.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
A masterpiece of supreme clarity and beauty, Figure in Movement (1978) stands among Francis Bacon’s most elegant and incisive visions of the human form. Bathed in radiant, glowing colour, it offers a staggering image of flesh suspended in motion. With his arms outstretched as if upon a barre, the figure recalls a dancer or an athlete, his luminous, muscular physique doubled in the mirror-like surface behind him. Closely related to the central panel of Triptych March 1974 (Fundación Juan March, Madrid), the painting is suffused with memories of Bacon’s great love, George Dyer, whose image continued to define his art after his death earlier that decade. At the same time, however, it reflects the artist’s newfound contentment during this period: the figure, aglow with life, spirals out of the darkness and into the light. Bacon explained that the work ‘was an attempt to make a figure in movement as concentrated as I could do it’ (in conversation with D. Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 2009, p. 190). ‘In this technically and conceptually impeccable painting,’ writes Martin Harrison, ‘he realised this aim with aplomb’ (Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné. Volume IV 1971-92, London, 2016, p. 1160).
Shown in landmark exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, the Hayward Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, the work is indeed a painterly triumph. With his lithe, sculptural form, the figure is at once statuesque and spectral, born of a sprawling mental archive that housed photographs of ballerinas and boxers alongside the works of Michelangelo and Muybridge. Piercing white highlights imbue his torso with volumetric grandeur; elsewhere, his flesh dissipates through fluid brushwork and pastel sfumato. Bacon’s palette is extraordinary: from the burnished flame-like hue that floods the backdrop and encircles the figure, to vivid teal and violet shadows. A tangle of limbs seems to bleed directly into the flickering mirror-image behind, creating the illusion of bodies entwined. Dennis Farr, notably, suggests that the figure contains flashes of both Bacon and Dyer, combining the latter’s depiction in Three Studies of the Male Back (1970, Kunsthaus Zurich) with a sandy-coloured head reminiscent of the artist’s own self-portraits (‘Figure in Movement, 1978’, in Francis Bacon: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat., Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 1999, p. 176).
Dyer had died suddenly and tragically in 1971, on the eve of Bacon’s major retrospective at the Grand Palais. Since 1963, the two had been lovers, bound together in a tempestuous relationship that spawned some of the artist’s finest canvases. As he attempted to come to terms with his loss, Bacon poured his sorrow into his series of so-called ‘black triptychs’—dark, operatic eulogies that replayed Dyer’s death. By the time of the present work, however, the artist’s grief had begun to lift. In 1974 he had taken a studio in Paris, precipitating a period of triumph that culminated in his sensational debut at Galerie Claude Bernard in 1977. 1976 also saw the advent of John Edwards, who became a new devoted companion and confidante. The present work exudes a new sense of carnal dynamism and luminosity, reviving the exquisite jewel-toned hues that had defined Bacon’s works of the 1960s. David Sylvester, comparing his use of colour to that of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, described the artist as ‘the one great exponent in our time of the Figurative Sublime’ (Francis Bacon: The Human Body, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1998, p. 21).
Dyer’s image, however, never fully left Bacon’s psyche. For the next two decades his art would continue to picture his fall, his resurrection and—perhaps, ultimately—their reunion beyond the veil. Michael Clary writes that the work’s black backdrop ‘links the composition to the dark doorways and window shades of the “black” triptych atonements. This one, however, provides a reflection, as if it were a mirror hanging by rods’ (‘Figure in Movement, 1978’, in Francis Bacon: Late Paintings, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2015, p. 51). Bacon’s use of reflecting and doubling—a device that defined many of his 1960s portraits of Dyer—intensified during this period, populating both the black triptychs and his self-portraits. So, too, did the fusion of his own likeness with Dyer’s: a strategy that recurred with increasing complexity throughout his paintings of the 1970s. The artist understood life and death as two sides of the same condition; a turn of the coin, he believed, was all that existed between himself and those he had lost. Here, flesh and spirit play out side by side, one a mirror image of the other.
These elements of Bacon’s visual imagination were inextricably bound to his fascination with movement. From the very beginning, his art had explored the transition between states, attempting to capture what he described as the ‘emanation’ of his subjects. Heavily inspired by the aesthetics of film and photography, he posited paint as a vehicle for conjuring ‘all the pulsations of a person’. As part of this process, he harnessed the motions and impulses of his own nervous system, seeking—as he put it—to ‘trap this living fact alive’. Bacon was particularly drawn to Muybridge’s motion photographs of wrestlers, explaining that ‘I’ve often used the wrestlers in painting single figures, because I find that the two figures together have a thickness that gives overtones which the photographs of single figures don’t have’ (in conversation with D. Sylvester, op. cit., p. 134). This idea certainly speaks to Figure in Movement, in which the force of multiple entangled limbs seems to pull the body towards the ground. Ernst van Alphen describes the painting as ‘the most striking example’ of this downward motion in Bacon’s work, conjuring the sensation of flesh sinking into nothingness (Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, London, 1992, p. 82).
Bacon’s complex fusion of source imagery may also be understood in terms of his interest in movement. He claimed that images fell into his mind ‘like slides’, comparing himself to a machine in which ‘everything I have seen has been ground up very fine’. Reams of photographs and clippings littered the floor of his studio at Reece Mews, feeding into the paintings through a process of constant metamorphosis. The mirror and horizontal rail conjure a ballet studio, invoking photographs of the dancer Rudolf Nureyev that were found in the artist’s workspace. Such imagery also forms a bridge to the works of Degas: Bacon described his pastels as ‘among the greatest things ever made’, and made increasing use of the medium himself throughout his later oeuvre (quoted in M. Peppiatt, ‘Francis Bacon: Reality Conveyed by a Lie’, Art International, Autumn 1987, p. 30). The figure’s curvaceous, undulating physique, meanwhile, calls to mind the voluptuous biomorphic figures of Picasso, which were among his earliest influences.
Bacon’s own paintings, too, formed part of this cyclical chain. Aside from its relationship to Triptych March 1974, the present work’s figure also evokes the right-hand panel of the artist’s 1965 triptych Crucifixion (Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich). This, in turn, was based on a photograph of a boxer in a ring: a primary source of inspiration. In certain lights, indeed, the figure is less a dancer than an athlete—a gymnast poised on the brink of a somersault, or a discus thrower coiled ready for action. Muybridge, notably, had photographed the latter in a sequence of 1887. Harrison, meanwhile, describes the figure as a ‘discobolus’, referencing the famous ancient Greek statue by Myron (op. cit.). Bacon, who held the sculpture of antiquity in the highest regard, was undoubtedly aware of this work.
The figure also bears witness to Bacon’s longstanding engagement with the work of Michelangelo. ‘Michelangelo and Muybridge are mixed up in my mind together,’ he explained, ‘and so I perhaps could learn about positions from Muybridge and learn about the ampleness, the grandeur of form from Michelangelo … As most of my figures are taken from the male nude, I am sure that I have been influenced by the fact that Michelangelo made the most voluptuous male nudes in the plastic arts’ (in conversation with D. Sylvester, op. cit., pp. 132-134). The figure’s twisting anatomy calls to mind Samson and the Two Philistines, which Bacon knew from Martin Weinberger’s 1967 book Michelangelo: The Sculptor. His exquisitely-rendered musculature, meanwhile, conjures Michelangelo’s sumptuous figure studies and sketches, reproductions of which lay strewn about Bacon’s studio. Dyer, notably—with his classical features and chiselled physique—had always reminded the artist of these drawings.
The 1970s also saw the beginnings of a new trajectory within Bacon’s art. As the years progressed, he was increasingly at pains to distil and condense his visual language, professing his distaste for ‘malerisch’ painterly gesture. ‘I would like the intimacy of the image against a very stark background,’ he explained (ibid., p. 120). Figure in Movement captures the powerful sense of clarity and rigour that came to define the works of these years. In conversation with the artist in 1979, Sylvester highlights the present work, asking ‘when you talk about essence, and about whittling down, I wonder whether there was something of the same intention in this painting.’ Bacon answers, ‘yes, there was. It comes very much into that category’ (ibid., p. 190). The impulsive sweeping brushwork and searing colour fields of his earlier oeuvre are concentrated and refined. Their intensity, in the process, is magnified, every stroke charged with electrifying precision and radiance. The result is an image of sharp, crystalline impact, in which jumbled excess gives way to glowing lucidity.
From the time of the black triptychs onwards, shadows made an increasingly marked appearance in Bacon’s work. Many were inspired by an illustration in Didier Anzieu’s 1977 book L’Oedipe: un complex universel, whose contours are echoed here. In the wake of Dyer’s death, Bacon had indulged his passion for literature anew, finding solace in the works of Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians as well as Modernist poets and playwrights. The present work calls to mind lines from T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925): ‘Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.’ Elsewhere, Colm Tóibín draws parallels with Samuel Beckett’s 1982 play Nacht und Träume—written several years after the painting—in which, he explains, ‘the self lives with its dream-self, its shadow-self’ (‘Late Francis Bacon: Spirit and Substance’, in Francis Bacon: Late Paintings, op. cit., p. 28).
Bacon was fascinated by the idea of the ‘after-image’: the residual trace that visual material leaves upon the nervous system, and which seeps through the hand onto the canvas. Perhaps, ultimately, Figure in Movement might be understood as a mediation on the act of painting itself. As van Alphen points out, ‘the figure is not reflected in the mirror; our gaze at the figure is repeated, not mirrored, in the mirror. Looking itself, not the object in front of the mirror, is reflected’ (op. cit., p. 63). Perhaps the mirror, in this sense, might be better understood as a canvas. In the luminous imprint of his figure upon its black surface, Bacon gives form to the very process of image-making, flashed upon a screen like a beacon in the darkness.
Shown in landmark exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, the Hayward Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, the work is indeed a painterly triumph. With his lithe, sculptural form, the figure is at once statuesque and spectral, born of a sprawling mental archive that housed photographs of ballerinas and boxers alongside the works of Michelangelo and Muybridge. Piercing white highlights imbue his torso with volumetric grandeur; elsewhere, his flesh dissipates through fluid brushwork and pastel sfumato. Bacon’s palette is extraordinary: from the burnished flame-like hue that floods the backdrop and encircles the figure, to vivid teal and violet shadows. A tangle of limbs seems to bleed directly into the flickering mirror-image behind, creating the illusion of bodies entwined. Dennis Farr, notably, suggests that the figure contains flashes of both Bacon and Dyer, combining the latter’s depiction in Three Studies of the Male Back (1970, Kunsthaus Zurich) with a sandy-coloured head reminiscent of the artist’s own self-portraits (‘Figure in Movement, 1978’, in Francis Bacon: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat., Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 1999, p. 176).
Dyer had died suddenly and tragically in 1971, on the eve of Bacon’s major retrospective at the Grand Palais. Since 1963, the two had been lovers, bound together in a tempestuous relationship that spawned some of the artist’s finest canvases. As he attempted to come to terms with his loss, Bacon poured his sorrow into his series of so-called ‘black triptychs’—dark, operatic eulogies that replayed Dyer’s death. By the time of the present work, however, the artist’s grief had begun to lift. In 1974 he had taken a studio in Paris, precipitating a period of triumph that culminated in his sensational debut at Galerie Claude Bernard in 1977. 1976 also saw the advent of John Edwards, who became a new devoted companion and confidante. The present work exudes a new sense of carnal dynamism and luminosity, reviving the exquisite jewel-toned hues that had defined Bacon’s works of the 1960s. David Sylvester, comparing his use of colour to that of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, described the artist as ‘the one great exponent in our time of the Figurative Sublime’ (Francis Bacon: The Human Body, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1998, p. 21).
Dyer’s image, however, never fully left Bacon’s psyche. For the next two decades his art would continue to picture his fall, his resurrection and—perhaps, ultimately—their reunion beyond the veil. Michael Clary writes that the work’s black backdrop ‘links the composition to the dark doorways and window shades of the “black” triptych atonements. This one, however, provides a reflection, as if it were a mirror hanging by rods’ (‘Figure in Movement, 1978’, in Francis Bacon: Late Paintings, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2015, p. 51). Bacon’s use of reflecting and doubling—a device that defined many of his 1960s portraits of Dyer—intensified during this period, populating both the black triptychs and his self-portraits. So, too, did the fusion of his own likeness with Dyer’s: a strategy that recurred with increasing complexity throughout his paintings of the 1970s. The artist understood life and death as two sides of the same condition; a turn of the coin, he believed, was all that existed between himself and those he had lost. Here, flesh and spirit play out side by side, one a mirror image of the other.
These elements of Bacon’s visual imagination were inextricably bound to his fascination with movement. From the very beginning, his art had explored the transition between states, attempting to capture what he described as the ‘emanation’ of his subjects. Heavily inspired by the aesthetics of film and photography, he posited paint as a vehicle for conjuring ‘all the pulsations of a person’. As part of this process, he harnessed the motions and impulses of his own nervous system, seeking—as he put it—to ‘trap this living fact alive’. Bacon was particularly drawn to Muybridge’s motion photographs of wrestlers, explaining that ‘I’ve often used the wrestlers in painting single figures, because I find that the two figures together have a thickness that gives overtones which the photographs of single figures don’t have’ (in conversation with D. Sylvester, op. cit., p. 134). This idea certainly speaks to Figure in Movement, in which the force of multiple entangled limbs seems to pull the body towards the ground. Ernst van Alphen describes the painting as ‘the most striking example’ of this downward motion in Bacon’s work, conjuring the sensation of flesh sinking into nothingness (Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, London, 1992, p. 82).
Bacon’s complex fusion of source imagery may also be understood in terms of his interest in movement. He claimed that images fell into his mind ‘like slides’, comparing himself to a machine in which ‘everything I have seen has been ground up very fine’. Reams of photographs and clippings littered the floor of his studio at Reece Mews, feeding into the paintings through a process of constant metamorphosis. The mirror and horizontal rail conjure a ballet studio, invoking photographs of the dancer Rudolf Nureyev that were found in the artist’s workspace. Such imagery also forms a bridge to the works of Degas: Bacon described his pastels as ‘among the greatest things ever made’, and made increasing use of the medium himself throughout his later oeuvre (quoted in M. Peppiatt, ‘Francis Bacon: Reality Conveyed by a Lie’, Art International, Autumn 1987, p. 30). The figure’s curvaceous, undulating physique, meanwhile, calls to mind the voluptuous biomorphic figures of Picasso, which were among his earliest influences.
Bacon’s own paintings, too, formed part of this cyclical chain. Aside from its relationship to Triptych March 1974, the present work’s figure also evokes the right-hand panel of the artist’s 1965 triptych Crucifixion (Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich). This, in turn, was based on a photograph of a boxer in a ring: a primary source of inspiration. In certain lights, indeed, the figure is less a dancer than an athlete—a gymnast poised on the brink of a somersault, or a discus thrower coiled ready for action. Muybridge, notably, had photographed the latter in a sequence of 1887. Harrison, meanwhile, describes the figure as a ‘discobolus’, referencing the famous ancient Greek statue by Myron (op. cit.). Bacon, who held the sculpture of antiquity in the highest regard, was undoubtedly aware of this work.
The figure also bears witness to Bacon’s longstanding engagement with the work of Michelangelo. ‘Michelangelo and Muybridge are mixed up in my mind together,’ he explained, ‘and so I perhaps could learn about positions from Muybridge and learn about the ampleness, the grandeur of form from Michelangelo … As most of my figures are taken from the male nude, I am sure that I have been influenced by the fact that Michelangelo made the most voluptuous male nudes in the plastic arts’ (in conversation with D. Sylvester, op. cit., pp. 132-134). The figure’s twisting anatomy calls to mind Samson and the Two Philistines, which Bacon knew from Martin Weinberger’s 1967 book Michelangelo: The Sculptor. His exquisitely-rendered musculature, meanwhile, conjures Michelangelo’s sumptuous figure studies and sketches, reproductions of which lay strewn about Bacon’s studio. Dyer, notably—with his classical features and chiselled physique—had always reminded the artist of these drawings.
The 1970s also saw the beginnings of a new trajectory within Bacon’s art. As the years progressed, he was increasingly at pains to distil and condense his visual language, professing his distaste for ‘malerisch’ painterly gesture. ‘I would like the intimacy of the image against a very stark background,’ he explained (ibid., p. 120). Figure in Movement captures the powerful sense of clarity and rigour that came to define the works of these years. In conversation with the artist in 1979, Sylvester highlights the present work, asking ‘when you talk about essence, and about whittling down, I wonder whether there was something of the same intention in this painting.’ Bacon answers, ‘yes, there was. It comes very much into that category’ (ibid., p. 190). The impulsive sweeping brushwork and searing colour fields of his earlier oeuvre are concentrated and refined. Their intensity, in the process, is magnified, every stroke charged with electrifying precision and radiance. The result is an image of sharp, crystalline impact, in which jumbled excess gives way to glowing lucidity.
From the time of the black triptychs onwards, shadows made an increasingly marked appearance in Bacon’s work. Many were inspired by an illustration in Didier Anzieu’s 1977 book L’Oedipe: un complex universel, whose contours are echoed here. In the wake of Dyer’s death, Bacon had indulged his passion for literature anew, finding solace in the works of Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians as well as Modernist poets and playwrights. The present work calls to mind lines from T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925): ‘Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.’ Elsewhere, Colm Tóibín draws parallels with Samuel Beckett’s 1982 play Nacht und Träume—written several years after the painting—in which, he explains, ‘the self lives with its dream-self, its shadow-self’ (‘Late Francis Bacon: Spirit and Substance’, in Francis Bacon: Late Paintings, op. cit., p. 28).
Bacon was fascinated by the idea of the ‘after-image’: the residual trace that visual material leaves upon the nervous system, and which seeps through the hand onto the canvas. Perhaps, ultimately, Figure in Movement might be understood as a mediation on the act of painting itself. As van Alphen points out, ‘the figure is not reflected in the mirror; our gaze at the figure is repeated, not mirrored, in the mirror. Looking itself, not the object in front of the mirror, is reflected’ (op. cit., p. 63). Perhaps the mirror, in this sense, might be better understood as a canvas. In the luminous imprint of his figure upon its black surface, Bacon gives form to the very process of image-making, flashed upon a screen like a beacon in the darkness.