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拍品專文
Painted in 1961, Nude is a striking and comparatively rare full-length portrait of a naked woman standing alone and isolated in a bizarre, empty and somewhat imperial-looking purple interior. The woman is exposed in this large painting as a solitary voluptuous living entity of soft flesh harshly illuminated from above as if suddenly caught in the sterile unfeeling glare of an electric arc light.
With its interior reminiscent of the lonely purple enclosures into which, in the 1950s, Bacon had enshrined his screaming Popes, Nude projects an image of raw and fragile humanity. Bacon, who was more erotically predisposed to the male form, seldom painted women and even more rarely, the naked female form. Here, he depicts the female figure, not, as a sexual being, but as a purely material presence encased in an alienating monochrome environment. The woman's features and her buxom figure suggest that Bacon has used his friend Henrietta Moraes as his source. Moraes was a professional artist's model who frequented the social circles of Soho, and Bacon had recently commissioned John Deakin to produce a number of photographs of her in the nude.
In the chaos of Bacon's studio, photographs would become scrunched and damaged. Such damage would encourage and often stimulate the distortions that Bacon would bring to what he called the "illustrative" content of the image. Here, in Nude Bacon has created a swirling globular mass of flesh that eloquently conveys the weighty physicality of Moraes' voluptuous body whilst also suggesting a vital living presence. To the right of the figure hanging ominously above her head hang two tassels - items of Bacon's iconography that had previously appeared only in his terrifying existential portrait heads of men screaming in the early 1950s. Seeming as if they control the on and off switches of an invisible light bulb that, in this context, also seems to control life and death, the tassles are a poignant reminder of the fleeting temporality of life. Deliberately contrasted against the splendid physicality of this fertile nude, they are a central element in Bacon's unique search to express the bizarre facticity of human existence.
Fig. 1 Henrietta Moraes, 1961, photograph by John Deakin
With its interior reminiscent of the lonely purple enclosures into which, in the 1950s, Bacon had enshrined his screaming Popes, Nude projects an image of raw and fragile humanity. Bacon, who was more erotically predisposed to the male form, seldom painted women and even more rarely, the naked female form. Here, he depicts the female figure, not, as a sexual being, but as a purely material presence encased in an alienating monochrome environment. The woman's features and her buxom figure suggest that Bacon has used his friend Henrietta Moraes as his source. Moraes was a professional artist's model who frequented the social circles of Soho, and Bacon had recently commissioned John Deakin to produce a number of photographs of her in the nude.
In the chaos of Bacon's studio, photographs would become scrunched and damaged. Such damage would encourage and often stimulate the distortions that Bacon would bring to what he called the "illustrative" content of the image. Here, in Nude Bacon has created a swirling globular mass of flesh that eloquently conveys the weighty physicality of Moraes' voluptuous body whilst also suggesting a vital living presence. To the right of the figure hanging ominously above her head hang two tassels - items of Bacon's iconography that had previously appeared only in his terrifying existential portrait heads of men screaming in the early 1950s. Seeming as if they control the on and off switches of an invisible light bulb that, in this context, also seems to control life and death, the tassles are a poignant reminder of the fleeting temporality of life. Deliberately contrasted against the splendid physicality of this fertile nude, they are a central element in Bacon's unique search to express the bizarre facticity of human existence.
Fig. 1 Henrietta Moraes, 1961, photograph by John Deakin