiris, November 20th, 1981: "For me, realism is an attempt to capture the appearance with the cluster of sensations that the appearance arouses in me."

The painter, photographed by Daniel Farson, London, c. 1965

Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1961. Oil and sand on canvas, 198.5 x 142 cm. Edward R. Broida Collection, Los Angeles

New Figuration. A very broad term for a general revival of figurative painting in the 1960s following a period when abstraction (particularly Abstract Expressionism) had been the dominant mode of avant-garde art in Europe and the USA. The term is said to have been first used by the French critic Michel Ragon, who in 1961 called the trend "Nouvelle Figuration" (Ian Chilvers, The Oxford Dictionary of Art, 2004).

Bacon, Paralytic Child on All Fours (after Muybridge), 1961. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague

Nouvelle Figuration. La Nouvelle Figuration est un mouvement artistique qui fait la transition entre l’abstraction et une figuration dite narrative. Dès 1958, la mise en place d’un régime présidentiel invite un certain nombre de peintres abstraits à traduire leur ressenti face à une actualité menaçante. Ils s’affranchissent de la neutralité du signe par le passage du signifiant au signifié.
Un esprit frondeur traite avec insolence les sujets les plus graves : les dangers du nucléaire, les effets de la psychanalyse sur l’aliénation, l’envoi d’un homme dans l’espace, l’accouchement sans douleur, l’attentat entre factions rivales, la circulation automobile arrivée à saturation, etc. (WKP).

Bacon, Man With Glasses IV, 1963

Careful Planning

Matilda Battersby, Beneath the Layers of Bacon, Independent, 24 March 2010

A new exhibition seeks to shed new light on Francis Bacon's working practises and expose the fallacy of the artist's own myth.

“I can dream all day long and ideas for paintings just fall into my mind like slides,” Francis Bacon once said. The self-promulgated idea that the Irish-born figurative artist’s wonderfully twisted and subversive imagery appeared fully formed in his mind, not demanding high levels of planning, drawing and experimentation, provides an interesting mythical basis for Bacon’s genius.

But a new exhibition of torn papers and photographs, manipulated film and other archival material harvested from Bacon’s studio, seeks to some way dispel this myth, by revealing the practise-runs, thought processes and scrawlings behind some of Bacon’s best work.

Co-curators Martin Harrison and Antonia Harrison have placed the scavenged studio artefacts alongside well known Bacon oil paintings, including five works never shown before in the UK, to demonstrate the root of some of his ideas, exhibited at the Compton Verney gallery in Warwickshire from this Saturday.

“No one ever saw Bacon work. But our research reveals a very different man from the public persona, which demands we unlearn what we think we know about him,” Martin Harrison said.

The notion that Bacon was only a spontaneous creative whose work emerged effortlessly and straight into paint, is rendered “unsafe” by the exhibition, the researchers claim. Bacon’s “collusion” in such ideas has been well documented, as is his devotion to other artists who often bypassed the drawing process, such as Picasso and Chaim Soutine.

Bacon said of himself that he “never knew what to paint,” yet pages of lists from a notebook taken from his studio in Reece Mews, South Kensington stand testament to his careful planning. As do the influences of other artists, particularly Velazquez, and even filmmakers like Buñuel and Resnais, according to the Harrisons.

“There’s a real risk that the myth of Bacon – albeit one in which the artist colluded- is all we will hand on to future generations. Yet the paintings are still by far the most important thing – it is only by reaching into those that we will ask the right questions and do justice to Bacon’s real genius,” Martin Harrison said.

Francis Bacon: In Camera is at Compton Verney gallery from 27 March until 20 June 2010.

The Grotesque in Bacon's Paintings

Francis Bacon, British painter, self-taught artist, 1909-1992

Mariano Akerman
The Grotesque in Francis Bacon's Instinctive Paintings
1999

Artistic Grotesqueness

A critic in a British newspaper, 1985: One day he amused me by saying, in an apologetic tone: "You know, I think I've got the scream, but I am having terrible trouble with the smile." The truth was that he could get no kicks from an image of a smiling face.

"Perhaps one day I will manage to capture an instant in all its violence and all its beauty" (Bacon).[1]

1. Francis Bacon, Portrait of Michel Leiris, 1976
Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 30.5 cm.
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Francis Bacon's paintings are mysterious and suggestive. They are ambiguous and constitute symbols of multi-leveled significance, which is conveyed through the artist's manipulation of the grotesque.

2. Bacon, Lying Figure in a Mirror, 1971
Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm.
Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao.[2]

As configurations of the ambiguous, Bacon's pictures engender both curiosity and perplexity. They often produce mixed feelings, such as attraction and repulsion at the same time. For a well-balanced yet disquieting interplay between fear and desire, vulnerability and cruelty, suffering and apathy is characteristic of Bacon's instinctive paintings.

3. Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944
Oil on board, each panel 95 x 73.5 cm. Tate Gallery, London.[3]

Tension and intensity, the combination of incompatible elements, and suggestions of the monstrous or the inhuman abound in the artist's imagery.

4. Bacon, Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror, 1968
Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.[4]

Bacon uses the grotesque as a means of self-expression enabling him to ambiguously communicate not only his fascination with power and violence, but also his haunted condition. The grotesque thus becomes a means of simultaneous purgation and transcendence.

5. Bacon, Motif from the right-hand panel of Three Studies for a Crucifixion
1962. Oil on canvas. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.[5]

Aside from their extravagance, Bacon's instinctive paintings are far from being ornamental accesories (eg., Italian grotteschi and other European designs in auricular style such as Dutch Kwabornament and German Knorpelwerk). In fact, the instintive paintings are inalienable personal reports encapsulating a private truth: the artist's contradictory feelings and sensations, which are neither decorative nor entirely evasive.

6. Bacon, Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1950
Oil and cotton on canvas, 139 x 108 cm.
Stedelijk van Abbenmuseum, Eindhoven.[6]

Through his instinctive paintings, Bacon willingly walks along the border of an emotional precipice, suggesting his obsession with sex and death, his apathy in matters of vulnerability and suffering, and his fascination with power and aggressiveness.

7. Bacon, Study from the Human Body, Figure turning on the Light, 1973-74
Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm.
Formerly in The Royal College of Arts, London.[7]

The suggestiveness of Bacon's art at once reveals and conceals the artist's ultimate intentions in such a blurred way that identity itself becomes problematic in his imagery. By depicting the ambiguously combined and the equivocally suggestive Bacon disorients the viewer, who cannot establish a precise meaning in his ever-changing images. Various readings are thus possible and they seem all equally valid.

8. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
right-hand panel, close-up
Tate, London.[8]

Considering that instinct implies the abolishment of morals, at the time of contemplating Bacon's paintings, we are to arrive at our own moral conclusions (certainly irrelevant to the artist and his calculated lack of concern). At this point, everything melts under our feet, because in Bacon's grotesque realm the only safe given is insecurity.

9. Bacon, Study of the Human Body, Figure in Movement, 1982
Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm.
Marlborough Fine Art, London.[9]

Bacon’s instinctive art, on the other hand, is certainly not the product of accident or chance, as the artist liked to claim from the mid-1960s onwards. They constitute carefully planned compositions which are inextricably related to the artist's life and also function as mysterious, anti-illustrational traps that suggest the monstrously cruel.

10. Bacon, face of Man in Blue VI, 1954
Oil on canvas, detail
Private collection.[10]

In this context, we realize Bacon's manipulation of the grotesque and the artist's fundamental intervention in turning it into a useful vehicle for self-expression. Bacon's instinctive images are thus profound but also problematic—a New Grand Manner of Painting merging the defiantly powerful, the disquietingly extraordinary, the suggestively monstrous, the sarcastically allusive, the theatrically manipulative, and the extremely personal.

11. Bacon, Self-Portrait, 1972
Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 30.5 cm.
Gilbert de Bottom Collection, Switzerland

As a species of confusion par excellence, the grotesque suspends belief and invites a search for meaning. Pushing us to consider alternative possibilities, the grotesque paralyses language and challenges categories. Grotesque art is thus thought-enlarging art.[11] This is true in Bacon's case, whose grotesque art conveys immediacy and suggests multilayered ideas granting us an active role as both spectators and interpreters. This is possibly the ultimate meaning of the artist's pictorial freedom, which he has achieved through a singular manipulation of the grotesque.

12. Bacon, Study for Bullfight No.2, 1969
Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon. [12]

The ambiguous element that inhabits Bacon's instinctive paintings has an immense capacity to open the valves of feeling. It is this expressive, ever-changing element of Bacon's suggestive art which proves to be extraordinarily rich: pictorial freedom is a provocative, grotesque element which coherently unites Bacon's truth and our freedom.

13. Bacon, Study from the Human Body after Muybridge, 1988
Oil on canvas 198.1 x 147.3 cm
Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York.[12]

Notes
"The Grotesque in Bacon's Instinctive Paintings" is based on Mariano Akerman, The Grotesque in Francis Bacon's Paintings, M.A. thesis, July 1999 © 1999-2009, by the author.
1. Bacon, quoted by Paloma Alarcó, 2001 (Retrato de George Dyer en un espejo, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; 19.2.2009).
2. Mariano Akerman, Figura en el espejo, Plenitud, 4.3.2008
3. "When this triptych was first exhibited at the end of the war in 1945, it secured Bacon’s reputation. The title relates these horrific beasts to the saints traditionally portrayed at the foot of the cross in religious painting. Bacon even suggested he had intended to paint a larger crucifixion beneath which these would appear. He later related these figures to the Eumenides – the vengeful furies of Greek myth, associating them within a broader mythological tradition. Typically, Bacon drew on a range of sources for these figures, including a photograph purporting to show the materialisation of ectoplasm and the work of Pablo Picasso" (Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Tate Gallery, London, exhibition label, May 2007). See also Wikipedia.
4. "En este doble retrato, George Dyer, el amante de Bacon durante años, está sentado en una silla giratoria frente a un espejo colocado sobre un extraño mueble con peana. La violencia y brutalidad de la imagen, con el cuerpo distorsionado y la cara retorcida por un espasmo, está agudizada por un halo de luz circular que proviene de un foco situado fuera del cuadro. En contraposición, la cara reflejada en el espejo, escindida en dos por una franja de espacio luminoso, no sufre las mismas distorsiones. Si pudiéramos unir las dos mitades, tendríamos un retrato bastante naturalista del modelo, con su perfil anguloso de nariz ganchuda y una expresión que combina deseo y muerte. Bacon, en la estela de los retratos dislocados de Picasso de los años centrales del siglo pasado, logra traducir los aspectos más sórdidos del ser humano" (Retrato de George Dyer en un espejo, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza; 30.10.2009). "Ejemplo de la capacidad de Bacon para acercarse al interior de la mente de sus retratados, la anamorfosis en el espejo sirvió en esta obra para confrontar al modelo con su retrato y su reflejo, al tiempo que no deja su papel como recuerdo aterrador de la amenaza del tiempo y de la muerte. El espasmo retorcido del rostro de Dyer se contrapone a la cara reflejada en el espejo, escindida en dos por una franja de espacio luminoso que parece un reflejo en el cristal. Al igual que todos los personajes de Bacon, George Dyer está representado en solitario, aislado en un espacio vacío, para simbolizar la soledad del hombre en un mundo hostil y demostrando el clima existencialista de la Europa de entreguerras en el que se formó" (EducaThyssen, 31.10.2009).
5. "In 1944, one of the most devastating years of World War II, Francis Bacon painted Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. With this horrific triptych depicting vaguely anthropomorphic creatures writhing in anguish, Bacon established his reputation as one of England’s foremost figurative painters and a ruthless chronicler of the human condition. During the ensuing years, certain disturbing subjects recurred in Bacon’s oeuvre: disembodied, almost faceless portraits; mangled bodies resembling animal carcasses; images of screaming figures; and idiosyncratic versions of the Crucifixion. One of the most frequently represented subjects in Western art, the Crucifixion has come to symbolize far more than the historical and religious event itself. Rendered in modern times by [many] artists [...], this theme bespeaks human suffering on a universal scale while also addressing individual pain. The Crucifixion appeared in Bacon’s work as early as 1933. Even though he was an avowedly irreligious man, Bacon viewed the Crucifixion as a “magnificent armature” from which to suspend “all types of feeling and sensation.” It provided the artist with a predetermined format on which to inscribe his own interpretive renderings, allowing him to evade narrative content—he disdained painting as illustration—and to concentrate, instead, on emotional and perceptual evocation. His persistent use of the triptych format (also traditionally associated with religious painting) furthered the narrative disjunction in the works through the physical separation of the elements that comprise them. / That Bacon saw a connection between the brutality of slaughterhouses and the Crucifixion is particularly evident in the Guggenheim’s painting. The crucified figure slithering down the cross in the right panel, a form derived from the sinuous body of Christ in Cimabue’s renowned 13th-century Crucifixion, is splayed open like the butchered carcass of an animal. Slabs of meat in the left panel corroborate this reading. Bacon believed that animals in slaughterhouses suspect their ultimate fate. Seeing a parallel current in the human experience—as symbolized by the Crucifixion in that it represents the inevitability of death—he has explained, “we are meat, we are potential carcasses.” The bulbous, bloodied man lying on the divan in the center further expresses this notion by embodying human mortality." Nancy Spector, Three Studies for a Crucifixion, Guggenheim Museum, New York (30.10.2009).
6. "Magie rond de ‘Salonfähige uitbater van het erge’ is de titel die gekozen werd bij Fragment of a Crucifixion uit 1950 van Francis Bacon. Bacon schildert vrijwel altijd gekwelde personen en uit hiermee zijn gevoelens ten aanzien van het leven. Als persoon houdt hij graag controle. In de loop van zijn carrière creëert hij als een toneelspeler een sfeer rondom zichzelf en zijn werk waarbij het als buitenstaander moeilijk te zien is waar fictie ophoudt en werkelijkheid begint. Niet zelden wordt de indruk gewekt dat Bacon als het ware zijn schilderijen leefde." (Eindhoven, Van Abbenmuseum, Mixed Messages, April-September 2008; trans.: Magic around the "socially acceptable operator of the worst" is the title that was chosen by Fragment of a Crucifixion in 1950 by Francis Bacon. Bacon paints almost always afflicted with this person and his feelings towards life. As a person he likes to keep control. In the course of his career as an actor, he creates an atmosphere around himself and his work in which the outsider is difficult to see where reality ends and fiction begins. Not infrequently the impression that Bacon, as it were his paintings survived; accessed 31.10.2009).
7. "To raise funds [...], Council agreed in June 2007 to the sale of a Francis Bacon painting Study from the Human Body, Man Turning on the Light, which was given by the artist as rent for a studio which he occupied in the College for a short period in the late 1960s. The painting was sold at Christie’s in October 2007 for just over £8m." (Christopher Frayling, Accounts, Royal College of Art, London, 2006/7; PDF, 31.10.2009).
8. "The face of the figure is distorted into a scream of horrific intensity. He painted many screams in later works, but none can match the impact of this one. It is the scream of the torture victim at the very moment that the lash cuts the flesh. The victim, of course, is Bacon himself. He was heavily into bondage and masochistic ritual in his private life, and he relived his painful eroticism in many of his images of trussed up, agonised, distorted figures. / Francis was fascinated by extreme forms of facial expression, and the mouth stretched open to full gape was his favourite. One day he amused me by saying, in an apologetic tone: "You know, I think I've got the scream, but I am having terrible trouble with the smile." The truth was that he could get no kicks from an image of a smiling face. It was not part of his complex sexual obsession. / Others may see in this screaming face a reflection of the agonies of war-torn Europe, a statement about the horrors of modern existence, or the entrapment and isolation of modern man in his urban cell. I see nothing of the sort. I see a devout masochist enjoying the thrill of encapsulating the secret joys of his most private moments. The great mystery about Bacon's work is why this lifelong fetishistic indulgence should have resulted in the creation of such truly great art. But then mystery is the very essence of art. As Picasso once said: 'I don't understand it and if I did, I wouldn't tell you.' " (Desmond Morris, On Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Tate Etc., Issue 8, Autumn 2006, MicroTate; 31.10.2009).
9. "Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was a British figurative painter. He was a collateral descendant of the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon. His artwork is known for its bold, austere, and often grotesque or nightmarish imagery. [...] Bacon came to London in 1925 and although he received no formal art training, he was a totally original artist whose work always contained a heroic grandeur. He created a sensation in 1945 when he exhibited his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion at the Lefevre Gallery in London [...] now in the Tate Britain’s collection in London. [... Bacon had a predilection for the] triptych format and placing his work behind glass in heavily gilded frames; [also for] the open mouth and the use of painterly distortion. [...] Bacon’s work was Expressionist in style, albeit that his distorted human forms are unsettling. He developed his idiosyncratic style during the 1950s when he achieved an international reputation. In 1958 Bacon signed a contract with Marlborough who represented him exclusively worldwide until his death in 1992 (Francis Bacon, Marlborough Fine Art, London; 31.10.2009).
10. "Man in Blue VI by Francis Bacon (estimate: £4,000,000 to £6,000,000) [...]. The finest of a series of seven major paintings that Bacon made in the spring of 1954, the present work dates to an intense [...] period in the artist’s career when he was in the midst of a tempestuous and violent romance with Peter Lacy, a veteran Spitfire pilot whom he described as the great love of his life. As Francis Bacon said of his relationship with Lacy, 'Being in love in that extreme way - being totally, physically obsessed by someone - is like having some dreadful disease. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.' In 1954, as a result of the violent and divisive nature of their mutually destructive relationship, Bacon had moved out of the cottage that he shared with Lacy and was staying at the Imperial Hotel in nearby Henley-upon-Thames. It was during the 1950s that Bacon gained international recognition; his portraits and paintings of Popes were exhibited at museums around Europe and the United States. The seven paintings depicting Man in Blue are unusual in that Bacon appears to have painted the sitter from life, as opposed to using a photograph which was his usual method. The sitter is an unknown man who Bacon is thought to have met at the hotel in Henley. The work depicts an ordinary figure pulsating with life and apparent inner turmoil at the centre of a dark void. This form of depiction contrasts to that of the screaming agony of the heads and popes that the artist had been painting the previous year, and offers a more subtle representation of personal anxiety and torment" (Matthew Patton, "Francis Bacon's Man in Blue VI leads Christie's Auction of Post-War and Contemporary Art," Press Release, London, 14.1.2009; PDF, 31.10.2009). See also Mariano Akerman, Lo familiar vuelto inquietante, Imaginarium, 13.3.2009
11. Geoffery Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982
12."Fasciné par la figure humaine depuis son entrée sur la scène artistique britannique avec le Triptyque de 1944, Bacon s'intéresse également au tableau "à sujet". En 1969, il peint trois études pour une corrida. Ce thème a pu lui être suggéré par son ami, l’écrivain Michel Leiris, auteur de livres sur la tauromachie ou encore par Picasso auquel il s’est si souvent référé dans son œuvre. Isolés dans un rond comme sur une piste, le torero et le taureau sont représentés affrontés dans l’arène. Le mouvement est suggéré par un jeu de courbes qui, sur le sol ou dans les airs, évoquent le tournoiement de la bête et les voltes de la muleta. Eliminant tout récit, Bacon donne une expression "strictement physique du jeu taurin" (Leiris). Si dans le tableau de Lyon, le grand aplat orange qui structure l’espace comporte encore un panneau ouvert où l’on aperçoit une foule, dans une autre version à la composition inversée, Bacon a fermé ce panneau. Traitées dans les mêmes tonalités de brun et de mauve, les deux figures sont indissociables l’une de l’autre. L’artiste a fait subir des déformations au corps du torero : en brossant et en nettoyant la toile, il a fait perdre à la tête sa forme humaine, lui donnant en retour des traits d’animalité. Le carré rouge qui domine la foule, frappé d’un cercle et surmonté d’une forme qui ressemble à un rapace, a été souvent rapproché d’un emblème nazi, issu de ces photographies d’actualité que Bacon collectionnait et qui jonchaient le sol de son atelier" (Etude pour une corrida n° 2, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon; 30.10.2009).
12. New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Francis Bacon: Paintings, April-May 2002. The exhibition was aimed "to bring to light the extraordinary relationship Francis Bacon had with John Edwards," with whom the painter "found a son and 'became' the loving father he had never had." Excerpt from catalog (31.10.2009). Picture price at the Frieze Art Fair 2008: $9 Million (Scott Reyburn, Frieze Week to Lure Billonaires with $9 Million Bacon Nude, Bloomberg.com, 7.10.2009).

Images
Photographs and reproductions used for educational purposes exclusively. They all belong to their respective owners. Photo credits: The Estate of Francis Bacon, 1. Centre Pompidou, 2. Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 3. Tate Gallery, 4. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 5. Guggenheim Museum, 6. Van Abbemuseum, 7. Royal College of Art, 8. Tate Etc., 9. Marlborough Fine Art, 11. Plenitud, 12. Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon, 13. Artnet.com

Resources
Painter Francis Bacon's Centennial Birthday
Tate Gallery

Idea, research and design: Mariano Akerman. Initial version: 30.10.2009 - Last version: 21.2.2011

© Mariano Akerman. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced or republished without the previous written consent of the author.

Impact of the article on Knol

Knol prize to Mariano Akerman as a most selected author

Impact of the article on Scoop.it!

Knol Publishing Guild: "The Best of Google Knol", 28.6.2011


Murry Shohat: "The Best of Google Knol."