Francis Bacon: Post War Success (Part 2)

0:02Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm Alastair Souk. And I'm James Fox. A white-faced ghoul dressed in a cape of sensuous smeary purple, like a smashed grape and sitting on an insubstantial golden throne, is screaming at the top of his lungs. Except we can't hear him, because a bit like, I don't know, a distressed genie stuffed back in his lamp. He's trapped in a transparent but claustrophobic box which is muffling his agonised cries. You have these long vertical black stripes in the background which seem to flicker like dark flames and appear to consume him.

0:42His cranium's already disappeared, as if he's vapourising before our eyes. And what's that thing that's dangling from the top of the box, tormenting him even further? It's a tassel which threatens to tickle the tip of his nose. nose-tickling for eternity. There are probably worse punishments, James, in store for sinners in hell, but the painting that I've just described, which is called Head Six and was painted by Francis Bacon in 1949, is still a pretty terrifying vision, right?

1:10Yeah, it's terrifying. And it's an image that's really complex, really elusive, full of really interesting references. And we are going to be digging deeper into it later in this episode. Shall we begin, Alastair, by just reminding listeners to where we got to? Yeah, we need a recap. This is, of course, the second episode of a three-part series on the life and work of Francis Bacon. So just to remind ourselves what we covered in the previous episode, Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909, had a pretty unhappy childhood, drifted as a teenager.

1:41He spent a decadent period of time in Berlin and Paris in the 1920s before returning to London and becoming an interior designer. Slightly unexpected. His first attempts at painting in the 1930s were a mixed bag. He had a breakthrough work, A Crucifixion, in 1933, but a follow-up exhibition was really disappointing for him. But in 1945, aged 35 years old, he made his name with that breakthrough work, three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion.

2:12And this is the moment which he marked out as the beginning of his artistic career. Yes, he's 35, but it's the beginning for him. And what he has to try to do now is to consolidate the success of three studies from 1945. Could he do it? Of course he could. So this is the second part of our three-part mini-series on the life and work of Francis Bacon. So Alistair, we're now in 1945, 1946. Bacon has had an enormous success, really, a breakthrough moment with three studies.

2:53He's now got to try to build on that. And he's obviously very confident because he very quickly in early 1946 embarks on what will be his largest painting to date. So it's a six and a half foot tall painting. And it's called, very imaginatively, Painting 1946. It's a really fascinating image. Do you want to talk us through it? Yeah, I mean, it's worth, just before I dive into it, worth explaining that the piece I described at the very start of this part comes a few years later, 1949, and that one's called Head Six.

3:28That's also a key work in Bacon's Oeuvre, and we're going to get there hopefully by the end of this part. But the milestone along the way is painting 1946, which is, it was actually bought really early on by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It's still there. And although in Britain, perhaps we, because it's in the Tate, are very familiar with three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion, which we ended the last part of this series with, this painting is as much of a masterpiece.

3:59Yeah, I mean, it's a really fascinating image. So I'm looking at it now. There's a bright pink room. And hanging from the middle of the ceiling, there's an enormous beef carcass with its limbs outstretched. So it's like another crucifixion. This time it's not a human figure at all. It's an animal, dead animal. And in front of and beneath that meet, there's a ghostly figure of a man, again with half a face, no eyes. So he's in black. He's wearing some suit and he's underneath an umbrella.

4:33And the umbrella seems to be cast. Is it a shadow that means we can't see the top half of his face? It's very disconcerting. It's bizarre. And Bacon himself said that he arrived at this painting completely by chance. So he'd started, I think, painting a chimpanzee. and then he turned it into a bird of prey. Yes. And then suddenly alighted at this, and all the images that arrived in this picture just sort of coagulated on the canvas almost without him knowing.

5:00That's how he described it. Well, so he's always seemingly tapping into the unconscious in some way. Yeah. And it's not quite a splurge, which you then find on canvas, but what you are seeing is something that cannot be very easily reduced to the various elements that have gone into its making. So that huge side of meat, the beef, the cow carcass in the background that looks like the crucified Christ, he's obsessed with butchers. There are stories that he'd go down to Harrods just to look at the meat counter.

5:32He loves the aesthetics of raw flesh, the colour of it. There is a sort of meat counter here in the picture. Do you think he's a butcher, this guy? Yeah, there is that element. You've got the cuts of meat laid out on some kind of table in the foreground. as a butcher might do it. You also have in the foreground on that sort of table-like form and it's tempting to think back to his career as an interior designer with his tubular furniture because here it looks like there's a sort of balustrade or something in front of this man.

6:02You also have these forms that look a little bit like, are they maybe microphones? And some of the imagery that I think Francis Bacon has been looking at, thinking about at this moment in the run-up to and then in the Second World War, are he's thinking about dictator types who are talking to the crowds, it's public address, it's mass communication, and maybe this sinister figure in black who, by the way, has a buttonhole, bizarrely, just a yellow, I don't quite know what type of flower it is, but a flash of yellow at his chest.

6:33Is he a sort of monstrous bully, cum, ape, cum dictator? Yes. Is that who he represents? Why the umbrella? I know. Well, you know, there was a, I mean, again, that reminds me perhaps of political figures. So Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, always went everywhere with an umbrella. I love this detail. I've come across this on, in fact, I mentioned that this painting is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. I think their gallery label talks about Neville Chamberlain.

7:00I don't think this guy's anything like Neville Chamberlain. I think it's like, it's terribly unfair that Neville Chamberlain, Mr. Appeasement, looks like this imposing dictator type. And actually, I think you often find, And British art historians seem less keen on the Neville Chamberlain theory. But I take the point about the umbrella. Maybe in some way that's part of the source that's kind of coming into Francis Bacon's head. But what's certain is it's hard not to look at this picture as, in some ways, an expression of the times, to a world emerging from war and genocide and, of course, nuclear warfare in 1945.

7:36I mean, the war detail, just before we move on from that, it's important. In the background of the picture, behind the carcass of meat, you have these three purple blinds which are being pulled down. And supposedly, the source for these blinds is an often circulated photograph of Adolf Hitler's bunker, where you saw something similar. So these aren't literal allusions to the times, but clearly, this is an expression of the awful, atrocious zeitgeist, a sort of sensibility of feeling in Europe in the mid-1940s in the wake of the Second World War.

8:14Yeah, it's very easy to read this as an indictment of the failure of politics, of the brutality and violence at the heart of global affairs at this time. And interesting to think that he was already at this point, because it's so important with Francis Bacon to understand this is how he works, but he's using things, disparate sources. he's thinking about paintings by Rembrandt Slaughtered Oxen he's thinking about news photography he's thinking about this picture of Hitler's bunker he's mixing all of these things up to create this image to create something that feels extremely new and for some people as much as it was shocking it was also really exciting yes and the person I'm thinking of is his great his friend at the time and great champion the British artist Graham Sutherland yes But just one final thing on the painting before we go.

9:03We've talked about some of these sources of interpretation, but one of the challenges we always have with Francis Bacon, you mentioned this actually at the start of the first episode, his resistance to narrative. He was also deeply resistant to meaning in some ways. Yes. He didn't, you know, there were lots of interviews, there were amusing interviews later on when he was on the BBC, when people say, oh, are you talking about, is this about the war or is this about religion?

9:26And he'd always say, no, it's not about anything. I mean, a brilliant example of that. In the 60s, he does a painting where there's a nude lying on a bed and in this woman's arm, there's a hypodermic syringe, there's a needle. And people are like, why have you done that? Or there's another painting where he's got a swastika and an armband on a figure in a crucifixion. And people say, well, it's clearly about the Nazis. I mean, there it is. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

9:48He would completely deny it. He really denied it. There's a great line that he used where he said, after all, if you could explain it, why would you go to the trouble of painting it? Yeah. So I think we're always, as art critics, as art historians, trying to pull apart these paintings, try to understand what they're saying. There's always this friction when you come to Bacon because he would always say, well, the image just appeared. And the goal is simply to create an image that is powerful and meaningful and that it impresses on your, if you like, nervous system.

10:19So which is the phrase he would always use, that sort of sense of visceral immediacy of the picture. I guess partly what he's doing is he wants to preserve a certain mystique about his art. If something can be easily analysed and just quickly defined, it loses its sense of power. So there's this bizarre almost contradiction in Francis Bacon where he's an atheist. He paints religious imagery. I mean, this is sort of quasi-crucifixion in a way, painting 1946.

10:45But he is an atheist. He doesn't believe in God. And yet in his art, he wants that sense of spiritual mystery almost, an equivalent of that. If you were being cynical, you might think that he wanted to do that because it just suited his ends. It sort of preserved his sense of his own career, if you like. But I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that visual art is not, it can be, but it's typically not a verbal medium. And of course, he is kind of right.

11:16You know, we can do our descriptions at the beginning of these episodes where we describe a work of art. but when you see it, if it's good, you're getting that impact immediately. Absolutely. Without having to sit around, mess around, doing what we're doing. Yeah. So in a sense, even though, I mean, I don't want to completely undermine the purpose of this podcast, but just following Francis Bacon's lead. Well, I think it's that inscrutability of his pictures that is what makes them so unbelievably powerful.

11:44And this picture in particular had an enormous impact on people at the time. Graham Sutherland was deeply impressed by it. Well, we were coming to Graham Sutherland. weren't we? So, I mean, he, I've always been slightly puzzled by the friendship between them. I don't think necessarily of, I certainly don't think of Graham Sutherland as of an equivalent calibre and power as an artist to Francis Bacon, but they were friends. And we found out, as you told us in the first part, that Graham Sutherland helped kickstart Bacon's career earlier on.

12:10And he plays an important role with painting 1946 as well, doesn't he? Because he sees it and he's really impressed with it. Yes. And he ends up getting a woman, an extraordinary female art dealer called Erica Browson, to come and see the picture. And she goes in the autumn of 1946 to Bacon's studio and she sees painting 1946 and she is dumbfounded. Yeah, but you know how she's sort of almost prepped for it. I think they meet first in the bar of the Ritz.

12:39Oh, I didn't know this. Of course it's the Ritz. And that meeting goes well. And then possibly, slightly oiled, they then go and go to the studio. And she sees this picture that she's been tipped off about by Graham Sutherland. And she buys it. She buys it for £200. She says to Bacon, can I get it? I'll give you £200. Will you sell it to me? He says yes. She goes to the bank. She takes out £200 in cash. She gets £45 notes. She returns to the studio.

13:10She hands this cash to him. This is a very significant sum of money at that time. This is £200 at that point in 1946. It's pretty much the average annual wage for a British person. It's like £25,000, £30,000 today. She later sells it to MoMA, to the Museum of Modern Art, for I think £240. So she makes a bit of a profit. She makes a profit. But can you imagine, Alistair, writing a nice piece for The Telegraph, and a biker coming over that evening with £25,000 in cash.

13:37That's how it used to be. Yeah, well, so if I got that cash, I would do my windows. You'd probably replant your garden. Bacon goes to Monte Carlo. He's got other plans. Of course he goes to Monte Carlo. So he travels to Monte Carlo a couple of weeks after making that sale. I quite like the idea. I think in our first episode about Bacon, we established that there are these moments in his life where he drifts. He's in drift mode. And here, with these proceeds, he goes full drift.

14:04He goes full drift. He moves to Monte Carlo. The exchange rate, once again, is very favourable. So he can live in splendour. He's eating lobster Thermidor and caviar. He's drinking Dom Perignon. And he's spending an enormous amount of time in the casino. So gambling, I'm not sure we've established this yet, but Francis Bacon was an inveterate gambler. He loved gambling. He loved roulette. And it's not just sort of, salacious isn't quite the right word, but thinking about the biographical detail.

14:39It's interesting when you think about his art. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So, yes, first of all, let's just say that he's spending hours and hours in the casino. So he's arriving at 10 in the morning and leaving at 4 the following morning. Roulette is his favourite thing because it's a game of complete chance. There's no skill. There's no game playing in it. You're just either lucky or you aren't lucky. And sometimes he was really lucky. And sometimes he would make money, but more often than not, as all gamblers experience, you end up getting unlucky.

15:07But I think you're really onto something. I think the gambling is a real master key into understanding his personality and also the way he worked. So bear in mind that his whole sort of philosophical framework is we live in a godless world without meaning. Life is meaningless. It's a game of chance. Life is a game of chance. Life is roulette. You get lucky, you don't get lucky. And he applied that when it comes to making paintings because chance would be an essential tool for him later in his life, throughout.

15:38Yeah, he's a massive risk taker in life and in his work. He's also, I wonder whether he's a slight sort of, could be a bit of a bullshitter, because what I love about the Monte Carlo years is he's aware that he's met this dealer who's given him this money, and she's essentially funding him, and she's setting up a gallery in London called the Hanover Gallery, which is showing the latest cutting-edge contemporary art, and he's going to have a show there.

16:05and eventually he will have a show there and that's where Head Six, the painting I described at the start, will be shown. But he obviously is going to have to make some work for it and he's telling all and sundry, yeah, Monte Carlo, great place, wonderful light. He's writing back to the Sutherlands saying, you know, it's really good for pictures. They're falling ready-made into the mind, as there he is in Monte Carlo. He says, I paint dozens every week there.

16:291947, not a single work by Francis Bacon survives. Yes. 1948, one painting by Francis Bacon survives. Now, we know he was really ruthless about self-editing. He destroyed a lot of work. He didn't feel it was satisfactory. And maybe in those years, he did produce some work which he destroyed. That's part of the risk-taking element. That's part of the chance. You know, his pictures, the way he works, very impulsively, he either triumphs or it's a disaster and he destroys the canvas.

16:58So, yes, as far as we know, he's not producing a great deal in Monte Carlo. But he does discover something there, which is, again, very important in terms of technique and his approach for the rest of his life to painting, which is maybe he's had some bad luck in the casino and he's suddenly out of funds again. But he is at least trying to paint and he runs out of canvas. So typically for an artist, you're painting on the so-called primed side of the canvas.

17:27and that means it's been prepared and the preparation which has been laid down like a sort of off-whitey colour allows, it takes paint very well and Francis Bacon had run out of primed canvases on which to continue working. So out of desperation really around this time he just decides to do something and remember he didn't go to art school, he's self-taught so throughout his career he's full of these idiosyncratic ideas when it comes to technique.

17:53He flips around a primed canvas he's already painted on and he starts painting on the so-called unprimed the wrong side of the canvas which is the sort of raw side and he realizes that he loves the effect yes because it has a much thicker weave and the the paint that comes on and i think this links back to our chance discussion you can't with the prime side if something goes wrong you can kind of wipe it back start again with the unprimed side it's there for good yeah so you're taking your chances you're going to make a mark, it's indelible.

18:24He quite likes the thrill. It suits his temperament somehow to do that. And also you can get thinner applications of paint that somehow get stained in the bite, if you like, of that raw side of the canvas. It means that he likes the effect. So he is, despite not being very productive, he's making some important for him artistic discoveries in Monte Carlo. So he runs out of money at Monte Carlo after a couple of years. I'm actually surprised he lasts that long when you consider the expenditure.

18:54Yes. He comes back to London at the end of the 1940s and is working towards this exhibition. But by this stage, he already has a very close new friend who's a pretty important figure in his own right. Yeah. Now, look, when we spoke about this episode beforehand, James, where there was some discussion about we really want to tell this story. Yeah. It's not really linked to the Monte Carlo bit. It's not particularly linked to the 1949 show that we're coming to.

19:16It's an interlude, but it's a fun interlude. because it's the story of the friendship between Francis Bacon and another really important 20th century British painter who also painted the figure at a time when that wasn't very fashionable, Lucian Freud. And interestingly, they're introduced by a mutual friend who's appeared a few times already in our podcast, Graham Sutherland, in the mid-1940s. He's the puppet master, isn't he, Sutherland? He does seem to be.

19:43I never really thought he had it in him. We should say something. Before we move on, we should say something about Lucian Freud. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud. He is. Born in Berlin. And he emigrates with his parents. They're a Jewish family, of course. And they emigrate from Berlin to London in 1933. He's significantly younger than Francis Baker. I think he's 13 years younger. Yes. And that dynamic is quite important. Lucian clearly looks up to him.

20:10Yes. In that sense, they do have something in common. and they're both kind of exiles from their place of birth. They're outsiders. Francis Bacon, of course, not living in Dublin, where he was born into the high society that he went on to reject. And, of course, Lucian Freud leaving Germany in 1933. They both paint the figure. They both love gambling. Yes. I mean, there are a lot of links. Yes. And there is a moment when they become, as friends, inseparable.

20:44They're hanging out the whole time. It's a very, very intense friendship. I always wonder whether possibly something more. Well, they both love sex. They do. They both love drinking. As you say, they both love gambling. There's a really nice Freud's daughter, Annie Freud. She recalls this idea of Bacon and Freud, Lucien, spending all their afternoons, evenings together in Soho and all the restaurants and bars. and her description of this was it was a kind of public verbal lovemaking telling stories being absolutely scandalous and looking fantastic yeah you know there's this real obsession there's a lovely also i mean this is an irresistible little anecdote but um in the 40s freud marries a woman called kitty garman daughter of a sculptor jacob epstein marriage doesn't work out in 1953 he marries again he marries a woman called lady caroline blackwood bacon is at the wedding Caroline Blackwood's description of this whole period is that she had to have dinner with Bacon nearly every night for more or less the whole of my marriage to Lucien.

21:53How romantic. Pause. We also had lunch. I mean, there's this idea that there was no escape whatsoever. But later on, things start to sour. So, I mean, I know we're now jumping around with the chronology. They've met in the 40s. They've become very, very good friends. but the friendship, they end up actually estranged. I've never quite got to the bottom of it. They both make portraits of each other. The first named portrait of someone that Francis Bacon does is a portrait of Lucian Freud, where sort of typically for Bacon, the source he uses, at that stage he's working from life with sitters, but Freud turns up, he finds this portrait which dates from the early 50s, almost finished already, and the source he's been using, that Bacon's been using, is a photograph of the young writer Franz Kafka.

22:37Yeah. So quite strange. Freud himself depicts Bacon. There's one beautiful painting, I'm sure you know it, which is on copper from the 50s in Freud's early hyper-realist style, really exquisite, close-up of Bacon's head, Bacon's big pudding-shaped head, which he, Bacon, loathed. And it sort of brings us almost to the end of this little Freud interlude because that picture ends up much, much later going on loan to a show from the Tate to a show in Germany, in Berlin, and it's stolen.

23:13And Freud's clearly really, really upset about this. And then if we fast forward even further to, I think, 2001-ish, he's about to have his own retrospective at the Tate, and he would love for this picture to be in the show. And he pulls off this stunt where he issues all of these posters, which he puts up around Berlin. I think you can get hold of them. I've always, I just, I would love to have one framed. could be a Christmas present Jane if you're thinking about that down the line and these posters they have a black and white image of the lost stolen portrait of Francis Bacon by Lucian Freud and above in red the word wanted it's a wanted poster it's an appeal now the picture doesn't turn up as a result of it but I find it so interesting because by that point they well by that point Francis Bacon was dead yes but they'd long been estranged and that word wanted I don't know whether you think this is reading too much, but there's a sense of regret, desire in that.

24:11Not just for the portrait, perhaps. Francis Bacon is missing from his life. He played such a key role and he's gone. Oh, so heartwarming, Alistair. But, you know, can I just, I mean, just to finish that. Oh, yeah. Because what isn't heartwarming is what Bacon said about the fade out of their friendship. there's a wonderful recent two part biography of Lucian Freud by William Fever he talks about this in the biography supposedly Francis Bacon said about Freud leaving him first of all he calls him she very typical Bacon move he goes she's left me after all this time and she's had all these children just to prove she's not homosexual so it really was total kind of by the end they hated each other's late work yeah and But yes, there we should perhaps draw a line under the interlude.

25:04Yeah, but I think they are two titanic figures of figurative art in the 20th century. I mean, Freud, perhaps the only person to equal Bacon and to match Bacon in terms of the power and the accomplishment of his vision. But such different artists as well. I mean, obviously, Freud worked from life, typically very, very slowly, very, very meticulously. Bacon hardly ever worked from life. He worked from photographs, as we shall see, very impulsively and quickly.

25:32It's quite interesting that in the 50s, and this is now a bit of an aside, but Lucian Freud's style changes really radically. It goes from that hyper-realist, quite exquisite style early on to something which is a lot freer. He has kind of coarser brushes. And lots of people credit the friendship with Francis Bacon. Bacon represented a slightly looser sense of freedom, both in his personality and in his art, and influenced younger Lucian Freud in that sense.

25:58So let's return to the story, Alastair. So he's come back from Monte Carlo, completely broke, run out of money, desperately needs an exhibition, desperately needs to sell some pictures. And in 1949, so he's now, what, 40 years old, 38, 39, 40 years old, he has his first official one-man show. He's done a one-man show of his own back in the 30s that listeners may remember was a complete disaster. This is his first proper one-man show at the Hanover Gallery.

26:28And it is a really important exhibition. and a really important milestone in the history of Bacon's career. So he's got to produce, I mean, it is, and he's got to produce quite a lot quite quickly to fill it. And perhaps as a result, the sense of ambition, the grandeur, the scale that you find in the three studies picture of 1944 and in painting 1946, he goes down a different route. He paints a series of heads. And the first five of these six heads have a particular feel.

26:59They're against a very dark monochromatic background. And it seems that Bacon is looking at imagery, photography of wildlife, because you have these heads which look like they are mostly a scream and you see in the teeth these fangs. So is he looking at chimpanzees here? It's a sense of these primates maybe, they're snarling. Is it aggressive? Are they frightened? But again, we established in part one that he becomes very interested in the idea of the scream, the mouth.

27:34You're starting to see that articulated here in these series of heads. Do you rate these works? I mean, I've looked at them quite closely in preparation for this episode. I don't think they're very good. I mean, Head Six, which we'll come to, is a great picture. But the first five, they're very hesitant pictures. They're very unresolved pictures. they're almost in the process of erasing themselves. They don't feel for me like they're quite working.

28:03But at the same time, it does feel like a major step forward in his career. I think he's moving away to some extent from monsters towards the human form. Not fully, but he's moving towards the human figure that will become a very important motif, the most important motif in his career for the next few decades. I think they're also important because they're not perhaps straining for effect in the way that three studies, in the way that Painting 1946 were using very strident colours, very explicitly violent imagery to really shock the viewer.

28:35They feel quieter than that. I'm not sure I'd use the word quiet. They still feel like there's something howling. I think they distill a central preoccupation of Bacon's, which is that sense of man's animal nature, a kind of brutal vision of the universe. and a howl in response to that, if you like. They're not, they lack any seductive qualities of that orange background in three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion, which for all of its repellent, obscene, bulbous imagery, it somehow is still quite, ravishing isn't quite the right word, but there's an appeal there, sort of visual optical appeal.

29:17These are really quite mysterious, dark, muted things. But for me, it really is all about that head six because it's such a step change. There's a departure in this series that he creates. Yes. And suddenly you have something which isn't resembling a part of an ape. Yes. But is clearly a human figure. And as I described at the start of this part, seems to be, well, is wearing some purple cape that looks ecclesiastical. is in this odd box there's an element of a throne behind him and the center of it underneath the tickling tassel under the link underneath the nose is again the mouth screaming but there's a real mystery a sense of suddenly he's found a new source of inspiration that he's tremendously excited by and creating a work of art as a result is phenomenally important in his career And this source of inspiration will prove to be a really pivotal and important factor of his painting for the next 10 years at least.

30:29And we will talk more about it. We're not going to reveal it now. No, you have to wait until after the break. A reminder that if you want to see the artworks we're discussing, you can switch to video in your podcast app at any time. And if you're enjoying this episode, please consider following Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts, and maybe even leave a review. So welcome back to Stories of Art. It is, James, well, it's 1949. And is this right, James?

31:11This is Francis Bacon's first solo show. It's his first solo show at the Hanover Gallery. In London. And he's already established himself as a very challenging, provocative presence on the post-war British art scene. He's emerged. But here he is at the Hanover Gallery showing a series of heads, heads one to six. And I think where we left things was with the crucial step change that we find in head six, where suddenly you have this figure who looks like he's in ecclesiastical robes.

31:45And there is a reason for that. Because there is a new source that Francis Bacon is excited by and he will be obsessed with for many years to come. Yes, there's a new kid on the block in Francis Bacon's imaginative life. And that new kid is a 17th century Spanish artist called Diego Velazquez. So he is obviously one of the great painters of the 17th century. I've actually met many artists through my career, as I'm sure you have as well, who consider him to be the greatest of them all.

32:16He's a real painter's painter, Velázquez. He's most famous for Las Meninas, this extraordinary, life-changing group portrait, which is the star exhibit in the Prado. Very complex picture. Very complex, including a self-portrait. A royal context here. Yes. But I think his greatest single portrait is the portrait of Pope Innocent X, which he paints in 1650. There are lots of stories swirling around this picture, many of them apocryphal probably. But the usual story is that Velázquez finds himself in Rome.

32:57He offers to paint Pope Innocent X. The Pope doesn't want to be painted. Velázquez shows him a previous work he's made. the Pope is so impressed that he agrees. Velázquez goes on to paint Pope Innocent X. And when he's finished it, the Pope looks at the painting and goes, it's too true. It's too true. And of course, that's probably an apocryphal statement. But at the same time, it's completely right. Because in this picture, Velázquez captured this absolutely intense, inescapable, terrifying presence of the Pope.

33:32And I remember... Is it worth just describing what it looks like? So this is a seated portrait of Innocent X. He is seated at this gold throne with a red curtain behind him. He's holding this letter which bears the signature of Velazquez. And he is wearing the Pope's robes. He's wearing this unbelievable shimmering silk red cape and red hat. And he is looking out at you with unbelievable power and authority. Of course, the Pope is the ultimate figure of earthly authority.

34:04It's a wonderful piece of painting. He just looks so wily. He does. I remember, Alistair, when I was 18 or 19 years old and made my first ever visit to Italy, I went in order to see lots of paintings and frescoes because I was already a bit of an art fetishist at that point. And I remember going to see this picture in Rome and my knees actually buckled in front of it. It's one of those paintings that is so intimidating, so terrifying, that you feel it is looking at you more than you are looking at it.

34:36It feels more real than you. And you tower in front of it. The amazing thing about that anecdote is you did the opposite of what Francis Bacon did. Francis Bacon became obsessed with this portrait. He collected obsessively reproductions of it. He had them throughout his studio. He painted it in various variations again and again. but when he had the opportunity to go and see that portrait in reality in Rome he didn't do it he didn't want to he goes to Rome the height of his obsession with this picture he goes to Rome in 1954 he's there for I think two months does not go to see the picture he's too scared to go to see the picture because it is that kind of it's got that presence he didn't want his knees to buckle no he didn't want his knees to buckle it's got that burning intensity to it he sees the picture through reproductions mostly black and white reproductions well okay go on then where are you going with that?

35:26So in Head Six, as we have established, I believe the cape looks rather like a smashed grape. Yes, famously. Yes. Immortally. Because grapes, they can be purple. In the Velazquez portrait, clearly that cape is red. Now, Bacon perhaps doesn't know that. He's looking at it in reproduction in black and white. And as a result, it's quite possible he just gets the colour wrong and he opts for what he thinks is a liturgical ecclesiastical purple yeah but he does credit this painting as being i mean i think his phrase for it is this is my first subject yes which i find odd because he obviously the crucifixion he's attempted in various guises already by this point but he calls this the start of this this long series of variations of alaska is it's his first subject yeah well it's his first single source i suppose that he keeps returning to again and again and again.

36:21He says it's like a schoolboy having a crush on their housemaster. Yes. So he really becomes obsessed with this picture. But of course, the crush images, I mean, you know, it's very interesting because that suggests something. We're going to talk about crushed grapes again. Crushed grapes, left, right and centre. It suggests something that would be quite a positive. You know, what this is not is a straightforward homage to Velazquez's portrait. I mean, what do you think, in Head Six, what do you think he's doing to Velazquez?

36:52And then we can widen out, think about the series that follows. It seems that he is attacking an emblem of authority. That's what it seems above all to me. It's a sort of violent, iconoclastic urge somehow. I think so. I think obviously the Pope is the ultimate figure of authority. And I think we have to understand that at this point in the late 1940s, early 1950s, Francis Bacon is emerging as a mature artist in his own right. He's trying to establish himself in the world as a figure on his own terms.

37:27And what people do in those circumstances, they have to challenge the authority. They have to challenge the people who come before them. And when you think about it with the Pope, it embodies all different kinds of authority that Bacon might be wanting to challenge. The first, his father. Well, the Pope is a father figure. Il Papa. The name is related. So there's a challenge of the fatherly figure. There's the challenge of religion. Bacon grew up in a Christian house in a Catholic country.

37:53He's a devout atheist, so he's challenging religion. He's challenging his father and father figures. And importantly, he's challenging or taking on old masters, the artistic authority. So I think for him, his engagement with Velázquez and the Pope Innocent X painting at this particular point in his career feels like an important threshold that he has to pass through. How much do you... Genuine question. The father figure idea. It's so tempting...

38:24It is, isn't it? ..to read his biography into this painting and then the series that follows. He hates his dad, his father, Eddie Bacon, who was potentially just so abusive towards him and had him horsewhipped by his grooms. Probably always screaming at him as well. Exactly. And but, you know, I mean, do you think that's a total given that that biographical psychoanalytical reading of taking down the father figure is what this is all about? I don't think anything is a given with Francis Bacon.

38:53That's what makes his work so unbelievably compelling. Because another biographical interpretation that I love is it looks like this guy is screaming, but he is sitting in this box. and the box could be airless. Maybe he's not screaming at all. Maybe he is gasping for air. And why is that important? Well, Bacon, chronic asthmatic throughout his life, a fit of asthma. I mean, what a terrifying experience. You feel you can't breathe. So some of that personal fear and terror is maybe writ large in this painting in the series of variations on the Pope.

39:31That's really, I've not heard that interpretation before. It's fascinating. I think the other thing is, of course, he's a cannibaliser of images. Remember when he went to Berlin in the 1920s? He saw Sergei Eisenstein's battleship Potemkin with that famous screaming woman. So he's thinking about that. He's thinking about the previous screaming paintings that he's depicted. Can we just pause on the scream? Because, I mean, maybe it's too obvious to even spell it out, but the Velazquez painting, the Pope is not screaming.

40:02So there is an artistic decision that's taken place here. He is fusing Old Master Portrait of Pope with imagery of the scream. He's obsessed with the human mouth. Yeah, and it's one of the things that's interesting. When you go back through the, this is a bit of an aside, but when you look back at the history of art, you hardly ever see figures with their mouths open because their teeth were so terrible. So actually to take an Old Master painting and then almost to depict it with the mouth wide open and the teeth showing is transgressive almost on its own terms.

40:38Bacon, you know it. I mean, it's an incredibly famous quote, but he was obsessed with mouths. He loved the movement of mouths. He loved, these are his words, the glitter, the colour of mouths. And he said he always hoped he could paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset. Yes. I mean, there's nothing Monet-like and sunset-like about this image, but it gets to the heart of his fixation with it. I suppose a scream can be, there's that pleasure-pain paradox.

41:05You know, the mouth is a site of primal emotion, in a sense. And everything about Bacon is, what's that phrase he used? The nervous system. He wants his paintings to get you on the nervous system. Yes. And somehow the scream is a physical embodiment of that concept. Yeah. It's an extraordinary image and it will prove, the Velázquez painting will prove immensely productive for him for at least a decade. He is preoccupied with Velázquez in many ways throughout the 1950s and he returns to Velázquez actually after that as well.

41:38So it's a really, really fascinating aspect of his career and it feels like it's a very important way forward for him towards the human figure. So Francis Bacon, And as we move into the 1950s, Alistair is building on his success. He's making these extraordinary pictures inspired by Velázquez. But he's also, his romantic life, his personal life is changing. Well, I think for people who were following his art in the 50s, they first get a sense of this in a different series of works he creates, which are known as the Men in Blue.

42:14So related in a way to the popes, but it's not a pope this time. it's a businessman these paintings present an anonymous business executive in a dark suit practically blending into a monochromatic background may have been based initially on an encounter that Francis Bacon had with a man at a hotel the Imperial Hotel in Henley on Thames which is relevant we'll find out in a moment why and what Bacon told the famous art critic David Sylvester, who later published a whole series of interviews with Bacon that are foundational for anyone who's interested in Francis Bacon as a subject.

42:53Bacon revealed that that sense in these Men in Blue paintings of claustrophobia, of unease, might have stemmed from the fact that they were depicting the new lover in his life, the person who in fact was, by his own account, the love of his life. A man called Peter Lacey, who according to Bacon was always in a state of unease. Peter Lacey, this man who was neurotic, almost hysterical. Yes. Bacon meets Peter Lacey at the beginning of 1952. He meets him in a Soho bar one night, and Lacey is, I think, the jazz pianist in the corner of the room.

43:28Lacey is a bit younger than Bacon, but he looks older in some ways. He's very tall. He was in the Air Force during the Second World War and he's kind of good looking in a Biggles sort of way. He's got this curly, wavy side parting. Although he didn't fight in the Battle of Britain. It's often said he did. Yes, he didn't. I think he was a test pilot or something, wasn't he? And a former mechanic. Yeah, he's very on the surface of it. He's very well put together.

43:54He's quite quietly spoken. He's got a little stammer. But beneath the surface, he's got this very sadistic element to him. And Bacon falls unstoppably and helplessly in love with Lacey. Well, he says being absolutely physically obsessed with someone is like an illness. Yes. So this is his description of being in love with Peter Lacey in the 1950s. It's an awful relationship in many ways. I think they do love each other. They do love each other. But Bacon describes the relationship as one of, and these are his words, continuous horror.

44:28So there are beatings, there are rapes, there are humiliations. Lacey would often want to be watched having sex with Francis Bacon he would often get other men to have sex with Francis Bacon and then would would follow follow in afterwards they Lacey would Lacey would destroy his possessions he would destroy his paintings at one point he threw Francis Bacon out of a first floor window and all of this was really prompted by alcohol they were drinking enormous amount I think actually Peter Lacey was probably the only man in Britain who could out drink Francis Bacon.

45:00I mean, he was drinking at his peak three bottles of whiskey a day. I mean, this would be a problem for him in the end. But there is a sense of yin and yang in terms of Lacey's sadism really works with Bacon's masochism. So his sex life is now very, very violent. And he's often injured, essentially, during his encounters, his couplings, as he would call them, with Peter Lacey. And that gets depicted. It somehow comes up in some of the work that you see at this moment.

45:32Well, there's one painting in particular called Two Figures, which he painted in 1953, a year after they met. So they're right in the heat of the relationship at that point. It is an extraordinary painting. Yeah, I mean, I do think it is incredible for a whole host of reasons. So you see two naked male figures who are grappling, possibly wrestling, probably something else, on a bed, a bed of rumpled white bedsheets. And they're in a dark space. And you can see the contours of the room behind them sort of delineated.

46:13And there were these stripes going across an effect that Bacon called shuddering, which makes it feel almost as though this image is, can you quite see it. It's dematerialising before our eyes. And what people think is that if you look at the faces, you can see that these are, in some sense, portraits of Peter Lacey and Francis Bacon. And the lower figure has this grimace. You can see the teeth, the mouth, as these two men are having sex is that an expression of pleasure again is it an expression of pain this is a really radical gay painting for the time when homosexuality is illegal yeah i mean it's an icon in that sense yeah i mean it's extraordinary this is this 1953 so at this point homosexuality is illegal it will be illegal until the what the mid to late 1960s this is a time in 1952 the year before this alan Turing, a great guy who cracked the Enigma code.

47:16He is convicted of homosexuality and is chemically castrated. John Gielgud is arrested in the same year for homosexuality. This is a really tough thing to express. No artists really at this time are expressing this. I think I would like to say a little bit more about the genesis of this picture. And I think we haven't really talked in great detail about Bacon's method. And Bacon's method was very much based on secondary sources. As I say, unlike Lucian Freud, who was working from life, Bacon was a cannibaliser of the age of the image.

47:51He was someone who was collecting photographs, books, newspaper cuttings, clippings, diagrams, medical textbooks, and using these images, stills from films, old master paintings, as we've discussed, and using this to fertilise his imagery. Can I interject? Just because you mentioned Lucian Freud, and it feels like there's a really brief aside, it's an apposite thing to say. This painting, two figures, belonged to Lucian Freud, who had it for decades, I believe hung it in his bedroom, make of that what you will, and refused to lend it, which may be some of the source of the animosity in later life between Freud and Bacon.

48:35I think it definitely annoyed Bacon that the picture wasn't lent to shows. So Bacon is constantly cannibalising, digesting the world of images, the world, as Walter Benjamin would call it, the age of mechanical reproduction all around him. And one of the most important sources for Bacon, the one he used more than almost any other, was Edward Muybridge's work. Eadwyrd Muybridge. Yes, he renamed himself many times. He took the Anglo-Saxon version of Edward or something.

49:03I think his real name was Edward Mugridge or something like that. But let's not do him down. He's an important figure. Very important figure. A Victorian photographer who produced these pioneering studies of motion in which he would show in this kind of stop-motion way, he would show people, animals, horses, for instance, in this kind of stop-motion photography to show how they actually moved. and one of my bridge's studies focused on wrestlers these two male wrestlers and the techniques they're using to i mean i don't know the specific vocabulary surrounding wrestling but the techniques they're using to throw each other over their shoulders their holds their holds exactly and uh and their grips and things like that and bacon loved this image and this is absolutely the source material for this picture and of course what is always the case with bacon is he takes the source material and he subverts it.

49:53He does something very interesting with it. He takes an image that is a kind of pretty staid image of people wrestling, a study of motion, and turns it into this homoerotic, homosexual image. You also spoke about his relationship with the Old Masters. And one of his favourite Old Masters was Michelangelo, an artist I know very close to your own heart. and Bacon particularly loved Michelangelo's drawings. Yes. And he loved the sense of the musculature that you could see.

50:25That was clearly of key importance for Bacon. And so what you find in an image like Two Figures is you've got all of these layers where you've got Muybridge's photography, you've got Michelangelo's drawings somehow in there, the male nude as a time-honoured motif for the old masters. you've got his own life the intimacy, the autobiography Peter Lacey and him going at it on a bed and you have as well a sense, I think through that shuddering I quite like this interpretation that because of the illicit nature of homosexuality at the time somehow in the way it's been painted.

51:03Feels voyeuristic doesn't it? It does. It sort of feels somehow covert. It's sort of it is happening in the privacy of it appears to be a bedroom but that shuddering effect makes it almost dematerialise. Is it there? Is it not? Can we quite trust what we're seeing with our own eyes? So all of those different layers are coming together and somehow they're saying something about that moment, about the time. Yeah, it is remarkable. And when this picture gets shown in the Hanover Gallery, and it's pretty amazing they do agree to show it, they put it on the first floor so the police won't easily see it and there won't be complaints.

51:40So it's a really, really powerful picture for the reasons you describe in so many different ways. That relationship with Peter Lacey continues through the 1950s. And of course, Bacon is becoming more and more successful across that decade. And in May 1962, Alistair, so Bacon is now 52 years old. He gets his first major retrospective at the Tate Gallery. This is a very significant honour. He knows it. And it's a full picture, essentially, of his entire career to date, featuring most of the great works we have discussed over the last two episodes.

52:19I mean, it's worth saying that by this point, Lacey himself has actually moved to Morocco, to Tangier, which was a place where you could be more openly, you could be gay. There was a period where it was tolerated, if you like. he's playing the piano again at some bar there and the relationship has by the early 60s they're no longer together um but yes there's this moment of potential great personal triumph in terms of francis bacon's career and the exhibition is an unbelievable success i mean a hundred thousand people go to see this exhibition the reviews are rapturous can i read another times review i wish you'd find one in the telegraph james i'm sorry i didn't find a telegraph one the times one this is And I think it captures the transformation between the 1930s, that Times review then and the Times review now.

53:07They say in 1962, this is the black night of the 20th century soul. Images of a man which are terrifying, violent and at times bestial. Yet they are royal and proud and silent. No other painter of our day, and for once the phrase can be left as it stands without worrying about the word British, could make these five large galleries look so nearly like an exhibition by an old master. But as always with Bacon, Alistair, triumph and tragedy would intermingle because on the 24th of May, the very day that exhibition opens, Bacon receives a telegram.

53:49And that telegram tells him that Peter Lacey is dead, died at the age of 46, brought about by drink. So this is a devastating blow for Bacon. Lacey, for all of his failings, was the love of Bacon's life, probably the only man he ever truly loved in that regard. So what would happen next? Would Bacon kick on and continue to build on his success as an artist, or would he fall to pieces? Well, you will have to find out in our next and final episode.

54:18Goodbye. to see Alistair in a film about Francis Bacon visit the Henny Talks YouTube channel and a comprehensive book on his works is available to buy at henny.com