"Ugly, obscene and terrifying - the grotesque figures in Francis Bacon's paintings disturbingly evoke the claustrophobia and voyeurism of Big Brother," writes Gordon Burn.
Examining Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944
Gordon Burn, The Human Zoo, The Guardian, 1 July 2006
"His subject matter is still man in the horror of his isolation - naked and obscene on a studio couch, or grinning baboon-like from behind a desk ... But after the initial shock, one begins to feel on almost friendly terms with the creatures in his zoo. It may be an ugly, obscene and terrifying world, but it is also a deeply human one."
It is hard to read the American poet John Ashbery's review of Francis Bacon's 1963 Tate retrospective today without thinking of the menagerie being fed and watered in the forensically over-illuminated, bread-and-circuses Big Brother house. Conversely, it is impossible to watch Lea, the sex-hungry, cartoonishly enhanced single mum from the Midlands; Pete, who has Tourette's syndrome and is forever rabbit-punching himself in the throat, involuntarily ejaculating the word "wanker"; or Nikki, the prating Essex diva - and not be reminded of the grotesques in a typical Bacon painting, their faces bloated with laughter or twisted into a scream.
The correspondences from time to time have been eerie. "Devil woman" Grace flinging a glass of water in the face of "golden girl" Susie as she was evicted was an almost literal transcription of Bacon's 1965 painting After Muybridge - Woman emptying bowl of water and paralytic child on all fours: the ribbon of glittering water in each carries the same sting of surprise. Lea in extremis - teeth bared, nostrils flared, war-paint smeared - bears a strong resemblance to one of Bacon's (and Lucian Freud's) favourite models, Henrietta Moraes. (From different backgrounds and eras, the two women have more in common than just physical appearance. Moraes once came across the photographer John Deakin selling the gynaecologically explicit pictures he had taken of her as an aide memoir for Francis Bacon to sailors in a Soho pub. Lurid pictures taken of Lea Walker before she went into the Big Brother house were recently published in the Sunday Sport.)
The simultaneously claustrophobic and voyeuristically transparent spaces of the Channel 4 house are suggestive of the modern, vaguely threatening, cell-like rooms in which Bacon habitually isolates his figures, "putting them before us", as a critic once noted, "as the lepidopterist puts a new specimen on a pin".
The Diary Room, where Big Brother contestants are encouraged to drop their game-faces and give vent to whatever extremes of rage, elation or vindictiveness the producers can coax from them, shares the mean dimensions of the cages or boxes - David Sylvester referred to them as the "spaceframes" - which hold the screaming popes and cardinals that Bacon famously painted during the 1950s. The only furniture in the Diary Room this time round is a ludicrously ornate, button-backed gold leather chair, which (resist it or not) invites comparison with the thrones in which the snarling, primate-popes of Bacon (Study after Velazquez, 1950 and Portrait of Pope, 1957-58, in the current show) are trapped.
The drawing of parallels between the participants in a reality TV show and the subjects in the paintings of an artist who has been credited with "reinventing the human head" and who, during his lifetime, prompted major works by the French structuralist thinkers Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Leiris, among others, is less facetious than it might at first appear.
Bacon's overriding preoccupation was with what he liked to call "the brutality of fact". "I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail," he once said, "leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime."
Throughout his life, he liked to remember that Sigmund Freud kept in his possession a set of particularly horrendous photographs from the Viennese police archives; Bacon himself was welcomed as a visitor to the Black Museum at Scotland Yard on more than one occasion. His fascination with diseases of the mouth ("I like the glitter and 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") and with medical plates showing the body being positioned for x-ray are part of the foundation myth. His ambition, he said, was "to make the animal thing come through the human". And he did this in any number of pictures of men seated in interiors wearing City suits, as Sylvester once remarked.
It is still a source of excitement to art students that Bacon was a keen collector of photographic images that most people would turn away from, showing the inevitable course of decay and death. That violence of subject matter was fundamental to his own art.
He spent his life tearing pictures out of newspapers and magazines - he was particularly drawn to images of predatory wildlife and sportsmen, especially boxers - and then discarding them on the studio floor where, over the decades, they turned into a sort of involuntary visual resource; a kind of painterly mulch. "Bacon values the photograph as a source of significant falsehood, and he values it as a source of exact information about incidents to which he has not had direct access," his friend, the former New York Times art critic John Russell, once wrote. "But above all, he values it as a way of breaking back into reality; or, equally, of taking reality by surprise."
This, of course, was one of the earliest uses to which photography had been put: the camera was seen as a way of creeping up on truth, catching the naked shaking animal unawares and off-guard; it was seized on as a way of making statements about the fugitive nature of human beings. Fox Talbot's wife called the first cameras "mousetraps" - little wooden boxes set down to capture flattened objects and stilled lives.
According to Russell in his 1971 book on the artist, Bacon had to wait until he turned 60 to fulfil an ambition of several years' standing by putting a camera into a painting and characterising it as vividly as any of its human co-participants. Triptych - Studies from the Human Body (1970) is one of a dozen triptychs in the unprecedentedly blue-chip show just opened at the Gagosian Gallery in London. (Before it went up, there was as much excitement about how much it had cost to bring these paintings to London - they have been insured for about £400m, it is rumoured - and the motives behind Larry Gagosian mounting what is, on paper at least, a non-selling show, as there was about the opportunity of seeing the most substantial body of Bacon's work since the Hayward Gallery retrospective in 1998.)
The camera in the 1970 triptych is an old-fashioned one standing on three timber legs, with goggle-like lenses that approximate the uglified, gouged-out faces so characteristic of the people in Bacon's paintings. It has been suggested that the camera here has a symbolic role: that it stands for the faculty, much prized by Bacon, of impartial observation - it sees all, and comments on nothing. But it seems to me possible that its inclusion was intended as a rejoinder to John Berger, who, the previous year, had published an essay linking the decline of the painted portrait with the rise of photography, and in which he baldly stated that "it seems to me unlikely that any important portraits will ever be painted again".
"The talent once involved in portrait painting can be used in some other way to serve a more urgent, modern function," Berger wrote. "[In all painted portraits] the sitter, somewhat like an arranged still life, becomes subservient to the painter. Finally, it is not his personality or his role which impress us but the artist's vision." Bacon, as Berger would certainly have been aware, preferred to work from photographs of friends or models rather than have the person come to the studio to sit for him. "They inhibit me," he once admitted. "If I like them, I don't want to practise before them the injury that I do to them in my work. I would rather practise the injury in private by which I think I can record the fact of them more clearly."
The Gagosian show contains at least one authentically "important" painting: Triptych May-June 1973 records in an austere, unflinching way the death, alone in his hotel room, of Bacon's lover and companion, George Dyer. This "document about pain", as it has been described - the protagonist's pain, the artist's pain- is a work whose details are local and personal; it is an expression of felt, rather than operatic, grief.
However, just as the Big Brother contestants' tearful, disfiguring reactions are usually out of all proportion to what has caused them - Richard has eaten all the cornflakes, Lea has been bitching about Nikki behind her back - so the passages of existential angst in Bacon's painting too often can seem excessive and embarrassingly worked up, at best formulaic, at worst merely camp.
In many ways, he was a victim as well as a beneficiary of his historical moment. He had his first solo show at the Hanover Gallery in London in 1949, the year that Cyril Connolly, in the last-ever issue of Horizon, declared that "it is closing time in the gardens of the west and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair".
Throughout his life, Bacon refused the interpretations of his work, which imputed to it a "message" about the cold-war atmosphere of postwar Europe, full of menace, guilt, disquiet, doubt, a sense of nearness to death. He insisted that what stirred him was the private realm, "the vulnerability of the human situation": "I'm just trying to make images as accurately of my nervous system as I can. I don't even know what half of them mean. I'm not 'saying' anything . . . I've always been more interested in what is called 'behaviour' and 'life' than in art." Nevertheless, the label of chief interpreter of the morally and spiritually bankrupt, post-atrocity universe is the one he was stuck with.
At the same time, the flamboyant figure he cut in the drinking-clubs of Soho and the gambling-rooms of the West End, his refusal to disguise or apologise for his homosexuality, and a commitment to living, according to the Picasso formula, like a poor man with a lot of money, gave Bacon a personal glamour, and a media presence, that no other British artist had ever had. Plus he talked a good painting. The "Conversations" he recorded with David Sylvester between 1962 and 1986 are one of the great documents of 20th-century art.
Some years ago, the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik credited Bacon with a tendency in young international art to which he gave the name the "High Morbid Manner" - "a detached, distanced, oddly smiling presentation of violence ... the macabre fragment, the tortured videos, the cryptic neon signs ... that new kind of ghostly, frozen, remote look at death and suffering".
The "Conversations" are probably more greedily poured over by art students today than Bacon's work, which, far from being affectless or frozen, presently (post-Nauman, post-Hirst, post-Chapmans) seems overcooked, shouty, despairing and fetishising of death in a dated way.
"His subject matter is still man in the horror of his isolation - naked and obscene on a studio couch, or grinning baboon-like from behind a desk ... But after the initial shock, one begins to feel on almost friendly terms with the creatures in his zoo. It may be an ugly, obscene and terrifying world, but it is also a deeply human one."
It is hard to read the American poet John Ashbery's review of Francis Bacon's 1963 Tate retrospective today without thinking of the menagerie being fed and watered in the forensically over-illuminated, bread-and-circuses Big Brother house. Conversely, it is impossible to watch Lea, the sex-hungry, cartoonishly enhanced single mum from the Midlands; Pete, who has Tourette's syndrome and is forever rabbit-punching himself in the throat, involuntarily ejaculating the word "wanker"; or Nikki, the prating Essex diva - and not be reminded of the grotesques in a typical Bacon painting, their faces bloated with laughter or twisted into a scream.
The correspondences from time to time have been eerie. "Devil woman" Grace flinging a glass of water in the face of "golden girl" Susie as she was evicted was an almost literal transcription of Bacon's 1965 painting After Muybridge - Woman emptying bowl of water and paralytic child on all fours: the ribbon of glittering water in each carries the same sting of surprise. Lea in extremis - teeth bared, nostrils flared, war-paint smeared - bears a strong resemblance to one of Bacon's (and Lucian Freud's) favourite models, Henrietta Moraes. (From different backgrounds and eras, the two women have more in common than just physical appearance. Moraes once came across the photographer John Deakin selling the gynaecologically explicit pictures he had taken of her as an aide memoir for Francis Bacon to sailors in a Soho pub. Lurid pictures taken of Lea Walker before she went into the Big Brother house were recently published in the Sunday Sport.)
The simultaneously claustrophobic and voyeuristically transparent spaces of the Channel 4 house are suggestive of the modern, vaguely threatening, cell-like rooms in which Bacon habitually isolates his figures, "putting them before us", as a critic once noted, "as the lepidopterist puts a new specimen on a pin".
The Diary Room, where Big Brother contestants are encouraged to drop their game-faces and give vent to whatever extremes of rage, elation or vindictiveness the producers can coax from them, shares the mean dimensions of the cages or boxes - David Sylvester referred to them as the "spaceframes" - which hold the screaming popes and cardinals that Bacon famously painted during the 1950s. The only furniture in the Diary Room this time round is a ludicrously ornate, button-backed gold leather chair, which (resist it or not) invites comparison with the thrones in which the snarling, primate-popes of Bacon (Study after Velazquez, 1950 and Portrait of Pope, 1957-58, in the current show) are trapped.
The drawing of parallels between the participants in a reality TV show and the subjects in the paintings of an artist who has been credited with "reinventing the human head" and who, during his lifetime, prompted major works by the French structuralist thinkers Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Leiris, among others, is less facetious than it might at first appear.
Bacon's overriding preoccupation was with what he liked to call "the brutality of fact". "I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail," he once said, "leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime."
Throughout his life, he liked to remember that Sigmund Freud kept in his possession a set of particularly horrendous photographs from the Viennese police archives; Bacon himself was welcomed as a visitor to the Black Museum at Scotland Yard on more than one occasion. His fascination with diseases of the mouth ("I like the glitter and 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") and with medical plates showing the body being positioned for x-ray are part of the foundation myth. His ambition, he said, was "to make the animal thing come through the human". And he did this in any number of pictures of men seated in interiors wearing City suits, as Sylvester once remarked.
It is still a source of excitement to art students that Bacon was a keen collector of photographic images that most people would turn away from, showing the inevitable course of decay and death. That violence of subject matter was fundamental to his own art.
He spent his life tearing pictures out of newspapers and magazines - he was particularly drawn to images of predatory wildlife and sportsmen, especially boxers - and then discarding them on the studio floor where, over the decades, they turned into a sort of involuntary visual resource; a kind of painterly mulch. "Bacon values the photograph as a source of significant falsehood, and he values it as a source of exact information about incidents to which he has not had direct access," his friend, the former New York Times art critic John Russell, once wrote. "But above all, he values it as a way of breaking back into reality; or, equally, of taking reality by surprise."
This, of course, was one of the earliest uses to which photography had been put: the camera was seen as a way of creeping up on truth, catching the naked shaking animal unawares and off-guard; it was seized on as a way of making statements about the fugitive nature of human beings. Fox Talbot's wife called the first cameras "mousetraps" - little wooden boxes set down to capture flattened objects and stilled lives.
According to Russell in his 1971 book on the artist, Bacon had to wait until he turned 60 to fulfil an ambition of several years' standing by putting a camera into a painting and characterising it as vividly as any of its human co-participants. Triptych - Studies from the Human Body (1970) is one of a dozen triptychs in the unprecedentedly blue-chip show just opened at the Gagosian Gallery in London. (Before it went up, there was as much excitement about how much it had cost to bring these paintings to London - they have been insured for about £400m, it is rumoured - and the motives behind Larry Gagosian mounting what is, on paper at least, a non-selling show, as there was about the opportunity of seeing the most substantial body of Bacon's work since the Hayward Gallery retrospective in 1998.)
The camera in the 1970 triptych is an old-fashioned one standing on three timber legs, with goggle-like lenses that approximate the uglified, gouged-out faces so characteristic of the people in Bacon's paintings. It has been suggested that the camera here has a symbolic role: that it stands for the faculty, much prized by Bacon, of impartial observation - it sees all, and comments on nothing. But it seems to me possible that its inclusion was intended as a rejoinder to John Berger, who, the previous year, had published an essay linking the decline of the painted portrait with the rise of photography, and in which he baldly stated that "it seems to me unlikely that any important portraits will ever be painted again".
"The talent once involved in portrait painting can be used in some other way to serve a more urgent, modern function," Berger wrote. "[In all painted portraits] the sitter, somewhat like an arranged still life, becomes subservient to the painter. Finally, it is not his personality or his role which impress us but the artist's vision." Bacon, as Berger would certainly have been aware, preferred to work from photographs of friends or models rather than have the person come to the studio to sit for him. "They inhibit me," he once admitted. "If I like them, I don't want to practise before them the injury that I do to them in my work. I would rather practise the injury in private by which I think I can record the fact of them more clearly."
The Gagosian show contains at least one authentically "important" painting: Triptych May-June 1973 records in an austere, unflinching way the death, alone in his hotel room, of Bacon's lover and companion, George Dyer. This "document about pain", as it has been described - the protagonist's pain, the artist's pain- is a work whose details are local and personal; it is an expression of felt, rather than operatic, grief.
However, just as the Big Brother contestants' tearful, disfiguring reactions are usually out of all proportion to what has caused them - Richard has eaten all the cornflakes, Lea has been bitching about Nikki behind her back - so the passages of existential angst in Bacon's painting too often can seem excessive and embarrassingly worked up, at best formulaic, at worst merely camp.
In many ways, he was a victim as well as a beneficiary of his historical moment. He had his first solo show at the Hanover Gallery in London in 1949, the year that Cyril Connolly, in the last-ever issue of Horizon, declared that "it is closing time in the gardens of the west and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair".
Throughout his life, Bacon refused the interpretations of his work, which imputed to it a "message" about the cold-war atmosphere of postwar Europe, full of menace, guilt, disquiet, doubt, a sense of nearness to death. He insisted that what stirred him was the private realm, "the vulnerability of the human situation": "I'm just trying to make images as accurately of my nervous system as I can. I don't even know what half of them mean. I'm not 'saying' anything . . . I've always been more interested in what is called 'behaviour' and 'life' than in art." Nevertheless, the label of chief interpreter of the morally and spiritually bankrupt, post-atrocity universe is the one he was stuck with.
At the same time, the flamboyant figure he cut in the drinking-clubs of Soho and the gambling-rooms of the West End, his refusal to disguise or apologise for his homosexuality, and a commitment to living, according to the Picasso formula, like a poor man with a lot of money, gave Bacon a personal glamour, and a media presence, that no other British artist had ever had. Plus he talked a good painting. The "Conversations" he recorded with David Sylvester between 1962 and 1986 are one of the great documents of 20th-century art.
Some years ago, the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik credited Bacon with a tendency in young international art to which he gave the name the "High Morbid Manner" - "a detached, distanced, oddly smiling presentation of violence ... the macabre fragment, the tortured videos, the cryptic neon signs ... that new kind of ghostly, frozen, remote look at death and suffering".
The "Conversations" are probably more greedily poured over by art students today than Bacon's work, which, far from being affectless or frozen, presently (post-Nauman, post-Hirst, post-Chapmans) seems overcooked, shouty, despairing and fetishising of death in a dated way.
Head II, 1949. Oil on canvas, 80.5 x 65 cm. Ulster Museum, Belfast
Ref. Francis Bacon: Gagosian Gallery, London WC1R.
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