Francis Bacon's Form-of-Life

Narrative and Form-of-Life

Over twenty-five years since his death the life and work of Francis Bacon continues to fascinate. He stands as the most ‘bankable’ of 20^th century artists whose paintings now count among the most expensive ever sold at auction. These bloated figures generated by the art market are in stark distinction from the relatively humble environs of Bacon’s working life, the last three decades of which was spent at his small, sparse apartment at 7 Reese Mews in South Kensington.

Since his death the number of biographies, catalogues and scholarly works have steadily accumulated, shedding light on hitherto unknown aspects of his working practices and the intrigues of his personal life. It’s perhaps a sign of the times that these latter intrigues are the principle subject of so much recent biographical and documentary work on the artist. It is also a measure of just how much he guarded his private life from public scrutiny and how much personal mythmaking he practiced that many of the clichés about Bacon and his times have been up for revision. We know well the image of Bacon the Colony Room stalwart and rover of Soho clubs, just as we do Bacon the fine dining, hard drinking nihilist of post-war London. Little however was known about his formative years in Ireland or his early career as an interior designer while living with the Australian painter Roy De Maistre.

Francis Bacon with Lucian Freud

Posthumous documentaries and memoirs by the likes of Michael Peppiatt and Daniel Farson have increasingly turned attention towards his sexuality and relationships as the principle source not only for his subjects but for the supposedly tortured, ruggedly carnal spirit of his work. As Peppiatt puts it at the introduction to a recent BBC documentary: “This is the central enigma of Bacon; where did the darkness come from?" It’s significant that despite his own regular protestations against narrative interpretation, Bacon’s work holds the epithet enigmatic perhaps more than any other artist of the post-war period. His starkly distorted portraits of bohemian figures like Muriel Belcher and Henrietta Moraes, or fellow artist Lucien Freud, sit alongside more complex and difficult arrangements of figures and settings; most notably the series of so-called Black triptychs featuring George Dyer after the latter's death in Paris in 1971. These works are far harder to reconcile to a non-narrative interpretation and with the artist now dead a quarter of a century, few are still trying to maintain Bacon's line of refusing the autobiographical. Nevertheless he always maintained that his work was not an attempt to say anything in particular, let alone something of the nature of Man.

Francis Bacon and George Dyer

Yet when pushed by David Sylvester during one in that series of classic interviews, Bacon speculated that the so-called violence in his paintings might be attributed to the violent times he had lived through, both during the Irish war of Independence and the inter-war years in Europe, during which he visited Berlin and Paris. He was at pains to say however that this did not mean that he attempted a direct transference of such experiences onto the canvas, as if he were passing a general comment on the violence and disorder of the early 20th century. For Bacon, the violence of painting has nothing to do with the violence of war. It's was to do - he said - "with an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself. And the violence of reality is not only the simple violence meant when you say that a rose or something is violent, but it's the violence also of the suggestions within the image itself which can only be conveyed through paint". He would also speak of "emanations" which have to do with the personality and the attempt to remove some of the screens through which we live to get to the raw sensations beneath. Nevertheless the subjects for his work were often directly autobiographical; they were friends, lovers, or images drawn from Bacon's paint spattered archive weaved into familiar situations from his own experience.

How is it then that a work can simultaneously be non-narrative and a direct expression of a particular life? I suggest that this seeming contradiction can be resolved only if one views Bacon’s life and oeuvre as indistinguishable parts of a Form-of-Life. That is to say, a life, the works of which can never be separated, or abstracted from its form. Thus in the case of Francis Bacon, self-narrativization is absent since the work produced by that life is a direct emanation of that life’s mode of living. This notion deserves some explication.

Henrietta Moraes (1966

The concept of form-of-life appears in the later writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein and designates that realm of pre-linguistic experience out of which meaning and understanding arise. It's not something that one can describe with a series of propositional statement but rather the basic level that gives those statements sense. It is - to use Heideggerian jargon - our immanent mode of being-in-the-world and relates to our practice as living, acting beings and not to the function of self-reflection. My use of the term here also reflects the recent work of Giorgio Agamben who deploys the concept as a way of exploring alternative forms of political association apart from those based on property and obedience to an external rule giving authority. His principle subject in this investigation was the early Franciscan monastic community. In this latter example the notion that one does not have a property in one's life but rather a collective form of use is especially interesting for looking at Francis Bacon's biography.

Bacon himself was well read in 20^th century theories of subjectivity. John Edwards’ photographs of Bacon’s studio include detailed images of his book shelves, which in addition to collections of Greek plays and poets like T.S. Eliot, included volumes by Freud, Sartre, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Lacan. Occasionally he wore his existentialist derived nihilism in boastful fashion, as when asked by an interviewer for French television why he had given so much attention to painting teeth he replied exuberantly “…after all what is left of you after you’re gone but your bones and your teeth”.

Two Figures (1953)

The concept of Form-of-Life also allows us to better understand Bacon's often repeated quote of Valéry, that what he wanted to achieve in his painting was to "give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance". In the Sylvester interview from 1966 he further elaborates by claiming that once a story enters into the interpretation of a work, that's when the boredom comes upon you. The storytelling then, the narrativization of the work, is what creates the distance, the act of conveyance, that blocks the violent return to reality and sensation which the artist strove for. The obverse to this insight is that Bacon's understanding of the place of painting was as a means to an immanent experience of reality, one without narrative or cognitive distancing; pure sensation without the burden of understanding. The raw life in Bacon's figures truly cannot be separated from their form, which is to say from the life out of which and in which they were created. Such works of immanence could only take the artists own life as their material, though not in an autobiographical way.

Considering this view, a painting like Two Figures (1953) (also known affectionately as the buggers) is not a representation or a retelling of an event in Bacon’s relationship with Peter Lacey, but a concretisation of the experience, an image produced in paint that in Bacon’s words returns the viewer to reality more violently. It is an image of the thing suffuse with more pathos than a photograph or illustration of the coupling could ever contain.

Áskēsis and Materiality

In the case of a life and work inseparable in their form, what practices might bring together and hold the existence of the two in place? What were these practices - these áskēsis - deployed by Bacon and what concepts might we use to bring them to light? Certainly we can agree - as has often been said - that Bacon's work stages a conflict between illustration and abstraction; the two poles if you like, both of which occasioned the artist's distain, and the struggle between which appears in his own practice through the desire for order and the use of accident.

Painting 1946 (The Butcher Shop)

Here then are two concepts which Bacon himself offers, as he does explicitly when he tells David Sylvester of his desire for an ordered image, but that it should come about by accident. The quintessential Bacon image in this regard is Painting 1946, sometimes called the butcher shop. One would not imagine that such a thoroughly unique composition could come about by anything except considerable preparation and sketches. Bacon however testifies that he originally wanted a very different picture; first a chimpanzee, then a bird alighting into a field. Then, when all the marks he had made and rejected came together, the image that suggested itself was one he could never have conceived of without the use of accident. It was a technique he constantly applied in numerous different forms, from experimenting with throwing paint to using sand and dust (sometimes scraped up from his studio floor) mixed in with the paint. He would often gamble everything on the next brushstroke, unable to take it back due to using the reverse, unprimed side of the canvas, which would soak up the paint and prevent reworking. When the gamble didn't pay off or he was dissatisfied with the final result he would destroy the picture. It is thought he destroyed just as many paintings as he 'let out' over his lifetime, despite potentially throwing away millions of pounds in the process. There are even stories of him buying back his own work in order to destroy it.

At the other pole Bacon imposed order on his pictures using a number of devices which he developed throughout his career. The most familiar is the use of a enclosed space in which to situate the figure. In his "first" work, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1945) the biomorphic monsters are framed within an ochre and red space demarcated by black lines. They strain against their confinement, positioned awkwardly in the extreme forground. Anger and frustration pour from them. The figures from the 1950s continue this use of space and if anything make the aspect of constraint more explicit by the depiction of cages, frames and fences and the use of much darker colours. Bacon paints the confinement of both animals and humans. Monkeys strain against wire while in the series of pictures titled Man in Blue the figure is held behind a desk or cocktail bar, often in front of what could be curtains, but that look more like the bars of a prison cell. The pallet is shades of darkest blue. Still in the 1950s, in his famous series of Popes - which blend into and out of the series of figures depicting his lover Peter Lacey - the Pontiff is framed by the architecture of his chair, which in some versions seems to morph into the frame of a bed or hexagonal cage.

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1945)

Bacon would sometimes describe such devices as an "armature" onto or within which he could arrange the figure. For pictures such as Crouching Nude (1951) and Figure on a Dais (1958) these devices offset the at times rough and aggressive brushstrokes giving a spatial dimension to the figure's anguish. Later in the 60s and 70s these armatures became more elaborate with the use of rails, improbably designed boxes and rooms, the aspects of which conform to no known physics. Most mysterious of all was the appearance of additional figures which the artist called attendants, the function of which seemed to be to give the appearance of being observed, or judged.  Martin Harrison, who compiled the artist's catalogue raisonné has shown how Bacon was influenced by K.C Clark's book of photographs showing positioning in radiography. As with Eadweard Muybridge's book, so beloved by Bacon, the pictures show bodies in unusual positions and in addition use circular edits on the photo negative to highlight areas of interest to the radiographer. Bacon used a similar device in several paintings in the late 60s and 70s. Three Figures and a Portrait (1975) uses two such circles which home in on the body of the then deceased George Dyer. Was their use an attempt to add a sense of mystery to the composition? Or, like the rails and cages were they just another armature, another way of showing the figure, heightening the sensations within?

Three Figures and a Portrait (1975)

This repeated motif of restraint, of confinement - particularly in conjunction with figures from his private life - naturally leads us to reflect on the artist's sexuality and his taste for masochism. It's only in the last ten years that the degree and ferocity of the violence meted out to Bacon by his lover during the 1950s, Peter Lacey, has become widely known. In the most recent documentary film on the artist Nadine Haim recalls that control was central in Bacon's life but that in his violent relationship with Peter Lacey he had very little and on several occasions received serious injuries as a result of the former Airman's rages. 

Bacon himself was coy or silent about these dark encounters and those with other men throughout his life. Peppiatt recalls that on appearing in a bruised state and being asked what had happened, the artist would fix you with a Basilisk stare merely replying "what do you mean?"

His notorious taste for "rough trade" would sometimes lead him to being done over and relieved of the wads of cash he like to carry round for gambling and buying everyone drinks. Psychoanalytic speculation - not least by some of his former friends and associates - would have Bacon's amenability to pain as having its origin in childhood beatings by his father's stable-hands. Certainly his own admission that he both hated and felt sexually attracted to his father cannot but add weight to the psychoanalytic interpretation. However, one could also see in his relinquishing of control to the other in masochistic sexual relations, another form of practice, another way of opening up the possibility of joyful accidents. Just like the throwing of paint, the gamble of one more brush-stroke or distortion, Bacon aims at what Michel Foucault termed a "limit experience" opening up both new possibilities of sexual enjoyment and ways of depicting the figure in paint. In both domains the flesh (or meat as Bacon would say) is the ultimate medium; what Gilles Deleuze in his study on Bacon called a "zone of indiscernability" between man and animal which is the object of Bacon's compassion and horror.

Between Man and Animal. Head 1 (1947-48)

Despite these encounters and the artist's assertion of living a “drifting life” Peppiatt recalls that Bacon did not take well to change, and despite his reputation could go long periods away from the hedonistic night-life of Soho to focus on his work. In the David Silvester interviews from the 1960s he claimed to almost always get up early in the morning to paint even if he’d been out drinking the night before; a claim he made again during the Melvin Bragg interview of 1987 for BBC's Culture Show. One should also bear in mind that masochistic submission is not antithetical to self-control. Submitting oneself in such a relation demands the self-suppression of basic instincts of resistance and a disciplined handing-over of will to the other. It is in this sense that we might understand Bacon's love of gambling and chance. Fortuna is not for him the capricious goddess cruelly dealing out plenty and loss. She is what makes visible the gap between animal and man, blind instinct and radical contingency. As a true gambler Bacon is not in love with winning but with chance itself. Standing opposite fortuna  in Bacon's small pantheon are the Erinyes (Eumenides) the infernal goddesses which forever torment man with demands for vengeance and violence. The Greek tragedian Aeschylus was a significant influence on Bacon who liked to quote from The Oresteia. They are the subject of his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1945) and appear frequently in his work, haunting his figures in reflections or hovering outside of windows.

Order and accident in painting, masochism and self-control in personal life. This schema lays out a somewhat formalistic description of Francis Bacon's áskēsis. What's missing is a unifying trait, an ethos which brings together these forms of living and gives them their modality. Again the Sylvester interviews, this time from 1973, give us a clue. When asked what he felt his painting was concerned with besides appearance Bacon offers a gnomic answer: "It's concerned with my kind of psyche, it's concerned with my kind of - I'm putting it in a very pleasant way - exhilarated despair".

Materiality in the Life and Work

He was often charged by his interlocutors as fostering hopelessness, a charge he cheerily rebutted with claims that he was an otherwise very positive and optimistic person. Here I think we find Bacon's atheistic sensibility writ large. When he talks about "exhilarated despair" or man as a piece of meat, what he refuses (as we have already seen) is any possibility of transcending the finality and materiality of human life. No salvation, no deliverance from the world of violence and accident. One could perhaps imagine Jean-Paul Sartre, who Bacon encountered at the Gargoyle club in Soho in the early 1950s raising a glass of Champaign with the artist to toast everything that is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. Bacon was a lover of life which for him meant chance, accident, and the knowing anticipation that every day could be your last. Unsurprisingly with such an ethos Bacon had little time for weakness and had even less for the post-war Welfare settlement. From cradle to grave just sounded so boring.

Study for a Bullfight No.1 (1969)

Nowhere is Bacon's vitality, his love of chance and fleshly materiality brought together in a more visceral way than in the bullfight, which was the subject of several paintings from the late 1960s onwards. He owned several books of images on the subject and may have been introduced to it by his friend the surrealist Michel Leiris. With his trademark distortions in Study for a Bullfight No.1 (1969) the bodies of the matador and the bull seem to merge in a sweeping movement of human and animal flesh; again that zone of indiscernability, which acts as a permanent crossing point between humanity and the animal. The bullfight stages this almost metaphysical boundary as a pitched contest where the ultimate risk is pain and death. Such a gamble couldn't not appeal to Bacon's sensibility. His last completed painting is a remarkably poignant one depicting a bull, almost just a shadow, passing between a black and a white space. Most of it is raw canvas, but the composition suggests an awful finality, that of a man who knew he was close to death. Dust (to which we all return) is mixed in to form the ghostly texture of animal.

Study for a Bull (1991)

Bacon the atheist found profundity in flesh. He would say of his many depictions of the human scream that he wished to paint the mouth with all the beauty of a Monet landscape. What a strange comparison to make, the colours of the human mouth and a landscape. But again it was perhaps another instance of Bacon signalling his valuing of human materiality above the traditional themes of painting. For him all the "beautiful colours" of the mouth were just as valuable as that of the natural landscape, a traditional site of the artistic sublime. For Bacon the anti-Romantic, a screaming mouth has just as many qualities as an enormous vista. According to Edmund Burke in his classic study, the sublime reminds us of humanity's limitations and finitude; an experience he associates with a sense of terror. Bacon characteristically turns this insight towards an experience of immanence, seeing in the scream - literal terror - that same sensation of the sublime, but within the materiality of human flesh itself. The ultimate mark of finitude, of radical contingency in human life is the flesh.

Fra Angelico, Fresco, Museo di San Marco, Florence

To conclude, I believe an unusual comparison may be drawn between Francis Bacon and the 15th century Italian painter Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro). Both artists obsessively painted around the same themes throughout their lives. Bacon's Popes, men in blue and depictions of lovers and friends find their counterparts in Fra Angelico's classical religious themes. The passion of the crucifixion is mirrored in the passion of Bacon’s figures who seem affected by an existential suffering. No-where else is this seen more than in the series of pictures of George Dyer - painted after his death in Paris – known as the Black Triptychs. When Pope John-Paul II beatified Fra Angelico he noted the “integrity of his life and the almost divine beauty of the images he painted”. William Rossetti noted that he was wont to say “He who illustrates the acts of Christ should be with Christ”. Fra Angelico painted out a true inner experience of faith which permeated his whole life and for which his art was an inseparable part. Bacon, more a man of anti-faith, none-the-less lived and worked by an inner conviction about the nature of man and the inevitability of suffering in this world. This irreducible connection between the life’s work and the way of living is emblematic of the kind of Form-of-Life shared by both Angelico and Bacon. Perhaps it would be going too far to suggest that Bacon's masochism was a modern expression of the imitatio christi, an irrepressible desire to embody the suffering of the 'son of man', the condition of suffering and finitude into which we are all thrown.

Triptych, May–June 1973 depicting George Dyer

We might however stretch the comparison just a little further and see in Bacon's personal sensibility on death and human materiality a distinctly modern version of the memento mori. As he says to David Sylvester: "But then, perhaps, I have a feeling of mortality all the time. Because, if life excites you, its opposite, like a shadow, death, must excite you. Perhaps not excite you, but you are aware of it in the same way as you are aware of life, you're aware of it like the turn of a coin between life and death. And I'm very aware of that about people, and about myself too, after all. I'm always surprised when I wake up in the morning".

To revel in a radical evocation of chance in one's life, through working practices, ways of living or by relinquishing one's pleasure to the will of another, Bacon forges a kind of existentialist sacrament out of which came his art. This ever-present practice of living by which he continually opened himself to an experience of finitude, possibility and sensation was the core of Francis Bacon's form-of-life.