In September 1988, in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the British Council organised an exhibition of the work of Francis Bacon in Moscow. Bacon (1909-1992) planned to attend the opening but decided at the last minute not to. Grey Gowrie, a Minister for the Arts in Margaret Thatcher’s administration and by this time European chairman of Sotheby’s, was a friend of the painter and represented him. Lord Gowrie also provided the introductory essay to the catalogue of the exhibition which was translated into Russian. It is republished here in English for the first time to coincide with the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain. Famished for unofficial art, and no doubt bored by Soviet programming, more than 100 million people tuned into the Moscow exhibition on television.

The 20th century has been called the age of anxiety. Certainly it is an age of extremes. Life lived against the edge, the extremity of the human experience is, even vicariously, electric with nervous stress. Scientific progress is double-edged. In the industrialised world people live longer, are better nourished, entertain ideas, at least, of developing their creative potential. Through film and television and the pervasive influence of photography they are bombarded with images of what life can or should be. At the same time they are made aware that this civilisation of cars and central heating and pain killing drugs has entertained more horrors than any since the dark ages. Visual technology transmits the parts of the globe which have been left out of the development race or, worse still, allows people to view skyscrapers and bars and hospitals beside open-drained hovels only a few metres away. Throughout the advanced societies, the great central images which once governed people’s lives have cracked or broken down: the religious icons which reminded them, however briefly, of matters richer than their own concerns. We live in an age of political and scientific materialism which is nevertheless uncomfortably aware of the psychological limits of materialism. We are aware of the physical limits as well, of an earth threatened by tools of peace as well as weapons of war. No wonder that we are an anxious species, or that artists, who hold up mirrors to our condition, are nervous themselves of attempting those images of an idealised experience which art used to provide.

Since the death of Picasso, Francis Bacon has more than any other painter provided the age with an image, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, of its accelerated grimace. The key to his work is its ambition. He has taken on the great masters of the past without their mythological resources or their requirement to record events. At the same time he has turned his back on the abstract artist’s indulgence in decorative introspection: the painting whose principal subject is itself and the fact that someone painted it. Although his subject matter, the visual impulse which triggers his attempts to fashion an image on canvas, derives from his own sensibility and is to that extent egoistic, Bacon is the least narcissistic of artists. He uses some recollection or preoccupation which is at hand, so to speak, as a prompt for an act of painting. But it is the paint alone, and what happens as a result of its being pushed around on the canvas, which can provide an image of great externality and force, influencing the viewer with a life of its own and doing this independently of the artist. Bacon is in some respects closer to being a sculptor than a painter. The background to his paintings, which are applied at the end, act as a kind of plinth for the images poised upon them. It is sad that Bacon’s eminence occasions, as is often the case with major artists, so much photographic reproduction of his work. The physical grandeur, the sensual texture of his paint outweighs the often horrifying imagery it encapsulates. In reproduction it is the imagery that tells.

Bacon is descended from his great Elizabethan namesake, Shakespeare’s contemporary and an ancestor of the English scientific enlightenment. In his late 70’s now, though looking and talking like a man fifteen years younger, he lives alone in two rooms in central London. He works continually at present, sees a few close friends, eats and drinks very well, gambles with less Doskovieskian intensity than before. He is a man of great but narrow erudition, narrow because he is impatient of anything less than masterpieces and impatient also of masterpieces which he cannot harness to his own art. He is an asthmatic who dislikes the countryside: an urban, noctambular spirit. His bleak view of human life does not stop him enjoying it; indeed he has said in an interview that the aim of art – however violent or sad or grim - is to produce joy. He is good company and generous with money in the way of one who has had to hustle for a living in youth and now has more than he needs. Politically, he is an old-fashioned aristocratic liberal with a low threshold of boredom. He has said that in recent years he has supported the Conservatives, because they are marginally less interfering of individual liberty than political groups on the Left; he is savage about the way modern states interfere with citizens’ lives for their own good. He has refused to be honoured. The British admire his eminence but do not know quite what to make of him: an elegant, wealthy, rather conservative gentleman who paints such scary pictures.

Nevertheless he is the greatest living painter and the most important Britain has produced since Turner. This is a large claim but it is shared by a remarkable number of people round the world, many of them painters, rather few of them British. To us natives, it is still difficult to recognise how distinct Bacon and the sculptor Henry Moore have made us in the visual arts. Our cultural establishment is musical and literary in outlook; we take our theatrical tradition, and Shakespeare, for granted; since the Beatles we can command a world stage in popular music. Seeing and touching, by contrast, belong to the slightly seditious universe of pure sensation and both our puritan and idealistic strands of thought make us suspect appearances. Happily, these two great men have encouraged more than one generation of artists now to build on their achievements and make international names.

Of the two, Bacon is the more surprising. Henry Moore’s work is permeated with the English love of nature. He gives simple and powerful signals about the correspondence between landscapes and female figures. He reinforces life’s primal effects, as if the poet Wordsworth were working in stone. Francis Bacon is not a romantic artist in this way, although he shares the aristocratic intuitiveness of later romantics like Baudelaire. He has the nihilism and gaiety of certain 18th century minds. Nature, when it appears at all in his work, is both threatening and monotonous: purposeless matter unrelieved by the flicker of civilisation’s match. One of his greatest paintings, Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963), is a picture of a tree. It demonstrates the way colour, not drawing, is movement in painting, and how a tree’s sinews suggest muscular movement. But try to people this landscape and you are in the world of Beckett’s Godot or King Lear. A more recent work, Sand Dune (1981), is a picture of sand encroaching a building by the sea. The sand is all movement, dynamic; the building is being eaten and that will be the end of it because nature is in the business of demolition. To fly in the face of nature you need luck and the peculiar courage to stare her down. To adapt a line of the poet Thom Gunn, a few friends and a few with historical names have had the courage. A number of artists – Cimabue, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Degas, Picasso – have looked without blinking. Otherwise, existence is the same as nature: food, drink, territory, sex and status. Bacon is an artist of endgame. His work is a lifespan distant from Moore’s family groups or mothers-with-child.

Classical and romantic are hoary old terms but they provide us with a shorthand, yet to be superseded, for a profound and permanent divide, a creative conflict, within our sensibility. The classical approach represents tradition and training. Its focus is on the human clay and on proportions suitable for the configuration of the body. ‘The lengthened shadow of a man/Is history, said Emerson,’ wrote T. S. Eliot, the great classical poet of our century and one who has always haunted Bacon, in his poem Sweeney Erect. The fascination of the classical artist is the way he bends tradition and training to his own purpose, be that subjective and self-realising, or objective in the sense of realising or trying to imitate a world beyond the self. The permanent things in nature are birth, copulation and death; the ruins of time, man’s time, are what interest the classicist and provide him with his forms. The romantic says, with the 19th century poet Hopkins, that the sensibility soars above its terrestrial confines: ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/, Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed.’

This being the case, the classical artist is preoccupied with realism. Bacon is passionate for realism, only he would argue that now photography has made reportage redundant you need realism of another kind: the ability to capture the emotional energy thrown off by any living presence. Added to this is the energy which works of art generate themselves. In a recent interview he said:

‘I have just finished three portraits of a friend and the problem, as usual, was how to make an image and keep the likeness. To combine the two is what creates tension and excitement.’

John Edwards

The Study for Portrait of John Edwards (1988) is as ‘like’ as a photograph but with so much density of form that it has an object-life of its own. Because of the force of his painting, some commentators have confused Bacon with the Expressionists. They attribute to him an unsettling, northern sensibility. Bacon insists this is wrong. He is adamant that he is not an expressionist, believing in truthfulness rather than effects. The disturbing quality of his work comes partly from what Michel Leiris, quoting Bacon himself, has called his ‘exhilarated despair…the painful yet lyrical disturbance felt by all those who, living in these times of horror spangled with enchantment, can contemplate them with lucidity.’ It also comes, more prosaically, from what Bacon would see as his failure to win the fight between the raw material of oil paint and the mind’s eye. When Bacon does win, as in the Edwards portrait, his paintings are both awesome and tender, moving in the highest and most humane way. Yet even in the most violent pictures, the distortions of his figures are implicit in their own flesh. This is where he comes closest to Picasso.

Lying Figure

To an existential artist like Bacon, chance is very important, both as a rubric for the universe (his hobby is roulette) and for what it brings about on the canvas. Lying Figure (1969) is one of a number of works painted in the 1960’s in which a naked, usually female figure lies on a bed, the head south to the viewer, limbs akimbo, bed and body seemingly about to slide down a great escarpment of carpet. Facial features are blurred as if they and the pigment from which they are formed had been pummelled into the final image. (This is often literally the case, since Bacon paints with rags and his hands as well as with brush). Stripped of their associations, not least the threat to civilised values and human dignity suggested by hypodermic digging into vein, these paintings have the vibrance – the beauty even – of colour which early in his career Bacon found in a medical textbook about diseases of the mouth. Bacon’s surgeon’s aesthetics and sang-froid take some getting used to. They are worth it because they are bound up with his special lucidity of purpose. Look how close oil paint comes to the stuff of life, he seems to say. You are used to this happening with clouds and hills in landscape painting. Why not discover it with the body as well? If the painter is lucky, impulses of memory and desire may allow him to manipulate the stuff so as to trap elusive and temporal personalities, and our feelings about them. Bacon does not paint from life. His subjects are a few friends and himself, painted over and over, in some cases after they have died, from snapshots and memory. Bacon himself looks very like a Francis Bacon. In this respect he is close to his admired contemporary, the painter and sculptor Giacometti. And as John Russell wrote in his book Francis Bacon (1971), ‘Bacon when he wishes is one of the great painters of human flesh and can give it a kind of creamy resonance, a fulfilled soft firmness, for which both Ingres and Courbet had also been searching.’

Ambition, in art, requires not only high seriousness but sufficient personal confidence and aplomb to take on the masters at their own game. Bacon’s belief in un-accommodated man, his identification during the two decades after the war with London’s low life, his gambling, his generosity with money and caustic wit, his frightening ability to drink a great deal and remain at the height of his powers, his age-cheating appearance – all play their part in his anti-heroic legend. By contrast, his career has been altogether steadfast and determined. He was a late starter. He was born and spent much of his childhood in Ireland, where his father trained racehorses. There is a lot of Ireland in Bacon but it is reasonable to think of Bacon as Irish only in the way of thinking of Camus as Algerian. He was educated haphazardly and travelled about Europe in the late 1920s. Berlin and Paris held his imagination and Paris remains the city which most admires his work.

Second Version of Triptych

He made his historical debut about 1930 as an interior decorator and furniture designer; he worked in what is today called the Art Deco style, a popularisation of cubism and geometric abstraction. He studied the art of Picasso, at that time involved in attenuated semi-geometrical figure paintings which were beginning to look haunted and surreal. Inspired, he taught himself to paint. His early work, nearly all of which he subsequently destroyed, gave abstracted hominoid shapes a similarly heightened air – sometimes by little references to the Western religious tradition. His work was not well received and he was turned down for the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936. He himself dates his career from the 1944 triptych Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion in the Tate Gallery.

Head VI

At first glance, this work still owes much to Picasso. It is a study, like the paintings and sketches of the Guernica period, of how to assault the nervous system of an onlooker with formal equivalents for pain, mental stress, distortions not of art merely but of daily living and his own hold upon it. Closer acquaintance suggest that here is someone who has looked hard and imaginatively at the Baroque tradition of wrenching the figure until it is, literally, dragged towards that self-extension known as the sublime. Although the triptych is a very strong, even a terrifying picture, one is at least as much aware of the scepticism and control underlying the element of shock. It is as if the artist were playing ‘touch’ with theatrical excess and learning to paint on the dangerous Baroque margin between going very far and going too far.

The Magdalen

Bacon then dropped the linear, attenuated style of the triptych in favour of something much more solid. He was discovering oil paint’s correspondence with the density of the observed world: the Bourbet road to nature. Key paintings were Figure Study I and Figure Study II (both 1945-6), the latter also known as the Magdalene. These paintings seem to have inaugurated the interest in clothes (no other 20th century painter has rendered them so attentively) which reflected Bacon’s preoccupation with Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X and led to his own robed and enthroned popes, Head VI (1949) for example. A strong formal understanding of the kind of space clothes are designed to occupy draws shocking, and effective, attention to the absence of any owner – or the presence, in the case of Figure Study II, of the wrong owner. “´What modern man wants,`” Bacon has said, quoting Valéry, “´is the grin without the cat`: the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance.” Throughout his career, he has attempted to combine psychological immediacy – his chamber of horrors side – with whatever formal mechanics are most likely to allow the viewer to retain the pained image until it moves into memory and becomes a way of looking at the world. In the years following the war this search led Bacon to solidity at all cost. The Magdalene has the poise of a Giotto figure, so much presence that the umbrella half-concealing her becomes a convincing frame and not the gratuitous surreal emblem for which it is sometimes mistaken. Thirty years later we see it again, in the left panel of Triptych (1974-77): quarry for Bacon iconographers, along with light bulbs, blinds, plumbing, cricket pads and newspapers.

In the following decade, Bacon juxtaposed violent historical signs of our era with the gravities, hollow maybe, but socially and spiritually well anchored, of earlier epochs of painting. His habit of working from photographs and news clippings is everywhere apparent. Himmler and Goebbels, silent or in oratorical flood; Nadar’s captivating photograph of Baudelaire’s sidelong look; people rushing for shelter during street fighting in Petrograd in 1917; Marius Maxwell’s photographs of animals in equatorial Africa; the screaming nurse from Eisenstein’s film Potemkin; a postcard of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice – all appear and reappear as if they were slabs from some lost fresco of devastating formality and scale. There is the same feeling of a civilisation undergoing nervous breakdown that we find in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (‘These fragments I have shored against my ruin.’) although the prevailing mood is relish rather than disgust. Bacon would bring technical devices out into the open and reinstate them as images. The famous boxes which circumscribe his male nudes, popes, business executives and monkeys start life as methods of containing space and end it as prisons out of Kafka or, prophetically, scenes from the trial of Eichmann. His brush strokes become rapid at this time (he does no preliminary drawing) and blur into one another. So originates the suggestion of the flesh poised, like that of M. Valdemar in Poe’s horrifying tale, on the edge of putrefaction.

In recent years the work has in the main turned from public to private scenes, although the image of President Wilson in Triptych (1986-87) must be one of Bacon’s greatest paintings. Bacon’s originality is on as firm ground here, and slightly less susceptible to the aesthetics of shock. It can be said against him, however, that his paintings of men defecating or vomiting lack the grace which Degas found in women’s exercise of natural functions. They look as if their purpose were epater le bourgeois and they do. Memory traces of friends, nudes and the urban interiors which provide a natural setting for all but our least superficial human encounters are recreated, hit and miss, in the large body of work which made his international name. Bacon is unique in this century in his ability to render the indoor, overfed, alcohol-and-tobacco-lined flesh of the average urban male. His painting is how most of us look. Bacon paints beds, platforms, chairs and sofas with the attention Courbet gave to rocks. The effect is a suffocating enclosure: the landscape of hell done as hell’s hotel bedroom; the non-world of Sartre’s Huis Clos and Beckett’s Endgame. The implied theatricality seems to be deliberate. Compositional layout is very much like a stage set; at any moment another figure, bearing hypodermic or ashtray, may enter left or right. Sofas and tables have, like flesh, puffed out and turned flabby, their Art Deco youthfulness long gone. Not surprisingly, the great Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981) discovers a theatricality appropriate to its purpose. The Oresteia plays are an abiding inspiration for Bacon, as they are the most powerful image in literature of mankind trapped by its history and its own sensibility. But in general all these interiors reveal a truism of art impossible to over-emphasize. The function of any artistic medium is to make the recipient work: to offer interchange, metamorphosis, the telescopic sliding-together of our perceptions until they are gathered back to their solitary neural source, there to be stored, reprocessed and used.

Like Eliot’s early poetry, Bacon’s paintings are documentaries of nervous stress. Given the era in which we find ourselves living, this comes as no surprise. What is surprising is the attempt to endow our diminished psychological circumstances with painting which can achieve the formal grandeur and beauty of texture of the very greatest old masters. These characteristics remain, in his best paintings, long after the initial assault on the system has worn off. When things work, therefore, the quality achieved is joy, which is, as Bacon said it should be, the purpose of art.

The Alligator is extremely grateful to Tate Britain for permission to use its images. The Francis Bacon exhibition is on until 4th January and the Alligator strongly recommends going to see it.