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Francis Bacon (artist)

Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992)
was an Irish-born British[1] figurative painter known
for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human
form, his subjects included crucifixions, portraits of
popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends,
with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in
geometrical structures.[2] Rejecting various
classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to
render "the brutality of fact."[2] He built up a
reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art
with his unique style.[3]

Bacon said that he saw images "in series", and his

work, which numbers in the region of 590 extant
paintings along with many others he destroyed,[4]
typically focused on a single subject for sustained
periods, often in triptych or diptych formats. His Bacon photographed in the early 1950s
output can be broadly described as sequences or
variations on single motifs; including the 1930s
Picasso-influenced bio-morphs and Furies, the 1940s male heads isolated in rooms or geometric
structures, the 1950s "screaming popes," the mid-to-late 1950s animals and lone figures, the early
1960s crucifixions, the mid-to-late 1960s portraits of friends, the 1970s self-portraits, and the cooler,
more technical 1980s paintings.

Bacon did not begin to paint until his late twenties, having drifted in the late 1920s and early 1930s as
an interior decorator, bon vivant and gambler.[5] He said that his artistic career was delayed because
he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his interest. His breakthrough came
with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which sealed his
reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition. From the mid-1960s he mainly
produced portraits of friends and drinking companions, either as single, diptych or triptych panels.
Following the suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971 (memorialised in his Black Triptychs, and a
number of posthumous portraits) his art became more sombre, inward-looking and preoccupied with
the passage of time and death. The climax of his later period is marked by the masterpieces Study for
Self-Portrait (1982) and Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych, 1985–86.

Despite his existentialist and bleak outlook, Bacon was charismatic, articulate and well-read. A bon
vivant, he spent his middle age eating, drinking and gambling in London's Soho with like-minded
friends including Lucian Freud (although they fell out in the mid-1970s, for reasons neither ever
explained), John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes, Daniel Farson, Tom Baker and Jeffrey
Bernard. After Dyer's suicide he largely distanced himself from this circle, and while still socially
active and his passion for gambling and drinking continued, he settled into a platonic and somewhat
fatherly relationship with his eventual heir, John Edwards.

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Since his death, Bacon's reputation has grown steadily, and his work is among the most acclaimed,
expensive and sought-after on the art market. In the late 1990s a number of major works, previously
assumed destroyed,[6] including early 1950s pope paintings and 1960s portraits, re-emerged to set
record prices at auction.

Biography

Early life

Francis Bacon was born on 28 October 1909 in 63 Lower Baggot Street,

Dublin, Ireland.[7] At that time, all of Ireland was still part of the United
Kingdom. His father, army Captain Anthony Edward Mortimer Bacon,
known as Eddy, was born in Adelaide, South Australia, to an English father
and an Australian mother.[8] Eddy was a veteran of the Boer War, a
racehorse trainer, and grandson of Major-General Anthony Bacon, who
claimed descent from Sir Nicholas Bacon, elder half-brother of The 1st
Viscount St Albans (better known to history as Sir Francis Bacon), the
Elizabethan statesman, philosopher and essayist.[9] Bacon's mother,
Christina Winifred Firth, known as Winnie, was heiress to a Sheffield steel
business and coal mine. Bacon had an older brother, Harley,[10] two younger
sisters, Ianthe and Winifred, and a younger brother, Edward. Bacon was
raised by the family nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, from Cornwall, known as
"Nanny Lightfoot", a maternal figure who remained close to him until her
death. During the early 1940s, he rented the ground floor of 7 Cromwell
Place, South Kensington, John Everett Millais's old studio, and Nanny
Lightfoot helped him install an illicit roulette wheel there, organised by Francis Bacon's
Bacon and his friends.[11] birthplace at 63 Baggot
Street, Dublin
The family moved house often, moving between Ireland and England several
times, leading to a sense of displacement which remained with Bacon
throughout his life. The family lived in Cannycourt House in County Kildare from 1911,[10] later
moving to Westbourne Terrace in London, close to where Bacon's father worked at the Territorial
Force Records Office. They returned to Ireland after the First World War. Bacon lived with his
maternal grandmother and step-grandfather, Winifred and Kerry Supple, at Farmleigh, Abbeyleix,
County Laois, although the rest of the family again moved to Straffan Lodge near Naas, County
Kildare.

Bacon was shy as a child, and enjoyed dressing up. This, and his effeminate manner, angered his
father. A story emerged in 1992[12] of his father having had Bacon horsewhipped by their grooms.

In 1924, shortly after the establishment of the Irish Free State, his parents moved to Gloucestershire,
first to Prescott House in Gotherington, then Linton Hall near the border with Herefordshire. At a
fancy-dress party at the Firth family home, Cavendish Hall in Suffolk, Bacon dressed as a flapper with
an Eton crop, beaded dress, lipstick, high heels, and a long cigarette holder. In 1926, the family moved
back to Straffan Lodge. His sister, Ianthe, twelve years his junior, recalled that Bacon made drawings

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of ladies with cloche hats and long cigarette holders.[13] Later that year, Bacon was thrown out of
Straffan Lodge following an incident in which his father found him admiring himself in front of a large
mirror wearing his mother's underwear.[14]

London, Berlin and Paris

Bacon spent the latter half of 1926 in London, on an allowance of £3 a week from his mother's trust
fund, reading Nietzsche. Although poor (£5 was then the average weekly wage),[15] Bacon found that
by avoiding rent and engaging in petty theft, he could survive. To supplement his income, he briefly
tried his hand at domestic service, but although he enjoyed cooking, he became bored and resigned.
He was sacked from a telephone-answering position at a shop selling women's clothes in Poland
Street in Soho, after writing a poison pen letter to the owner. Bacon found himself drifting through
London's homosexual underworld, aware that he was able to attract a certain type of rich man,
something he was quick to take advantage of, having developed a taste for good food and wine. One
was a relative of Winnie Harcourt-Smith, another breeder of racehorses, who was renowned for his
manliness. Bacon claimed his father had asked this "uncle" to take him 'in-hand' and 'make a man of
him'. Bacon had a difficult relationship with his father, once admitting to being sexually attracted to
him.[16]

In 1927 Bacon moved to Berlin, where he first saw Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Sergei Eisenstein's
Battleship Potemkin, both later to be influences on his work. He spent two months in Berlin, though
Harcourt-Smith left after one – "He soon got tired of me, of course, and went off with a woman ... I
didn't really know what to do, so I hung on for a while." Bacon then spent the next year-and-a-half in
Paris. He met Yvonne Bocquentin, pianist and connoisseur, at the opening of an exhibition. Aware of
his own need to learn French, Bacon lived for three months with Madame Bocquentin and her family
at their house near Chantilly. He travelled into Paris to visit the city's art galleries.[17] At the Château
de Chantilly (Musée Condé) he saw Nicolas Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents, a painting which he
often referred to in his later work.[18]

Return to London

Bacon moved to London in the winter of 1928/29, to work as an interior designer. He took a studio at
17 Queensberry Mews West, South Kensington, sharing the upper floor with Eric Allden – his first
collector – and his childhood nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. In 1929, he met Eric Hall, his patron and lover
in an often torturous and abusive relationship. Bacon left the Queensberry Mews West studio in 1931
and had no settled space for some years. He probably shared a studio with Roy De Maistre, circa
1931/32 in Chelsea.[19]

Furniture and rugs

The 1933 Crucifixion was his first painting to attract public attention, and was in part based on Pablo
Picasso's The Three Dancers of 1925. It was not well received; disillusioned, he abandoned painting
for nearly a decade, and suppressed his earlier works.[20] He visited Paris in 1935 where he bought a
secondhand book on anatomical diseases of the mouth containing high quality hand-coloured plates
of both open mouths and oral interiors,[21] which haunted and obsessed him for the remainder of his
life. These and the scene with the nurse screaming on the Odessa steps from the Battleship Potemkin
later became recurrent parts of Bacon's iconography, with the angularity of Eisenstein's images often
combined with the thick red palette of his recently purchased medical tome.
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In the winter of 1935–36, Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, making a first selection for the
International Surrealist Exhibition, visited his studio at 71 Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea saw "three
or four large canvases including one with a grandfather clock", but found his work "insufficiently
surreal to be included in the show". Bacon claimed Penrose told him "Mr. Bacon, don't you realise a
lot has happened in painting since the Impressionists?" In 1936 or 1937 Bacon moved from 71 Royal
Hospital Road to the top floor of 1 Glebe Place, Chelsea, which Eric Hall had rented. The following
year, Patrick White moved to the top two floors of the building where De Maistre had his studio, on
Eccleston Street and commissioned from Bacon, by now a friend, a writing desk (with wide drawers
and a red linoleum top). Expressing one of his basic concerns from the late 1930s, Bacon said that his
artistic career was delayed because he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his
interest.[5]

In January 1937, at Thomas Agnew and Sons, 43 Old Bond Street, London, Bacon exhibited in a group
show, Young British Painters, which included Graham Sutherland and Roy De Maistre. Eric Hall
organised the show. He showed four works: Figures in a Garden (1936); Abstraction, Abstraction
from the Human Form (known from magazine photographs) and Seated Figure (also lost). These
paintings prefigure Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) in alternatively
representing a tripod structure (Abstraction), bared teeth (Abstraction from the Human Form), and
both being biomorphic in form.

On 1 June 1940, Bacon's father died. Bacon was named sole Trustee/Executor of his father's will,
which requested the funeral be as "private and simple as possible". Unfit for active wartime service,
Bacon volunteered for civil defence and worked full-time in the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) rescue
service; the fine dust of bombed London worsened his asthma and he was discharged. At the height of
the Blitz, Eric Hall rented a cottage for Bacon and himself at Bedales Lodge in Steep, near Petersfield,
Hampshire. Figure Getting Out of a Car (ca. 1939/1940) was painted here but is known only from an
early 1946 photograph taken by Peter Rose Pulham. The photograph was taken shortly before the
canvas was painted over by Bacon and retitled Landscape with Car. An ancestor to the biomorphic
form of the central panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), the
composition was suggested by a photograph of Hitler getting out of a car at one of the Nuremberg
rallies. Bacon claims to have "copied the car and not much else".[22]

Bacon and Hall in 1943 took the ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, formerly the
house and studio of John Everett Millais. High-vaulted and north-lit, its roof was recently bombed –
Bacon was able to adapt a large old billiard room at the back as his studio. Lightfoot, lacking an
alternative location, slept on the kitchen table. They held illicit roulette parties, organised by Bacon
with the assistance of Hall.

Early success

By 1944 Bacon had gained confidence and moved toward developing his unique signature style.[23]
His Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion had summarised themes explored in his
earlier paintings, including his examination of Picasso's biomorphs, his interpretations of the
Crucifixion, and the Greek Furies. It is generally considered his first mature piece;[24] he regarded his
works before the triptych as irrelevant. The painting caused a sensation when exhibited in 1945 and
established him as a foremost post-war painter. Remarking on the cultural significance of Three
Studies, John Russell observed in 1971 that "there was painting in England before the Three Studies,
and painting after them, and no one ... can confuse the two."[25]

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Painting (1946) was shown in

several group shows including in
the British section of Exposition
internationale d'art moderne (18
November – 28 December 1946)
at the Musée National d'Art
Moderne, for which Bacon
travelled to Paris. Within a
fortnight of the sale of Painting
(1946) to the Hanover Gallery
Bacon used the proceeds to
decamp from London to Monte Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944. Oil and pastel
Carlo. After staying at a on Sundeala board. Tate Britain, London
succession of hotels and flats,
including the Hôtel de Ré, Bacon
settled in a large villa, La Frontalière, in the hills above the town. Hall and Lightfoot would come to
stay. Bacon spent much of the next few years in Monte Carlo apart from short visits to London. From
Monte Carlo, Bacon wrote to Sutherland and Erica Brausen. His letters to Brausen show he painted
there, but no paintings are known to survive. Bacon said he became "obsessed" with the Casino de
Monte Carlo, where he would "spend whole days". Falling in debt from gambling here, he was unable
to afford a new canvas. This compelled him to paint on the raw, unprimed side of his previous work, a
practice he kept throughout his life.[26]

In 1948, Painting (1946) sold to Alfred Barr for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York for
£240. Bacon wrote to Sutherland asking that he apply fixative to the patches of pastel on Painting
(1946) before it was shipped to New York. (The work is now too fragile to be moved from MoMA for
exhibition elsewhere.) At least one visit to Paris in 1946 brought Bacon into more immediate contact
with French postwar painting and with Left Bank ideas such as Existentialism.[27] He had, by this
time, embarked on his lifelong friendship with Isabel Rawsthorne, a painter closely involved with
Giacometti and the Left Bank set.[28] They shared many interests, including ethnography and classical
literature.[29]

Late 1940s

In 1947, Sutherland introduced Bacon to Brausen, who represented Bacon for twelve years. Despite
this, Bacon did not mount a one-man show in Brausen's Hanover Gallery until 1949.[30] Bacon
returned to London and Cromwell Place late in 1948.

The following year Bacon exhibited his "Heads" series, most notable for Head VI, Bacon's first
surviving engagement with Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (three 'popes' were painted in
Monte Carlo in 1946 but were destroyed). He kept an extensive inventory of images for source
material, but preferred not to confront the major works in person; he viewed Portrait of Innocent X
only once, much later in his life.[31]

1950s

Bacon's main haunt was The Colony Room, a private drinking club at 41 Dean Street in Soho, known
as "Muriel's" after Muriel Belcher, its proprietor.[32][33] Belcher had run the Music-box club in
Leicester Square during the war, and secured a 3 – 11pm drinking licence for the Colony Room bar as
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a private-members club.
Bacon was an early
member, joining the day
after its opening in
1948.[34] He was
'adopted' by Belcher as a
'daughter', and allowed
free drinks and £10 a
week to bring in friends
and rich patrons. In 1948
he met John Minton, a
regular at Muriel's, as Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1963
were the painters Lucian
Freud, Frank Auerbach,
Patrick Swift and the Vogue photographer John Deakin.[35]

In 1950, Bacon met the art critic David Sylvester, then best known for his writing on Henry Moore and
Alberto Giacometti. Sylvester had admired and written about Bacon since 1948. Bacon's artistic
inclinations in the 1950s moved towards his abstracted figures which were typically isolated in
geometrical cage-like spaces, and set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon said that he saw
images "in series", and his work typically focused more on a single subject for sustained periods, often
in triptych or diptych formats.[36] Although his decisions might have been driven by the fact that in
the 1950s he tended to produce group works for specific showings, usually leaving things until the last
minute, there is significant development in his aesthetic choices during this period which influenced
his preference for the represented content in his paintings.

Bacon was impressed by Goya, African landscapes and wildlife, and took photographs in Kruger
National Park. On his return journey he spent a few days in Cairo, and wrote to Erica Brausen of his
intent to visit Karnak and Luxor, and then travel via Alexandria to Marseilles. The visit confirmed his
belief in the supremacy of Egyptian art, embodied by the Sphinx. He returned in early 1951.

On 30 April 1951, Jessie Lightfoot, his childhood nanny, died at Cromwell Place; Bacon was gambling
in Nice when he learned of her death. She had been his closest companion, joining him in London on
his return from Paris, and lived with him and Eric Alden at Queensberry Mews West, and later with
Eric Hall near Petersfield, in Monte Carlo and at Cromwell Place. Stricken, Bacon sold the 7 Cromwell
Place apartment.

In 1958 he aligned with the Marlborough Fine Art gallery, who remained as his sole dealer until 1992.
In return for a 10-year contract, Marlborough advanced him money against current and future
paintings, with the price of each determined by its size. A painting measuring 20 inches by 24 inches
was valued at £165 ($462), while one of 65 inches by 78 inches was valued at £420 ($1,176); these
were sizes Bacon favoured. According to the contract, the painter would try to supply the gallery with
£3,500 ($9,800) worth of pictures each year.[37]

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In 1958, Bacon was a habitué of the King's Arms on Fulham Road, near the Chelsea School of Art.
Known to all as "Finch’s", the pub was at this time the principal haunt of a bohemian network of
artists, writers and poets, including Frank Bowling, Lucian Freud, and sculptors Elizabeth Frink and
Lynn Chadwick.

1960s and 1970s

Bacon met George Dyer in 1963 at a pub,[38] although a much-repeated myth claims they met when
Dyer burgled Bacon's flat.[39] Dyer was about 30 years old, from London's East End. He came from a
family steeped in crime, and had till then spent his life drifting between theft and prison. Bacon's
earlier relationships had been with older and tumultuous men. His first lover, Peter Lacy, tore up
Bacon's paintings, beat him in drunken rages, at times leaving him on streets half-conscious.[40]
Bacon was now the dominating personality, attracted to Dyer's vulnerability and trusting nature. Dyer
was impressed by Bacon's self-confidence and success, and Bacon acted as a protector and father
figure to the insecure younger man.[41]

Dyer was, like Bacon, a borderline alcoholic and similarly took obsessive care with his appearance.
Pale-faced and a chain-smoker, Dyer typically confronted his daily hangovers by drinking again. His
compact and athletic build belied a docile and inwardly tortured personality, although the art critic
Michael Peppiatt describes him as having the air of a man who could "land a decisive punch". Their
behaviours eventually overwhelmed their affair, and by 1970 Bacon was merely providing Dyer with
enough money to stay more or less permanently drunk.[41]

As Bacon's work moved from the extreme subject matter of his early paintings to portraits of friends
in the mid-1960s, Dyer became a dominating presence.[42] Bacon's paintings emphasise Dyer's
physicality, yet are uncharacteristically tender. More than any other of Bacon's close friends, Dyer
came to feel inseparable from his portraits. The paintings gave him stature, a raison d'etre, and
offered meaning to what Bacon described as Dyer's "brief interlude between life and death".[43] Many
critics have described Dyer's portraits as favourites, including Michel Leiris and Lawrence Gowing.
Yet as Dyer's novelty diminished within Bacon's circle of sophisticated intellectuals, Dyer became
increasingly bitter and ill at ease. Although Dyer welcomed the attention the paintings brought him,
he did not pretend to understand or even like them. "All that money an' I fink they're reely 'orrible,"
he observed with choked pride.[44]

Dyer abandoned crime but descended into alcoholism. Bacon's money attracted hangers-on for
benders around London's Soho. Withdrawn and reserved when sober, Dyer was highly animated and
aggressive when drunk, and often attempted to "pull a Bacon" by buying large rounds and paying for
expensive dinners for his wide circle. Dyer's erratic behaviour inevitably wore thin with his cronies,
with Bacon, and with Bacon's friends. Most of Bacon's art world associates regarded Dyer as a
nuisance – an intrusion into the world of high culture to which their Bacon belonged.[45] Dyer reacted
by becoming increasingly needy and dependent. By 1971, he was drinking alone and only in occasional
contact with his former lover.[41]

In October 1971, Dyer joined Bacon in Paris for the opening of Bacon's retrospective at the Grand
Palais. While Bacon's career was at a peak, he was described at the time as Britain's "greatest living
painter", Dyer knew that his own importance to Bacon was in decline. To gain attention, he planted
cannabis in his flat and phoned the police, and attempted suicide on a number of occasions.[46][47] In
Paris, Bacon and Dyer initially shared a hotel room, but Bacon left. When he returned on the morning
of 24 October, with Danziger-Miles and Valerie Beston, they discovered Dyer's body. They persuaded
the hotel manager not to announce the death for two days.[48]
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