Francis Bacon pt. I Raw Sensations

According to the art market, Bacon is the most successful dark artist ever. He's the guy to point to when people say "you're talented but maybe you'd be more successful if you painted prettier things."

This is one of the pieces from his Tryptic of Lucian Freud that sold for 89 million pounds in 2013.

What made Bacon so successful though? I'd argue that it was mostly branding, his unusual work ethic, with a little bit of historic luck. I'll probe some of that stuff more in the next posts.

But for now, here's a little biography and some stories about Bacon.

Bacon was born October 28th 1909 in Dublin Ireland.

His life was full of abuse. Receiving it and giving it. He was a masochist and he lived by what he might call a godless existentialist creed which is "we're born alone, we die alone, then that's it."

He lived a consciously hedonistic lifestyle, what he called his "gilded gutter life," drinking, gambling and partying all night, ordering the most expensive thing on the menu at restaurants, paying for all his friends. But then he'd go into the studio early in the morning and paint. Hedonism and masochism. He enjoyed both a good time and the pain it accrued.

His father was the first abusive person in his life.

Bacon was very effeminate at a young age, which his father hated. Bacon talks about knowing that he was gay as a young boy. His father, who trained race horses, would allegedly have the stable boys whip Francis on occasion.

Eventually his father kicked him out of the house when he discovered that Francis was trying on his mother’s underwear and looking at himself in the mirror.

He roamed around Europe in his late teens and early 20s. First to Berlin where he discovered the underground gay subculture, then to Paris, where he discovered Picasso (among other things but Picasso was a big influence on him.)

He moved to London and took a job as an interior decorator. And apparently he was quite good at it.

In the 30's Bacon painted some biomorphic forms which were inspired by Picasso, but interestingly distinct from Picasso. Not obvious attempts to copy.

Things really took off for bacon in 1944 when he did a series called Three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion.

They were shocking to viewers and launched bacon's career.

The success of Bacon is often attributed to a reaction of the cruelty and brutality of humanity exposed in the events of World War II.

This may account for people's reactions to Bacon's work. But Bacon himself was not making trying to make a statement about the war.

His work was personal to him. It was always about his experience. How existence felt to him. An attempt to capture the raw sensation of experience.

He was influenced by Existentialist philosophy. People like Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus whose work explores the inherent meaninglessness of life. And that we must create our own meaning in life.

But, again, Bacon wasn't making art about existentialist philosophy. He was influenced by its emphasis on experience and immediacy. Also chance and accident, which I'll explore in a later post when talking about his process.

Bacon enjoyed pain.

His first lover was a man named Peter Lacey who would beat Francis unconscious. Destroy bacons artwork. He told bacon he wanted to chain him up in a stable and make him sleep on hay.

Bacon didn't know how to get out of the relationship. Lacey eventually killed himself.

This isn't the last insane love story.

George Dyer was a criminal from London's east end.

Bacon was a masochist. He liked to be beaten up. George was good at that. But at a certain point, George started showing a softer side and Bacon just got over him. George tried to win back Bacon's love in the worst possible way: with tenderness and affection.

The problem was, that George still could beat bacon up. So George really didn't have to leave. Bacon's damage control was to basically keep George perpetually unconsciously drunk so that he wouldn't get in the way too much.

Before one of Bacon's huge retrospective shows in Paris, George went to to rehab. George was a subject in many of the pieces.

Bacon went out to celebrate. He returned to the room and found George dead on the toilet. He had taken a bottle of sleeping pills and drank a bottle of booze.

Francis and Valerie from the Gallery essentially covered up the death so that it wouldn't overshadow Bacon's big opening.

There's a disturbing scene where Bacon is talking with some high end art patron about one of his paintings of George on the toilet, when he's the only person who knows that George in fact had died on the toilet.

This incident absolutely recked Bacon.

He later revisited the paintings of George, staying in the same room where George had died.

Michael Peppiatt, who wrote the book I read on bacon, talks about how Bacon did this to get "closer to Georges death" and how Bacon enjoyed the experience of feeling pain.

Bacon became lonelier and lonelier as his life went on.

Bacon died in 1992 of a heart attack in Madrid. He was there to see a younger man who didn't return his love.

So maybe don't point to Bacon when people say "you're talented but maybe you should paint prettier things."

His life was kind of chaotic and depressing.

But there's a lot I learned about his artistic practice that I found useful. So I'll cover that in the next few posts.

Sources

For my Bacon "Research" I listened to Michael Peppiatt's book "Francis Bacon in Your Blood." I was skeptical of this book first because it's more of a memoir than a straight forward artist biography. But the more I learned about Bacon the more it made sense to learn about him this way because of the immediacy that the format offers, which a straight forward biography might not give you.

Peppiatt was just trying to do an interview with Bacon for a student magazine in the 60's but ended up befriending Bacon. He reads the book himself too so it's like an older dude telling stories about bacon.

I also watched the Documentary a Brush with Violence which you can see on YouTube.

I also listened to the Bad Gays podcast about Bacon. Which is interesting because you can't really talk about Bacon's personal life without talking about his homosexuality and it's interesting to hear their perspective on that. And they do a good job of giving a distilled biography of Bacon's life.

All the images from this post are from Yves Peyré's book Francis Bacon or the Measure of Excess. Which is an excellent art book of Bacon's work.

Have Fun

Goodnight Sweeties