Francis Bacon: Man and Beast
Royal Academy London
It’s not surprising that this major exhibition has the title it has. Francis Bacon’s visceral, often horrifying paintings frequently depict man as being animalistic, driven by the same urges and instincts as wild animals, whether alone and vulnerable, copulating, screaming, devouring, spewing, or dying. Some people find his paintings ‘cold’, but for me, they’ve always been fascinating. Many of Bacon’s obsessions can be understood in the context of his upbringing and other life experiences.
Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 and his earliest years were spent on a stud farm, where his English father, Anthony Edward ‘Eddy’ Bacon, a retired Army Major, bred and trained horses. Eddy’s wife, Christina, was an English steel heiress from Sheffield. The family moved around a lot when Bacon was a child, transferring to London during WW1 so that Eddy Bacon could work in the War Office, but they returned to an Ireland less subservient to the English after the 1916 Rising. The War of Independence (1919-1921) and Civil War (1922-1923) increased the discomfort for Bacon’s English parents, and they moved back and forth between their country houses in Co. Kildare and Co. Laois, with short spells in England. This interrupted the young Francis’s schooling, so that his education and socialisation was sporadic and inadequate.
Bacon’s father was aggressive and his mother a somewhat narcissistic socialite, so Francis received most of his love and care from his nanny and his maternal grandmother. His early-onset asthma meant he was not able to partake in sport, which made his father more impatient and intolerant of him. When the young Bacon became aware of his burgeoning gay sexuality, he had to keep it hidden, and sex was confined to a few furtive encounters with stable hands. His father caught him trying on his mother’s underwear when he was around 17, and threw him out of the house. Bacon moved to London, and it was only a modest allowance from his mother that kept him afloat. Later, his father tried to shake his homosexuality from him by arranging for Bacon to travel to Berlin with a macho cousin. But the unscrupulous cousin took advantage of Bacon sexually. Still, the trip opened Bacon’s eyes to sexual freedom, nightlife, and art, and soon after, he travelled to Paris on his own. When he returned to London, he initially pursued a career as a furniture designer.
Bacon only really started painting as a young adult. He would gather photographs and manuals of animals and humans, and study their form both while stationary and during movement. He became influenced by the art of Chaim Soutine, who painted carcasses of meat, and this helped lead Bacon to his style of rendering humans as flesh. Bacon was also deeply influenced by the screaming nurse in Sergei Eisenstein’s seminal film Battleship Potemkin (1925), and by the image of another screaming mother in Poussin’s painting The Massacre of the Innocents (1628-29). Screaming mouths would feature in many of Bacon’s paintings. He would later become infatuated with Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650). These sources blended gave rise to his series of screaming popes, but he also used screams in many other paintings. He collected photographs of animals in the wild, and used their behaviour and poses in his paintings.
The first painting in this exhibition is Head l from 1948, which features an open, fanged mouth that Bacon saw in a photo of a chimpanzee. The unnerving effect of the animalistic scream is heightened by a human ear. The sense that the head is suspended; the creature in anguish, adds to the horror.
Bacon’s vision of pain and death was undoubtedly coloured by his living through two World Wars. He was not able to serve in WW2 due to his severe asthma, but he saw the death and destruction all around him. He embarked on a series of Crucifixion paintings in 1933. The first in the series is present in this show. Bacon held no religious beliefs; his Crucifixion images represented man’s inhumanity to man, just as his work also expressed nature, red in tooth and claw. These paintings are often fleshly and grotesque, using forms of animals to reveal the fragility of the bodies of humans and animals alike. He wanted to portray humans as being meat. The first Crucifixion painting, shown here, could be a game bird hanging in a butcher’s, its living form immediately transformed into poultry to be torn apart and consumed with no feeling for the living creature it once was.
Viewing these paintings, I queasily wondered if Bacon was a vegetarian or at least a pescatarian. But these are not sentimental depictions; their intent is not to provoke fury at the fate of animals. It is simply the cold-eyed observation that humans are, in fundamental ways, no different to other creatures, and our life trajectory is the same, whatever sophisticated frippery we use to dress up our lives.
Bacon’s paintings are most disturbing when the form is more recognisably human. Figure Study l (1945-1946) depicts a shabby figure in a herring-weave coat wearing a hat, his face sunk into a bloom of colourful flowers emanating from a pot. The figure is floppy, perhaps drunk.
In the adjacent Figure Study ll, a semi human naked body emerges from the coat. The torso and arms look vaguely human, but the head is extended on a stretched neck, the only visible feature the dark chasm of a screaming mouth. A black umbrella above the figure gives him the semblance of being a civilised human, but the tortured head could be any mammal.
Bacon was hugely influenced by The Oresteia, by the ancient Greek writer Aeschylus. He bought the translation by WB Stanford in 1942, and the themes - vengeance and guilt - began to seep into his paintings. He was particularly taken with the idea of the mythical Furies, who would avenge past crimes. Fury (1944) recalls the right hand panel in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). An amorphous mass of flesh standing on spindly legs cranes its neck forward, its head entirely made up of a vast mouth with a human ear alongside. Is the creature bellowing in pain, fear or anguish? Is it vomiting forth the bunch of - paradoxically romantic - roses emerging from its mouth? There is never any attempt at explanation, no hint of narrative. Bacon just wants to thrust us into the jaws of despair. We are made aware of the futility of life, its temporary nature, and the dismal fate awaiting us all.
Other animals roam the walls here - circling, hungry, exhausted dogs; hunched, bat-like owls; bulls, merging with the matador. And the same alienated features inhabit the faces of many of the figures, which are distorted into grotesque shapes. Yet despite the sense of melting flesh, many of the facial features are recognisable as Bacon’s long-term lovers lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer, Bacon’s friends, or Bacon himself. A sense of nihilism pervades many of the animal paintings, helpless creatures doomed to lives of suffering and bloody attack.
But Bacon wasn’t, on the surface, a depressive. He was affable and convivial and enjoyed friendships and frequenting bars and clubs. He was capable of love, living with his beloved nanny for years during early adult hood in London, and falling for men who appealed to his desire for the dark side of life. An early lover was a married man with children, Eric Hall. Later, he enjoyed masochistic relationships with often violent petty criminals. Homosexuality was still illegal in the UK until 1967, so that relationships and trysts were often illicit and secret.
Tragically, two of Bacon’s lovers died during his lifetime. The first was the former fighter and test pilot Peter Lacy, who appeared in many of Bacon’s paintings. Their relationship was destructive and compulsive, and Lacy was a sadist. Bacon moved to Tangier with him in the mid 1950s. They later broke up, and Bacon moved back to London, but he was still devastated when Lacy died years later from alcoholism. Bacon learnt of the death on the opening day of his major retrospective at the Tate in May 1962.
His next long-term relationship was with the thief George Dyer, who Bacon also painted numerous times. Dyer’s tough exterior belied a insecurity and depression that would lead to him making numerous parasuicide attempts. Their troubled relationship reached a nadir when Dyer tried to frame Bacon for possession of cannabis. Bacon was acquitted at the trial. But worst was to follow: two nights before the opening of Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, Dyer was found dead in his Paris hotel bathroom from an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates. Footage of the opening of the exhibition in a Francis Bacon documentary made at the time shows Bacon’s ashen, grief-stricken face.
Thankfully, Bacon found love again in the mid ‘70s, in the far more stable and equable figure of John Edwards, another East Ender. He was largely a paternal figure to Edwards, but their companionship was a source of great joy to Bacon.
So Bacon was a far more complex figure than is sometimes assumed. Capable of immense tenderness and warmth, he was a product of his time and experiences, and his art a unique blend of his preoccupations and a strikingly original vision. It’s not surprising that he was great friends with Lucien Freud, who was also engrossed with the depiction of flesh, although in Freud’s case, a far more conventional human, if detached and anatomical, one. This exhibition is a must-see for anyone wanting insights into Bacon’s fascination with hybrid human-animal forms, flesh, the stuff of nightmares, and the ephemeral nature of life.