The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

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  AT THIS TIME, ACCORDING to David Sylvester (who was living in the apartment directly below Bacon and Minton), Freud “clearly had a crush on Francis.” He was sensitive to it because, by his own admission, he did, too: “We both copied Bacon’s uniform of a plain, dark grey, worsted double-breasted Savile Row suit, plain shirt, plain dark tie, brown suede shoes,” he said.

  Emboldened, perhaps, by Freud’s own drawings of him with his pants open, Bacon asked Freud to pose for him in his studio. The painting that resulted turned out to be the first named portrait in Bacon’s oeuvre. For this reason alone its significance is huge: Portraiture would be at the heart of Bacon’s mature art. From the mid-1960s, when his reputation was peaking, by far the majority of his paintings were portraits of a small number of intimate friends (just as Freud’s already were, and would continue to be).

  Was this a sign that Freud’s approach to painting was beginning to exert a pull on Bacon, just as he was clearly influencing Freud? It’s hard to say. Finding evidence of Freud’s influence on Bacon has never been as straightforward as identifying the influences going the other way. That’s mostly because Bacon became famous decades before Freud. Freud spoke openly about Bacon’s effect on him. But Bacon—who was keen to establish his own pedigree and whose acknowledged models (Velázquez, Ingres, Soutine, van Gogh, Picasso) were exclusively Continental—had no reason to acknowledge the influence of a younger, provincial protégé with whom he subsequently fell out, and whose name would barely have registered with international critics and art historians in any case. But Freud had, and would always have, an impact on almost everyone who knew him. He was anarchic, amoral, and fundamentally selfish; but he had a captivating gift for intimacy. “To be with him in his company is like sticking your finger in an electric socket and being wired up to the national grid for half an hour,” said Louise Liddell, a framer who sat for him years later. Bacon was not immune to his effect.

  “When I was younger,” Bacon later said, “I needed extreme subject matter for my paintings. Then, as I got older, I realized I had all the subjects I needed in my own life.” It may well have been Freud, with his nose for the potential for anarchy within intimacy, who helped him arrive at this realization. Certainly, Bacon’s focus, from this time forward, on constantly reiterated portrayals of a small group of intimate acquaintances strongly suggests the influence of the younger man.

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  WHAT WAS UNEXPECTED ABOUT Bacon’s first named portrait (although it set a pattern for the future) was that, when Freud arrived, he found the painting of him already on the easel—and almost finished. In it, a full-length figure in a gray suit leaned against a blurred suggestion of wall [see Fig. 3]. A flat black shape, like a photographer’s shadow in a holiday snapshot, entered the frame from below. The figure’s (nominally, Freud’s) arms and feet were fudged (the articulation of joints was never Bacon’s forte), and he had pinlike eyes and a bland, meaty chin that in no way resembled his.

  It turned out that, in lieu of Freud himself, Bacon had used a visual trigger—a photograph, as it happened, of a young Franz Kafka that had been used as a frontispiece to the first edition of Max Brod’s biography of the writer. What Kafka had to do with Freud is impossible to say and perhaps not really the point: It was a question, instead, of unconscious, almost random suggestion.

  © THE ESTATE OF FRANCIS BACON. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK / DACS, LONDON.

  FIG. 3 Francis Bacon, Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1951 (oil on canvas) / Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, UK / Bridgeman Images.

  The portrait is nothing special. It barely hints at the lavish distortions and ardent injuries Bacon would later inflict on his subjects, all in an attempt to convey what he liked to call “the brutality of fact.” What mattered was what it revealed about Bacon’s attitude to his subjects—an attitude that, for now at least, was completely at odds with Freud’s.

  Bacon was interested in capturing what he called “the pulsations of a person.” It was an idea that profoundly affected Freud, who later spoke about the effect people make in space and about his desire to try to paint the air around his sitters as much as the sitters themselves: “The aura given out by a person is as much a part of them as their flesh.” But Bacon was also very open about the fact that he found the presence of sitters in his studio distracting. He preferred to paint alone. “This may be just my own neurotic sense,” he later told Sylvester, “but I find it less inhibiting to work from them through memory and their photographs than actually having them seated there before me.”

  Over the years, he found various, always beguiling ways of explaining this preference. When, for instance, Sylvester asked him whether he was saying that the process of painting was “almost like the process of recalling,” Bacon fervently agreed:

  “I am saying it,” he said. “And I think that the methods by which this is done are so artificial that the model before you, in my case, inhibits the artificiality by which this thing can be brought back.” The subject’s presence inhibited him, he said, because “if I like them, I don’t want to practice before them the injury that I do to them in my work. I would rather practice the injury in private by which I think I can record the fact of them more clearly.”

  What was the source of Bacon’s compulsion to inflict “injury” in his paintings? Any definitive answer would surely be pat. It’s clear, however, just from looking at them, that Bacon’s distortions of conventional likeness, effected via the circuit breaker of photography, communicated a deep ambivalence. This ambivalence—not just “mixed feelings” (the phrase suggests dilution) but actively opposed feelings—was at the heart of Bacon’s view of friendship and of love itself. Real friendship, he once said, was “a situation where two people could tear each other to bits.” His gorgeous smears and violent swipes of paint amounted, as David Sylvester put it, to “both a caress and an assault.” In conversation with Sylvester in the 1960s, Bacon even dredged up Oscar Wilde’s famous formulation—“you kill the thing you love”—which was itself merely another version of Degas’s diary entry: “The people you love the most are the people you could hate the most.”

  In the context of his relationship with Freud, the idea of portraiture as an injurious act has specific and ongoing relevance, since Bacon kept on painting images of Freud over several decades. What’s notable about all these portraits, according to Peppiatt, is Freud’s “unusual resilience and energy”:

  “Whereas several of Bacon’s favorite male sitters…seem on the point of succumbing to his furious onslaught of brushstrokes, Freud typically appears to withstand the worst, rearing up through paint attacks—dazed and confused but indomitable.”

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  THE PHOTOGRAPHS BACON WORKED with were not always of the sitter. The more vital source might be a photograph of an animal; it might be a suggestive film still; a trampled reproduction of an old-master painting; an image of an injury in a medical textbook; or a sequence of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneer of stop-motion photography. And it wasn’t only preexisting photographs Bacon worked from. He also commissioned photographs of prospective subjects from his friend and drinking companion John Deakin. A failed painter, Deakin was superbly effective behind the camera. His photographic portraits of the denizens of Soho in the 1950s, which were retrieved from under his bed when he died, many of them torn and tattered, the negatives unidentifiable, have become classics. They have the impact, as his friend Daniel Farson wrote, “of a prison mug shot taken by a real artist.” They were images “to recoil from, brutal portraits—intimate close-ups of the face—emphasizing every blemish.”

  Deakin had his friends, but he was also widely loathed. George Melly, the Surrealist and jazz aficionado, memorably described him as “a vicious little drunk of such inventive malice and implacable bitchiness that it’s surprising he didn’t choke on his own venom.”

  But Bacon was attracted by malice. And over several years, Deakin to
ok more than forty portrait photographs at Bacon’s behest. To create the psychological effect of having encountered them at random, Bacon liked to work from them after they had been ripped or torn and allowed to settle, like dead leaves, into the trammeled mulch of his filthy, paint-splattered studio floor.

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  LIKE MANY OTHER MODERN ARTISTS, Bacon was convinced he had seen through “the lie of realism”—even the kind of sophisticated urban realism invented by Manet and Degas in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Realism’s pretense at disinterested truth-telling, its slavish fidelity to appearances—these things were of dubious value, he believed, in the more extreme and fragmented circumstances of the twentieth century. A conventional portrait of a face could scarcely convey movement, let alone the gamut of psychological sensations, the human sense of mortality, the apprehension of futility, and of the nightmare of recent history—all those things that Bacon saw as fundamental to the modern condition, and therefore more “real” than appearances. Bacon was obsessed by the question of how to communicate these things. Inspired in part by Picasso and Matisse and the Surrealists, he spoke about distorting the image in an effort to bring about a greater sense of truth. Instead of painstaking observation over hours, days, and months, like Freud, he liked the idea of ambush. He wanted, wrote Russell, “to bait the trap, in such a way that conventional ‘likeness’ at first sight seems excluded, only to be caught unawares at a later stage.”

  “Tell me,” Bacon later asked Sylvester, “who today has been able to record anything that comes across to us as a fact without causing deep injury to the image?”

  Freud may have been influenced by this kind of talk. But he was still wedded to appearances. He remained adamant, contra Bacon, that appearances were connected to truth; or at least that the effort to record them as faithfully as possible—the artist and the model in the same room, hand and eye, feeling and instinct, all working in concert—carried its own charge of truth. It was in this matter—the use of photography, the presence or otherwise of the sitter—that Freud put up his most strenuous resistance to Bacon’s tremendous, potentially overwhelming influence.

  For Freud, a successful painting was always the record of a relationship in process. It was a transaction, as he later put it. It could go on for months, even years: Duration was what enriched it. Yes, the painter was ultimately in control; but the process demanded shifting degrees of domination and yielding from both parties. (“In a culture of photography,” he would later say, “we have lost the tension that the sitter’s power of censorship sets up in the painted portrait.”) What mattered to Freud about painting in the presence of a model was “the degree to which feelings can enter into the transaction from both sides. Photography can do this to a tiny extent, painting to an unlimited degree.”

  It wasn’t until later that Freud articulated these instincts, but they were already at the core of his creative convictions. They were insights he had held close for years, ones that he knew he couldn’t let go of. But he sensed, in the way he acted on them, a limitation. He had an inkling—a useful one, as it turned out—that Bacon’s more radical approach might hold the key to overcoming it.

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  WHEN FREUD CONVINCED BACON to sit for his famous small portrait, the idea (this, at least, is how he seems to have sold it) was to hang the finished work in Wheeler’s, the Soho fish restaurant where Bacon liked to hold court. Freud wanted to paint him, he remembered the year before his death in 2012, “not just as an art world person, but as…I don’t know…as a friend, I suppose. I have often painted people because I want to know them.”

  Bacon was willing. The process took about three months, working every day—not “particularly long,” as Freud later acknowledged; his mature portraits could take a year or more. His idea of portraiture was all to do with slow and patient scrutiny, steady accumulation of life-like detail, and the most fastidious attention to atmosphere and mood.

  It was a trial for Bacon, who was temperamentally unsuited to posing. “I can hardly sit down for long,” he told Sylvester. “I’ve never been able to sit in a comfortable chair…It’s one of the reasons I’ve suffered all my life from high blood pressure. People say: Relax! What do they mean? I never understand this thing where people relax their muscles and they relax everything—I don’t know how to do it.”(Compare this with Freud, who later in his life said: “My idea of leisure was to do with that luxurious feeling of having all the time in the world and letting it pass unused.”)

  Bacon’s simmering volatility is, of course, exactly what Freud managed to get over in the finished portrait. It’s the source of its startling force. But getting the thing done—three months of sittings, for several hours each day—cannot have been easy, for either artist or sitter. Freud remembered much later that Bacon “complained a lot about sitting—which he always did about everything—but not to me at all. I heard about it, you know, from people in the pub.” And it really was a case of sitting: Freud sat so close to Bacon that their knees touched. All the while Freud rested the copper plate on his lap. It’s hard to imagine a more charged situation. All the more so when you consider what Bacon at this point meant to Freud.

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  THE PICTURE WAS COMPLETED, but it never went to Wheeler’s, because, before the end of 1952, it was purchased by the Tate, along with Freud’s other early masterpiece, a portrait of Kitty called Girl with a White Dog.

  A photograph Deakin took of Bacon later that same year suggests that Deakin saw Freud’s portrait of Bacon in progress. Like Freud’s small picture, the photograph is a close-up of Bacon’s head, lit from one side in just the same way. Both photograph and painting are cropped in exactly the same places, except that Freud’s portrait includes Bacon’s full head of hair, whereas Deakin’s photograph cuts off just above the hairline.

  “I like my picture of Francis Bacon enormously,” said Deakin, “perhaps because I like him so much, and admire his strange, tormented painting. He’s an odd one, wonderfully tender and generous by nature, yet with curious streaks of cruelty, especially to his friends. I think that in this portrait I managed to catch something of the fear which must underlie these contradictions in his character.”

  The syntax is not Freud’s—he never spoke so plainly—but the thoughts expressed could almost be his. What is Freud’s stolen portrait of Bacon, anyway, if not a “a prison mug shot taken by a real artist”?

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  BACON’S HOUSEMATE JOHNNY MINTON saw Freud’s portrait of Bacon before it went to the Tate. Impressed, he commissioned Freud to paint him, too. Minton had a long face with thick, unkempt hair and dark, suffering eyes. His relationship with Bacon was vexed. He was talented. He had earned some early notice as a painter, and was well regarded for his distinctive illustrations, which graced the covers of Elizabeth David’s first two books on cooking. He was a respected teacher at the Royal College of Art, too. But his reputation as an artist was already in eclipse as Bacon’s was beginning to take off. His self-belief was eroding by the month, and he was hobbled by jealousy. “I am sure he watched Francis’s ascendency with despair,” wrote Farson.

  With his forceful personality and deep vein of ambition, Freud was to some extent insulated from too much envy. He liked and admired Bacon too much to let his friend’s success eat away at him. He was younger, too—which helps. He must have watched the dynamic between Bacon and Minton play out with considerable fascination, making mental notes about what to avoid in his own relationship with Bacon. Painting Minton at this juncture was, apart from anything else, perhaps a way to watch the situation more closely.

  Bacon and Minton, attention-seekers both, found themselves competing for the limelight, “holding court at opposite ends of [the Colony Room], vying with each other in rounds bought and general outrageousness,” according to Peppiatt. At least one of these evenings ended with Bacon pouring champagne over Minton’s head. Minton behaved as if he were ashamed of his commercial success and of his inherited wealth. “Let’s spend
the rest of my trust fund!” he liked to declare as he bought rounds in Soho.

  When Freud painted Minton, he portrayed him with a long and horsey face, glassy-eyed with despair. He had come off the worse in his competition with Bacon, and he gradually succumbed to alcoholism and psychic ruin. Within five years of Freud’s portrait of him, he was found dead in his own home. He had swallowed a pile of sleeping pills.

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  IT WAS STRANGE AND NO DOUBT disorienting to both men that, just as their own relationship reached a point of maximum intimacy and intensity, Freud and Bacon found themselves embarking on amorous relationships that were to be the most important, the most destabilizing, the most transformative in each of their lives. These relationships—Freud’s with Caroline Blackwood, Bacon’s with Peter Lacy—began in the early 1950s and took both artists right to the edge of their own self-knowledge, upturning earlier assumptions and sparking self-destructive, almost suicidal reactions.

  Love life, despite the biographers’ best efforts, is impregnably private. But love affairs do have observers, attendants, concerned and involved bystanders. And just as Freud’s relationship with Blackwood had, in Bacon, its hovering bad angel, Bacon’s affair with the ex-fighter-pilot Peter Lacy was observed, at a more measured, oblique, and baffled distance, by Freud.