Born On This Day- October 28th... Francis Bacon

"I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence." Francis Bacon

Thinking about him this morning, trying to wrap my head around doing this post, I had remembered that The Husband was not a fan of his paintings. I texted him to receive a quote as a jumping off spot for the post: “Francis Bacon… what are your thoughts?” The vegetarian Husband’s text in return: “I haven’t had Bacon in decades.”  Me either.

Francis Bacon: "We are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal." To Bacon, the world was a slaughterhouse on the verge of annihilation at any moment.

Bacon was an enigma. He was fiercely atheistic, believing life was delusive & meaningless. Yet he stated: "You can be optimistic & totally without hope." Bacon was acerbic & boorish but gentle & generous to friends & relatives. A gay man into S&M. but right-wing politically.

Bacon possessed a despairing & sarcastic sense of humor, with a disdain for convention. He once booed a member of the British royal family who had decided to sing before a crowd at an event. Publicly dissing Princess Margaret may have seemed cruel & shocking, but it also demonstrated his honesty & sense of criticism. When a member of the royal family asked him what he did for a living, Bacon stated: "I'm an old queen.”

Bacon's honesty & enigmatic personality is on display in his paintings. He is considered by many art historians & critics to be the greatest post-WW2 painter. He has inspired awe with his paintings of twisted body parts & distorted animalistic human faces, intensely concerned with the torn & lonely human condition.

Bacon's paintings portray profound aloneness, pain & inner turmoil. He saw violence, hatred & human degradation as essential elements of life.

Bacon expected his paintings to assault the viewer's nervous system. Bacon: "I wish to unlock the valves of feeling & therefore return the onlooker to life more violently." Toward the end of his life, he was delighted to hear that a woman viewing one of his paintings in Paris had closed her eyes & crossed herself.

Bacon's art was profoundly impacted by his homosexuality. At some point in his adolescence, Bacon had sexual encounters with the Irish grooms at his family home, possibly the same grooms who carried out horse whippings ordered by his father. The hurt & humiliation of the whippings, combined with the sexual attraction for the grooms are revealed in some of the violent sexual imagery in his paintings. Bacon felt that the expressions of human sexuality were limitless: Bacon: "You need never have any other subject, really, it's a very haunting subject."

Bacon was banished from the family home when he turned 16. Having surmised that cleverness & chance were his driving forces, Bacon went to London to see what waited for him. He took a series of odd jobs & entered the gay underworld where earned extra money being picked up by wealthy gay men.

 In London Bacon would read Nietzsche, & tossed off what ever was left of any religious belief & came to the conclusion that life was futile unless he could somehow do something extraordinary with it.

After some time, his father made an attempt to straighten him out, entrusting him to the care of a family relative traveling to Berlin. Things did not go the way his father planned. Bacon & the relative became lovers.

In Berlin, Bacon immersed himself in the decadent & disturbing world of gay cabarets, transvestite clubs & sex parties that offered a menu any experiences he could desire. As a pretty young man, he had no trouble getting picked up & making money.

In Berlin, Bacon also discovered the functional art of the Bauhaus movement which influenced the design of the furniture he began to build a few years later.

Bacon escaped the gay circles in Paris when he turned 17 years old. In Paris he attended exhibitions of the work of Picasso, his first big influence. Other influences at this time included artists Soutine, de Chirico, Arp, & Dali, the art magazine Cahiers d'Art, & Luis Buñuel's film Un Chien Andalou. Bacon was also influenced by the exhibit- Documents which contained photographs of a screaming mouth & pictures of bloodied animal carcasses & Positioning in Radiography, a reference book which had photographs showing the position of the body for X-rays to be taken & the X-rays themselves.

4 years later, unable to make a living in Paris, Bacon returned to London, with him images of violence, carcasses & screams that would impact his art for the rest of his life. In London, he took up with Roy de Maistre, a father figure & lover. De Maistre had wealth, which enabled Bacon to spend time designing & manufacturing furniture. De Maistre was also a painter, & the couple held a joint art exhibit in their garage.

 Bacon met the inspiration for some of his greatest paintings when a young man burgled his home in 1963. Bacon’s relationship with George Dyer was stormy, sad & shocking. They were a couple for 8 years. 2 days before the opening of the Francis Bacon Retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, Dyer was found dead from a drink & drugs overdose in the bathroom of a hotel in Paris. Bacon painted portraits of Dyer obsessively, both during his life & after Dyer’s death.

George Dyer on film & in paint

 In 1974, Bacon met John Edwards, not the douchy politician from North Carolina, but a young man from the East End, with whom Bacon formed his most enduring friendship. While on vacation in Madrid in 1992, Bacon was admitted to a private clinic. His chronic asthma, which had plagued him all his life, had developed into a respiratory disease& he could not talk or breathe very well. He died of cardiac arrest in April 1992. He bequeathed his entire estate, valued at £11 million, to John Edwards, not adultery prone senator who thought he might be president, the British one. Edwards donated the contents of Francis Bacon's chaotic studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. Bacon's studio was carefully reconstructed in the gallery.

I am not huge fan of Bacon’s work. I can barely bring my self to study his paintings, I find it too difficult to spend a lot of time with, but I understand the skill & the talent. I believe that his paintings represent places that I can skirt around & not linger.

If you want to know more watch openly gay Derek Jacobi as Bacon & my ocassional lover Daniel Craig as George Dyer in the film Love Is the Devil (1998).

Edwards with Bacon

Self Portrait