Who is Francis Bacon in the 21st Century?
During a recent trip to London, I went to the Tate Museum to see the paintings of the legendary English artist Francis Bacon (the paintings on display are Three Figures and Portrait 1975, Triptych August 1972, Study for Portrait on Folding Bed 1963, and Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944). The primary thing I experience in Bacon’s art is what he described as the “pattern of one’s nervous system being projected on the canvas.” Never before has an artist’s work so directly possessed me. As you’ll see in the pictures below, I tried to get as close to Bacon’s actual brushstrokes as decency and Tate security would allow. In his colors, his forms, his structure, and especially in the distortion of such structure, we are tossed into the intense and agonizingly beautiful visceral flow-muck of life on this fragile planet in a psychotically designed universe.
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in his book-length essay of Bacon’s method and madness The Logic of Sensation, writes that “Francis Bacon’s painting is of a very special violence…The violence of a hiccup, of the urge to vomit, but also of a hysterical, involuntary smile Bacon’s bodies, heads, Figures are made of flesh, and what fascinates him are the invisible forces that model flesh or shake it. This is the relationship not of form and matter, but of materials and forces making these forces visible through their effects on the flesh.” Within’s Bacon’s paintings we find a way to shake off the colonialist impulse to remain cocooned in plastic, separated from our bodies, separated from our ecologies. We become connected by the force to the force of bodily existence, in all its juice and flesh.
The violence of Bacon’s work is not gratuitous or benumbing. As Deleuze explains of Bacon: “What directly interests him is a violence that is involved only with color and line: the violence of a sensation (and not of a representation), a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression. For example, a scream rent from us by a foreboding of invisible forces: ‘to paint the scream more than the horror …’” Bacon’s violence is the holy/unholy unveiling of the experience of being unmasked. There is a startling ecstasy, a momentary ecstasy, which comes from having the masks we use to conceal ourselves ripped off. Truth, in those fleeting moments before it becomes harsh and cutting, always feels ecstatic. It still feels ecstatic even when it is harsh and cutting. The weight of our deceptions, hypocrisies, and prudishness falls away to reveal reality unvarnished. In Bacon’s paintings, we enter into the moments we want to hide from others and from ourselves. Our rage, our fear, our ennui, the heat of our desires, and grief for those people who we desperately cling to and who desperately cling to us confront us without a balm, without (and with) mercy.
The real human being, the animal human being, the human being lost within the ever-quickening montage of the 21st Century late-capitalist hellscape we live in, emerges lying, screaming, and gasping. We recognize this being as ourselves and also recoil from this “monster” within. In Bacon’s paintings we see the consequences and we see the possibilities when the masks come off.
To truly behold a Bacon painting requires something entirely different from the passive, fleeting gaze. One has to get close, to see and feel how the paint moved for Bacon and how he moved the paint. Bacon would often claim that he was at the mercy of the oil paint itself, of how the paint had a mind of its own, of how the paint created accidents that brought out the Figure and the image in a more real way. Bacon’s paintings can and will repel superficial approaches claiming they are “weird” or “strange” or “too dark”. His paintings, and his whole worldview, only makes sense when one is able to directly project one’s own pain, love, grief, rage, fear, and sexuality onto the experience of and relationship to his canvases.
The Figure emerges in a more real/realistic way. The Figure in Bacon’s paintings is not the photorealistic figure serving as a re-make/re-model of representation and appearance. As Deleuze further explains “the abandonment of simple figuration is the general fact of Modern painting and, still more, of painting altogether, of all time. But what is interesting is the way in which Bacon, for his part, breaks with figuration: it is not impressionism, not expressionism, not symbolism, not cubism, not abstraction … . Never (except perhaps in the case of Michelangelo) has anyone broken with figuration by elevating the Figure to such prominence.” The Figure is not figurative (of which, as Jerry Saltz points out, is still the primary mode of art one will encounter). The Figure is not literal. The Figure is what congeals when the surface and the depth reveal their interdependence. The Figure is the flow-muck of the subconscious becoming conscious.
It is through the Figure in Bacon’s paintings that we experience the force of sensation in our skin, our tendons, our guts. Bacon was not an admirer of abstraction in art, claiming that abstract art only truly affected the mind, rather than the body. The Figure, in its distortions, in its spasms and screams and cries, is someone we recognize far more in ourselves than what we see in the manicured gardens of our social-media selfies. That recognition is uncanny and Weird (the better category of Weirdness as defined so well by the late, great intellectual Mark Fisher). We recognize the parts of ourselves which are truly ourselves, but it’s really fucking frightening. But that Truth is so intense, so bottled-up by the expectations of our dope-sick society, that in recognizing ourselves, we meet someone we may not really know and don’t really want to know. The Shadow leaking away, the conscience, the ego, the crying child abandoned and abused by the parents, and/or the crying adult abandoned and abused by a callous, navel-gazing, rapacious and mendacious thing we call “civilization.”
There are certain paintings (especially his Three Studies for a Crucifixion 1962) which I can hardly bear to look at. I see in these paintings how much I have, inevitably, fucked up my own life, fucked up other people’s lives, and have had my life fucked over by other people. I came to Bacon’s work in the past couple of years because his art uncannily speaks to the disruptions and heartbreaks I am personally going through. The grief, guilt, and anger is immediate, searing, and nauseating. It is human nature, raw, without the neoliberal polish we desperately need to ward off those uncontrollable emotions lying like lava within us.
Is this what art is supposed to make us feel like? Who goes to the Tate or the Met or the Lourve or the Guggenheim to feel sick and angry? Art is not just a beautiful lover who coos in our ear and caresses us with romantic delight. Art is an exorcist. What disturbs us and what gives us beauty are often one and the same thing. This is the special effect of Bacon’s art upon our usually regulated sensibilities. How much more ugly would human history if there had not been people creating artworks like this which allow us to express the pain we desperately try to keep stored away inside us?
I don’t want to denigrate or reduce my experiences of seeing Bacon’s paintings up close by describing it as a “religious” or a “spiritual” experience. It did have the feeling of a specific pilgrimage, a desperate and committed seeking of something with great meaning. The emotions and feelings I experienced (especially being in front of the literal brushstrokes of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion) felt like the emotions and feelings I have experienced in my spirituality. Yet, as I am going through a very intense dark night of the soul, my direct experience with his paintings felt nothing like I have ever experienced in a church or a temple. What I felt was an aliveness, a vitality so extreme, so uncompromising, so naked, and so real that no wonder the priests and swamis have spent thousands of years trying to cover it up. That’s why Bacon ripped open the mouth and the garments of the holy fathers to show us the power-hungry pervert underneath.
Who is Francis Bacon in the 21st Century? I am and we are within his paintings in our divinanimality. I am and we are within his paintings in the writhings and curves and cries of our bodies, whether in grief, anger, or ecstasy. I am and we are within his paintings in the intimacies of tangled limbs on mattresses.
I am and we are within his paintings stuck in the madness of a rapidly collapsing civilization, trying to maintain our professional decorum as our insides are being eaten up by the contradictions of our lives.
Bacon, at least in his own words, had no particular political or existential agenda in his art. He simply wanted to translate the intensities of his own nervous system through the alchemical agency of oil paint onto a canvas which would then reach out and grab you by your own nervous system.
If his art was not meant to comfort or enlighten us, why then should anyone be attracted to such viscerally demanding and disturbing imagery?Look around you. Look around us. Who truly feels comforted or enlightened? Do not trust the unholy melange of influencers, yogis, grifters, and self-help gurus who populate and pollute your social-media streams. Do not trust how they coo at you, with their calls to bypass the ugly, the unjust, and the uncomfortable. Everything is collapsing around us because uncomfortable truths about how and why we have gotten to where we are remain cocooned in plastic.
Money, power, and privilege buys only temporary reprieve and even more severe ethical bargains. Every empire is like the Roys on Succession, riven by infantility and trauma so profound that it reeks like black mold. The planet we live on now begins to rear up in response to our extraordinary multi-generational selfishness of the last few centuries with an uncaring ferocity which belies our romantic images of “Mother Earth.” Epidemics of self-harm and suicide will become only more ever-present, especially for younger generations who begin to realize what has been left for them.
Hope feels like suicide. To plan for wife, home, mortgage, studio shed in the garden…when we have lost so much control, might be the epitome of madness, as we flail about in delirium saying “this is not my beautiful house…this is not my beautiful wife.” Yet Bacon, to his intimates, was in person often the optimistic ever-present fountain of youth. His whole being was a grand contradiction of optimism and nihilism in the strongest possible doses. He was someone who took great pride in luxury and great faith in chance (he claimed he could hear the roulette dealers calling our the winning number beforehand as he balanced multiple hands in the casinos of Monte Carlo). He lived life to such gnashing, abusive extremes in his relationships that he could claim experience of the entire spectrum of love and hate.
He was not a saint and he was not even one of those saints who was a saint because he wasn’t a saint. He was human like Jesus was human, emotional, earthy, prone to take up a whip, crucified in his own words and way. Bacon was a 20th Century Boy and is a 21st Century Magus.
Bacon’s unabashed queerness becomes, regardless of his own apoliticism, political for us in a time in which queerness is now at the brunt end of the fascist lash. Bacon lived in a time in which queerness was illegal in very much the same ways many people wish it to be so again today. Therefore his very life, and the way his life translated through the oil paint onto canvas, represented a resistance against that which aims to destroy or deny the ever-present reality of queerness. Of a queerness which destroys prejudices and boundaries. Of a queerness which insists upon radical intimacy in a time of our greatest atomization. Of a queerness which refuses the control of the priest, the swami, the CEO, the turbo-capitalist, the wannabe Hitlers and Mussolinis, and the everyday Eichmanns all around us with their banalities of evil.
In his paintings Bacon did not shy away from the ways the naked human body expressed the truths of love, violence, and grief, whether reposed or entwined. The tear of the flesh and the pink of the wound have the effect of the ikon, except that ikon is our own body in pain and ecstasy.
Human history, especially the history of religion/spirituality, has been spoiled by a spirit of fear-ridden, guilt-laden renunciation against the ways our bodies express spiritual (yes) truths through softness, wetness, movement, and even the S&M lash (a persuasion of Bacon’s). Through this sexuality we touch upon the mystery of the divine more surely than your moribund and mundane weekly church or temple offerings. The freedom of a healthy sexuality forged in consent, trust, and a seeking of the divine, not unlike Coltrane’s seeking of the divine through the cloud of knowing/unknowing which emanated from his horn, is the greatest threat to those who attempt to contain and kill what is queer. Everything Bacon represents, in the intertwining of his life and art, represents a resistance to that threat. In the same way I find the “spiritual” in Bacon’s life/art, I also find an example of everyday anti-fascist resistance.
Bacon was a man of great privilege, appetite, and complexities. His romantic/sexual relationships were complex, volatile, and abusive. On two of the most important occasions of his life, he discovered at the same moment that one of his lovers had essentially killed themselves. During the opening of his 1962 career retrospective at the Tate, he received a telegram informing him that his former lover Peter Lacy, a desperately heartbroken World War II veteran, had essentially drank himself to death.
In October 1972, during his finest career accomplishment, a career retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, where his idol Picasso had also recently been offered a similar retrospective, he received word that his current lover, the rough East Ender George Dyer, has died of an overdose in the hotel room they were sharing.
Bacon’s painting of Dyer’s passing moments (Triptych May-June 1973 TW: self-harm/suicide) may be Bacon’s most disturbingly intense painting (which is saying a lot). For anyone who has had a loved one attempt or succeed in harming/killing themselves, to then think oh I should make a painting of that happening is beyond any pale I have ever heard of. It is the most searing, uncompromising, achingly aggrieved artistic expression I have ever encountered.
Scholars and fellow intimates of Bacon’s life have tried to discern the core kernel of guilt which seems to be at the fount of Bacon’s sexuality and the intensity of his art. Certainly in the Dyer Triptych, Bacon is staring at what he has done (what he thinks he has done) straight in the face. Bacon did not shy away with making his guilt and grief crystal clear for all to see, hear, and feel.
We live in a culture in which it seems impossible not to harm each other very deeply. We have been trained, especially in cultures driven and riven by turbo-capitalism for decades and centuries, to cut the other person next to us to get ahead. We have created a fetish for bureaucracy which increasingly removes human dignity and relationally from our everyday lives. Everything we do, especially for those of us with privilege, harms and traumatizes many, many people. Our religious/spiritual communities often do very little to help us deal with the guilt and grief of all of this. Many of these communities use the pungency of that guilt and grief as their primary method of control, leading further and further on to abuse after abuse.
Guilt is there. Grief is there. Pain is there. Lust is there.
We destroy this planet because we think these emotions are evil.
If we feel these emotions more intensely, in community together, we can anticipate the way forward.
In encountering Bacon in this gods-forsaken century, we can look through the prism of what the philosopher and art historian Arthur Danto calls the end of art. The end of art is the end of Art (the European painting canon dominating everything), creating an opening towards an understanding and experience of art as the uncategorical rhizome in which we can all live and create without hierarchies (oh how so ideally!). In this Bacon stands, as usual, in contrast and paradox. He was and is a bridge between our more blessedly informal understandings of what art is and what it means to be an artist and a deep appreciation for classical mastery and formality. He did not have a formal art education. He was largely self-taught. He was a hustler par excellence who knew what and who he had to cling to to make his way (especially as an openly queer artist). His art does not aim to represent or please, as does most of the Canon.
His studio spaces were strewn with images from newsreels, art books, pornography, intimate pictures of friends and lovers, and anything else which struck his immaculate visual sense. All of this went into his art like, in his own words, as compost. Yet, Bacon was always a liege of the masters who came before him, such as Picasso, Velazquez, and Rembrandt. For Bacon, a mastery of technique was essential, if only to be the structure and foundation to then fuck with the expectation of the technique. In his own words, he explained that “one of the problems was to paint like Velazquez but with the texture of a hippopotamus skin.”
Bacon is like all of us creatives now, working within a bricolage of cultural artifacts, images, data, NFTs, bullshit, fake news, half-truths, and counterintelligence to make sense of an absolutely fucking insane civilization. Imagine what he could do today with the vibrant kaleidoscope of Reddit-board and dark-web phantasmagoria we are drowning in today like quicksand.
Bacon is not a modern or post-modern artist per se more so as a Magus of our personal and communal collapses. His art doesn’t so much show us the wreckage following World War II, as many superficial approaches to his art take, but the wreckage that always exists inside us and the wreckage that is to come. There is an argument that we have entered an age in which the composting of our cultural detritus has become destructive rather than regenerative. In fields like painting, music, and cinema (although not so much television ye gods what a medium) there is this feeling that it has all been done before and is just being done again. My six-year old nephew loves the Ninja Turtles and Super Mario just as much as I did at his age. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it tends to lead to solipsistic arguments (of which I have had quite a tendency to make myself) that there is nothing new under the sun and the moon.
The more and more I think about it, the more I think this argument is just as reductionist as the claim it claims to make (and I suppose to resist?). Art forms like jazz and heavy metal are in their relative infancy. So is the cinema. So are the various ruptures through which painting went through in the 20th Century. I may yearn for the end of this current civilization, but I still want to consider Lou Reed as avant-garde and hip once it has ended and we’ve moved on.
Bacon is not just an artist of his time and place. He gives us a method through which we can confront the absurdity of our everyday lives and the banal and cosmic evils which threaten our dignity and pride. How can one, in their writing, in their music, in their teaching, in their multimedia artwork, confront what we don’t speak about, what we don’t want to feel, what we need to grieve, if just to be human in an increasingly inhuman world?
(And yes painting too! Painting is still amazing and awesome and therapeutic and radically fulfilling. Bacon, as a proud bricolagist, said it was “always thrilling to paint from a picture which excites you.” I think I may follow his example and take the Head at the top of our essay here and reappropriate into an image of a screaming swami in my own painting)
Bacon’s paintings open up the wounds. His art asks us to look within us and around us, to see how we have fucked up, and to see if we might be brave enough to stare in the face what we see in the mirror when the masks come off.
