GLIMPSES OF FRANCIS BACON
“I lived through the revolutionary Irish movement, Sinn Fein and the wars, Hiroshima, Hitler and the death camps and daily violence that I’ve experienced all my life,” the painter Francis Bacon once famously declared, “and after that they want me to paint bunches of pink flowers.” Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Bacon’s work would know it didn’t quite turn out that way, and a freshly published catalogue raisonné of the tortured artist’s work — published by the Estate of Francis Bacon and available for about $2,000 — makes it abundantly clear.
TWO FIGURES, 1953
Based on Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of wrestlers, “Two Figures” is typical of Bacon for its contorted bodies locked in an indistinct action, somewhere between intimacy and aggression. For Bacon, who was gay in a time when it was not socially acceptable, intimacy was a dangerous experience and fraught with peril.
LYING FIGURE IN A MIRROR, 1971
One of six paintings made for Bacon’s 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Its indistinct tangle of body parts, piled in a heap, have the duality of many Bacon works: of a flayed husk of human flesh, or an exhausted heap of post-coital bliss. Not identifiably male or female, but visceral and raw, Bacon’s contradictory images remain captivatingly unresolved.
STUDY FOR SELF PORTRAIT, 1976
Deemed to be Bacon’s only nude self portrait, this work appears at first to be uncomplicated, but as Martin Harrison, the historian responsible for the catalogue notes, “it is a depiction of Bacon’s unease . . . the upper part of the body is anxiously convulsed, while the life force drains from Bacon’s foot.”
PAINTING, 1950
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bacon was among very few British artists to paint in the large scale as the Abstract Expressionists in New York. That he remained a figurative painter underscores his devotion to certain themes: death (the dissociated shadow, slipping away from the figure, suggests death shadowing life) and gender identity and sexuality, which the obliquely androgynous figure here leaves hanging.
TWO STUDIES FROM THE HUMAN BODY, 1974-75
Bacon, complaining to a one-time owner of this painting, explained that a 1975 newspaper article had outed his homosexuality, so he painted this work with a figure (in the upper right) as “part ape, part sea bird” defecating on the patch of newsprint in the foreground. He was probably kidding, but the mutating figures in this work — the hunched, simian figure in the foreground; the knot of limb and flesh behind — are classic, visceral Bacon.
SECOND VERSION OF TRIPTYCH 1944, 1988
Made near the end of his life, this is a monumental reprise of a work Bacon first made in 1944. He made this one with posterity in mind: It was donated to the Tate a year before his death, in 1991. The image portrays three Furies — “semihuman fragments,” as Harrison puts it, as though Bacon “sought to intensify the psychological dimension of the bony, eroticized forms.”