Grilling Bacon
MATTHEW STURGIS Francis Bacon: Revelations
‘The job of the artist,’ Francis Bacon claimed, ‘is always to deepen the mystery.’
It was certainly something he worked at. From their first appearance, in the 1940s, his paintings of distorted, barely-human forms – twisted, shrieking, bereft – provoked alarm and bemusement. Their power, though, was undeniable. If they were clearly personal, they were also oddly resonant – suggestive of the anxieties and neuroses of the unfolding century.
It was a combination that grew
more powerful, though no less mysterious, with the decades. By the time of his death in 1992, at 82, Bacon had won a position as one of the great figures of the contemporary scene, not just in Britain but across the world: a unique voice, fêted as much by French intellectuals as by American museums.
He had created, too, a powerful personal legend, presenting himself as a dandy à rebours, a reckless habitué of an illicit netherworld of drinking clubs, gambling dens and homosexual encounters. He was a man familiar alike with the decadence of Weimar Berlin, the camp bitchery of Soho’s Colony Room Club and the tawdry glamour of Monte Carlo.
As an artist, he liked to suggest he had sprung forth, in his thirties, fully armed, an untutored genius escaping a philistine family background of Anglo-irish horse-lovers.
These are fine ingredients for a biography, and they are well mixed by the American husband-and-wife duo Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. The great achievement of their impressively thorough and thoroughly impressive book is to tease away at the mysteries – or mystifications – in which Bacon wrapped himself, without diminishing either the art or the man.
We may lose some of the familiar highlights of his self-created myth: his rape by his father’s stable lads; the ease with which he acquired his painting technique; his first encounter with his lover, George Dyer, during Dyer’s attempted burglary of his flat. But we gain many richer perspectives.
A proper prominence is given to the early mentors who encouraged Bacon’s vision and career. There’s the Irish priest who introduced the largely unschooled boy to the classics. Then there’s a beloved female cousin who shared his voracious cultural enthusiasms. A sophisticated Frenchwoman picked him up in a Paris art gallery and took him home.
Along come the two more-or-less closeted Englishmen (Eric Allden and Eric Hall) who, in succession, provided avuncular pederasty, along with a good deal of money, to establish Bacon, first as a designer of modernist furniture, and then as a painter of uncompromisingly modern pictures. Bacon barely sold a painting – except to friends – before he was 40.
The authors perceptively point up the violence that infused Bacon’s upbringing in rural Ireland – the ritualised violence of the hunt, the distant violence of the First World War and the simmering threat of the IRA in the years that followed.
It was part of the family legend that Bacon’s beloved maternal grandmother, sitting at home one night next to her husband – a senior officer in the Irish Constabulary – had narrowly escaped assassination. The IRA gunman, looking through the lighted window, had been unable to distinguish between the couple. Granny Supple had taken off her wig for the evening, and he didn’t want to ‘take a chance and shoot the lady’.
Certainly violence held a prominent place in Bacon’s art and life. It suffused his vision, and his experience, of sex. With occasional exceptions, both his casual encounters and his sustained relationships were fired by the sadomasochistic urge – until old age led him towards something more companionable.
The authors – who have previously written a life of the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning – are sure-footed guides to the art world in which Bacon moved. They trace the battles between his dealers: the formidable lesbian, Erica Brausen, and the impassioned, if devious, Harry Fischer at Marlborough Fine Art. They capture the admixture of admiration and rivalry in Bacon’s artistic friendships with Graham Sutherland and Lucian Freud.
There are deft pen-portraits of a rich supporting cast – from Reggie Kray and Lord Berners to Andy Warhol and Nanny Lightfoot – Bacon’s old nurse, who moved with him to London and helped him to arrange gambling parties in his Kensington flat.
What is oddly lacking, though, especially during the first half of the book, is Bacon’s own voice. Although we get a few of his later, deliberately misleading quips about his early life and career, almost nothing has been recovered from the time itself. We are told that he wrote ‘chatty letters’ to his mother – but they are not quoted. The first of the very few of his letters transcribed (written to Graham Sutherland) does not appear until page 199.
We are told, frequently, of Bacon’s extraordinary charm and intelligence as a young man – so it is frustrating that Stevens and Swan have been able to recover so little of it.
It must, it seems, remain a mystery. And of that Bacon would surely approve.