“Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective”

Head VI

Photograph: Courtesy of Richard Nagy LTD., London

There are many adjectives—dark, brutal, homoerotic—one could use to describe the paintings of Francis Bacon (1909–1992), though popular wouldn’t seem to be among them. His work can be hard to take, and sometimes, given the histrionic tenor of his canvases, hard to take seriously. Yet on a recent Friday, visitors could be seen thronging through this survey (edited from the one that originated at London’s Tate Gallery) marking the 100th anniversary of the English-Irish artist’s birth. From all appearances, people were raptly taking in Bacon’s iconographic panoply of screaming popes, slabs of beef and male nudes grappling in heated contortions of love, hate and personal destruction. Perhaps years of exposure to Jason and Freddy Krueger have conditioned viewers to accept Bacon as some sort of high-toned master of horror whose greatest monster was his own bad self.

Certainly Bacon’s backstory fits the mold of the classic reprobate: The second of five children born to a wealthy British family in Dublin, Bacon, who was gay, was kicked out of the house at age 17 after his father discovered him wearing his mother’s clothes. He spent the 1920s and ’30s idling around London, Paris and Munich, supporting himself as a gentleman’s gentleman (under the name Francis Lightfoot) before finding some success as an interior designer. But his destiny lay in painting; indeed, though his career really didn’t take off until after the war, he first exhibited in 1933. One of his compositions of the time was purchased by an important collector and was even featured in the book Art Now by the influential British critic Herbert Read. Still, Bacon was dissatisfied by the critical reception to his works and wound up destroying many of them. He produced little during the war years, spending most of his time in pubs and betting parlors. He was famous for his drinking, and was a founding member of the Colony Room, a private bar for artists in London’s Soho district.

Bacon wasn’t wise when it came to matters of the heart, either. Both of the major loves of his life, Peter Lacy and George Dyer, were drug addicts prone to violence, whether physical or emotional. Although their relationship had ended, Dyer accompanied Bacon to Paris in 1971 for the painter’s triumphant survey at the Grand Palais; the former wound up ODing in the bathroom of their hotel on the eve of Bacon’s opening. Talk about drama queens.

Like his life then, Bacon’s canvases are kind of a mess, an amalgam of abstraction and figuration, postwar angst and recondite old-master references. Self-taught, Bacon betrayed little interest in the conventions of avant-garde art at the time. Propelled by an autodidact’s restless curiosity, he borrowed freely from a wide range of source material, including photography and cinema. He mixed together references to Velázquez, Russian director Sergei Eisenstein and Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion studies, a strange thing to do in the late 1940s, though quite normal now. It’s been argued that Bacon’s import lies in being the first openly queer artist, but it’s also the case that he was one of the first to foreground the photograph as a subject matter for painting. Bacon drew the parallel between the photographic blur and the painterly stroke well before Gerhard Richter did the same, though his penchant for portentousness also gave license to the bombast of contemporary artists like Damien Hirst.

The output that first gained him notoriety in the aftermath of the war has been described as “religious painting for atheists,” and there’s undoubtedly some truth to this, given the surfeit of shrieking pontiffs—notably Head VI (1949), Study After Velázquez (1950) and Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)—and allusions to crucifixion. Taken together, these canvases create a metaphor for Europe’s experience of the conflict as a collective Passion that disproved the existence of God. But these works also suggest that Bacon, as frank as he was about his homosexuality, may have found his sexual orientation a cross to bear.

In any case, by the late 1960s, Bacon increasingly turned to portraying himself and his circle of friends and lovers. Expanses of bright color became a hallmark of his work, and if these vivid hues signal the return of the decorator’s eye, Bacon’s subjects could still be indecorous, albeit heartfelt. Triptych, May–June 1973 depicts Dyer’s ignoble death on the toilet, flanked by walls painted a vermilion rich enough for a monarch’s robes. Individually, paintings like this are hard to beat, but seen en masse, they are somewhat oppressive. In art as at breakfast, a little Bacon goes a long way.

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