Queer Francis

Cooper, Emmanuel. "Queer Francis: Life, Death and Anguish in the Work of Francis Bacon," Queer Arts, 1998, www.queer-arts.org/archive/9906/bacon/bacon.html 

Queer Francis: Life, death and anguish in the work of Francis Bacon

Written by Emmanuel Cooper

Paradoxically, both the life and work of Francis Bacon is both highly conventional and iconoclastic. As an artist he painted on traditional easel canvases - though preferring the roughened untreated back to the smooth front - using oil paint, and demanded that his work when shown in galleries be given respectful gilt frames. At the same time there was a powerful subversive element in his compositions with much of his chosen subject matter searingly autobiographical. These often dealt with his own homosexuality, his intimate and often anguished relationships, and his own uneasy association with the world in general. Although Bacon may have described himself as queer in the old-fashioned sense he can with some justification be described as a queer artist, using Philip Derbyhire's concept of "this violent rejection and despoliation of the norm by the exiled.

The death of Francis Bacon at the age of 82 in 1992 stands as a significant moment, a turning point, in our understanding not only of the concept of queer, but of how artists felt able to operate if they were to be both true to themselves yet find a measure of acceptance in a society by and large hostile to homosexual expression. Margaret Thatcher, Tory Prime Minister, reflected a popular view when in reference to Francis Bacon she described him as "that artist who paints those horrible pictures." A well known philistine - Thatcher's artistic interests seem to be limited to collecting pretty ceramic figurines - the remark could be read as referring to both Bacon's often violent style of painting and to his usual subject of the interaction between two men, which in Bacon's view was neither affectionate nor relaxed but turbulent and traumatic.

In terms of critical writing about his work, Bacon's death signaled the end of the traditional school of politeness, and the start of a new, fresher appraisal. To all intents and purposes Bacon often appeared like a latter day Edwardian gentleman. As a young man he was handsome and despite what is reported to be a heavy social life of drink, he retained (and tinted) his hair and striking looks. Invariably in public Bacon the bachelor was smartly dressed, appearing wealthy, debonair and vaguely aristocratic; he was fond of booze, food, gambling and sex. His success as an artist enabled him to lead a privileged, and despite massive publicity in recent years, a remarkably private life. The media, public and friends conspired with the artist to ensure a veil of secrecy was cast over the stormy events of his life, and on any specific queer reading of his work.

Anxiety of Analysis

Bacon's death was a significant moment, a turning point, the end of a convention in which respected writers and experts on Bacon's work such as Michel Leris and David Sylvester felt able at last to address major issues around his work and life. Hitherto the life of this highly acclaimed artist was discreetly passed over in favor of the discussion of form, use of color, historical precedents and such like. On his death the floodwaters, pent up for years, broke, and a spate of obituaries, and biographies were only too ready to give graphic, often explicit details of his life and loves of which there had previously been little more than hints and nods.[1]

Discussion of Bacon's life - and death - is important not only because of the queerness of his art in subverting and making the fact of homosexual desire a real if often highly coded presence in art, but because of the often fabulous claims made for his status. In his tribute to Bacon after the artist's death, Grey Gore, later a respected Chairman of the Arts Council, described Bacon as "the greatest living painter and greatest British painter since Turner," a view endorsed by many critics, artists and writers. Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate Gallery, though more circumspect, was still fulsome in his praise, saying "Bacon was not only the greatest British painter of his generation, but also recognized as one of the outstanding post-war artists." More recently such extravagant praise has become more muted. The catalogue for the latest exhibition of Bacon's oeuvre of works on paper (Tate Gallery, London, February 1999) describes Bacon as "one of the most important painters of the figure in the second half of the twentieth century" -- a far more modest though not unsubstantial claim.

Within the art world glowing praise is rarely offered lightly, and seems even more surprising given that in many ways Bacon was an old fashioned and very conventional easel painter. Although Bacon preferred to work on the back of the canvas because he liked its raw, untreated surface (and I also suspect because it carried a frisson of difference), he used the traditional materials and form of the artist, working in oils. His insistence on expensive gilt frames gave the work status, suggested worth and the conventional - all important facets of combining subversion with respectability. Bacon also liked to have his paintings shown under glass, which whether intentional or not, often resulted in the viewer's own reflection being mirrored in the image and thus involved in the action portrayed.

Almost as significant as the presentation of Bacon's work was his use of academic composition. Generally he restricted himself to a limited range of colors with black and red predominating (maybe a hang over from his days as an interior designer in the 1930's), with the paint often being used to suggest form as much through line as solid color. The figurative compositions, however widely interpreted, meant that Bacon resisted abstraction, drawing for ideas on artists as diverse as Valesquez, Van Gogh and Picasso, often for their bold, confrontational choice of subject matter.

As the artist aged so respect for his work increased. Prices for his paintings rose dramatically, prompting many critics to devote many column inches to his work and his often enigmatic utterances, leaving journalists to focus on his dissolute but exciting life of drinking and gambling rather than his affairs with men. Press attention increased as he approached his 80th birthday. Bacon showed little reluctance to be photographed, invariably appearing in a smart leather bomber jacket and posed, like the phoenix, amongst the piles of detritus in his studio, or in his favorite Soho drinking hole, the Colony Club. Melvyn Bragg's now infamous South Bank Show, broadcast on British television in 1985 did eventually make Bacon's sexual interests clear if viewers were paying attention when the artist pointed out that as far as models went his taste lay in the direction of his own sex.

While in later life Bacon generally claimed that his sexuality was public knowledge, and that it was no secret, the press had severe problems dealing with his private/public life; some journalists even managed to come up with conflicting views in the same article. The greatest difficulties have been over the exact nature of Bacon's 'private life,' and the extent to which he had, or had not gone public about his homosexuality, and the 'content' of his art. Caroline Lees, reporting on the beneficiary of Bacon's will, claimed that Bacon "made no secret of his homosexuality," while adding in the same article that "the artist's reluctance to have his personal affairs discussed in public was legendary." She presumably did not see the two statements as contradiction. In a report on his death the Daily Telegram described Bacon dismissively as "the homosexual artist," an identification in terms of sexuality they would never dreamt of running before his death.

Homosexuality lay at the heart of the enigma about Bacon. While his sexual preferences were a fact well known within the art world and a small coterie of friends and acquaintances with whom he drank and gambled, it was not placed within the public domain until Bacon was well into his 70s, and even then in such understated ways that would be easy to miss. There seems to be two aspects to this decision. One was Bacon's own contradictory attitude towards talking about his work. "If you talk about it, why paint it," was a favorite diverting device; if that did not seem sufficient, he often presented a fatalistic view, saying "We live, we die, and that is all." The other aspect was Bacon's own attitude towards, and understanding of, his homosexuality.

Two of his often told anecdotes were about his childhood and homosexual adventures as a youth in Ireland. Eventually he was banished from his home by his brutish father (who also had him beaten) after being caught dressing in his mother's clothes, and also discovered having sex with the grooms who managed his father's stable. Apart form these melodramatic incidents, Bacon said little in public about his sexuality, and the obituary notices had few direct quotations from the artist on the subject.

In his obituary in The Guardian, Lord Gowrie wrote:

He told me that he (Bacon) had come to the view that homosexuality was an affliction, that it had turned him, at one point in his life, into a crook. The crookishness, not the sex, was a source of shame and if he talked at all, it was his nature to tell everything. We both liked Proust and agreed that the beginning of Cities of the Plain [2] said all that needed to be said about being homosexual.

In an interview in 1991 with art critic Richard Cork shortly before his death, Bacon was more blunt and direct about his sexuality, when, commenting on the public reception of his work in this country, said

Oh they don't like my work here at all. Maybe it's the savagery they find in it, or maybe it's the homosexuality which I suppose is in my work. I don't go about shouting that I'm gay but AIDS has made it all much worse. People are very, very odd about it.

As important as Bacon's own ambiguity towards discussing his work was the difficulty the art establishment had in acknowledging Bacon's subject matter. This was partly because critics did not want to see what was implied by the work, and partly because, just as in the work of David Hockney, they did not have an established language to use. Modernist orthodoxy had put forward the view that to be meaningful art had to be abstract, that it should avoid depicting particular events or people, but had to seek out some essence which could be conveyed as much spiritually as literally. Clearly Bacon's work presented a dilemma. It was self-evidently about particular events depicted with violence and passion, and while the emotional impact of the work could be acknowledged, the specific subject matter was more problematical.

Peter Lennon could only hint at Bacon's subject matter saying "what painters and poets do for you is unlock the valves of sensation and bring you nearer to a kind of reality." It was not a reality Lennon chose to identify. Nor was this acknowledged by Michel Leris, the distinguished chronicler of Bacon's work, who comments that Bacon's 'searing' paintings express the human condition as it truly and peculiarly is today; man dispossessed of any durable paradise." [3]

For the painter R. J. Kitaj, such generalizations would not do. Quoting Picasso, he wrote that "It is not sufficient to know an artist's work. It is also necessary to know when he did them, why, how, under what circumstances," adding "Bacon might not agree with that, but I do." Ironically perhaps, Picasso was one of the few artists whose work Bacon openly admired, and like Picasso he invariably worked from memories of people (or photographs) rather than from actual life.

'Why, how and under what circumstances,' are aspects of Bacon's work which have been thoroughly raked over in the flood of biographies and articles published since the artist's death, though none have been incisive about the artist's close involvement with his subject matter. For Bacon's retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London in 1989, he collaborated in the preparation of a commentary on each painting, giving background information and any relevant autobiographical details. In the event, the artist withdrew this material at the last moment and sadly the commentary has never been issued.

Deprived of, or choosing not to acknowledge the 'facts' which inform particular pieces of Bacon's art, critics have been only too ready to fall back on generalities which reinforce the mystery and mysticism of the work, rather than offering any real analysis of it. For example, Brian Morton, writing in The Times Educational Supplement said that his painting "communicates a tremendous physicality, both of paint and its image," and that "much of his work has had to do with the uneasy relationship between the physical body and the spiritual nature," while the plastic qualities of paint are "thoroughly humane and wholly sympathetic." A convenient ploy to suggest that this is all there is in Bacon's work, which, under a veneer of art historical generalizations, subverts a closer discussion of the sort of tremendous physicality, with which the artist grappled.

The late Peter Fuller, always a controversial critic, had little sympathy with Bacon's subject matter which he slightingly parodies as "lonely figures still throwing up in lavatory bowls beneath naked light bulbs, (who) occasionally... hunch together on couches for some barbarous act of congress, or be sprawled disgorging their abdomens." Nor did Fuller admire Bacon's use of paint, saying that he "applied pigment as if he hated the stuff, dragging it across the raw, unsized canvas which drains it of beauty and of all semblance of life." Lest we feel the homophobic boot is not well and truly slammed home he added, "Bacon's technical inadequacies seem to me to be inseparable from his spiritual dereliction."

Fuller's rejection of Bacon's art and, I suspect, all that Bacon stood for, was a view not shared by other critics. More problematic is how Bacon, and the critics, regarded Bacon's homosexuality. At least the art critic Tim Hilton acknowledged the sexual dimension of Bacon's art, writing in purple prose that "Bacon's art is about risk, catastrophe, murder and an abandoned but private sexuality." Cautiously, he made no attempt to identify what the 'private sexuality' referred to. Richard Cork was less ambiguous, writing grandly "With characteristic honesty, Bacon has never made any attempt to hide his homosexuality. Some of his finest and most erotic paintings depict male figures embracing and making love," something of an understatement for the energetic and often violent actions pictured.

Queer

Francis Bacon was a queer artist in the old fashioned sense when queer was a term of abuse, a recognition and disapproval by society of divergent sexual tastes. In his own words he was not gay - he disliked the word - and preferred to be labeled queer. There is little indication to suggest that he was touched by the ideas and concepts of gay liberation, but rather that the movement brought an unwelcome intrusion in what he regarded as his private life. At the time of the Stonewall riots in 1969, he was nearly 60 and his lifestyle was resolutely pre-liberationist in style and attitude. To change this would have involved great effort on his part. 'Going public,' would not have seemed the thing to do at a time when his international reputation was well established. Yet by the late sixties Bacon had completed some of his queerest paintings. The relatively straightforward image Study from the Human Body of a naked man behind a transparent curtain is sensuous and enticing, offering a glimpse of some quiet, personal moment.

Contrast the intense privacy of this Study, with a number of paintings depicting two men on a bed, such as Two Figures, 1953, which is based on a photographic study of wrestlers by Eadweard Muybridge. Surrounded by a cage-like structure that both protects and entraps, the two naked figures who appear more male than female, grapple and engage, thrown into sharp silhouette by the whiteness of the sheets and the darkness of the background. The exact nature of their physical closeness may be enigmatic, possibly part of a struggle, perhaps an expression of sexual desire, but the intimacy and vulnerability remains undisputed. It, and such later images such as Three Studies of Figures on Beds, 1972, are very queer paintings.

There is a similar ambiguity in Two Figures in the Grass, carried out a year later. Here the two naked bodies, again more male than female, are engaged in some intimate activity, some wild abandon in which decorum and pose are far less significant than energy and emotion. Whatever they are doing they are doing it with great passion and involvement. The grass suggests an outdoor pursuit, but the caging and framing could just as easily be inside some sort of cage - suggesting animal-like behavior. Nature is also a powerful component in the composition Figures in a Landscape, 1956/57. Here it is difficult to see exactly what the involvement is between the two figures, but the sense of interaction is powerfully expressed.

As much as any artist and more so than most, Bacon poured his emotions and feelings into his art, often basing them on specific incidents in his life. His love affairs were often stormy, and frequently ended in violence. One of his former lovers, Peter Lacey, an ex RAF pilot who played the piano in Dean's Bar, Tangier, died on the opening day of Bacon's 1962 Tate Gallery show. Undeterred, Bacon attended the opening and publicly at least acted as though nothing untoward had happened. There was a similar catastrophe some 10 years later when Lacey's successor, George Dyer, also died a violent death at his own hand on the day of Bacon's larger and even more important retrospective which opened at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971.

While Bacon, the urbane and ultra-cool artist, acted out his part, his paintings continue to offer some idea of his inner turmoil and anger. His paintings of Dyer regularly present his lover as twisted, distorted and virtually disembodied. The Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror, 1967-68 shows Dyer sitting in what looks like a swivel office chair, his disembodied face, split down the center, reflected in a lectern-like stand. On the painting are two splurges of white paint splashed across the surface reminiscent of semen defacing the image. Whether indicative of the sexual dimension of their relationship, or of the need to assert a particular personal expression of possession, even in an image, it was Bacon going public on a profound and deeply important aspect of his emotional life. 

Bacon could almost have said, as his acknowledged mentor Picasso had claimed some time before, "My work is like a diary. To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life." Without any precise commentary by Bacon to point us in the right direction we need to have to relate the events in the artist's life with the scenes he creates in his compositions. In some there is a suggestion of the body twisted and tortured, a dream-like state in which the reality of the flesh and the odder corners of the imagination seem to have full sway. In Triptych, 1973 there is an element of self-portraiture, of a figure looking critically at himself, at who and what he is. Although such powerful paintings are highly personal, they suggest a great deal about the 'human condition' in general. Observing the figure as it sleeps such as in Sleeping Figure, 1974 imbues the viewer with some of the power of the artist. We can observe without being seen, we can scrutinize the body, note it's form with an admiring or critical eye, secure in the knowledge of anonymity.

Certainly the starting point for any real assessment of Bacon's queer art - art which for all it's establishment form, continued to explore deviant, highly personal and transgressive emotions - is the work itself and a knowledge of his life. But such work is only effective if it succeeds not only in communicating the artist's own feelings and emotions, but in conveying a meaning to which we all can relate, and to recognize the sort of language being used. However reticent Bacon was in disclosing the specific subject of his work, he was totally uncompromising when he came to putting it on canvas. It is there to be seen, and from it we get not only an indication of the turbulent emotional life of the artist, but more importantly an insight into our troubled times.

Notes

"Queer Francis," is based on "Queer Spectacles," which appeared in Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, edited by Peter Horne and Reina Lewis, Routledge, London and New York, 1996.

[1] The first biography was by Daniel Farson, a long-standing friend of Bacon's, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, Century, London 1993 which drew on his friendship with the artist and his intimate knowledge of Soho. Andrew Sinclair's Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (Sinclair-Stevenson, London 1993) is a more serious and detached study.

[2] Marcel Proust Remembrance of Things Past: Cities of the Plain Trans C. K. Scott Montcrief and Terence Kilmartin, Vol. II, Penguin, London 1983 pp 623-656. This incident describes a casual sexual meeting between M de Charlus 'whose ideal is manly precisely because (his) temperament is feminine,' and Jupien, a tailor. The 'objective' account identifies the sort of sexual signals involved and the (often) crossing of social boundaries. Proust goes on to identify different sorts of homosexual liaisons, though the overall picture is distanced and objectified.

[3] Michel Leris Bacon Phaiden quoted in Peter Lennon The Times 15/9/83.

List of Illustrations

1. Study of the Human Body, 1949, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
2. Two Figures, 1953, Private Collection
3. Two Figures in the Grass, 1954, Private Collection
4. Figures in a Landscape, 1956-7, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery
5. Three Figures in a Room, 1964, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centres George Pompidou, Paris
6. Portrait of George Dyer, 1967-8, Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
7. Three Studies of Figures on Beds, 1972, Private Collection
8. Triptych, May-June 1973, Mr. and Mrs. Saul P. Steinberg
9. Sleeping Figure, 1974, A. Carter Pottash

Research purposes exclusively

Lo Grotesco en las pinturas instintivas de Bacon

Francis Bacon (pintor y artista autodidacta británico, 1909-1992).

Francis Bacon
Tres estudios para figuras al pie de una crucifixión, 1944
óleo y pastel
Tate Gallery, Londres

Contenido
El arte grotesco
Notas
Imágenes
Recursos bibliográficos y electrónicos
Acerca del presente trabajo
Advertencia legal

El arte grotesco

"Quizás algún día logre capturar un instante con toda su violencia y toda su belleza" (Bacon) [1].

1. Bacon, Retrato de Michel Leiris, 1976
Óleo sobre lienzo, 35.5 x 30.5 cm.
Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, París

Las pinturas de Francis Bacon son misteriosas y sugerentes. Son ambiguas y constituyen símbolos con significados a múltiples niveles, que se transmiten a través de la manipulación del artista sobre lo grotesco.

9. Bacon, Figura yacente en un espejo, 1971
Óleo sobre lienzo, 198 x 147.5 cm.
Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao.[2]

Como configuraciones de lo ambiguo, las pinturas de Bacon generan curiosidad y perplejidad. A menudo producen una mezcla de sentimientos, como la atracción y la repulsión al mismo tiempo. Para una interacción equilibrada pero inquietante entre el miedo y el deseo, la vulnerabilidad y la crueldad, el sufrimiento y la apatía son características de las pinturas instintivas de Bacon.

3. Bacon, Tres estudios de figuras para la base de una crucifixión, 1944
Óleo y pastel, cada panel de 95 x 73.5 cm.
Tate, Londres.[3]

La tensión y la intensidad, la combinación de elementos incompatibles, y las sugerencias de lo monstruoso o inhumano abundan en la imaginación del artista.

4. Bacon, Retrato de George Dyer en un espejo, 1968
Óleo sobre lienzo, 198 x 147.5 cm.
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.[4]

Bacon utiliza lo grotesco como un medio de autoexpresión que le permite comunicar ambiguamente no sólo su fascinación por el poder y la violencia, sino también su obsesionada condición. Así lo grotesco se convierte en un medio de purificación y trascendencia simultáneas.

5. Bacon, motivo del panel derecho de Tres estudios para una crucifixión, 1962
Óleo sobre lienzo
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Nueva York.[5]

Dejando de lado su extravagancia, las pinturas instintivas de Bacon están lejos de ser adornos o accesorios ornametales. Supuestamente son informes personales inalienables que encapsulan una verdad privada: los sentimientos y sensasiones contradictorios del artista, que no son ni decorativos ni del todo evasivos.

6. Bacon, Fragmento de una crucifixión, 1950
Óleo y algodón sobre lienzo, 139 x 108 cm.
Stedelijk van Abbenmuseum, Eindhoven.[6]

A través de sus pinturas instintivas, Bacon camina voluntariamente por el borde de un precipicio emocional, lo que sugiere su obsesión con el sexo y la muerte, su apatía en cuestiones de vulnerabilidad y sufrimiento, y su fascinación por el poder y la agresividad.

7. Bacon, Estudio del cuerpo humano, hombre encendiendo la luz, 1973-1974. Óleo sobre lienzo, 198 x 147.5 cm.
Inicialmente en el Royal College of Arts, Londres.[7]

Lo provocativo en el arte de Bacon revela y oculta a la vez las intenciones fundamentales del artista de una manera tan borrosa que la identidad misma se convierte en un problema en sus pinturas. Al representar la combinación ambigua y lo erroneamente provocativo, Bacon desorienta al espectador, quien no puede establecer un significado preciso en sus imágenes que están en constante cambio. Por ello existen varias interpretaciones, y parece que todas son igualmente válidas.

8. Tres estudios de figuras para la base de una crucifixión
detalle del panel derecho
Tate, Londres.[8]

Teniendo en cuenta que el instinto implica la abolición de la moral, a la hora de contemplar las pinturas de Bacon, hemos de llegar a nuestras propias conclusiones morales (ciertamente irrelevantes para el artista y su calculada falta de interés). En este punto, todo se derrite bajo nuestros pies, porque en el grotesco reino de Bacon, solo segura nos es la inseguridad.

9. Bacon, Estudio del cuerpo humano, figura en movimiento, 1982
Óleo sobre lienzo, 198 x 147.5 cm.
Marlborough Fine Art, Londres.[9]

Por otro lado, el arte instintivo de Bacon no es el producto de un accidente o casualidad, como le gustaba afirmar al artista desde mediados de los años 60 en adelante. Constituyen composiciones cuidadosamente planificadas que están íntimamente relacionadas con la vida del artista y que también funcionan como trampas misteriosas anti-ilustrativas que sugieren lo monstruosamente cruel.

10. Bacon, face of Hombre en azul VI, 1954
Detalle de óleo sobre lienzo
Colección privada.[10]

En este contexto, nos damos cuenta de la manipulación de Bacon sobre lo grotesco y la intervención fundamental del artista por convertirlo en un instrumento útil para la auto-expresión. Por lo que las imágenes instintivas de Bacon son profundas pero también problemáticas - una nueva y magnífica manera de pintar fusionando lo poderosamente desafiante, lo inquietantemente extraordinario, lo sugestivamente monstruoso, lo sarcasticamente alusivo, lo dramáticamente manipulativo, y lo extremadamente personal.

11. Bacon, Autorretrato, 1972
Óleo sobre lienzo, 35.5 x 30.5 cm.
Colección Gilbert de Bottom, Suiza

Como una especie de confusión a la par con la excelencia, lo grotesco posterga la creencia e invita a una búsqueda del significado. Nos impulsa a considerar otras posibilidades, lo grotesco paraliza el lenguaje y desafía categorías. El arte grotesco es un arte que permite la ampliación de ideas. Esto es cierto en el caso de Bacon, cuyo arte grotesco transmite lo inmediato y sugiere ideas de varias capas que nos permiten tener un papel activo como espectadores e intérpretes. Posiblemente éste sea el máximo significado de la libertad pictórica del artista, la cual logró a través de una manipulación excepcional de lo grotesco.

12. Bacon, Estudio para corrida Nº 2, 1969
Óleo sobre lienzo, 198 x 147.5 cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon.[12]

El elemento ambiguo que habita en las pinturas instintivas de Bacon tiene una capacidad inmensa para abrir las válvulas de los sentimientos. Es este elemento expresivo y en constante cambio del arte sugestivo de Bacon, que resulta ser extraordinariamente rico: la libertad pictórica es un elemento provocativo y grotesco, que con coherencia une la verdad de Bacon y nuestra libertad.

13. Bacon, Estudio del cuerpo humano según Muybridge, 1988
Óleo sobre lienzo, 198.1 x 147.3 cm
Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Nueva York.[12]

Notas
1. Bacon, citado por Paloma Alarcó, 2001 (Retrato de George Dyer en un espejo, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 19.02.2009).
2. Mariano Akerman, Figura en el espejo, Plenitud, 04.03.2008
3. "Cuando este tríptico se exhibió por primera vez al final de la guerra en 1945, aseguró la reputación de Bacon. El título relaciona a estas bestias horribles con los santos retratados de forma tradicional en la base de la cruz en la pintura religiosa. Incluso Bacon dijo que su intención había sido pintar una crucifixión más grande debajo de la cual éstos aparecerían. Más tarde, relacionó estas figuras con las Euménides - las furias vengativas de la mitología griega, asociándolos con una tradición mitológica más amplia. Por lo general, Bacon se inspiró en una serie de fuentes para estas figuras, incluyendo una fotografía que pretende mostrar la materialización del ectoplasma y la obra de Pablo Picasso "(Tres estudios para figuras en la base de una crucifixión, Tate Gallery, Londres, sello de exhibición, mayo de 2007). Véase también 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. "En 1944, uno de los años más devastadores de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, Francis Bacon pintó Tres estudios para figuras en la base de una Crucifixión. Con este espantoso tríptico que representa vagamente criaturas antropomorfas retorciéndose de angustia, Bacon estableció su reputación como uno de los principales pintores figurativos de Inglaterra y un despiadado cronista de la condición humana. Durante los años siguientes, algunos temas inquietantes aparecieron en la obra de Bacon: retratos sin cuerpo, casi sin rostro, cuerpos mutilados que se asemejan a cadáveres de animales, imágenes de figuras gritando, y versiones idiosincráticas de la Crucifixión. Siendo uno de los temas más representados en el arte occidental, la crucifixión ha llegado a simbolizar mucho más que el acontecimiento histórico y religioso en sí mismo. Obsoleto en los tiempos modernos por [muchos] artistas [...], este tema revela el sufrimiento humano a escala universal al mismo tiempo que trata sobre el dolor individual. La crucifixión apareció en la obra de Bacon desde 1933. A pesar de que era un hombre reconocido por no tener religión, Bacon considera la crucifixión como una "magnífica armadura" de donde partir de "todo tipo de sentimientos y sensaciones." Le proporcionó al artista un formato predeterminado donde inscribir sus propias representaciones interpretativas , permitiendole evadir el contenido narrativo, ya que despreciaba la pintura como ilustración, y para concentrarse, en cambio, en la evocación emocional y perceptual. Su uso continuo del formato tríptico (también se asocia tradicionalmente con el arte religioso) promovió la disyunción narrativa en las obras a través de la separación física de los elementos que los componen. / Es particularmente evidente que Bacon vio una conexión entre la brutalidad de los mataderos y la crucifixión en la pintura del Guggenheim. La figura crucificada deslizándose por la cruz en el panel de la derecha, una forma derivada del cuerpo sinuoso de Cristo de la obra célebre de Cimabue del siglo XIII Crucifixión, está extendida como el cadáver descuartizado de un animal. Trozos de carne en el panel izquierdo corroboran esta interpretación. Bacon creía que los animales en los mataderos, sospechaban de su destino final. Al ver una corriente paralela en la experiencia humana simbolizada la Crucifixión, ya que representa lo inevitable que es la muerte - explicó, "somos carne, somos cadaveres potenciales." El hombre protuberante y ensangrentado tendido en el diván en el centro también expresa esta idea al encarnar la mortalidad humana." Nancy Spector, Tres estudios para una Crucifixión, Guggenheim Museum, Nueva 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. Dit wordt ook zichtbaar in de speelfilm Love is the Devil (1998). Deze onconventionele ‘biopic’ van filmmaker John Maybury toont het leven van Bacon in al zijn facetten. Kijken we door deze informatie anders naar Fragment of a crucifixion?" (Eindhoven, Van Abbenmuseum, Mixed Messages, abril-septiembre de 2009: "Francis Bacon"; 31.10.2009).
7. "Para recaudar fondos [...], el Consejo acordó en junio de 2007 poner a la venta de una pintura de Francis Bacon Estudio del cuerpo humano, hombre encendiendo la luz, que el artista dio como pago del alquiler de un estudio que ocupó en la universidad por un corto período en la década de 1960. La pintura fue vendida en Christie's en octubre de 2007 por poco más de 8 millones de libras. " (Christopher Frayling, Accounts, Royal College of Art, Londres, 2006/7, PDF; 31.10.2009).
8. "El rostro de la figura se distorsiona en un grito de horrible intensidad. Él pintó muchos gritos en trabajos posteriores, pero ninguno puede igualar el impacto de éste. Es el grito de la víctima de la tortura en el momento en que el látigo corta la carne. La víctima, por supuesto, es el propio Bacon. A él le gustaban mucho los rituales de esclavitud y sadomasoquistas en su vida privada, le dió vida a su eroticismo doloroso en muchas de sus pinturas de figuras atadas, agonizantes y distorsionadas. / Francis estaba fascinado por las formas extremas de expresión facial, y la boca completamente abierta era su favorita. Un día me hizo reir cuando dijo en tono de disculpa: "Sabes, creo que tengo el grito, pero tengo muchos problemas con la sonrisa." La verdad era que no lo deleitaba la imagen de una cara sonriente. No era parte de su compleja obsesión sexual. / Otros pueden ver en este rostro gritando el reflejo de la agonía de una Europa devastada por la guerra, una prueba sobre los horrores de la vida moderna, o la trampa y el aislamiento del hombre moderno en su carcél urbana. No veo nada por el estilo. Yo veo un masoquista devoto disfrutando de la emoción de encapsular las alegrías secretas de sus momentos más privados. El gran misterio de la obras de Bacon es la razón por la que la indulgencia fetichista permanente debería tener como resultado la creación de este arte verdaderamente grandioso. Pero entonces, el misterio es la esencia misma del arte. Como Picasso dijo una vez: "No lo entiendo y si lo hiciera, no te lo diría." (Desmond Morris, Sobre Tres estudios para figuras en la base de una crucifixión de Francis Bacon, Tate Etc., Número 8, otoño de 2006, MicroTate; 31.10.2009).
9. "Francis Bacon (28 de octubre de 1909 - 28 de abril de 1992) fue un pintor figurativo británico. Era un descendiente colateral del filósofo, de la época Isabelina, Francis Bacon. Su obra se caracteriza por sus imágenes audaces, austeras y a menudo grotescas o terroríficas. [...] Bacon, llegó a Londres en el año 1925 y aunque no recibió una formación artística, fue un artista totalmente original, cuyo trabajo siempre ha contenido una grandeza heroica. Causó sensación en 1945 cuando expuso sus Tres estudios para figuras en la base de una crucifixión en la galería Lefevre de Londres [... obra] que ahora se encuentra en la Tate Britain Collection en Londres. [... Bacon tuvo predilección por el formato del] tríptico y colocaba sus obras detrás de vidrio y con marcos dorados de gran medida, [también] por la boca abierta y el uso de la distorsión pictórica. [...] La obra de Bacon es de estilo expresionista [y] sus distorsionadas formas humanas son inquietantes. Desarrolló su estilo idiosincrásico durante la década de 1950, cuando alcanzó la fama internacional. En 1958, Bacon, firmó un contrato con Marlborough que lo representó exclusivamente en todo el mundo hasta su muerte en 1992 ("Francis Bacon," Marlborough Fine Art, Londres, 31.10.2009).
10. "El Hombre en azul VI de Francis Bacon (estimado: £ 4.000.000 £ 6.000.000) [...es] el mejor de una serie de [...] siete cuadros [...] que hizo Bacon en la primavera de 1954. La obra actual se remonta a un período intenso [...] en la carrera del artista, cuando estaba en medio de un romance tempestuoso y violento con Peter Lacy, un piloto veterano de Spitfire a quien describió como el gran amor de su vida. Francis Bacon dijo acerca de su relación con Lacy: "Estar enamorado de esa forma extrema, estar total y físicamente obsesionado con alguien, es como tener una enfermedad terrible. No se lo deseo ni a mi peor enemigo." En 1954, como resultado de la naturaleza violenta y divisiva de su relación mutuamente destructiva, Bacon se mudó de la casa que compartía con Lacy y se alojó en el Hotel Imperial cerca de Henley-upon-Thames. Fue durante la década de 1950 que Bacon ganó reconocimiento internacional, sus retratos y pinturas papales se exhibieron en museos de Europa y Estados Unidos. Las siete pinturas que representan el Hombre en azul son poco comunes ya que Bacon parece haber pintado el modelo vivo, en lugar de utilizar una fotografía, lo cual era su método habitual. El modelo es un hombre desconocido que se cree que Bacon conoció en un hotel en Henley. La obra representa una figura común y palpitante, que presenta cierta confusión interna en el centro de un vacío oscuro. Esta forma de representación contrasta con la de la agonía de los gritos de las cabezas y los papas que el artista había pintado el año anterior, ofreciendo una representación más sutil de la ansiedad personal del pintor y su tormento" (Matthew Patton, "Hombre en azul VI de Francis Bacon lidera la subasta de Christie de arte contemporaneo y de posguerra," comunicado de prensa, Londres, 14.1.2009, PDF; 31.10.2009). Véase también Mariano Akerman, Lo familiar vuelto inquietante, Imaginarium, 13.3.2009
11. "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. Nueva York, Galería Tony Shafrazi Francis Bacon: Paintings, abril-mayo de 2002. La exposición tenía como objetivo "sacar a la luz la extraordinaria relación que tuvo Francis Bacon con John Edwards," en el que el pintor "encontró un hijo y" se convirtió en "el padre amoroso que nunca había tenido." Extracto del catálogo (31.10.2009). Imagen valorada en la Frieze Art Fair del 2008 en $ 9 millones (Scott Reyburn, Frieze Week to Lure Billonaires with $9 Million Bacon Nude, Bloomberg.com, 10/07/2009).

Imágenes
Fotografías y reproducciones utilizados con fines educativos exclusivamente. Todos ellos pertenecen a sus respectivos propietarios. Créditos para las fotos: The State 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, 10. Imaginarium , 11. Plenitud, 12. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, 13. Artnet.com

Comparación por Mariano Akerman, realizada en 2008. Motivo del panel central de Tres estudios para figuras al pie de una crucifixión (Francis Bacon, c. 1944) y su referente visual en Maladies de la bouche (Ludwig Grünwald, 1903). Investigación original. Todos los derechos reservados.

Recursos bibliográficos y electrónicos
Painter Francis Bacon's Centennial Birthday (Centenario cumpleaños del pintor Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon, Londres: Tate Gallery, 2008

Acerca del presente trabajo
Idea, investigación y diseño: Mariano Akerman. Versión inicial: 30.10.2009 - Última versión: 5.2.2012

Advertencia legal. El material citado es propiedad intelectual de sus respectivos autores y se incluye en el presente trabajo con objetivos educativos exclusivamente. "Lo grotesco en las pinturas instintivas de Bacon" tiene su referente en la tesis de Mariano Akerman, The Grotesque in Francis Bacon's Paintings, julio de 1999. Todos los derechos intelectuales y de publicación son propiedad del autor del presente trabajo. Queda prohibida su traducción y/o reproducción sin el previo consentimiento por escrito del autor. Todos los derechos reservados © Copyright 1999.

John Edwards

Francis Bacon, Portrait of John Edwards, 1988
Oil on canvas, 198.1 x 147.3 cm. Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York

Mick Brown, Eggs, Bacon and Jellied Eels, Telegraph, 18.2.2002

"AND that," says John Edwards, pausing in front of the huge canvas at the top of the stairs in the South Kensington mews where Francis Bacon lived and painted for more than 30 years, "is me."
Portrait of John Edwards, 1986-87, which shows a figure seated cross-legged in a chair, dressed only in a pair of white underpants, is one of the 30 or more paintings that Bacon executed of Edwards, and is widely regarded as one of the artist's last masterpieces.
"Actually," says Edwards, with a laugh, "some people have said I look like a monkey. But I didn't mind. I mean, Francis was a lovely painter, wasn't he?"
For 31 years, Bacon spent almost every day in his Reece Mews studio but, as Edwards admits, he would hardly recognise it now.
The cramped bed/sitting room, lit by four bare light bulbs, where Bacon slept and ate, is now an elegant lounge, all leather sofas and smoked glass tables. The detritus of dirty brushes, paint pots, mounds of newspapers and photographs that littered the floor of Bacon's studio have been replaced by polished wood and splashy abstract rugs.
"Terrible mess, it was," says Edwards. "I remember the first time I saw it, I said to Francis: how can you work in here? But he said it was how he liked it. He couldn't be bothered to clear it up. All he wanted was to have the peace and quiet to paint."
Edwards, the son of an East End docker, was working as a barman in a Wapping pub when he first met Francis Bacon in 1976. For the next 16 years, until the painter's death from a heart attack, he was his closest friend and confidant - as Bacon put it, the only true friend he had.
When Bacon died in April 1992, he left everything - an estate valued at some £11m, including the mews studio in South Kensington - to Edwards.
But the legacy proved to be more tangled than it initially appeared. In 1999, the Bacon estate brought a case against the Marlborough Gallery, which had represented Bacon for most of his working life, alleging that the painter had been "wrongfully exploited" in his relationship with the gallery and seeking a "proper accounting" of his affairs.
The litigation, which threatened to become one of the most acrimonious - and costly - legal battles that the art world has ever seen, was suddenly withdrawn two weeks ago, in a "drop hands settlement", in which both sides agreed to pay their own costs. Marlborough has also agreed to release to the estate all the documentation that belonged to Bacon which is still in its possession.
The reclusive John Edwards has never before spoken publicly about Bacon and their relationship. Following the artist's death, he moved to Florida and, for the past seven years he has lived a quiet, almost reclusive life in Thailand.
Last year, however, he was diagnosed with cancer, and returned to London for treatment.
He is 52, a genial man with dark, battered good looks, who speaks in a soft, unreconstructed Cockney accent, spotted with rhyming slang. "Don't I know your boat-race from somewhere?" he asks. He offers Krug champagne - "it was Francis's favourite" - and a "lah-di-dah" (cigar).
A Bacon triptych dominates one wall. On another are grouped a framed collection of French five franc stamps bearing Edwards's image, painted by Bacon; a child-like picture dedicated "to Francis" and signed "Ronnie Kray, Broadmoor" ("He certainly knew Ronnie", says Edwards, carefully, "but I don't think I'd describe them as friends"); and a scroll marking the award to Edwards of the Lord Mayor's Medal by the city of Dublin.
This was in recognition of his donation of the contents of the Reece Mews studio to Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery, where it has been painstakingly reconstructed, item by item, and now stands as a permanent exhibit. Bacon, Edwards says, "would have roared with laughter", to think of his discarded brushes and paints, his moth-eaten bedspread and rotted curtains preserved for posterity.
Edwards first met Bacon in the Colony Room, the famously raffish Soho drinking club where the painter would hold court. Edwards, at the time, was working as a barman in his brother's East End pub, and he was friends with Muriel Belcher, who owned the Colony, and Ian Board who worked as the barman there.
A few weeks earlier, Edwards had been asked by Belcher to lay in some champagne as she intended to bring her "famous painter friend" to the East End. But they never came. When Edwards was eventually introduced to Bacon in the Colony Room, he "gave him some stick" for ordering champagne, then not bothering to turn up and drink it. "He liked the way I didn't care about who he was supposed to be."
So began a relationship that would last until Bacon's death. Bacon was homosexual and the popular misconception is that Edwards was his lover. But that, he says, was never the case. Edwards is also gay and has been with the same boyfriend for 27 years. His relationship with Bacon was one of deep emotional, but never physical, friendship.
"Francis was a real, true father figure to me. I was close to my own father. But Francis gave me all the guidance I needed, and we laughed a lot. And I think he liked me because I didn't want anything from him. With everybody else, it was 'Francis this' and 'Francis that'."
It was, on the surface, an improbable friendship. At 66, Bacon was almost 40 years Edwards's senior. He was also Britain's most celebrated living painter; a man of mercurial intelligence and high poetic temperament.
Edwards knew nothing about painting or books. Chronically dyslexic, he had never learnt to read or write. But his lack of a formal education, his down-to-earth unpretentiousness, was one of the things that clearly endeared him to Bacon.
Edwards recalls that, shortly after their first meeting, Bacon took him gambling at Charlie Chester's casino, one of his regular haunts. When Edwards was handed a membership form he confessed that he could neither read nor write. "Francis said, God, that must be marvellous. Because he hated filling in forms or anything like that."
Their life together followed a set pattern. No matter what time he'd been drinking until the night before, Bacon would rise at between six and seven o'clock and start painting. Around nine, he would telephone Edwards to say that he was ready for breakfast and Edwards would join him in Reece Mews, where Bacon would cook a fry-up. Bacon, he says, liked only egg white, Edwards only the yolk, "so it was the perfect relationship". His nickname for the painter was "Eggs".
Edwards would then sit with Bacon through the day while he painted - the only person the artist ever allowed to watch him at work - talking and helping him prepare his canvasses for collection.
"We'd talk about everything. He was a beautiful man; you'd be hypnotised by him. He'd talk to you and you'd just want him to talk more. Everything he talked about - his posh mates, the people he knew in the art world, it was all so clear."
"I think," says Edwards, "he felt very free with me, because I was a bit different from most people he knew. I wasn't asking him about his painting or anything like that. Most people around Francis looked up to him, and he didn't like that.
"I asked him once: what do you see in me? And he laughed and said: you're not boring like most people.
"I remember once we were with the Duke of Devonshire, talking about all this and that, and Francis decided it was time to change the conversation, so he got me talking about running a pub and jellied eels. The nice thing about Francis was he wouldn't let you roast."
"John was the only person in London who treated Francis as an absolute equal," says the architectural artist Brian Clarke, a close friend of both men and, for the past six years the executor of Bacon's estate. "Whenever you saw John and Francis together you knew you were going to laugh a lot. John is a totally honest man. He would be very rude to Francis, which was a very enjoyable thing to see because nobody else had licence to do that. He'd give it to him straight, and Francis appreciated that. Even in the Colony Room, Francis was the king of Soho. But to John he was just 'My Francis'."
Clarke describes the friendship as "each looking after the other". Bacon had a famously cavalier attitude to money. He never carried a cheque book or a credit card, but always had a wad of cash, likened by one friend to "a bog roll" from which he would peel off notes to spend on gambling, meals at Wheelers, drinks at the Colony Room, or simply to give to friends.
Edwards took it upon himself to ensure that no one was "taking liberties".
Bacon, he says, didn't mind being taken advantage of "up to a point". But beyond that point, he didn't like it.
"He said I was a good judge of people, which I am," says Edwards. "There were always lots of people around Francis on the cadge. But they wouldn't do it while I was around."
When they went gambling together, Edwards would carefully pocket some of the chips to ensure that Bacon had something left over at the end of the evening. Bacon, he says, was "a clever gambler", who "won some big lumps and lost some big lumps.
"I remember, one night, he won £15,000. I put some of it in his jacket and some in his trousers, so he wouldn't lose it.
"The following morning, he phoned and asked if I had the money. I said no, I'd put it all in his pockets. We searched all over the flat and couldn't find it anywhere. And then, a couple of days later, I came across it. He'd stuck it in a pair of old socks. He was so pleased, he gave me half of it."
Edwards's guileless good nature was recognised by others in the painter's circle. Sonia Orwell, the widow of George, and a close friend of Bacon, offered to teach Edwards to read and write. But she fell ill before they had the chance.
Stephen Spender was another of Bacon's friends who became deeply enamoured of Edwards.
"I think that if I knew him well I would become obsessed by him, and I can well understand loving him," Spender wrote, in a letter to Bacon, in 1988.
"Of course, it is seriously marvellous to be untainted by what is called education. It means he moves among real things, and not newspaper things."
"Steve was a lovely bloke," says Edwards, affectionately.
This letter from Spender is among a significant cache of documents that have been returned to the Bacon estate during the course of the litigation, and which provide a fascinating insight into the painter's friendships, affairs and his rackety personal life.
They include a cache of some 150 letters from such friends as Sonia Orwell, Hans Werner Henze, Peter Beard and the painter Victor Passmore, as well as numerous pleas for money from Daniel Farson, and a promise to return "the 50 quid you lent me" from Jeffrey Bernard. "Fat chance!" says Edwards with a laugh. "Jeff was terrible. I remember Francis once sitting in the Tate Gallery, signing books, and Jeff was there right beside him, trying to borrow money as he signed."
Clarke says that Bacon's death left Edwards "completely devastated". For years, the painter had told Edwards that he intended to leave him everything, but he was totally unprepared for the attention the bequest brought him.
"I remember him telling me about opening the curtains at Reece Mews and seeing the mews full of photographers," says Clarke. "To a shy person it was the ultimate nightmare."
Edwards retired to a remote area of the Florida Keys for a year, and then to Thailand, where he lived quietly in a house on the beach, spending his days fishing and walking.
But, after five years, he realised that he had still not received a full accounting of his inheritance. He approached Clarke, who in turn introduced Edwards to his lawyer, John Eastman - the brother of the late Linda McCartney - who initiated the action against Marlborough.
Edwards is reluctant to discuss the case, except to say that he is relieved that it is now over.
"All that John wanted," says Clarke, "was to do right for Francis.
"Francis left John very well looked after. And John was prepared to spend every penny he had in the prosecution of this litigation, win or lose."
The documentation retrieved as a result of the case will form a substantial part of the material for a comprehensive catalogue raisonne of Bacon's work that Edwards intends to commission, and will then go to the Francis Bacon archive at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.
Edwards is also establishing a charitable foundation that will be devoted to the promotion and study of Bacon's work and life.
It is for other people, he says, to make an estimation of Francis Bacon the painter. He can talk only about Bacon the man.
"I think," he says, "that a lot of people misunderstood Francis. People get this impression of him as the bon vivant, the gambler, the drinker. That was part of it. But what people don't realise is that he was a very lonely, and shy man. But I felt warm with Francis and I think he felt warm with me."

Una mirada al grotesco vital

Ideas extractadas de un texto de Marcela Albano, Tocorre, España, 13.4.2007

Las mismas fueron editadas sólo con el propósito de conferirles mayor claridad dentro del marco de mis personales estudios de investigación.



Tras haber vislumbrado cuadros de Picasso en 1928, Francis Bacon no era ya el mismo. Detrás de esas enormes figuras retorcidas en agrupaciones geométricas y pieles y carnes envueltas en caóticas y múltiples perspectivas.

En esa mirada se encontraba la semilla inesperada de su talento, el fuego creativo de su obra, y el aire apasionado heredero de antiguos sueños de expresionistas.

Bacon es uno de los artistas que abren la puerta al posmodernismo y lo hace bajo la bandera del Neofigurativismo, permitiéndonos a su vez dar una ojeada al grotesco vital.

Francis Bacon nace en Dublín, de padres ingleses, el 28 de octubre de 1909. Su padre es entrenador de caballos de carrera. Tras la Primera Guerra mundial, la familia se translada a menudo de lugar en lugar y la afección asmática impide que Bacon tenga una escolarización normal, recibiendo clases de profesores particulares.

Alrededor de 1925 es expulsado de la casa de sus padres para establecerse en Londres. Tras una breve estancia en Berlín, pasa dos años en Francia, cerca de Chantilly. Allí visita con frecuencia el Museo Condé, donde se conserva La matanza de los Inocentes, cuadro de Poussin (1630-1). La imagen de la madre gritando cuando le quitan a su hijo para asesinarlo le impresionó hasta el punto de convertirse en una imagen recurrente en sus primeras pinturas. A ello se le agrega otro grito famoso, el de la enfermera herida con los quevedos rotos que se desploma desde las escaleras de Odessa en El acorazado Potemkin, legendaria película de Sergei Eisenstein de 1925. Una exposición de obras de Picasso en París en la galería de Paul Rosenberg en 1927, lo lleva a iniciarse en la pintura.

Picasso le muestra que "hay todo un territorio que, en cierto modo, no ha sido todavía explorado, [un territorio] de formas orgánicas y relativas a la figura humana, pero que la distorsionan por completo".

Después de ver aquellas nuevas imágenes jamás volvería a ser el mismo.

A principios de los cincuenta, sus diferentes versiones del papa Inocencio X de Velázquez (a quien aparentemente admiraba) se conjugan con la brutalidad y los gritos ya mencionados evocando incluso el famoso Grito del expresionista noruego Munch.

De Rembradt toma el buey degollado pero lo traslada a un mundo helado y cruel, asfixiante y deformador, una cámara de torturas, un matadero, una carnicería.

Sus figuras desnudas presentan los rastros de un trauma interior termina por mutilar el cuerpo. Por doquier hay cuerpos desprovistos de toda belleza y reducidos hasta volverse simples masas sanguinolentas.

Alguien dijo que Bacon no pinta carne ni pescado sino una raza de boxeadores que él ha visto o soñado en algún sitio, algo tiene que ver con su vida nocturna, con su interior, del que nunca quiso salir. Presenta una superficie que en principio puede parecer picassiana. No obstante, mientras que Picasso pinta el día, Bacon apunta a la noche.

Ante lo retorcido de sus pinceladas tan idas y tensionantes en movimiento, el espectador busca escaparse. La Nueva Figuración a la Bacon lo expone es una forma de reflejar los propios temores y la agresión del mundo.

"Siempre que pinto", dice Bacon, "tengo la impresión de seguir la llamada de la antigüedad". Su conocimiento sobre los maestros antiguos le sirvieron para poder hacer frente a los temas de sus obras, temas que trata con violencia y agresión pero siempre con el respeto debido a las obras antiguas con las que jugaba para resignificarlas.

Tres estudios de figuras junto a una Crucifixión del año 1944 hace referencia al un tema alusivo -tres figuras, la idea de cuerpos mutilados-, y no explícita.

Las formas pulposas tienen cierto parecido con los monstruos de algunas pinturas surrealistas, movimiento con el que Francis Bacon tiene algunas conexiones que no llegan a encajar.

En el "estudio para retrato (Isabel Rawsthorne)", de 1964 existe una cierta discordancia entre la coordinación espacial del personaje y la silla en que se sienta, un factor común en muchos retratos del pintor.

La pintura de Bacon abrió heridas profundas en la belleza acabando con el sentido iconográfico del cuerpo para someterlo a una pesadilla. Supo retratar la soledad de seres masacrados por la vida y en sus óleos no tuvieron más regencias que el tibio y mal hecho lavado por el cual dejara a estas mismas figuras, profundamente deslavadas con esa apariencia desteñida de vida desdoblada y deformada.

Su pintura fue de la mano con su pensamiento. "Entre el nacimiento y la muerte siempre ha existido lo mismo, la violencia de la vida". En esta frase de Bacon convergen tanto su pensamiento como la materica forma de construir sus lienzos.

Bacon supo dentro de la Neofiguración entrar en ese camino sinuoso entre el informalismo y la abstracción y supo convertirse en le mejor exponente de esta vertiente.

Se concentró en ver a la figura humana como aislada de todo otro contacto humano y la rodeo de una soledad terrorífica y cuando no, encontrándose con otra, pero en una espiral de violencia.

No las doto de convenciones ni ataduras contextuales o históricas y se mantuvo a raya obedeciendo sólo a la actitud imperativa del trazo mórbido de su violencia compulsiva, variando a trechos entre la objetividad y la subjetividad.

La especialidad de los cuadros se acentúan no en el lugar en el que son pintados sino en la situación en la que son creados, y la temática para la que son evocados los personajes principales.

Existe un claro deseo de mostrarnos la relación que existe entre el fondo y la forma y es ese juego lúdico, frenético y dinámico que nos proporciona una visión del mismo movimiento vital que nos rodea.

Mientras que en ningún otro país esta tendencia tuvo claros esbozos de relevancia, las obras de Bacon alcanzan su sesgo de relevancia a pesar de que la Neofiguración o lo Grotesco Expresivo, jamás se convirtió en una tendencia muy concreta y que nació sin amparo obligada a terminar sus desenfrenos en la transitoriedad de los años.

Revelándose frente al estupor de la indefinición que nos prometía el informalismo, Bacon recupera un lenguaje directo, no ocasional que compromete al observador con la obra y lo hace parte de ella misma, empujándolo y retándolo mediante la claridad y vitalidad indiscutible de la violencia humana a la que ninguno de nosotros podría escapar.

Remarks

by Francis Bacon - Master of the Grotesque

Art as distraction. You see, all art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself; and you may say it has always been like that, but now it's entirely a game. | Futility of being. I think that man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason. | Accident. I use very large brushes, and in the way I work I don't in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do. Is that an accident? [...] I think that accident, which you would call luck, is one of the most important aspects of my work. | Potential carcasses. Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it’s surprising I wasn’t there instead of the animal. | No stories. In the complicated stage in which painting is now, the moment there are several figures - at any rate several figures on the same canvas - the story begins to be elaborated. And the moment the story is elaborated, the boredom sets in; the story talks louder than the paint. This is because we are actually in very primitive times once again, and we haven't been able to cancel out the story-telling between one image and another. | Tightrope. Painting a portrait is a tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and abstraction. [...] It's an attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system [...] violently and [...] poignantly. | Justification. You can't be more horrific than life itself. | Interwiew with David Sylvester, 1962

Abstract painting even at its very best, can be never more than lyrical, charming and decorative. It never finally unlocks, like great art can do, unlock the valves of feeling by the attempt to record the facts. What every artist needs today is a profound technical imagination. Technique by which he can reset the trap in which the image he wants to record can be trapped again. There are two things you can record. You can record a very factual thing, like a portrait of somebody, and you can also record your sensations about various things. Now you should know how you can record without illustrating. The great recording of facts today can only be made through accident. And the painter himself [...] has to work with the accident out of which he finally chooses the marks he wants to leave and can remake the image. The more unrelated the [accidental] mark is, of what is called an illustration of the fact, the more deeply can possibly [...] unlock all areas of feeling, which very great art has always done. Because it was not only recording a fact, but it has also unlocked all sorts of areas of sensation at the same time of recording, doing both, doing a double thing. | "Francis Bacon," pilot interview with Julian Jebb, London: BBC, recorded 1965, not broadcast

Transitoriness. You must never forget that every object has its passions. It has its implications. After all, life... we have this short moment of existence. To paint it’s a way... —we talk about Proust— of crystallizing time. And of crystallizing the moment of one’s existence and that’s all we have. Why one wants to do this? You may say it’s a mystery. We shan’t ever know whether we’ve done it. And perhaps it’s just a way of passing the time. "Stripped Down to What’s Real," interview with David Jones, London: BBC, broadcast 29 October 1971 on BBC2

Double-Edged: Bacon

Violence and Sensation. I used to think how marvellous these extraordinary carcasses are hanging in great butcher shops, hanging from the wall, how amazing their colour was, how beautiful they looked... What could I make to compete with what goes on every single day? If you read the newspapers, if you look at television, if you know what's going on in the world, what could I do that competes with the horror that 's going on? Except that I have tried to make images of it. I have tried to recreate it and make not the horror but I've tried to make images of realism. After all between birth and death it's always been the same thing. There's always been [...] the violence of life. I always think [I make] images of sensation. After all, what is life but sensation? [...] I believe in nothing: we are born and we die and that's it, there's nothing else. Voluptua is all we want, voluptuousness... isn't it a lovely word? Everything else is a falling away. "Francis Bacon," conversation with Melvyn Bragg, The South Bank Show, London, 1985

Additional reesources
Entrevista con David Sylvester, 1962. Arte como distracción, futilidad de ser, accidentes, carcasas potenciales, evitar la narrativa, entre lo figurativo y lo abstracto, horror y realidad.
Ades
Turano

Baconian Concerns

From: London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, 9.2008-1.2009

100% Bacon

Introduction. Francis Bacon is internationally acknowledged as among the most powerful painters of the twentieth century. His vision of the world was unflinching and entirely individual, encompassing images of sensuality and brutality, both immediate and timeless. When he first emerged to public recognition, in the aftermath of the Second World War, his paintings were greeted with horror. Shock has since been joined by a wide appreciation of Bacon's ability to expose humanity's frailties and drives.
This major retrospective gathers many of his most remarkable paintings and is arranged broadly chronologically. Bacon's vision of the world has had a profound impact. It is born of a direct engagement that his paintings demand of each of us, so that, as he famously claimed, the 'paint comes across directly onto the nervous system'.
As an atheist, Bacon sought to express what it was to live in a world without God or afterlife. By setting sensual abandon and physical compulsion against hopelessness and irrationality, he showed the human as simply another animal. As a response to the challenge that photography posed for painting, he developed a unique realism which could convey more about the state of existence than photography's representation of the perceived world. In an era dominated by abstract art, he amassed and drew upon a vast array of visual imagery, including art of the past, photography and film. These artistic and philosophical concerns run like a spine through the present exhibition.

1. Animal. A philosophical attitude to human nature first emerges in Francis Bacon's works of the 1940s. They reflect his belief that, without God, humans are subject to the same natural urges of violence, lust and fear as any other animal. Bacon showed Figure in a Landscape and Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion in April 1945, and exhibited consistently thereafter. The bestial depiction of the human figure was combined with specific references to recent history and especially the devastating events of the Second World War.
Bacon often drew his inspiration from reproductions, acquiring a large collection of books, catalogues and magazines. He repeatedly studied key images in order to probe beneath the surface appearance captured in photographs.
Early concerns that would persist throughout his work include the male nude, which reveals the frailty of the human figure, and the scream or cry that expresses repressed and violent anxieties. These works are among the first in which he sought to balance psychological insights with the physical identity of flesh and paint.

2. Zone. In his paintings from the early 1950s, Bacon engaged in complex experiments with pictorial space. He started to depict specific details in the backgrounds of these works and created a nuanced interaction between subject and setting. Figures are boxed into cage-like structures, delineated 'space-frames' and hexagonal ground planes, confining them within a tense psychological zone. In 1952 he described this as 'opening up areas of feeling rather than merely an illustration of an object'.
Through his technique of 'shuttering' with vertical lines of paint that merge the foreground and background, Bacon held the figure and the setting together within the picture surface, with neither taking precedence in what he called 'an attempt to lift the image outside of its natural environment'.
A theme that emerged in the 1950s was the extended series of variants of Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1650, a work Bacon knew only from illustrations. He used this source to expose the insecurities of the powerful – represented most often in the scream of the caged figure. Through the open mouth he examined the tension between the interior of the body and the spaces of its location, which is explored more explicitly in the vulnerability of the ape-like nudes.

3. Apprehension. Implicit throughout Bacon's work of the mid 1950s is a sense of dread pervading everyday life. Not only a result of Cold War anxiety, this seems to have reflected a sense of menace at a personal level emanating from Bacon's chaotic affair with Peter Lacy (who was prone to drunken violence) and the wider pressures associated with the continuing illegality of homosexuality. The Man in Blue series captures this atmosphere, concentrating on a single anonymous male figure in a dark suit sitting at a table or bar counter on a deep blue-black ground. Within their simple painted frames, these awkwardly posed figures appear pathetically isolated.
Bacon's interest in situations that combine banality with acute apprehension was also evident in other works. From figures of anxious authority, his popes took on malevolent attributes and physical distortions that were directly echoed in the paintings of animals, whose actions are also both sinister and undignified. Some of these images derived from Bacon's close scrutiny of the sequential photographs of animals and humans taken by Eadweard Muybridge, which he called 'a dictionary' of the body in motion.

4. Crucifixion. Bacon made paintings related to the Crucifixion at pivotal moments in his career, which is why these key works are gathered together in this room. The paradox of an atheist choosing a subject laden with Christian significance was not lost on Bacon, but he claimed, 'as a non-believer, it was just an act of man's behaviour'.
Here the instincts of brutality and fear combine with a deep fascination with the ritual of sacrifice. Bacon had already made a very individual Crucifixion in 1933 before returning to the subject with his break-through triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion in 1944. This is a key precursor to later themes and compositions, containing the bestial distortion of human figures within the triptych format. These monstrous creatures displace the traditional saints and Bacon later related them to the Eumenides – the vengeful Furies in Greek mythology.
In resuming the theme in the 1960s, especially in 1962 as the culmination of his first Tate exhibition, Bacon used references to Giovanni Cimabue's Crucifixion 1272–4, to introduce a more explicitly violent vision. Speaking after completing the third triptych in 1965 he simply stated: 'Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses.'

5. Crisis. Between 1956 and 1961, Bacon travelled widely. He spent time in places marginal to the art world, in Monaco, the south of France and Africa, and particularly with Peter Lacy in the expatriate community in Tangier.
In this rather unsettled context, he explored new methods of production, shifting to thicker paint, violently applied and so strong in colour as to indicate an engagement with the light of North Africa. This was most extreme in his series based on a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon 1888, which became an emblem of the modern predicament.
Despite initial acclaim, Bacon's van Gogh works were soon criticised for their 'reckless energy' and came to be viewed as an aberration. They can now be recognised as pivotal to Bacon's further development, however, and allow glimpses into his search for new ways of working. His innovations were perhaps in response to American Abstract Expressionism, of which he was publicly critical. Although he eventually returned to a more controlled approach to painting, the introduction of chance and the new vibrancy of colour at this moment would remain throughout his career.

6. Archive. The posthumous investigation of Bacon's studio confirmed the extent to which he used and manipulated photographic imagery. This practice was already known from montages recorded in the early 1950s by the critic Sam Hunter. Often united by a theme of violence, the material ranges between images of conflict, big game, athletes, film stills and works of art.
An important revelation that followed the artist's death was the discovery of lists of potential subjects and preparatory drawings, which Bacon had denied making. Throughout his life, he asserted the spontaneous nature of his work, but these materials reveal that chance was underpinned by planning.
Photography offered Bacon a dictionary of poses. Though he most frequently referred to Eadweard Muybridge's survey of human and animal locomotion, images of which he combined with the figures of Michelangelo, he remained alert to photographs of the body in a variety of positions.
A further extension of Bacon's preparatory practices can be seen in his commissioning of photographs of his circle of friends from the photographer John Deakin. The results – together with self-portraits, photo booth strips, and his own photographs – became important prompts in his shift from generic representations of the human body to portrayals of specific individuals.

7. Portrait. During the 1960s, the larger part of Bacon's work shifted focus to portraits and paintings of his close friends. These works centre on two broad concerns: the portrayal of the human condition and the struggle to reinvent portraiture. Bacon drew upon the lessons of van Gogh and Velázquez, but attempted to rework their projects for a post-photographic world.
His approach was to distort appearance in order to reach a deeper truth about his subjects. To this end, Bacon's models can be seen performing different roles. In the Lying Figures series, Henrietta Moraes is naked and exposed. This unprecedented raw sexuality reinforces Bacon's understanding of the human body simply as meat.
By contrast Isabel Rawsthorne, a fellow painter, always appears in control of how she is presented. With a mixture of contempt and affection, Bacon depicted George Dyer, his lover and most frequent model, as fragile and pathetic. This is especially evident in Dyer's first appearance in Bacon's work, Three Figures in a Room, in which he represents the absurdities, indignities and pathos of human existence. Everyday objects occasionally feature in these works, hollow props for lonely individuals which reinforce the sense of isolation that Bacon associated with the human condition.

8. Memorial. This room is dedicated to George Dyer who was Bacon's most important and constant companion and model from the autumn of 1963. He committed suicide on 24 October 1971, two days before the opening of Bacon's major exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Influenced by loss and guilt, the painter made a number of pictures in memorial to Dyer. From this period onwards the large-scale triptych was his established means for major statements, having the advantage of simultaneously isolating and juxtaposing the participating figures, as well as guarding against narrative qualities that he strove to avoid.
But while evading narratives, Bacon drew more than ever from literary imagery; the first of the sequence, Triptych In Memory of George Dyer 1971, refers to a specific section of T.S. Eliot's poem ‘The Waste Land'.
In addition to his own memory, for Triptych – August 1972 Bacon relied on photographs taken by John Deakin of Dyer in various poses on a chair. He confined his dense and energetic application of paint to the figures in these works. The dark openings consciously evoke the abyss of mortality that would become a recurring concern in Bacon's later works.

9. Epic. References to poetry and drama became a central element in Bacon's work from the second half of the 1960s. Alongside images of friends and single figures (often self-portraits), he produced a series of grand works that identified with great literature. Imbued with the inevitability and constant presence of death, the poetry of T.S. Eliot was a particular source of inspiration. The sentiments of the poet's character Sweeney could be said to echo the painter's perspective on life:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
That's all the facts when you come to
brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
The works in this room refer to and derive from literature. Some make direct references in their titles, others depict, sometimes abstractly, a certain scene or atmosphere within the narratives themselves. Bacon repeatedly stated that none of his paintings were intended as narratives so, rather than illustrations, these works should perhaps be understood as evoking the experience of reading Eliot's poetry or Aeschylus's tragedies: their violence, threat or erotic charge. Thus, of the triptych created after reading Aeschylus, Bacon explained 'I tried to create images of the sensations that some of the episodes created inside me'.

10. Late. When Bacon turned seventy in 1979, more than a decade of work lay ahead of him. Neither his legendarily hedonistic lifestyle nor his work pattern seemed to age him, but he was continually facing up to mortality through the deaths of those around him.
This unswerving confrontation, however mitigated by youthful companions such as John Edwards, became the great theme of his late style. Constantly stimulated by new source material – from photographs to poetry – he was able to adapt them to his abiding concerns with the vulnerability of flesh.
Exploring new techniques he also extended his fascination with how appropriate oil paint is for rendering the human body's sensuality and sensitivity. A certain despairing energy may also be felt in the forceful throwing of paint that dominates some of these final works: the controlled chance as a defiant gesture.
Ultimately, and appropriately, Bacon's last Triptych of 1991 returns to the key image of sexual struggle that had frequently recurred in his work. He faced death with a defiant concentration on the exquisiteness of the lived moment.

Lo Grotesco en las pinturas de Bacon

Luis Mariano Akerman
Lo Grotesco en las pinturas de Francis Bacon
1999

Francis Bacon, Retrato de George Dyer en un espejo, 1968. Óleo sobre lienzo, 198 x 147.5 cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. "Tal vez algún día me las arregle para capturar un instante de vida en toda su violencia y toda su belleza", Bacon, citado por Paloma Alarcó al referirse a esta obra en 2001.

Las pinturas de Bacon son misteriosas y sugestivas. Son ambiguas y constituyen símbolos con múltiples significados, los que son comunicados gracias a la hábil manipulación que el artista hace de lo Grotesco. Como configuraciones de lo ambiguo, las pinturas instintivas de Bacon generan tanto curiosidad como perplejidad, incluso atracción y repulsión al mismo tiempo. En efecto, un estudiado balance entre miedo y deseo, vulnerabilidad y crueldad, sufrimiento y apatía es propio de las pinturas de Bacon.

Tensión e intensidad, la combinación de elementos incompatibles entre sí y numerosas sugestiones de lo monstruoso e inhumano abundan en la imaginería del artista. Bacon usa lo Grotesco como medio de expresión. Ello le permite transmitir de un modo ambiguo no sólo su admiración por el poder y la violencia, sino además sus heridas más íntimas. Lo Grotesco actúa en su caso como un conveniente instrumento de purga y trascendencia.

Si bien extravagantes, las pinturas instintivas de Bacon están lejos de ser adornos accesorios (grutescas, caprichos en estilo auricular, grotescos cartilaginosos).[1] Se trata de informes personales inalienables que conllevan una verdad privada: las sensaciones contradictorias y el sentir ambivalente del pintor, que no son ni meramente ornamentales ni completamente evasivos.

Paradójico hasta la médula, el arte grotesco de Bacon es profundo pero también superficial. Si lo Grotesco a menudo involucra lo ridículo, la imaginería de Bacon es entonces inclusiva hasta el punto de mezclar lo absurdo con la lógica. Ya que es el suyo un arte de simultánea lucidez y sinrazón.

A través de su imaginería instintiva, Bacon camina a voluntad por el borde de un precipicio emocional, dejando huellas de su obsesión con el sexo y la muerte, su apatía respecto a la vulnerabilidad y el sufrimiento humano, y su irresistible fascinación con la fuerza física viril y su agresividad.

Con su inmediatez y vaguedad, la grotesca obra de Bacon revela y al mismo tiempo oculta las intenciones últimas del artista. Y lo hace de un modo tan turbio que la mismísima noción de identidad se vuelve problemática su pintura instintiva.

Al representar lo ambiguamente combinado y lo equívocamente sugestivo, Bacon desorienta al espectador, quien a su vez no puede establecer ningún significado preciso en sus imágenes de metamorfosis en estado avanzado. Varias lecturas son así posibles y todas ellas parecen ser válidas. Considerando que el instinto implica la abolición de la moral, al contemplar las imágenes de Bacon debemos llegar a nuestras propias conclusiones morales (irrelevantes para el pintor y su calculado desinterés al respecto). En ese mismo momento todo se desmorona bajo nuestros pies, ya que en el grotesco reino de Bacon sólo nos es segura la inseguridad.

Hoy queda claro que las pinturas instintivas no son el resultado de ningún accidente pictórico o de la pura casualidad (ambos indicados por el pintor en reiteradas oportunidades). En efecto, las pinturas instintivas no son otra cosa que composiciones diseñadas que conciernen a la vida privada de su autor. Sean ya ilustrativas o no, las pinturas instintivas de Bacon de hecho funcionan como efectivas trampas visuales, sugiriendo con persistencia una realidad monstruosa, a la que propongo denominar realidad de doble filo.

En este contexto, comprendemos la manipulación que Bacon hace de lo Grotesco y su decisiva intervención en transformarlo en agente útil para su expresión personal. El arte instintivo de Bacon es por ello profundo, pero también problemático—una Nueva Gran Manera de Pintar que entremezcla lo poderosamente desafiante, lo extraordinariamente perturbador, lo sugestivamente monstruoso, lo cínicamente alusivo, lo teatralmente manipulador, y lo enigmáticamente privado.

Como especie de confusión por excelencia, lo Grotesco suspende la creencia para promover la búsqueda de nuevos significados. Empujándonos a considerar posibilidades alternativas, lo Grotesco paraliza el lenguaje y pone en jaque a las categorías. El arte grotesco amplía nuestro modo de sentir y de pensar.[2]

Todo esto es particularmente cierto en el caso de Bacon, cuyo arte grotesco engendra múltiples ideas y asociaciones, garantizándonos así un rol activo como espectadores e intérpretes. Este posiblemente sea el significado último o razón de ser de la libertad pictórica del artista, a la cual él ha llegado a través de su notable manipulación de lo Grotesco.

El elemento personal y ambiguo que acecha desde el arte de Bacon tiene una enorme capacidad para abrir las válvulas del sentir. Es a este elemento, expresivo y metamórfico, típico del arte sugestivo de Bacon al que yo encuentro extraordinariamente fecundo: el instinto pictórico es un elemento provocativo y grotesco que—de un modo coherente—crea un puente entre la verdad del pintor y nuestra libertad.

Francis Bacon, Autorretrato, 1972
Óleo sobre lienzo, 35.5 x 30.5 cm
Colección Gilbert de Bottom, Suiza

Notas
1. Grutescas, grutescos o grotescos. Adornos caprichosos que presentan figuras o partes humanas combinadas con otras animales y vegetales en un todo complejo e insólito. Conocidos como grotteschi, el origen de tales ornamentos irracionales se halla en los motivos de la Domus Aurea de Nerón (en Roma), a la que en tiempos del Renacimiento se accedía a través de túneles artificiales o grotto. Recordando la suavidad, formas y curvas de la oreja humana, el estilo auricular fue desarrollado por plateros holandeses a principios del siglo XVII; en Alemania, dicho estilo llegó a su expresión extrema con el Knorpelwerk (trabajo de cartílago), caracterizado por sus extraños mascarones a los que se conoce como "grotescos cartilaginosos." Una interesante serie de grabados ornamentales que resultan ser consonantes con lo expresado ha sido oportunamente compilada por Joaquin Llorda para la Universidad de Navarra; tales estampas han sido tomadas de Désiré Guilmard, Les maîtres ornemanistes: dessinateurs, peintres, architectes, sculpteurs et graveurs: écoles française, italienne, allemande et des Pays-Bas (flamande & hollandaise), París: E. Plon, 1880-1.
2. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature, Princeton, Nueva Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982

Para otros recursos ligados con este tema, véase SER Y NO SER

Comparación por Mariano Akerman, 2008. Motivo del panel central de Tres estudios para figuras al pie de una crucifixión (Francis Bacon, 1944) y su referente visual en Maladies de la bouche (Ludwig Grünwald, 1903). Investigación original.

© Mariano Akerman. Todos los Derechos Reservados. El presente artículo no ha de ser reproducido ni republicado sin el previo consentimiento por escrito de su autor. El texto aquí publicado es también conocido como Lo Grotesco en las pinturas instintivas de Francis Bacon, julio de 1999; la presente versión, formulada en febrero de 2009, es presentada con motivo del centenario del natalicio del pintor británico.