Baconian Strategies, or the Possibility of Originality in AI Art (MidJourney 2)

 

As I discussed in the previous part, a key philosophical question for the future of AI image generation and art is the question of representation. Will future iterations of MidJourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc, just become ever more proficient at translating complex prompts into accurate visual representations, with a consequent loss of the wildness and "ghost in the machine" type interventions, which for me are its main selling point? Or will the technology retain, or even begin to coalesce around its own artistic tendencies, ending up less of a tool and more of a genuine collaborator?

One artist who appreciated more than most the impact of new technology on artistic practice was Francis Bacon. In interviews he used the expression "deepening the game" to describe the approach painters needed to take in response to the advent of photography and film, which had during his lifetime thoroughly challenged the role of painting in the visual arts. After all, if photography was now the dominant medium for representing reality, what could traditional painting, and especially figurative painting offer that went beyond mere illustration? Bacon's answer to this challenge was to develop a style and technique of painting that not only produced works of unsettling power, but which also assimilated photography into their mode of production. He made no secret of the fact that photographs - of his friends and lovers, from newspapers and magazines, and even pictures of old masters like Velazquez' portrait of Pope Innocent X - frequently formed the raw material for his own images. While other artists of the time abandoned the figure and moved into abstraction, Bacon took on photography and in a sense made the camera into a collaborator.

Artificial intelligence poses yet another challenge to artistic production on perhaps an even greater scale to photography. It not only takes aim at the skills of the digital artist or graphic designer, but puts into question the very notion of artistic authorship. As such, I've spent a fair amount of my CPU time on MidJourney attempting to apply some "Baconian strategies" to how I use it and the types of images I've tried to make. Some of this has consisted of pictures produced in Bacon's style - with a contemporary twist, while at other times I've attempted to develop a more general approach to image generation in which Bacon's concepts and insights on art are applied.

I should say from the outset that each  version of MidJourney has a different take on Bacon's style which reflects the differing levels of complexity in the coding and the way the developers have trained it. Generally speaking, versions 3 and 4 will give you more abstraction, dissonance and incoherence, whereas the different iterations of version 5 and the recently released version 6 will offer more realism, better figurative representation and more straightforward expressions of compositional coherence. As such, producing Bacon-esque images is not as straightforward as asking for so and so "in the style of Francis Bacon". Indeed as you will see, Bacon's painting themselves must often be brought in to the prompts to provide guidance and set examples for the AI to follow, as well as moving between versions and using counterintuitive phrases to excite more interesting results. Take for example the two images below produced by version 6, both of which use the prompt "Francis Bacon painting of a dog sitting peacefully in front of a large open window", with the addition that the one on the right also includes a jpg file of Bacon's Dog (1952) as part of the prompt.

Neither of these images really captures much of Bacon's style. The most one could say is that some of the "brushstrokes" for the surrounding rooms are vaguely reminiscent of how Bacon would situate his figures perhaps in the 1940s and 50s. I also like the way the flooring from Bacon's painting has been remixed into the picture on the right. But the figure of the dog itself is just too well rendered, too illustrative, and just, well, a bit dull. Switching down to V4 however gives us a very different result. The picture on the left uses the exact same prompt (including the image of Bacon's Dog) as the picture above on the right, but gives us an entirely different style which in my mind much more characteristic of Bacon's compositions and stark framing of the figure. The dog is perhaps still too much of a direct representation but the whole thing is more obviously modernist in execution. The translation of the window, however, has entirely lost its realism, and is now only hinted at with the arrangement of line and colour in the upper half of the picture. 

Finally the image on the right adds a longer description in near-natural language: "Francis Bacon painting of a dog sitting peacefully in front of a large open window, twisted and distorted anatomy. Mirrored reflections of 1940s interior room in the background. Geometric lines frame the main figure. Yellow, black and white colour palette with streaks of red and blue". Now we're getting somewhere. The dog has been messed up a good deal with odd proportions and the surreal inclusion of a lizard-like tail. The requested colours are present, though the background and interesting use of forced perspective lines is perhaps a little busy. But overall I'd say this is a fairly good attempt at a Bacon-like dog, although the extra data in the description - such as the mirrored reflections and 1940s interior - has not directly translated into the image.

This example demonstrates one of the key attractions of MidJourney, which is its penchant for chance and indeterminacy when interpreting the data fed into it. The most convincing of the prompts above includes a natural language element, with subject-predicate and statement parts, plus an actual image approximating the subject and style desired. Nevertheless, the output image is something quite different, neither exactly what we asked for, nor a complete departure. Getting to that point took me six prompts which each produced a grid of four images, many of which were no-where near the desired outcome. It's this element of chance and accident that brings MidJourney into true Bacon territory. Don't believe me? Take it from the man himself: The following is an exchange between Bacon and the art critic David Sylvester in an interview in 1966.

FB: I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance.

DS: But you're sufficiently puritanical not to want to make the chance come too easily.

FB: I would like things to come easily, but you can't order chance. Because if you could, you would only be imposing another type of illustration.

DS: Are you aware of the moment when you find you are becoming free and the thing is taking you over?

FB: Well, very often the involuntary marks are much more deeply suggestive than others, and those are the moments when you feel that anything can happen.

Those of you conversant with the history of the surrealist movement will recognise the ethos at work here. Chance encounters, the unconscious, or the marvellous accident, were all themes and techniques developed in various ways by the surrealists (and before them in Dada) as a means to get behind - or beyond - the usual modes of representation in Western art. Bacon's courting of chance and accident in his work in part continues this tradition, but it also formed a key element of his personality, which came out in his often tempestuous relationships and predilection for gambling. But as we can see in the quote above he also wants to remain in overall control and desires "a very ordered image", not an abstraction produced by chance encounters between paint and canvas. Similar tensions are observable in his private life, which despite the reputation for sexual and alcoholic excess was similarly marked by a tendency towards control. I argued in an essay in 2018 that rather than being a simple facet of his character, this constant tension between chance and order constitutes Bacon's Form-of-Life; the wellspring if you like, from out of which came his remarkable paintings.  

Making a picture in MidJourney without an obvious subject can lead in odd directions. One way I like to start is by using the blend function in which up to five images can be fed into the AI which will then attempt to produce a single image which melds the aesthetic qualities of those in the prompt. It does this without any additional word prompting, instead relying entirely on its own internal logic. How exactly it does this, which elements it focuses on and which it ignores, is more than a little mysterious, and again like so many things with MidJourney, the results tend to vary between versions. One thing I've noticed consistently is that it will latch on to any anatomical shapes it can find and centre the image around them. If there is no central figure in the images fed into it, it will sometimes create one by anthropomorphising structures or textural elements. This can lead to a lot of strange results where limbs, faces or composite body parts will appear. This is usually the result of feeding highly non-comparable images into the prompt; but can, if you choose them wisely, lead to a fairly unique starting point to build your composition and improvise around results using additional word prompts or substituting new images into the prompt to take it in different directions. 

The image to the left started out as a blend which included some older Bacon-type images produced by MidJourney, plus some more photorealistic figurative data and "textural" matter. I call input images textural if their composition strongly influences the overall aesthetic style of the output without defining the subject or dictating overall coherence. Such images are often abstract or contain strong colours. After I had the initial blended image I began to push it more deliberately using word prompts in addition to the original images. First I started with “A young woman sits in a gloomy hotel room", before adding a description of her clothing and extra aesthetic filler such as "soft pastel thermal colour palette, variable contrast" and "dark urban skyline, shadowy figures, architectural drawings". Eventually I fed one of the resulting images back into the blend alongside material that suggested more of an urban setting. One of the images in the resulting grid had altered the position of the figure such that it looked reminiscent of a pole dancer. With this "involuntary mark" made I changed the word prompt pushing it more towards such an outcome, before finally switching in a textural image into the prompt, which I knew would have the effect of scrambling the anatomy of the figure (and losing its head!). The result was the image you see here; a unique, unplanned composition, that while utilising the indeterminacy of the AI's training is also ordered, thematic and recognisably figurative.

Bacon also employed a degree of improvisation in his work, gambling - as he saw it - a painting's fate on the next dramatic brush stroke. If it went wrong and could not be recovered he would frequently destroy the painting. But this approach could also yield desirable (though unconsciously produced) results, which for Bacon were a route away from illustration and towards what he described as a more violent return to reality itself. The most famous example of Bacon using this method is his Painting 1946, sometimes known as the butcher shop for its depiction of sides of beef. In an unusually detailed account of how one of his paintings was created he describes the intention of depicting a chimpanzee in grass, before then attempting to paint a bird of prey landing in a field. None of this came to fruition and in his laboured attempts he had produced such a strange mass of marks that it seemed as if the figurations he finally arrived at - the final assemblage of which owes a good deal to Poussin's The Adoration of the Golden Calf -  had formed by an act of his unconscious.

Francis Bacon, Painting 1946

What Bacon describes here - and what I've tried to apply with my image of the pole dancer - is I think one of the best strategies for getting unique images out of MidJourney. Images that do not privilege prompt following or exact representational translation but nevertheless aim at an ordered final result. It's also not random, since in order to get good results the user has to learn the aesthetic and interpretative tendencies of the AI and how to provoke it into making images with the desired artistic qualities and level of compositional coherence. It's also rarely instantaneous and involves a lot of tweaking and remixing of prompts. Sometimes, it leads nowhere worthwhile, and one is always pushing up against MidJourney's more conservative impulses, which are usually kitsch and highly influenced by American popular culture. When this happens, there is no choice but to abandon the thread and start off once again in a completely new direction.

In practice this involves, so to speak, mastering the dark side of MidJourney; deploying dissonance and contradiction, and getting a feel for the kinds of prompts that send the AI away from its basic representational paradigm. For example getting anything vaguely explicit into your compositions isn't easy. MidJourney's interface on Discord is moderated to exclude explicit images or words from prompts. This extends to slang or even phrases that could count as a double entendre. Despite the moderation, which also varies depending on the version you're using (earlier ones are generally more permissive for words, but also can't tell the difference between the Venus De Milo and a pornographic image, go figure) the system will frequently create images with explicit content, usually around the naked human form. In short, MidJourney has a predilection for boobs, and they sometimes pop up when you least expect them. It's just another little morsel of indeterminacy that makes using it fun. And on the plus side you're able to continue Western art's long tradition of fascination with the female form.

 

Testing the limits of the moderation, both around text and images is worth doing as it can be frustrating to have your prompts knocked back for seemingly innocuous infractions, e.g. the phrase "tight white" in any context cannot be used. This being said some surprising things do get through, so roll the dice, you never know what will come out the other end.

The moderation is meant to extend to horror and gore but there seems to be some intelligence to the way it is applied so that photorealistic images of injury or warped anatomy are excluded, but more painterly or cartoonish prompts get through. This is certainly beneficial if like me you want to produce figures with distortions or that generally look a bit roughed up. Combine this with the relative ease in making if not explicit then at least vaguely erotic images, then you have a good set of levers for adding more adult content into your compositions, and this is no bad thing. As I described in the last piece, the majority of content produced on MidJourney would in my opinion fall into the category of infantile. Thus I'm all in favour of pushing it towards a more mature audience. To my mind using cutting edge artificial intelligence to raise the aesthetic standard of erotica is a more venerable project than using it to produce endless Pokémon fan art.

 I've grouped the images I've created using these strategies in to two broad categories: After-Bacons, which try to produce images in Bacon's style but with subjects more in keeping with contemporary life in 2024; and Meta-Bacons (yeah I know it's a lame tag) which apply the conceptual toolkit described above to make images that do not look like paintings by Francis Bacon but nevertheless owe something to the ethos and approach to image-making. 

One example of the former I'm fond of is this picture of a man with a newspaper standing in a modern glass box apartment. Some of the elements, such as his white trainers and the fact he's holding a newspaper - which I recognise is hardly symbolic of the digital first era - were directly stated in the prompt, as was the high setting over the city; but the rest of the composition came about through trial and error, and improvising around marvellous accidents thrown up by MidJourney itself. I especially like the mirroring of the buildings outside the window on the presumably hyper-shiny floor of the flat. The figure is a delightful quandary. He looks anxious and out of place, despite the attempt seemingly to look relaxed with his newspaper, which in the way he's holding it appears as if he were trying to hide something in his hands. The clothing is also amusingly misplaced. Is that shorts over cut off leggings? The trainers are nicely done and draw attention to the shadow on the floor which instead of tracking the figure's silhouette, forms a incongruous rectangle. This is a scene that nicely captures the ennui and out-of-jointness amid superficial luxury that is symbolic 2020s Western culture.  

And as an example of a Meta-Bacon the image on the right, which I've titled An Unexpected Visitor, has all the qualities I'm looking for. The prompt developed over a couple of days and multiple iterations during which different colour palettes were tried out and the arrangement of the figure and background played around with. I'd been experimenting with trying to add something of Man Ray's surrealistic black and white photography to the mix and wanted a slightly erotic theme around a woman putting on stockings in a bedroom. the trouble was that most of the versions either produced a too photorealistic representation or the result was just too abstract and unnatural looking. One of the images included in the final prompt featured a classical statue without its head - which I'd included to give a nudge towards the body shape I wanted - but instead this seems to have filtered down into the final picture in the wonderful accident seen above, where the woman's head is unnaturally large and constructed as a kind of glowing neon sign. The head, turned to the figure's left, wears an anxious expression, and the left hand is held up at the throat as if startled by a sudden knock at the door. The dishevelled state of the bed mirrors the degraded framing of the image, as if it were a collage of old photographs. 

The figure itself is beautifully formed, non-symmetrical in appearance (which is something MidJourney often struggles with) and has these suggestive marks that could be either surface damage (in a photo collage) or symbolic of violence. Finally, there's the odd sprite-like entity at the head of the bed, that in its diaphanous appearance seems hardly there. It's an image that's full of intrigue and tension, combining a number of styles into a striking final result. As with the picture of the man in the apartment above, it grew out of a combination of intention and accident, where unintended results could be built upon and improvised around. I had only an outline of the subject I wanted, and the decision when to settle for a final image is somewhat arbitrary, after all, images can be endlessly remixed and new versions produced. In a similar fashion to how Bacon claimed his paintings were "let out", pictures on MidJourney are not so much finished as abandoned.

The jargon around AI such as ChatGPT and MidJourney would have the user known as a 'Prompt Engineer'. One influencer on Twitter even speculated this could be a future job title for anyone whose livelihood was under threat from the new technology. Sadly I think for many that will be the case,  much as previous rounds of automation rendered older skills obsolete, those former hands-on builders and creatives were pushed further away from the product of their labour, and now mostly supervised the machines that actually do the work. The threat now is that the inner logic and tendencies of the AI - which, we should remember, is never neutral, and can only approximate our world, with all its prejudices and darkness included - will come to supplant the inexhaustible creative potential of human beings. Humans do require paying, MidJourney just needs a monthly subscription. Thus you can be sure that company executives across the creative industries are gleefully adding up the possible savings from eliminating those same pesky humans from the production process. If the public gallery on MidJourney is anything to go by, then, MidJourney is well suited to being a workhorse for the mainstream of the culture industry.

But, as I hope I've been able to show, this technology also has artistic potential that can be brought out in collaboration with a user that seeks - so to speak - to meet the ghost in the machine halfway. I think this form of use - which rejects the standard representational paradigm, whereby AI should be a slave to our most asinine dreams - is a real and open possibility. It's certainly no more outlandish than the idea of artificial general intelligence or the notion of the human/AI singularity that excites transhumanists. Art, like cruelty, is one of the quintessential human things, and the leap from the Lascaux cave paintings to Duchamp's Fountain is perhaps greater than what artificial intelligence will do for us. 

My bet is that Francis Bacon would also not have been overly disturbed by AI image generation. There is no possibility of perfect prompt following since the meaning of the words pumped into it can have no objectively translatable aesthetic counterpart. To suggest otherwise is a category error. It's the same category error made by people who claim music can be reduced to maths. Adding image prompts into the mix only compounds this basic truth.  Consequently, this means is that there will always be a fundamental degree of chance and indeterminacy at work; a ghost in the machine, that by way of certain clairvoyant techniques can become the collaborator in an artist's work. If he were around now perhaps Bacon would have used MidJourney much as he used photography; as a source of inspiration, of subjects and new ways to show the figure. It will undoubtedly accelerate cultural production in the most shallow and commercially driven parts of society. But alongside that certainty there is also the possibility of taking up the challenge and deepening the game.

 

 

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.