Francis Bacon: Tragic Genius

Francis Bacon did for despair what Michelangelo did for faith. He made it majestic. The Bacon retrospective that just opened at Tate Britain in London is one of the most powerful shows I’ve seen in more than 40 years of museum-going. This is Bacon’s fifth retrospective, and by now his screaming Popes, wrestling lovers and tread-marked faces are so famous it’s impossible to make them new. But the Tate show, which runs until Jan. 4, does something better. It brings almost five decades of Bacons together into a kind of collective cry, one that makes you realize how rare it is to see contemporary art that attempts, much less achieves, a genuine tragic dimension. Irony you can find in any gallery these days, also low comedy, puerile cool and enigma. But in a time that has its share of tragedy, where is the art that tries to strike an equivalent note? What we have no language for anymore, at least not in art, is acute pain. Except in room after room at the Tate, in a show that moves later to Madrid and New York City.

After the butchery of World War II, Bacon was one of the artists, along with Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet and a few others, who found a way to make the painted human figure plausible again by subjecting it to extreme pressure. The soft tissue of Bacon’s boiling men and women is wrenched, smeared and vaporized by their own drives and desires, and by whatever it is they do to one another. Their heads are fissured, their torsos are invertebrate; their limbs, stretched and exploded, truly deserve to be called extremities — because with Bacon the body is always in extremis.

For Bacon none of this was a statement about his particular life and times, though his life played a part in it, and so did his times. What Bacon was after was something deeper. He wanted to make the body the visible sign of the eternal devils of human nature, the dog beneath the skin that bares its fangs in war and in bed.

To do that he took whatever he needed from art history. From Poussin came the mouth of a screaming mother in The Massacre of the Innocents and from Degas the arched back of a woman bathing herself in a tub. He also drew on sources from far outside art, things like an illustrated medical text about illnesses of the mouth. He worked from reproductions, and from photographs of all kinds pinned to walls and scattered on the floor of his studios in a muck of paper, rags, used brushes and broken furniture that he dived back into for ideas.

But Picasso was the first source. In the central panel of one of Bacon’s great works from the 1970s, Triptych — In Memory of George Dyer, a shadowy man stands near the landing of a darkened stairwell, turning a tiny key in a lock. That key is surely borrowed from an odd creature doing the same in several of Picasso’s seaside pictures from the late 1920s, when he was flirting with Surrealism. Those elastic Picassos, with their biomorphic figures that are part human, part dirigible, part swollen breast or phallus, turned a key in Bacon. They showed him the way to the nightmare distortions of anatomy that he arrived at by the end of World War II, a time when living flesh had been twisted every which way.

One of the first of those images he set loose in public was Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, a triptych he exhibited in 1945, when he was 35 years old. On three panels of bright reddish orange scuffed with grey, a trio of mutant figures grimace, snarl and bark. In two of them, the most expressive feature is the gaping mouth. What the eyes represent for most painters, the mouth was for Bacon, the locus of human identity. The mouth is what bites, suckles and howls at the moon. By contrast, the eyes in any face painted by him are likely to be missing entirely or smeared shut or obscured by a milky scrim. In Bacon’s pictures, the windows of the soul — not that he believed in the soul — always have the curtains drawn.

By the mid-1940s Bacon had been making art for almost two decades, but he had exhibited very little before the Three Studies. Until the postwar years, he was largely unknown except perhaps to the older men who supported him, his multitude of male pick-ups on the side and whatever clients he attracted for a time as an interior designer in London. Decades later, stripped of any associations with fashion or taste, the ghostly outlines of his Bauhaus-flavored interiors and steel-tube furnishings found their way into the stark spaces and barred enclosures of his paintings. You detect them for the first time in the series of paintings he made from the great Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X, in which Bacon’s flickering white perimeters form a cage for the Pontiff’s impotent fury.

Why a Pope? With Bacon there’s never one answer. His great gift was for conflation, visual and psychological, for compressing multiple possibilities into a single sliding form. From a 19th century photograph by Eadweard Muybridge he could take the squatting silhouette of a man and dissolve it within the outlines of a crouching boy attributed to Michelangelo. He could borrow the eyeglasses from a famous shot of a screaming nurse in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and perch them on a Pope’s nose. In the same way, the meaning of his screaming Pontiff in Head VI fluctuates. Trapped in a kind of isolation booth, where a thunderstorm of granular black strokes rains down on him, this Pope suggests the baying, baboon madness of authority. (Indeed, one source for the painting was a photo of Joseph Goebbels in full harangue.) Yet at the same time, he’s the face of the powerlessness sometimes even of absolute power.

And the same picture of the Holy Father could also bear traces of Bacon’s anguished dealings with his own father, a truculent English army officer turned horse trainer who moved the family to Ireland, where Bacon was born in 1909. “Eddie” Bacon eventually rejected his girlish son and, if Bacon’s not always reliable stories can be trusted, even had him whipped by stableboys to make a man of him.

But it’s always a mistake to understand Bacon’s work too quickly by way of his life. That’s true even of the ferocious triptychs he made after the suicide of his lover George Dyer, a onetime London hood who killed himself in their hotel room on the eve of Bacon’s 1971 Paris retrospective. With a picture like Triptych — August 1972 Bacon didn’t simply unload his grief. He used it to find his way to an even starker abbreviation of a pitiless world. All through the ’70s Bacon would flatten and simplify the spaces within which he put his liquid people. That made those places even colder and more clinical, and set off more sharply the wide passages of black he used as the threshold of mortality.

Not every Bacon is a triumph, however. As early as the mid-1950s, inspired by Van Gogh and by the keen sunlight of Tangiers, where he was spending much of his time in a miserable love affair, he attempted to work in brighter colors and with looser brushwork. The result was a few congested, conventionally expressionist canvases. But the movement to a high-key palette also opened the way to the orange, lilac and pale beige backgrounds that make his work of the ’60s and ’70s so unnerving, precisely because the agonized figures struggle in such bright spaces.

And by his last decade — he was 82 when he died in 1992 — Bacon was almost too fluent in his own idioms of despair. There are cluttered, over-determined pictures in the last galleries, where you watch him trying to find a way to make it new. But there are also great ones, like the 1991 Triptych. In all three panels, a large black square is placed like a window within a flat, beige background. In the center, a figure barely recognizable as human flows over the lower edge of the black square. On each side panel, Bacon appears as a painted photograph of his own head pinned to the space above a pair of disembodied legs. Each of these has one foot stepping into the blackness. It’s a portrait of the artist bowing out, dying as fearlessly as he lived. And without a trace of sentiment, making death majestic.