Francis
Bacon - Self Portrait
(oil on canvas, 1971))
Musée
National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Francis
Bacon was born in Dublin on 28 October 1909, the second
of five children. He often came into violent conflict
with his intolerant and authoritarian father who was a
horse trainer and major in the British army. After irreconcilable
differences over his sexuality, he left home at the age
of sixteen to live with an uncle in Berlin. The Berlin
that he arrived in was a melting pot for radical social
and political ideas and evolved as the capital of European
culture in the 1920’s.
In 1928, Bacon moved to Paris where he decided to become
an artist after seeing an exhibition of Picasso’s
work. The following year he returned to London and set
up a studio in South Kensington. His art was influenced
by Surrealist abstraction but it did not gain much critical
success. Around 1944, he destroyed most of the work he
had produced to date as he believed that it failed to
communicate the way he felt about the world.
Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
(oil on board (triptych), 1944)
Tate
Britain
1944 was a turning point for Francis Bacon. He painted
and exhibited the triptych (a painting composed of
three panels) ‘Three Studies for Figures at
the Base of a Crucifixion’. The work was met with
huge criticism over its horrific imagery. The painting
was a modern interpretation of the Furies: the three goddesses
of vengeance (Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone) from Greek
mythology. Their task was to punish crimes that were beyond
human justice. Bacon painted the work at the end of World
War Two, as the accounts of the Nazi death camps were
beginning to emerge. The three deformed ‘Figures’
were an apt metaphor for the corruption of the human spirit
and the artist’s revulsion at mans’ inhumanity
to man.
SEVERAL STYLISTIC ELEMENTS that recur throughout Bacon’s
body of work are introduced in ‘Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’:
THE CRUCIFIXION AND GREEK MYTHOLOGY - Crucifixion themes
and tales from Greek mythology, particularly the 'Oresteia'
trilogy by Aeschylus, are often used symbolically as the
subject of his paintings.
USE OF THE TRIPTYCH FORMAT – the triptych, a painting
composed of three separate panels, was a format that was
first used in Christian altarpieces. Bacon’s use
of this religious format for such a grotesque subject
is a calculated act of desecration that would amplify
the emotive response to his image. The idea to use this
format in a secular setting was probably inspired by the
expressionist
paintings of Max Beckmann which Bacon would have seen
in Berlin.
Eadweard
Muybridge
(1830-1904)
‘The Human Figure in Motion’
SEQUENTIAL
IMAGES - 'I see images in series. And I suppose I
could go on long beyond the triptych and do five or six
together, but I find the triptych is a more balanced unit'.
Bacon never drew from life and always worked from photographs.
He had a copy of Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering
book from the 1880’s, ‘The Human Figure
in Motion’ which explored movement through
series of still sequential images of people walking, running,
jumping and wrestling. Muybridge’s photographs can
be recognized as the source for many of the figures that
appear in Bacon’s paintings. Another
book that he referred to for some of his more tortuous
poses was Clark's 'Positioning in Radiography'.
ANTIQUE FRAMES WITH GLASS – Bacon mounted his paintings
behind glass and used traditional heavy frames. He covered
his paintings with glass as he liked the subtle interaction
between the viewer and the image that was created by its
reflection. The traditional frames were a device that
associated his art with the dignity and substance of the
old masters. Bacon’s most famous work, ‘Study
after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ is
based on the painting by the great Spanish master.
Study
after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
(oil on canvas, 1953))
Des
Moines Art Center, Iowa
In 1953, Bacon painted ‘Study after Velazquez's
Portrait of Pope Innocent X’. This painting, commonly
referred to as 'The Screaming Pope', was based on Velazquez's
portrait of 1650 and is considered to be Bacon’s
masterpiece.
Diego
Velázquez (1599-1660)
Portrait of Innocent X
(oil on canvas, circa 1650)
Galleria
Doria-Pamphili, Rome
Velazquez's
portrait is very skilful work as it conveys the dignity
and authority of the Pope, the most powerful figure in
the world at that time, while subtly revealing the suspicions
and doubts of the inner man.
Bacon
was obsessed by this image and between 1951 and 1965 he
painted around forty five variations of the subject.
The idea of producing variations on a work from the past
was probably inspired by Picasso who reinterpreted works
by Grünewald, Delacroix, Manet, Gauguin and Velazquez
himself. Bacon said, ‘Picasso is the reason
why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the
wish to paint………. Picasso was the first
person to produce figurative paintings which overturned
the rules of appearance; he suggested appearance without
using the usual codes, without respecting the representational
truth of form, but using a breath of irrationality instead,
to make representation stronger and more direct; so that
form could pass directly from the eye to the stomach without
going through the brain.’
Titian
- Tiziano Vecellio (1508-1576)
Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto
(oil on canvas, 1558))
Philadelphia
Museum of Art
Bacon never saw Velazquez's original painting and worked
from reproductions. He also used other photographic sources
to conjure up the final image of the his 1953 version.
Titian’s portrait of Filippo Archinto, where the
cardinal archbishop of Milan is partially obscured by
a transparent curtain, was probably the inspiration for
the ghostly veil of paint that screens Bacon’s Pope.
Sergei
Eisenstein
(1898-1948)
Still from ‘The Battleship Potemkin’ (1925)
The
inspiration for Bacon’s head of Innocent X comes
from a still photograph from ‘The Battleship Potemkin’
(1925), a silent black and white film by Sergei Eisenstein.
The image depicts the panic of a wounded nurse whose smashed
pince-nez spectacles are splayed across her blood stained
face. This fearful image held a fascination for Bacon
who always kept a copy of it in his studio. It encapsulates
his philosophy, ‘Painting is the pattern of
one's own nervous system being projected on canvas’.
If Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X portrays the
public face of power while hinting at the private flaws
of the man behind it, then Bacon’s ‘Study
after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ broadcasts
his inner psychoses.
Bacon’s Pope inhabits an ethereal world of perpetual
torment – a living hell from which there is no escape.
He is paralysed with pain and fear, and jolted with shocks
from his golden throne which has been transformed from
a symbol of authority into an instrument of torture. The
composition reaches its focal point as a primal scream
shrieks from the pope's mouth. This is a scream that we
have heard before: it echoes back to birth of modern expressionist
art - ‘The Scream’ of Edvard Munch at
the end of the 19th century.
Bacon's
art is full of contradictions - he both repulses and seduces
his audience simultaneously. He repulses them with his
shocking subject matter and his dispassionate gaze which
has the detached curiosity of a scientist watching a lab
rat. However, he also seduces them with the rich sensual
qualities of his beautiful paint surface, electrifying
brushwork and bold expressive colour.
The same paradox appears in his subject matter. While
‘Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent
X’ is a vengeful attack on the Catholic Church,
the social and religious establishment of his Irish childhood,
it is also part of an obsessive fascination (45 variations
on the 'Innocent' theme) with its iconography. Bacon,
himself, revelled in such ambiguities, 'The job of
the artist is always to deepen the mystery.........If
you can talk about it, why paint it?'
Francis
Bacon Notes
