Slabs of Bacon

Francis Bacon, the 12-letter name under the painting that puts you in mind of English Enlightenment Philosophy and Breakfast Meat, is one of my personal formative icons like Stanley Kubrick, John Coltrane, Pauline Kael, William Burroughs, Moms Mabley.

Francis Bacon, Man with Dog, 1953

I may have seen a photo of him once or twice, but all I really knew about him-- all I really needed to know--was his work.  Painting that made you feel.  Darkness at the edges.  Twisted, evaporating flesh and lurid viscera isolated but barely contained within glittering suggestions of 3-dimensional geometric shapes. Gaping, screaming darkness again at the core.

Francis Bacon, Figure With Meat, 1954

An Englishman born in Ireland in 1909 (a descendant of the stepbrother of his famous namesake), he took up painting in earnest only in his late 30s. Prior to that he was the original slacker: gambling, traveling, drinking, hanging out.  He lived with the Cornish nanny of his childhood, Jessie Lightfoot into his early 40s, until her death in 1951.

Francis Bacon, Painting, 1946

He was "unapologetically gay" before his time, with a taste for violence that expressed itself as reliably in his relationships as on his canvasses.  For a time as a young man, according to an account in Michael Peppiatt's Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, he placed advertisements for his services as a "gentleman's companion" on the front page of The Times of London.  His Nanny would help him sift through the replies.

He was inspired by the impressionists and, particularly, by Picasso.  As he developed his own voice, he bucked trends by returning to representational painting in his idiosyncratic expressionistic style.  He was asthmatic and some have conjectured that the motif of the gaping mouth in his work is as much about breath as it is about fury.  His own severest critic, he regularly destroyed scores of his paintings that did not meet his satisfaction.

Francis Bacon, Head VI, 1949

For a documentary that does justice to a complex, brilliant guide to the sharp edges of the unconscious, you could hardly do better than this recent production of the BBC, Francis Bacon: A Brush With Violence:

Francis Bacon, Splash of Water, 1988.   He died 4 years later in 1992 at 82.