Doctors failed to diagnose artist Bacon as an alcoholic
HE DRANK his friends under the table in Soho’s pubs and clubs, painted his masterpieces while hungover and, late in life, claimed to have been “drunk since the age of 15”.
But while Francis Bacon confided to his doctors that alcohol was taking a toll on his health, he was not diagnosed as an alcoholic, his previously unpublished medical records reveal.
Bacon told them that, while alcohol “boosted” him, he feared that he was losing his memory to it, feeling as if reality was slipping away, and worrying that drink brought on asthma attacks, fatigue and a flushed face.
Some 34 years of his medical records show that his doctors only once referred to alcoholism – and even then with a question mark. But their notes paint a picture of a man wrecked by near-constant ill health, suffering everything from asthma to acute heart failure. They cover his many painful conditions, including spinal, gall bladder, pulmonary, kidney and prostate problems, and the cocktails of medication that he was prescribed.
The records were kept by doctors Stanley and Paul Brass, a father and son, on whom Bacon became dependent, both as friends and physicians, whom he viewed as magic men.
He had sought out Stanley Brass in 1935 after moving to Kensington and Chelsea in central London. Recently donated to the Estate of Francis Bacon, the notes reveal parallels between the artist’s own chronic health and the pain of human existence that he conveyed in his paintings.
His 1960 medical notes record that he visited Stanley Brass complaining of feeling irritable after losing money gambling in Tangier. The doctor wrote down Bacon’s feeling of “living at the edge of a volcano”, along with his blood pressure recordings.
Sophie Pretorius, archivist of the estate’s Bacon Collection, has researched the notes for an extensive essay within a forthcoming book, Francis Bacon Studies III: Inside Francis Bacon, to be published on Aug 6.
She told The Sunday Telegraph she was struck that none of his doctors and specialists appeared to have been willing to admit that Bacon was an alcoholic: “Bacon was definitely and famously a drinker … Drinking alcohol formed a substantial part of his daily routine … Many of Bacon’s conditions, however, were liable to be exacerbated by excessive alcohol consumption.”
In 1962, for example, he was diagnosed with peripheral neuritis, a disorder caused by damage to the peripheral nerves carrying messages to and from the brain and spinal cord, of which alcoholism is one of the leading causes.
Bacon was “tensed up with tingling numbness”, the notes record.
The artist died in 1992 after suffering a heart attack.