I was sorry to miss the recent retrospectives of Francis Bacon’s work at Milan and London. I’ve only ever seen Bacon originals in the Tate Gallery’s permanent collection.
Despite my limited knowledge about the full body of his work, he’s a figure I’ve always been intrigued by. I think it is the unflinching way he confronts the darker side of humanity which I find so fascinating. Being a miserablist at heart I can relate to his unsentimental view of life as consisting of “a mere spasm of consciousness between two voids”.
Bacon was an atheist, homosexual, drinker, drifter and gambler. He was also one of the greatest artists of the 20th century who achieved everything on his own terms.
To learn more about the man behind the art, I turned to the well regarded biography by Michael Peppiatt ‘Anatomy of an Enigma’ and I found the story of his life thoroughly absorbing.
The book’s title comes from Peppiatt’s assertion that “enigma was the source from which he drew his greatest strength and inventiveness”. Peppiatt, who was a friend of Bacon’s, admits that this enigmatic quality is one which ultimately resists analysis. Why for instance, was an outspoken atheist so obsessively drawn to the potent religious symbolism of the Crucifixion?
While he was alive Bacon vigorously avoided giving full details of his private life and the idea of his paintings telling a story was anathema to him. He went to great lengths to ensure that his work was viewed in a “biographical vacuum” believing that once explained, an image is worthless.
Bacon revelled in flaunting his vices and was open about the fact that he gained his sexual pleasures from sadomasochistic practices. He comes across as a charismatic but controlling personality who hated anything that smacked of moderation or comfort. Although predominantly right wing in his beliefs Peppiatt maintains that he was also “too individualistic and contradictory to be politically classifiable”.
His taste for extravagant excess, whether it be in a luxurious hotels or squalid back street dive, he called the “gilded gutter of life”. When someone criticised his habit of draining the last drop from bottles of wine and drinking the dregs, Bacon retorted “the dregs are what I prefer”.
This uncompromising force of his character is reflected in his work. Believing that uncivilised impulses govern human conduct he realised that by representing this on canvas would disrupt conventional notions of what art was and what it could express. The more this offended the casual viewer the happier he was, Peppiatt describes Bacon as “a disturbing iconoclast in a predominantly genteel and mild-mannered English art world”.
Bacon was a one-off who understood the solitude and absurdity of existence and he was an artist whose images continue to resonate because they depict inconvenient truths.
