The cold war's enfant terrible

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

The cold war's enfant terrible

(Monday 22 September 2008)
EXHIBITION: Francis Bacon


Tate Britain, London SW1

FRACTURED: Triptych (1972).

CHRISTINE LINDEY is left pondering the contribution to humanity of Francis Bacon's dark images currently on show at Tate Britain.


You need a strong stomach for this retrospective of Francis Bacon's major paintings.


Taking the human figure as his subject, Bacon conveyed a bleak world view - life is horrible and then you die.

Dwelling on extreme states, his themes were human cruelties, violence, oppression and alienation.

No better than raw meat in a butcher's shop, people are portrayed as helpless victims or vicious perpetuators of physical or psychological mutilation. Sex is closer to brutal assault than to tender communication.
Often alone, his mostly male figures crouch on toilets, tremble on mattresses, hang on crucifixes and are trapped, caged or wounded. There is no escape.

In Figure Study II (1945-6), a naked figure ineffectually seeks cover beneath an overcoat which does not fully conceal its body, below an umbrella far too small to shelter it. It's terrorised, mutilated head cowers behind potted palms too thinly foliated to hide it.

By the early 1950s, powerful men in business suits or papal robes scream their nightmare cries from transparent cages. Are they howling with pain or roaring viciously at us? Do their cages safeguard or imprison them?

Bacon communicated these ambiguous emotions with a unique visual language developed from expressionist distortions of form, colour and line, surrealist juxtapositions of disparate realities and acceptance of spontaneous gesture and a dialogue with mass media images.

He did not work from life, but from flat images - photographs, reproductions and film stills. The screaming popes were inspired by Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X and a film still of the nurse shot in the eye from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.

Before pop art, Bacon understood the need to negotiate a space for painting in a world increasingly perceived through and dominated by mass imagery. He had not seen the original Velázquez. He worked from a colour postcard of it.
Rather than seeing mass imagery as painting's enemy, Bacon took it as his subject matter, examining it in a dialogue which sought the permanence and profundity of high art.
His figures are quoted motifs rather than illusionistically integrated into their background, as in traditional paintings. That is why they often appear to be floating on their background like thin transfers.

In the early works, the background is often washed with a layer of blue-black paint. from the mid-1950s onwards, these become pure sweetie colours - pinks, acid greens or lemon yellows. Sometimes, the canvas is simply left blank. Outlines of geometric shapes such as cubes, trapeziums or ovals create a sense of space without traditional illusionism.

This tension between horrific motifs and visually seductive contexts adds to the disconcerting effect. Anguished figures are marooned within tastefully sparse, unadorned interiors, defined by the elegant shapes of the modernist designs of his youth.

Similarly, there is a tension between traditional and modernist sources. Crucifixions, portraits and the human figure are subjects rooted in the Renaissance, as were his centralised compositions and fascination with the triptych format.

Born in Dublin in 1909 to rich English parents who moved several times between Ireland and England during his childhood, Bacon inherited the social self-confidence underlaid with emotional deprivation common to his class.

His homosexuality and attraction to the arts conflicted with the definitions of rugged manliness expected of the county gentleman and, when his father, a military man, caught the 16-year-old Bacon dressed up in his mother's clothes, he banished him from the family home.

Armed with a modest allowance from his mother, Bacon adopted the bohemian life of 1920s Paris and Berlin. Never formally educated as an artist, he was designing modernist rugs, furniture and interiors by the time that he was 20. He began to paint soon after, but destroyed most of his 1930s paintings.

His formative years were thus marked by the first wold war, the rise of fascism and World War II, while he found his mature voice in the post-Hiroshima, post-Holocaust years of the early cold war.

His 1940s paintings expressed a widely felt revulsion against recent atrocities. Influential critics championed him as an example of "free world" figuration in the ideological battles about realism and his international reputation was soon established and has remained high every since. He died in 1992.

However, calling him the greatest painter of the 20th century as some curators and critics have done and are doing is to over-inflate his contribution.

An artist with a fierce visual intelligence and technical facility, he produced thoughtful, serious and sincere paintings which expertly expressed cold war anxieties.

He courageously addressed gay issues at a time when homosexuality was illegal. His most lasting legacy may well be his sophisticated dialogue between traditional painting and mass imagery.
But his lifelong fascination with morbidity, violence, horror and disfigurement never transcended the enfant terrible's desire for shock and sensationalism.

After the moving memorials to his long term lover George Dyer, who killed himself in 1971, Bacon tended to produce variations upon his previous themes which had little new to offer in content or form.

Over five decades, his fatalism offered no hope or no possibility of change beyond an affirmation of his humanity by communicating his fears.

There is something voyeuristic in the cultural establishment's vicarious admiration. To uncritically celebrate Bacon's pessimistic view of human beings as vicious tormentors or helpless individuals is to perpetuate the dominant cultural and political credo.

Francis Bacon shows at Tate Britain until January 4. Tickets cost £12.50/£10.50 concessions.


Printable page
Email a friend
Contact Us Copyright Morning Star, all rights reserved
published by the Peoples Press Printing Society