‘Tearing away the veils’: the life and art of Francis Bacon

A troubled youth

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin on 28 October 1909 to English parents. His father Eddy was a retired army major who had been decorated in the Boer War. Eddy Bacon and his wife Winnie had moved to County Kildare in the early 1900s, where he turned his hand to training and breeding racehorses.

Hardened by years on the battlefield, Eddy had a fierce temper, and frequently clashed with his son. Shy and withdrawn, in weak health and with a dark, vivid imagination, the young Francis was far from the masculine ideal enshrined by his father.

As he reached adolescence, and began to explore his sexuality, the tensions between them grew deeper. After catching his 16-year-old son trying on his mother’s underwear in front of the mirror, Eddy expelled him from the family home.

Avant-garde encounters

Cast adrift and unsure of his next steps in life, Bacon travelled to Berlin and Paris in the mid-1920s. Alive with art, music, cinema and thrilling nightlife, both cities offered wellsprings of inspiration, from the lessons of the Bauhaus to the films of Eisenstein and Buñuel. After seeing an exhibition of Picasso’s drawings at Galerie Paul Rosenberg in 1927, Bacon vowed to devote his life to art.

Back in London, Bacon initially channelled the teachings of Europe into furniture design. His sleek, ordered studio at Queensbury Mews West was a far cry from the paper-strewn, paint-splattered rooms he would later inhabit. Bacon also produced his first paintings during this period: curious, otherworldly creations tinged with echoes of Surrealism and Cubism. In October 2018, a number of these youthful works made their market debut at Christie’s.

Religious dialogues

Much of Bacon’s early oeuvre was haunted by the spectre of religion. Raised as a Protestant in Roman Catholic Ireland, he was sceptical of the church’s claims, yet remained fascinated by its imagery.

Inspired by Cimabue’s depiction of Christ on the cross, Bacon produced the seminal large-scale triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). The artist was enthralled by the motif’s visceral power, describing it as ‘a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation’.

Between 1946 and 1971, Bacon took the Pope as his muse. Inspired by Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (circa 1650), and also by photographs of the incumbent Pope Pius XII, these works depicted the pontiff in various states of torment, from the screaming popes of the 1950s to the mute, deformed specimens who followed.

In 1964, Study for a Pope (1955) became the first of Bacon’s works to be sold at Christie’s; today, these paintings are widely regarded as some of the post-war period’s most potent existential visions.

Friends and lovers

As the 1950s progressed, subjects from Bacon’s own life began to infiltrate his work. Among the first of these was his then lover Peter Lacy, a former fighter pilot with whom he shared a passionate, tempestuous relationship.

Lacy’s mercurial character captivated Bacon, yet also brought him great pain. Shortly before the opening of his 1962 Tate retrospective, the artist received devastating news of Lacy’s death in Tangiers.

Despite its catastrophic start, the 1960s was to become one of Bacon’s most exciting decades. The sombre palette of his earlier oeuvre was gradually banished, replaced with vivid, jewel-like tones and rich, painterly textures.

In the heart of Swinging London, Bacon began to depict his bohemian social circle, a colourful cast of Soho denizens that included his new lover George Dyer, as well as friends such as Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes and Lucian Freud. A large-scale triptych of the latter sold for $142 million at Christie’s in 2013, realising what was then the highest price ever achieved for a work of art at auction.

Painting from the nervous system

In 1961, Bacon moved into a new studio at 7 Reece Mews. Over the years, it became a veritable laboratory, littered with eclectic source material that revealed the extraordinary range of his visual imagination.

Images of paintings, sculptures and wildlife mingled with medical journals, sporting manuals, film stills and snapshots of friends — many taken by former Vogue  photographer John Deakin.

Bacon preferred working from secondary imagery, believing that it allowed him to engage directly with the impulses of his nervous system. By filtering his subjects through disparate sources, he sought to strip away their external trappings and reveal the raw animal spirit beneath. This, ultimately, became the guiding principle of his art: to capture, in paint, ‘all the pulsations of a person’.

Triumph and tragedy

By 1971, Bacon was poised on the brink of international acclaim. That year, he mounted a major retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, an honour granted to no other living artist except Picasso. Less than 36 hours before its opening, however, his beloved George Dyer was found dead. A tragic echo of Lacy’s death just nine years earlier, it sent the artist into a spiral of grief and despair.

Having first met Bacon in the early 1960s, Dyer had been one of his most important subjects. With his lithe, muscular physique and innate sense of vulnerability, he had inspired masterpieces including Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (1963) and Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1966). After his death, his form continued to dominate Bacon’s paintings, most notably in the powerful series of ‘black triptychs’. With near-cinematic ambition, the artist exorcised his feelings of sorrow in harrowing replays of Dyer’s death: ‘Not an hour goes by’, he said, ‘when I don’t think about George.’

A literary imagination

Though themes of mortality continued to occupy Bacon for most of the 1970s – giving rise to a dark, obsessive stream of self-portraits — the pain of losing Dyer gradually began to subside. Alongside his growing friendship with John Edwards, who became a lifelong companion, Bacon took a new studio in Paris. Once more among the city’s poets and philosophers, he found solace in his other great love: literature.

Bacon had always made light of his purported familial connection to the great Elizabethan essayist with whom he shared his name. He was secretly flattered, however, by popular conspiracy theories that suggested his ancestor had been the ‘real’ William Shakespeare.

The bard’s plays and sonnets, along with the works of Yeats, T. S. Eliot and the Greek tragedians, would take on new resonance in the latter years of his life. Though increasingly abstract in appearance, many of his late works were grand, theatrical spectacles riddled with cryptic layers of narrative and metaphor.

It was a fitting conclusion to his career. Like many of his literary heroes, Bacon is remembered today as one of the great chroniclers of his time. Over the course of a life as rich, fraught and impassioned as any Homeric epic, he captured the poetry of the human condition — from the ecstasies of the flesh to the pain of its transience.

‘Great art,’ he said, ’is always a way of concentrating… tearing away the veils that fact acquires through time.’ It is this belief, ultimately, that has come to define his legacy.