Master Collector: Francis Bacon

I have always been fascinated by art whether I was observing it or creating it. I’m the girl that took all the art classes she could fit in high school and who says her favorite hobby is “drawing” whenever a questionnaire brings it up. I love galleries and can be a harsh critic of work I have no hope of ever fully understanding or recreating. And one of the most fantastic artists, out of all that I have studied and encountered in galleries all over the world is Francis Bacon. He sets the standard for brooding and self-deprecation which are some of my favorite qualities in artists. To really drive this point home, after a few of his first publicly displayed works received negative criticism, he hid from the art world for the next decade and destroyed almost all of the pieces he produced during that time. This decade of seclusion is an insight into his perfectionist and passionate personality, but it takes a broader view of his life to fully understand the complexities of Bacon. I hope to shed some light on this fantastic artist, through analyzing his person and process and their effect on the product.

First, some quick backstory on the Bacon. Francis Bacon had a whirlwind youth. He was born in 1909 in Dublin to English parents who fettered him back and forth from England during the subsequent world war. He was then expelled from his home in 1926 for demonstrating his emerging homosexuality. He spent the next two years traveling about Europe and going to galleries and even lived with an art connoisseur for a time. But eventually he turned to painting and you know now how that went in the beginning.

A major inspiration for his work was his relationships with his troubled, often violent partners. One was Peter Lacy, was often depicted in subtly aggressive poses. He was an alcoholic who would often fly into violent tantrums and turn his aggression on Bacon. Another partner of his, George Dyer, loved sitting and appeared in many pieces but, like Lacy, was also an alcoholic. In fact, both Lacy and Dyer died due to substance abuse. George Dyer suffered a dramatic death in Paris before one of Bacon’s exhibitions. Post-mortem, Bacon painted a triptych of his death and illustrated Dyer’s last lonely moments in a Parisian bathroom. 

A portrait of Peter Lacy

Although it may seem as though Bacon’s art said a lot about the subjects rather than himself, in one of our readings, it is proposed that, “writers and artists produce creative work as a way to express their unconscious desires in a publicly acceptable fashion” which I find an interesting take on the artist’s psyche (Sternberg, 354). Bacon’s inner workers should be as present in evaluation of his art as the subjects. Sternberg’s idea calls to my mind the book I’ve been reading, “A Picture of Dorian Grey” by Oscar Wilde and how it was used as proof of Wildes’s homosexuality in a trial. Even in the book, the character of the artist who paints Dorian confesses that he put his soul’s desire in that painting. He tells Dorian that even portraits are more descriptive of the artist than the sitter. Bringing this back to the original intent of this blog post, Bacon’s frequent paintings of his lovers does, to me, make sense if it was outlet to publicly express his inner feelings or desires. In the instance of Dyer’s post death triptych, it is certainly not a stretch to consider that a proper way to mourn the tragic death of his gay lover.

It was not only Bacon’s personality and relationships that he drew heavily on for his work, his process was perhaps most greatly influenced by collecting. Collecting is something creatives do when they absorb the world’s detail like a sponge and hold it and shape it and use it for their own purposes. Bacon was a master collector. He would harp on themes and repeat images throughout his career. For the sake of brevity, I will stick to two of the most prominent “pieces” he “collected”: A Portrait of Pope Innocent X and Battleship Potemkim. These two pieces worked together to create truly ghastly and amazing paintings. The Portrait of Pope Innocent X was a portrait done by Spanish artist Diego Velazquez. Bacon used photographs of the painting to inspire his work. This was another Bacon hallmark, he almost exclusively worked from photographs and clippings. His studio, which is currently on display in Dublin I believe, is littered with little bits of paper Bacon collected. One of the little bits was “the scream” from the Russian film, Battleship Potemkim. In the movie a nurse has a terrified open mouth scream that Bacon took and put into his portraits of the pope. He would intertwine these two images together and rework them and rework them. He produced several screaming pope pieces. I lied when I said I could limit myself to two examples. You can also see in the first two photos on this post that he also was inspired by the great creative, Picasso. He imitated the spindly, white figures from a pottery piece Picasso made. Bacon was an expert thief, I'm sorry, collector who always based his paintings on something concrete like a photograph or a painting. His work could be interpreted as repurposing of other works. Velazquez painted that original portrait of Pope Innocent and Picasso first drew those spindly figures, but does that make Bacon any less creative? I do not think so. I think every creative has at least one foot planted in reality and therefore cannot be completely original. I also think that, even though Bacon aggressively collected, he gave it a treatment only he could give it. Being able to find your own stroke, understanding, practice or view and then develop and project it makes you creative.

Paintings of George Dyer from Photographs

Painting from the film Battleship Potemkim

Although this blog post is criminally condensed, I feel as though I have given enough for you to leave it wondering what other dark, twisted fantasies Bacon had. He was a master collector surrounded by troubled individuals. He drew on his own life experiences as well as those around him to create powerful, arresting work. He faced incredible hardship and rejection early on but emerged one of Britain’s greatest painters of the 20^thcentury. 

Francis Bacon in his studio surrounded
by clippings