Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  Frank Auerbach, who arrived on the London art scene a couple of years after Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion had been exhibited, diagnosed a slightly lazy amateurism as the besetting sin of the senior generation of British artists he encountered.

  I remember artists asking one another in pubs, ‘Are you working?’, as much as to say it was a matter of choice; sometimes you’d be working, sometimes you weren’t. It wouldn’t really be gentlemanly to try too hard or make too heavy weather of the whole business. There was a lot of that.

  Bacon, in contrast, felt strongly that the only point of the business was to create a masterpiece. He dreamed of painting a picture that would annihilate all the others he had done. His difficulty was that almost nothing he did seemed, to him, good enough.

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  In a pick-up bar in Paris, as a teenager, Bacon met a man who remarked to him that the crucial thing in life was how you represent yourself. He was greatly struck by the observation and seems, indeed, to have lived by it. To an extent even greater than most artists he was self-invented. Bacon’s improvised careers, moreover, were at first remarkably successful. Initially, he set himself up as a designer of modernist furniture, in the manner of Bauhaus design and the more advanced Parisian interiors. Having attracted some attention with these, he abruptly changed course and – still in his early twenties – began to work as a painter. One of the startling aspects of this new course was that, with the possible exception of a few informal classes, he still had no training at all.

  Francis Bacon, 1950. Photo by Sam Hunter

  Bacon picked up some information about the subject from Roy de Maistre, an Australian-born painter fifteen years his senior with whom he had a close relationship in the late 1920s and early 1930s: a friendship that may not have been sexual, but certainly involved artistic mentoring. De Maistre could answer Bacon’s questions about how to put paint on canvas, although he was puzzled as to how someone with such a sophisticated understanding of art – gained entirely by looking at it – could ask such childishly simple questions about how it was made. What de Maistre did not do was instruct Bacon in how to draw, in the way drummed into students at art schools. Consequently, as other artists and friends are united in agreeing, Bacon couldn’t draw very well. Lucian Freud put it like this:

  Francis depended entirely on inspiration, which made him rather brittle. He was completely untrained, and couldn’t draw at all but was so absolutely brilliant that through sheer inspiration he could somehow make it work.

  While he had little facility with line, Bacon had a great intuitive feeling for paint – its substantiality, its fluidity, the things it could do. This, apart from the emotional charge – the grotesque horror – made Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, and the other picture Bacon exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945, Figure in a Landscape (1945), stand out. They were what art historians call ‘painterly’.

  One of the points about Bacon, simple but fundamental, was that he loved paint. It got everywhere. His working environments were splattered with it. In the 1940s he was occupying a ground-floor flat at 7 Cromwell Place, between South Kensington Underground station and the Natural History Museum. This was a place – part of a mid-nineteenth-century house that had previously been occupied by the Pre-Raphaelite John Millais and later the photographer E. O. Hoppé – that greatly struck everyone who visited with its mixture of faded opulence and anarchic disarray. The dowdy chintz and velvet sofas and divans with which the cavernous room was furnished gave it, the painter Michael Wishart felt, ‘an air of diminished grandeur, a certain forlorn sense of Edwardian splendour in retreat’. Two vast, glimmering Waterford chandeliers produced a mysterious illumination.

  It sounds like a stage set for some gothic drama. What in fact took place there was an extraordinary, subversive parody of the conventional family. Bacon’s protector and lover, a wealthy older man named Eric Hall, funded the household. But Bacon supplemented the funds he got from Hall with the proceeds of illegal gambling parties and, if necessary, a little shoplifting, both the latter activities assisted by his ex-nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who had already been living with him for a decade and a half. At Cromwell Place, she slept on the table. It seems Nanny Lightfoot filled the role she had always had: that of Bacon’s surrogate mother. Eric Hall was a substitute father, not angry and rejecting but affectionate and generous.

  John Craxton described the Cromwell Place studio as ‘rather marvellous’. He picked out a detail, a blend of luxury and disorderly squalor that was entirely typical of the man and the artist: ‘Francis had this huge Turkey carpet on the floor, and there was paint all over the carpet.’ Kathleen Sutherland, who dined there roughly once a week with her husband, Graham, recalled that ‘the salad bowl was likely to have paint on it and the painting to have salad dressing on it’ (but ‘the food and wine were good and the conversation wonderful’). It was true the flat and its furnishings got mixed up with the paint and vice versa, and both were integrated into Figure in a Landscape.

  This did not in fact represent a figure at all, but only part of one – a single leg, an arm and his lapel – the rest having vanished into a black void. What remains are sections of an empty suit. The painting was based on a photograph of Eric Hall, sitting in Hyde Park. But the location has apparently moved to the African bush, and an object resembling a machine gun has been mounted at one side of the figure – or, rather, the unoccupied clothes. The texture of the latter, Bacon explained to the critic David Sylvester, was the element of the picture that, in a moment of inspiration, got mingled with part of the room:

  Actually there is no paint at all on the suit apart from a very thin grey wash on which I put dust from the floor … I thought: well, how can I make that slightly furry quality of a flannel suit? And then I suddenly thought: well, I’ll get some dust. And you can see how near it is to a decent grey flannel suit.

  FRANCIS BACON Figure in a Landscape, 1945

  All of this is characteristic of Bacon: firstly, the desire for sensual detail – a depiction of grey flannel that would not only look right, but look as if it would feel right, as if caressing fingers would encounter that ‘slightly furry’ surface. This pursuit of a realism that would activate the nervous system was one of Bacon’s fundamental impulses as an artist (one, by the way, that distinguishes him from Picasso, which was doubtless why Sutherland added the more brushy work of Vuillard to his shorthand account of what Bacon’s work was like). This comes up again and again in Bacon’s interviews: his search for an image that would act more vividly or ‘poignantly’ on the nervous system. It was also typical that he would try something out on the spur of the moment, something as unheard of and, technically speaking, peculiar as sticking dust on his picture. Bacon loved improvisation and accident. In many ways his paintings grew out of the fertile chaos with which he surrounded himself – the dust on the suit was one example – in a direct and physical way.

  Bacon thrived on mess. He had an unusually symbiotic relationship with his works. Just as bits of the environment got into the pictures, the paint got onto him. Lucian Freud remembered, ‘Francis always used to mix paint on his forearm’ (until he ‘developed an allergy or something and couldn’t’). This habit, according to John Richardson, gave him turpentine poisoning, which eventually led him to switch to acrylic paints. A student is said to have encountered Bacon, during a brief period when he worked at the Royal College of Art in the early 1950s, in the washrooms, cleaning paint off his shoulders.

  Conversely, his use of make-up – utterly outrageous in mid-1940s London – was, in Richardson’s opinion, a variety of body painting, almost performance art. Bacon would let his beard grow until it had sufficient texture to take the cosmetic in a way he likened to the unprimed back of a canvas (on which he preferred to work). Then he took pads covered with different shades of Max Factor make-up and applied them to his face ‘this way and that across his stubble in great swoops’, just like his brushstrokes.

&nb
sp; This obsession with paint, then, was one of the qualities that set Bacon apart from many of his peers. In a community of painters who were, at heart, draughtsmen, or at least applied their pigments in a cautious and measured manner, he had an exuberant affinity for paint and what it could do. For Bacon, this was the essence of the matter, which led him to become an unexpected advocate of a slightly unfashionable older artist, Matthew Smith, whose work was shown alongside Bacon’s in the Lefevre exhibition in 1945. Smith’s subject matter – opulently rounded female nudes and piles of ruddy, ripened fruit – was very far from Bacon’s world. But the way Smith depicted them, with extrovert swirls and scoops of pigment, was exactly what the younger artist approved of. Bacon’s only published writing was a short text in praise of Smith’s work. The latter, he wrote, seemed to him,

  to be one of the very few English painters since Constable and Turner to be concerned with painting – that is, with attempting to make idea and technique inseparable. Painting in this sense tends towards a complete interlocking of image and paint, so that the image is the paint and vice versa.

  This fusing, so that the brushstroke and the thing it is representing become indissoluble, was a holy grail for Bacon. Howard Hodgkin later spoke in very similar terms of the way ‘a brush full of pigment is put down and turns into something’ such as ‘a piece of embroidery in a painting by Velázquez, or the edge of a curly hat by Rembrandt’. Hodgkin felt this was a phenomenon that was beyond verbal explanation or conscious planning. It was a magical metamorphosis: ‘if one were always after that, one couldn’t paint at all.’

  Bacon would surely have agreed. You couldn’t set out to get such an effect; it was something that happened while you were painting, almost as if the paint did it on its own as you moved it about. This was why, he felt, ‘real painting is a mysterious and continuous struggle with chance’. For Bacon – an instinctive high-stakes gambler – chance lay at the heart of the matter, both in the sense of luck, good and bad, and of the creative potential of sheer randomness. He amplified what he meant by those two adjectives, mysterious and continuous. Painting was:

  mysterious because the very substance of the paint, when used in this way, can make such a direct assault upon the nervous system; continuous because the medium is so fluid and subtle that every change that is made loses what is already there in the hope of making a fresh gain.

  FRANCIS BACON Painting 1946, 1946

  This conception of art was very different from the academic notion of a carefully planned picture, evolving slowly through studies and compositional sketches to the completed work. Bacon believed in painting as improvisation, even when he had a prior idea – and he was cagy, perhaps downright evasive, about the degree to which that was actually the case. In the paintings he showed at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945, however, he was still some way from achieving this ideal.

  In Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, the brushstrokes that make up the odd tripod arrangement in front of the central, blindfolded creature are loose and flowing and look as if they were rapidly executed (Bacon, once he got going, painted quickly). But the ‘complete interlocking of image and paint’ that Bacon sought was still some distance away. He got closer to this holy grail the following year.

  In 1946, he achieved a masterpiece, one of the greatest pictures of his career and the first he had considered complete. This was the work that Lucian Freud saw when he visited the Cromwell Place studio, and which he remembered as ‘the marvellous one with an umbrella’. Bacon, too, was stumped when it came to thinking of a title to describe this extraordinary work, which he ended up calling simply Painting 1946 (1946). According to Bacon, it came to him ‘as an accident’. He was working on another combination of imagery – a chimpanzee and a bird of prey – when, unexpectedly, the marks he had put down suggested a quite different image. ‘It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another.’ Mind you, this account might or might not be entirely true – or, perhaps, it might be a way of underlining what Bacon felt was the deeper truth about the picture: that its ingredients were random, that in aggregate they meant nothing.

  They were not all novelties in Bacon’s work, or his surroundings. The main figure – a man in a suit, the top of his head missing, his mouth gaping – seems to have been derived from photographs of politicians orating on podiums, among them senior Nazis, with microphones sprouting in front. The umbrella, a common accessory in snaps of early film directors in action, had already appeared in another Bacon painting, Figure Study II (1945–46). On the floor beneath, there is what looks very much like the Turkey carpet, drizzled with paint, from Cromwell Place.

  In the background are pink and purple panels that have been connected with the tiles of an old-fashioned butcher’s shop, in light of the butcher’s wares that are on display in the painting – what look like two sides of lamb in the foreground and, behind, the crucified carcass of a whole, spread-eagled cow. The raw meat was a new motif for Bacon, but one that responded to deep feelings, both psychological and aesthetic. He loved meat, much as he loved paint. He would go to look at it in the food hall at Harrods, one of his favourite places, which he described to Sylvester:

  If you go to some of those great stores, where you just go through those great halls of death, you can see meat and fish and birds and everything else all lying dead there. And, of course, one has got to remember as a painter that there is this great beauty of the colour of meat.

  Bacon thought meat a marvellous spectacle, while simultaneously it reminded him of ‘the whole horror of life, of one thing living off another’ – an unorthodox taste to mention, but scarcely a novelty in art. A long tradition of still-life painting, going back to the sixteenth century, had dwelt on the visual attractions of dead chickens and sides of beef. There was also a subsidiary tradition, including works by Francisco Goya and Rembrandt, which hinted at the link between butchered animals and human death, even holy martyrs. Francisco Goya’s Dead Turkey (1808–12) puts one in mind of a murdered saint, and Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox (1655) made a connection between food production and the most sacred theme in Christianity, the Crucifixion.

  This, of course, was the link that Bacon evoked. But rationally speaking, this assemblage – Harrods food hall, totalitarian speech-maker, umbrella and Bacon’s own carpet – made no sense. In a way, this was the message. Here was a crucifixion, but not one that led to resurrection and redemption; rather, it presented suffering and dead meat, presided over by a totalitarian despot. It was an altarpiece, sumptuous and sombre in colour, but one that dealt only with meaningless suffering and cruelty.

  Bacon doubtless came upon the combination intuitively, if not quite as accidentally as he claimed. He was, in any case, throughout his career, militantly opposed to spelling out the meanings of his pictures. To do so, he believed, would make them dull and literary. ‘The moment the story is elaborated, the boredom sets in; the story talks louder than the paint.’ In this, Bacon was in rebellion against a British art world that had long been fond of telling stories – an interest artists as different as the Pre-Raphaelites, Walter Sickert and even the Neo-Romantics all shared. Another departure in a nation that had not produced much in the way of religious art for centuries – a few, very literary works of Pre-Raphaelite storytelling aside – Bacon painted pictures that, even in a violently nihilistic way, looked like altarpieces.

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  In several ways, Painting 1946 was an index of Bacon’s ambition. One was its sheer scale. This was a size up from the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. It is some six feet high: very large for an easel painting, and too cumbersome – its alarming imagery apart – for most collectors’ houses. Even more ambitious than its dimensions, though, were its artistic and philosophical goals.

  Barnett Newman, the American painter who considered that art criticism was for the birds, also famously said, ‘our quarrel was with Michelangelo’. This was perhaps absurd over-reaching. The critic Robert Hughes retrospecti
vely responded, ‘Well, you lost, Barney!’ But Bacon – who was also fascinated by Michelangelo – would probably have agreed with Newman in aiming high. He too wanted to make a kind of painting that was adequate in emotional and artistic impact to reflect the human condition. And this, as he saw it, was defined by meaninglessness. God was dead, life was pointless, death was the end. Yet he wanted to carry on making pictures with the profundity and force of the old masters.

  Again, American contemporaries such as Newman and Mark Rothko would have agreed – though they would not have seen eye to eye with Bacon about his determined retention of the human image. The avant-garde painters in New York – who were first dubbed ‘Abstract Expressionists’ in 1946 – aspired to make pictures that did not represent identifiable people or objects in the visible world, but through paint alone measured up to the seriousness and heroic power of the most monumental works of the past.

  They wanted their pictures, as they put it, to be sublime. Bacon might not have used that term, but he wanted do something comparable through figurative paintings which represented nothing, or at least nothing that was easily nameable. The difference was that in New York there were several artists moving in parallel directions. No one else in 1940s London was aiming for sublimity. Bacon was working alone, and – despite being at the centre of a lively circle in the 1950s and 1960s, containing several hugely gifted fellow painters – he continued to feel he was a member of a group of one.