# Francis Bacon's Painting in the RA ![[IMG_7295.jpeg]] Francis Bacon's paintings are traditionally perceived as studies of the human figure caught alone and vulnerable in claustrophobic interiors. Another barely explored perspective in Bacon's work, however, is his obsessive interest in animals, and what the close observation of them could reveal about the true nature of mankind. Bacon was convinced that he could see and analyse human nature more directly and tellingly by watching the way animals behave. Although the artist later personified metropolitan man, with his circle of close friends and lovers at the bohemian heart of London, he was brought up on a stud farm in Ireland where hunting and horse breeding dominated everyday life. What Bacon learned about existence as a child came from what he learned about animals: how they fought, how they mated, how they died. Bacon's early encounters with animals affected his art deeply. At the core of his vision is a clinical observation of human instinct based on the uninhibited behaviour he had watched in animals. Wildlife remained Bacon's touchstone for portraying both male and female figures: he not only amassed photographs of animals in motion but saw big game up close on trips to South Africa. Bacon's half-human, half-beast forms first appeared in his breakthrough paintings of the 1940s, and they continued to mutate throughout his artistic development. Thus Bacon's man' frequently comes across as barely human while, disquietingly, his "beasts come to resemble humans in our most extreme, unguarded moments. 'Francis Bacon: Man and Beast set out to explore this fundamental yet less examined aspect of one of the great masters of twentieth-century art. The exhibition has taken shape in extraordinary times. As we follow Bacon's search for the truth about human nature, we grow aware of one other mark of his genius: to have sensed how closely man and anima would interact, whether caged or uncaged, to the point where each depends on the other to survive. In our current predicament, his paintings seem more prescient than ever. **Michael Peppiatt** ## Notes 드라이한 터치 검은색은 오히려 뒤로 들어가는 느낌이 든다 흰색을 제외한 모든 색들이 서로 경쟁하듯 뒤로 빨려가는 느낌 다만 꽃잎의 빨간 색은 다른 느낌인데 전반적으로 slice된듯한 이미지들. 모두 후퇴하지만 꽃 마큼은 앞으로 전진한다. 그가 보여지는 형태들에서는 인간에서 동물성을 찾는 것 이 아니라 동물에게서 인간성을 찾는 것처럼 보인다 살점 꼴라쥬 극단적 [[flatness|평면성]] 스티커 긁어내는 듯한 브러시 안으로 파고들어가는 배경 그리고 그 위에 쌓이는 스티커들 움직이기 시작하는 순간 흘러내리는 고정시킬 수 없는 형체들 여기서 인터뷰 찾아볼 것 내가 볼 때 그는 인간에게서 동물을 찾은게 아니라 동물에게서 인간을 찾은 것 같다. 그리고 그 공통점을 찾게 된 순간 고정성은 사라지고 흘러내린다. 이건 레이어가 아니야 amalgamation 이라는 단어로도 부족해. 합쳐짐 merging. 움직임에 관심을 가지게 된 것은 동물과 인간의 “차이” 라은 분열을 목격하면서 인간의 움직임 변화안에서의 차이의 분열을 보게된 것이 아닐까. 그리고 그런 분열은 무너져 내리는 고정되지 못하는 인간을 만들어낸 것이 아닐까. 확실히 베이컨에게 밝은 색은 사진이 가져온 것은 하나로 인식되어 왔던 것의 분열 동물원이 가져온 것은 자연이었던 것의 사회로의 분열 다이아그램이라기보다 스티커라고 표현 하는게 나한테는 더 정확해 보인다. ![[IMG_7314.jpeg|300]] 확실히 이 그림에서도 보이는 평면 persepctive에 맞게 그려진 침대의 선도 그렇기에 흘러내리는 듯한 감각이다. ![[IMG_7317.jpeg|300]] **'Fury', c. 1944** 검은 색은 오히려 scar? 배경이 아닌데? 갈라짐? ## Paintings **FLESH, SKIN AND BONE** Bacon's early life and career occurred in parallel with the deadly wars that shaped the first half of the twentieth century. The human capacity for extreme violence on a terrifying scale, both individually and collectively, was all too evident. Having worked as a furniture and interior designer, Bacon produced his first acclaimed painting, Crucifixion, in 1933. The theme dominated his early works, yet Bacon held no religious beliefs. He viewed the crucifixion as just an act of man's behaviour. Hanging in a dark void, this ghostly, skeletal body introduces the underpinnings of Bacon's art: that human beings are fundamentally animals made of flesh, skin and bone. In Bacon's words, *'we are meat, we are all potential carcasses'.* From 1944, Bacon's work gave birth to strange hybrid creatures: curious, silvery bodies stretching out, crouching down, or letting out primal screams. Taking inspiration from Pablo Picasso, these biomorphs explore what Bacon called '*organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it*'. Animal features - canine teeth; quadrupedal gaits; swooping necks - create that distortion, while a human ear or mop of hair lend familiarity. The disquieting effect of these figures is amplified by Bacon's inclusion of hats, umbrellas and cut flowers, locating these extreme expressions within the polite customs of everyday life. ![[IMG_7300 1.jpeg|300]] ![[IMG_7302.jpeg|200]] **Head l, 1948**, Oil and tempera on board, Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Richard S. Zeisler, 2007 An unnervingly realistic ear is the only clue that identifies this amorphous form as human. Its fanged mouth originated in a photograph of a chimpanzee. This is one of six Heads which were exhibited together in 1949. That year, Bacon gave an interview with Time magazine, expressing his desire "to paint like Velázquez but with the texture of hippopotamus skin' ![[IMG_7309.jpeg|300]] **Study for a Figure c. 1945**, Oil on canvas, Peter Simon Family Collection Bacon collected a wide array of sources. He gathered everything from press photographs of Hitler's speeches to books about forensic pathology, often drawn to images concerned with power, the body and the boundary between the visible and unseen. The head here is quoted from The Phenomena of Materialisation, a record of seances held during 1909-1913 that purport to show ectoplasm(심령체, 세포질 외층) emerging from the body of a medium. ![[IMG_7314.jpeg|300]] **Figure Study II, 1945-46**, Oil on canvas, National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Huddersfield Art Gallery, Kirklees Council (Presented by the Contemporary Art Society to Bagshaw Museum, Batley) ![[IMG_7317.jpeg|300]] **'Fury', c. 1944**, Oil and pastel on fibreboard, Private collection Conceived in the context of the crucifixion theme (it recalls the right-hand panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, on permanent display at Tate Britain), this biomorph is also associated with the 'furies' or Eumenides. These creatures of vengeance appear in the Orestela, a trilogy of plays by the Ancient Greek writer Aeschylus, a text that proved an ongoing source of inspiration for Bacon *** **WILDLIFE** By the 1950s, Bacon was an established artist. During this decade he painted various animals including the dogs, owls and chimpanzees in this gallery. Often the composition centres on a single animal in the manner of a portrait, underlining its "human' qualities. The howl of the caged *Chimpanzee* registers emotional, even existential pain, while the empathetic Study for Chimpanzee—with its bold pink background—unmistakeably captures a thinking, feeling being. Notably absent are the horses that surrounded Bacon during his childhood in rural County Kildare, Ireland (his English father, a retired army major, bred racehorses and the family's social life revolved around regular hunts). Dogs and horses were among the triggers for Bacon's asthma his relationship with animals was detached, yet they fascinated him. Bacon built a library of wildlife books and magazines as part of the vast stock of images amassed in his studio. He also took opportunities to observe live animals. In the early 1950s he made trips to southem Africa (where his mother and sisters moved following the death of his father in 1940). He described being mesmerised" by wild animals moving through the long grass. A series of paintings followed that placed naked human figures crouching in, or crawling through, grasslands. These landscapes are charged with the adrenalin of the stalk and the power dynamics of the chase and final tussle, often with strong sexual overtones. ![[IMG_7322.jpeg|300]] ![[IMG_7326.jpeg|200]] **Study for Chimpanzee, 1957**, Oil and pastel on canvas, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York ![[IMG_7327.jpeg|300]] ![[91J8rtYUW-L.jpg|300]] **Man Kneeling in Grass, 1952**, Oil on canvas, Munich - Pinukothek de Modore, Dauerleingabe Sammlung Olcese Crawling on all fours, the centtal, muscular body is human, but the pose may have partly derived from a photograph of a chino in Marius Maxwell's *Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa* (1924) A ghostly presence in the background suggests a lurking predator, echoing our position as voyeur. ![[IMG_7330.jpeg|300]] **Two Figures in the Grass, 1954**, Oil on canvas, Private collection Bacon was openly gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal. Two women lodged a complaint with the police about this painting when it was first exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1955. It would be another twelve years before the first step towards the legalisation of homosexuality in the UK. The Sexual offences Act of 1967 permitted homosexual acts in privacy between two consenting adults over the age of twenty-one in England and Wales. ![[IMG_7334.jpeg|300]] Figures in a Landscape, 1955-57, Oil on canvas, Lent by Birmingham City Council ![[IMG_7337.jpeg|300]] ![[IMG_7341.jpeg|300]]![[IMG_7347.jpeg|300]] **Landscape near Malabata, Tangier, 1963**, Oil on canvas, Private collection A centrifugal rush recalls the speed of a greyhound track, although the foreground shape may relate to a photo Bacon kept of two animals in mortal combat, captioned: 'while the owl tries to reach the snake's head, its legs become completely encoiled'. Malabata, on the coast of Morocco, is the final resting place of Peter Lacy, Bacon's partner during the 1950s. The pair spent time together in Tangier—a city that attracted many artists and writers. Bacon learned of Lacy's death (a result of alcoholism) by telegram just before his 1962 Tate retrospective opened. ![[Screenshot 2022-02-14 at 12.44.54.png|300]] ![[8210-842.jpg|300]] ![[f108-21a.jpg|300]] ![[13195-842.jpg|300]] Peter Lacy, c.1959 : John Deakin Photograph of Peter Lacy (possibly at Ostia, Italy), 1954 : Francis Bacon ![[IMG_7351.jpeg|300]] ![[Screenshot 2022-02-14 at 12.58.35.png|200]] **Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1950**, Oil and cotton wool on canvas, Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven Here, Bacon aligns the crucifixion theme with the animal instinct for survival. Above, a dog or cat-like creature with a wounded head stalks a winged body, based on a photograph of an ow in the 1949 book *Birds in Action* (a human mouth replaces the vole in the ow's beak). Bacon spoke of 'the whole horror of life, of one thing living off another', but was not an advocate for animal rights; his was a nihilistic outlook. ![[IMG_7354.jpeg|300]] ![[cvnfz9br3argq7f3tzpg.jpg|300]] Owls, 1956. 61 x 51 cm. Private collection © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2022. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. ![[N06131_10.jpg|300]] ![[opikmzhmp2zemziwpxts.jpg|300]] **Dog, 1952**, Oil on canvas, Tate: Presented by Eric Hall 1952 Bacon painted dogs more than any other animal, often adapted from photographs of a mastiff walking, taken by the nineteenth-century photographer, [[Eadweard Muybridge]]. The setting was probably based on a postcard of the manicured formal gardens of the seafront at Monte Carlo. where Bacon lived from 1946-1950, spending much time in the casinos. With its hunched back and panting tongue, the dog seems exhausted Isolated in the bare enclosure of a red hexagon, the passing traffic oblivious to its suffering. ![[IMG_7357.jpeg|300]] **Man with Dog, 1953**, Estate of Francis Bacon/DACS, London/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York ![[IMG_7358.jpeg|300]] Study for Portrait of P. L. No. 1, 1957, Oil on canvas, Private collection Bacon began a passionate, violent relationship with Peter Lacy in 1952. Bacon attributed his own sadomasochism to the beatings he received in childhood either by, or upon instructions from his father. In stark contrast to the strong physical power that Lacy often wielded over Bacon, here his naked, vulnerable body is curled up on the sofa like a domestic pet, his hand covering his face perhaps in pain or remorse ![[IMG_7361.jpeg|300]] ![[IMG_7363.jpeg|300]] ![[IMG_7365.jpeg|300]] **THE ANIMAL WITHIN** Portraiture was central to Bacon's exploration of the human form. The disparate characters gathered in this gallery underline Bacon's broad definition of the genre. Some reveal Bacon's love of Old Master painting, such as those derived from his obsessive interest in images of Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1650 by the Spanish court artist Diego Velazquez. Others capture friends and lovers, bestowing them with distorted, simian features, or represent types such as businessmen. Rather than wielding power, these suited, white-collared men resemble marionettes, their faces peering out from striations of paint that look like the bars of a cage. In contrast to its conventional use as celebration of a person's prestige, or a record of an accurate likeness, Bacon employs portraiture to scrutinise animality as a human trait. The composure of his 'sitters' is shattered by the escape of a cry, gasp, grimace - or even uncontrolled laughter. The silent paintings evoke audible expressions in our mind's ear. Bacon's 'portraits' strip away the pretensions of even the highest stations in society, with the implication that status or success - the trappings of civilisation - are merely a thin, fragile veneer distinguishing us from our non-human counterparts. ![[IMG_7370.jpeg|300]] ![[IMG_7372.jpeg|300]] ![[IMG_7373.jpeg|300]] ![[IMG_7374.jpeg|300]] ![[IMG_7376.jpeg]] **Study for Portrait of Pope Inoscent X, 1965** ![[IMG_7381.jpeg|400]] **Head VI, 1949**, Oil on canvas, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London Head VI is the earliest surviving example of the almost 50 variants of Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X that Bacon painted, and the final in his series of Heads. The Pope's vestments are suggested with cursory strokes of paint, while a black curtain seems to carry away the top of the head, transforming Velázquez's Pope from an intelligent, ageing man into a howling figure who elicits pity as much as fear. ![[IMG_7385.jpeg|400]] ![[IMG_7387.jpeg|300]] ![[IMG_7389.jpeg|300]] **_Pope I_, 1951**. Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums Collection, Artwork: © 2021 Estate of Francis Bacon/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London ![[IMG_7390.jpeg|300]] ![[T14121_10.jpg|300]] **Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1966**, Oil on canvas, Tate: Purchased 1966 Isabel Rawsthorne was one of Bacon's closest female friends. A successful artist and stage designer, she shared Bacon's interest in animals, depicting them in works such as Baboon and Child, c. 1964 (Tate). The sense of metamorphosis in Bacon's painting—amid which fragments of the sitter's distinctive features emerge—achieves what Bacon described as 'a sort of moment of magic to coagulate colour and form so that it gets the equivalent of appearance' ![[IMG_7394.jpeg]] **BODIES IN MOTION** Bacon was fascinated by the translation of movement into static imagery. The discovery of the time-lapse photographs by Eadweard [[Eadweard Muybridge|Muybridge]] had a profound impact on his art. Bacon kept numerous reproductions of [[Eadweard Muybridge|Muybridge]]'s Human and Animal Locomotion (first published in 1887) in his studio. Unlike a single shot that suspends movement, the grids of consecutive frames produce a sense of animation, as well as revealing forms unseen by the human eye. The myriad subjects recorded by [[Eadweard Muybridge|Muybridge]] acted as a visual dictionary of motifs, which Bacon would fuse with other stimuli. Bacon might take a position from a [[Eadweard Muybridge|Muybridge]] figure, and then refer to sculptures by Michelangelo for the 'ampleness, the grandeur of form;, or distort the pose by amalgamating it with a photo from a wildlife magazine. As he stated: =="[I] look at animal photographs all the time. Because animal movement and human movement are continually linked in my imagery of human movement'. ([[@sylvester_brutality_1988]], 166)== ![[IMG_7399.jpeg|400]] ![[IMG_7406.jpeg|300]] ![[FB_Print-Two-Figures-1953.jpg|300]] **Two Figures, 1953**, Oil on canvas, Private collection As this well-thumbed page reveals, Bacon returned repeatedly to particular images. [[Eadweard Muybridge|Muybridge]]'s studies of men wrestling provided the foundation for numerous compositions, and a legitimate context in which Bacon could paint erotic subjects prior to the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967. ![[IMG_7404.jpeg|400]] **Three Figures and Portrait, 1975**, Oil and pastel on canvas, Tate: Purchased 1977 Bacon set himself the challenge of painting multiple figures in a single composition, whilst avoiding a 'story-telling aspect'. The fragmented, human-animal figures that swoop in perpetual motion are observed by a portrait whose features are also in flux. The circles that bring areas into and out of focus are derived from *Positioning in Radiography*, 1939 which contained photographic instructions on posing patients to enable diagnoses, together with x-rays overlayed with geometric diagrams. ![[IMG_7410.jpeg|400]] **Paralytic Child Walking on all Fours (from Muybridge), 1961**, Oil on canvas, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, donation private collection in 1964 This figure is derived from a late nineteenth-century sequential photograph by Eadweard Muybridge of a disabled child. [[Eadweard Muybridge|Muybridge]] compared different bodies also walking on all fours, photographing a toddler, a young woman and a baboon carrying out the same movements. [[Eadweard Muybridge|Muybridge]]'s experiments were regarded by his contemporaries as objective science, yet the resulting images support hierarchies and taxonomies of bodies that are unacceptable today Bacon was drawn to the visual power of bodies in motion. In this ambiguous and unsettling painting, Bacon merges multiple [[Eadweard Muybridge|Muybridge]] frames and distorts the face ![[Child_with_infantile_paralysis_walking_on_hands_and_feet_(rbm-QP301M8-1887-539).jpg]] ![[IMG_7418.jpeg]] ![[IMG_7422.jpeg|400]] **Portrait of Henrietta Moraes on a Blue Couch, 1965**, Oil on canvas, Manchester Art Gallery. Purchased with the assistance of the Wilfrid R. Wood Bequest Fund and the Victoria & Albert Museum Purchase Grant Fund ![[IMG_7425.jpeg|400]] ![[IMG_7434.jpeg|400]] **Henrietta Moraes, 1966**, Oil on canvas, Private collection **THE BULLFIGHT** ![[IMG_7466.jpeg]] Bullfighting is like boxing - a marvellous aperitif to sex. Typical of Bacon's provocative humour, his words sum up the close links between violence, voyeurism and eroticism. Bacon believed that the controversial tradition exposed inconsistent attitudes towards animals: he found it illogical that people who condemned bullfighting as cruel might still wear furs and feathers. Three versions of this painting exist today, echoing the three tercios or stages of the bullfight. If Bacon initially planned them as a triptych, he completed them as individual works. The pictures were dispersed during his lifetime; their presence here is the first time they have been displayed together. As well as attending 'a few' bullfights, Bacon owned numerous postcards and books, in which photographs captured the dance-like motion of the fight. Bacon interpreted contours and shapes as gestural sweeps of paint. The swirling mass merges matador, cape and bull, challenging a clear distinction between human and animal. The dynamism is intensified by a brightly colored, imagined arena that is artificially small compared to the protagonists. In two paintings, a strange, concave screen reveals a feverish crowd, who mirror our status as onlookers. Above, a red banner with hints of an eagle recalls the imagery of the Nazi dictatorship. The paintings raise questions about the disturbing connections between spectacle, excitement, terror and power, and an individual's capacity to become lost in an anonymous mob or herd mentality. ![[IMG_7437.jpeg|400]] **Second Version of Study for Bullfight No. 1, 1969**, Oil on canvas, Private collection Lucien Freud described Bacon's approach as 'calculated recklessness'. Here, a brush loaded with white paint was hurled at the canvas. The spontaneous action leaves a trace that evokes both the spatial whorls of the cape and the ejaculation of sperm. Later the 'accidental' marks were built up with layers of paint, and a black trompe-l'œil shadow added. A parallel exists between the performance of the matador and the painter at work - both entail choreography, instinct, and an appetite for risk. ![[IMG_7442.jpeg|400]] ![[IMG_7447.jpeg|400]] **Study for Bullfight No. 1, 1969**, Oil on canvas, Private collection ![[IMG_7451.jpeg|400]] ![[IMG_7459.jpeg|400]] **Study for Bullfight No. 2, 1969**, Oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyons ![[IMG_7469.jpeg|700]] ![[IMG_7476.jpeg]] ![[IMG_7478.jpeg]] **AFTER THE BULLFIGHT** The bullfight paintings of 1969 encapsulated Bacon's mediations on the blurring of man and beast. Nearly two decades later he made his only triptych on the subject. Here, the excitement is over, leaving behind the wounds of the matador, the bowed head and bloodied horns of the bull; with a spectral 'fury' hovering above. When evoking the aftermath of the bullfight, Bacon may have had in mind Federico Garcia Loreas 1205 poem *Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Melias*, with its repeated refrain 'At five in the afternoon', which readers of the poem discover is the time of day that the young bullfighter dies. Bacon was convinced that there 'is an area of the nervous system to which the texture of paint communicates more violently than anything else. His fascination with the physicality of our bodies and the unmoderated behaviour of animals were touchstones for his art. Beginning with the hybrid creatures of the 1940s and animal studies of the 1950s, these interests ultimately found expression in his powerful paintings of the human form, which continue to resonate in new ways as generations pass. An animal became the subject of Bacon's final painting, *Study of a Bull*. The use of dust as a medium offers a potent cipher for mortality, although for Bacon it represented permanence too: 'Well dust seems to be eternal—seems to be the one thing that lasts forever'.![[IMG_7507.jpeg]] ![[IMG_7500.jpeg]] ![[IMG_7510.jpeg]] **_Study of a Bull_, 1991**, Oil, aerosol paint, and dust on canvas, Private collection ## Related Notes ## References