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 20th
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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 20th 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”.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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?
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
