Francis Bacon: five decades

Francis Bacon’s work depicts sexuality, violence and isolation through his depictions of the anxieties of the modern condition. By removing moral platforms, Bacon made room for what he called “the brutality of fact” to implode onto his canvases. ‘Francis Bacon: five decades’, part of the Sydney International Art Series, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is made up of over 50 paintings and is structured around the last five decades of his life, which explore these characteristic themes.

Bacon probed the isolation and terror of the human condition in his paintings by distorting the human body, focusing on the animalistic qualities of man. In the 1940s Bacon embarked on a series of studies of crucifixion. The figures in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, for example, blur the boundaries between human and animal, their gaping mouths expressing the extremities of their emotions. The canvases bore witness to the traumatised psychology of post-war deprivation, rage and existential doubt. His subjects were portrayed as violently distorted, presented as isolated souls imprisoned and tormented by existential dilemmas; in short, man’s inhumanity.

The 1950s saw Bacon produce such powerful works as his series of screaming popes; images of men in suits; and animals and crouching nudes. Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X suggests that faith is always vulnerable as the pope sits on a presumed electric chair clenching onto the survival of Christianity. His scream is Bacon’s visceral response to the human condition as a whole – a world of violence and despair, hopelessness and terror, essentially meaningless, in which we are all simply ‘meat’ – Bacon’s direct comment on human mortality.

The 1960s saw Bacon’s work transform to a much looser, more colourful and expressive style, revealing the human body exposed and violated. During this time he made many portraits of close friends including his younger lover George Dyer. This transformation of style continued to evolve into the next decade where he incorporated narrative, autobiography, and myth to mediate his ideas of violence and emotion. The death of Dyer in 1971 led to a series of commemorative paintings known as the black triptychs, drawing on literary subjects from the darker side of Greek mythology to invoke themes of haunting guilt.

The final decade of Bacon’s life saw his work marked by an acute knowledge of death and the brutal fact that all things come to an end, evidenced in the many self-portraits of this period. Like the animal in the slaughterhouse, he too knew his ultimate fate.

Bacon’s tortured figures might allude to more than his own conflicted psyche of homosexuality and atheism. Subject matter provided the artist with a predetermined format on which to inscribe his own interpretive renderings and to concentrate on emotional and perceptual evocation. His persistent use of the triptych format provided a narrative disjunction in the works through the physical separation of the elements that comprise them. It was not the violence of representation but the violence of sensation in his colour and line that interested Bacon. Forms still had their purpose, which he arranged in a way that courted an emotional response and he used certain colours to multiply the effect.

Art Gallery of New South Wales
November 17, 2012 to February 24, 2013
Sydney

Self Portrait, 1973, oil on canvas, 35.5 x 30.5cm

Study of a portrait, 1949, oil on canvas, 149.4 x 130.6cm

Courtesy The Estate of the Artist; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Richard Nagy, London; and the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney

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