WHEN MICHEL ARCHIMBAUD WAS PLANNING A BOOK OF Francis Bacon’s portraits and self-portraits, he asked me to write a short essay for it. He assured me that the invitation was Bacon’s own wish. He reminded me of a short piece I had published a long while back in the periodical L’Arc, a piece he said the painter considered one of the few in which he recognized himself. I will not deny my pleasure at this message, arriving years later, from an artist I have never met and whom I so admired.
That piece in L’Arc discussed Bacon’s triptych of portraits of Henrietta Moraes; I wrote it in the very first years after I emigrated to France, still obsessed by recollections of the country which I had just left and which still remained in my memory as a land of interrogations and surveillance. Some eighteen years later, I can only begin my new consideration of Bacon’s art with that older text from 1977:
“IT WAS 1972. I MET WITH A GIRL IN A PRAGUE SUBURB, in a borrowed apartment. Two days earlier, over an entire day, she had been interrogated by the police about me. Now she wanted to meet with me secretly (she feared that she was constantly followed) to tell me what questions they had asked her and how she had answered them. If they were to interrogate me, my answers should match hers.
“She was a very young girl who had little experience of the world as yet. The interrogation had disturbed her, and three days later the fear was still upsetting her bowels. She was very pale, and during our conversation she kept leaving the room to go to the toilet, so our whole encounter was accompanied by the noise of the water refilling the tank.
“I had known her for a long time. She was intelligent and spirited, she was very skilled at controlling her emotions, and was always so impeccably dressed that her outfit, like her behavior, allowed no hint of nakedness. And now suddenly, like a great knife, fear had laid her open. She was gaping wide before me like the split carcass of a heifer hanging from a meat hook.
“The noise of the water refilling the toilet tank practically never let up, and I suddenly had the urge to rape her. I know what I’m saying: ‘rape her,’ not ‘make love to her.’ I didn’t want tenderness from her. I wanted to bring my hand down brutally on her face and in one swift instant take her completely, with all her unbearably arousing contradictions: with her impeccable outfit along with her rebellious gut, her good sense along with her fear, her pride along with her misery. I sensed that all those contradictions concealed her essence: that treasure, that gold nugget, that diamond hidden in the depths. I wanted to possess her, in one swift second, with her shit and her ineffable soul. But I saw those two eyes staring at me, filled with torment (two tormented eyes in a sensible face), and the more tormented those eyes the more my desire became absurd, stupid, scandalous, incomprehensible, and impossible to carry out.
“Uncalled for and unconscionable, that desire was nonetheless real. I cannot disavow it, and when I look at Francis Bacon’s portrait-triptych it’s as if I recall it. The painter’s gaze comes down on the face like a brutal hand trying to seize hold of her essence, of that diamond hidden in the depths. Of course we are not certain that the depths really do conceal something—but in any case we each have in us that brutal gesture, that hand movement that roughs up another person’s face in hopes of finding, in it and behind it, something that is hidden there.”
THE BEST COMMENTARIES ON BACON’S WORK ARE BY BACON himself in two long interviews: with David Sylvester in 1976 and with Archimbaud in 1992. In both he speaks admiringly of Picasso, especially of the 1926–32 period, the only one to which he feels truly close; he saw an area open there “which has not been explored: an organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it” (the emphases are mine).
Aside from that short period, one could say that everywhere else in Picasso, it is the painter’s light gesture that transformed elements of the human body into a two-dimensional form exempt from any obligation to resemble. With Bacon, playful Picassian euphoria is replaced by amazement (if not by terror) at what we are—what we are materially, physically. Impelled by that terror, the painter’s hand (to use the words of my old piece) comes down with a “brutal gesture” on a body, on a face, “in hopes of finding, in it and behind it, something that is hidden there.”
But what is hidden there? Its “self”? Certainly every portrait ever painted seeks to uncover the subject’s “self.” But Bacon lives in a time when the “self” has everywhere begun to take cover. Indeed, our most commonplace personal experience teaches us (especially if the life behind us is very long) that faces are lamentably alike (the insane demographic avalanche further augmenting that feeling), that they are easily confused, that they differ one from the next only by something very tiny, barely perceptible, which mathematically often represents barely a few millimeters’ difference in the arrangement of proportions. Add to that our historical experience, which teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.
It is in this moment of uncertainty that the rapist hand of the painter comes down with a “brutal gesture” on his models’ faces in order to find, somewhere in the depths, their buried self. In this Baconian quest the forms subjected to “a complete distortion” never lose the character of living organisms, they recall their bodily existence, their flesh, they always retain their three-dimensional nature. And moreover they look like their models! But how can the portrait resemble the model of which it is intentionally a distortion? Yet photos of the persons portrayed are the proof: it does resemble him or her; look at the triptychs—three juxtaposed variations on the portrait of the same person; the variations differ from one another but at the same time have something common to them all: “that treasure, that gold nugget, that hidden diamond,” the “self” of a face.
I COULD PUT IT DIFFERENTLY: BACON’S PORTRAITS ARE an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?
FOR A LONG TIME BACON AND BECKETT MADE UP A COUPLE in my imaginary gallery of modern art. Then I read his Archimbaud interview: “I’ve always been amazed by this comparison between Beckett and myself,” Bacon said. Then, farther on: “I’ve always found that Shakespeare expresses more poetically, more accurately, and in a much more powerful way what Beckett and Joyce were trying to say.” And again: “I wonder if Beckett’s ideas about his art didn’t end up by killing his creativity…. There’s something too systematic and too intelligent about him, which is perhaps what’s always made me uncomfortable.” And finally: “Usually in painting, you always leave too much in that is habit, you never cut enough out, but with Beckett I often get the impression that because he wanted to hone down his text, nothing was left, and in the end his work sounds hollow.”
When one artist talks about another, he is always talking (indirectly, in a roundabout way) of himself, and that is what’s valuable in his judgment. In talking about Beckett, what is Bacon telling us about himself?
That he doesn’t want to be categorized. That he wants to protect his work against clichés.
Also: that he resists the dogmatists of modernism who have erected a barrier between tradition and modern art as if, in the history of art, modern art represented an isolated period with its own incomparable values, with its completely autonomous criteria. Bacon, though, looks to the history of art in its entirety; the twentieth century does not cancel our debts to Shakespeare.
And further: he is refusing to express his ideas on art in too systematic a fashion, lest his art be turned into some sort of simplistic message. He knows that the danger is all the greater because, in our time, art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media-free, not-pre-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener).
Wherever he can Bacon therefore blurs his tracks to throw off the experts who want to reduce his work to a pessimism cliché: he bridles at using the word “horror” with regard to his art; he stresses the role of chance in his painting (chance turning up in the course of the work—an accidental splotch of color that abruptly changes the very subject of the picture); he insists on the word “play” when everyone is making much of the seriousness of his paintings. People want to talk about his despair? Very well, but, he specifies immediately, in his case it is an “exhilarated despair.”
IN HIS REFLECTIONS ON BECKETT, BACON SAYS: “IN PAINTING, we always leave in too much that is habit, we never eliminate enough.” Too much that is habit, which is to say: everything in painting that is not the painter’s own discovery, his fresh contribution, his originality; everything that is inherited, routine, filler, elaboration as technical necessity. That describes, for example, in the sonata form (of even the greatest—Mozart, Beethoven), all the (often very conventional) transitions from one theme to another. Almost all great modern artists mean to do away with “filler,” do away with whatever comes from habit, whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential (the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say).
So it is with Bacon: the backgrounds of his paintings are super simple, flat color; but: in the foreground, the bodies are treated with a richness of color and form that is all the denser. Now, that (Shakespearean) richness is what matters to him. For without that richness (richness contrasting with the flat-color background), the beauty would be ascetic, as if “on a diet,” as if diminished, and for Bacon the issue always and above all is beauty, the explosion of beauty, because even if the word seems nowadays to be hackneyed, out of date, it is what links him to Shakespeare.
And it is why he is irritated by the word “horror” that is persistently applied to his painting. Tolstoy said of Leonid Andreyev and of his tales of terror: “He’s trying to frighten me, but I’m not scared.” Nowadays too many paintings are trying to frighten us, and instead they bore us. Terror is not an aesthetic sensation, and the horror found in Tolstoy’s novels is never there to frighten us; the harrowing scene where doctors operate without anesthetic on the mortally wounded Andrei Bolkonsky is not lacking in beauty; as no scene in Shakespeare lacks it; as no picture by Bacon lacks it.
Butcher shops are horrific, but speaking of them, Bacon does not neglect to remark that “for a painter, there is this great beauty of the color of meat.”
WHY IS IT THAT, DESPITE ALL BACON’S RESERVATIONS, I continue to see him as akin to Beckett?
Both of them are located at just about the same point in the respective histories of their art, that is, in the very last period of dramatic art, in the very last period of the history of painting. For Bacon is one of the last painters whose language is still oil and brush. And Beckett still wrote for a theater whose basis is the author’s text. After him the theater still exists, true, perhaps it is even evolving; but it is no longer the playwrights’ texts that inspire, renew, ensure that evolution.
In the history of modern art Bacon and Beckett are not the ones who open the way; they close it down. When Archimbaud asks Bacon which contemporary painters are important to him, he says: “After Picasso, I don’t really know. There’s an exhibition of pop art at the Royal Academy at the moment…. [But] when you see all those pictures collected together, you don’t see anything. I find there’s nothing in it, it’s empty, completely empty.” And Warhol? “He isn’t important to me.” And abstract art? Oh no, he doesn’t like it.
“After Picasso, I don’t really know.” He talks like an orphan. And he is one. He is one even in the very concrete sense of the life he lived: the people who opened the way were surrounded by colleagues, by commentators, by worshippers, by sympathizers, by fellow travelers, by an entire gang. But Bacon is alone. As Beckett is. In the Sylvester interview: “I think it would be more exciting to be one of a number of artists working together…. I think it would be terribly nice to have someone to talk to. Today there is absolutely nobody to talk to.”
For their modernism, the modernism that closes down the way, no longer matches the modernity around them: a modernity of the fashions propelled by the marketing of art. (Sylvester: “If abstract paintings are no more than pattern-making, how do you explain the fact that there are people like myself who have the same sort of visceral response to them at times as they have to figurative works?” Bacon: “Fashion.”) Being modern at the moment when the great modernism is closing down the way is an entirely different thing from being modern in Picasso’s time. Bacon is isolated (“there is absolutely nobody to talk to”); isolated from both the past and the future.
LIKE BACON, BECKETT HAD NO ILLUSIONS ABOUT THE future of the world or of art. And at that moment in the last days of illusions, both men show the same immensely interesting and significant reaction: wars, revolutions and their setbacks, massacres, the democratic imposture, all these subjects are absent from their works. In his Rhinoceros, Ionesco is still interested in the great political questions. Nothing like that in Beckett. Picasso paints Massacre in Korea. An inconceivable subject for Bacon. Living through the end of a civilization (as Beckett and Bacon were or thought they were), the ultimate brutal confrontation is not with a society, with a state, with a politics, but with the physiological materiality of man. That is why even the great subject of the Crucifixion, which in past times concentrated within itself the whole ethics, the whole religion, indeed the whole history of the West, becomes in Bacon’s hands a mere physiological scandal. “I’ve always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the crucifixion. There’ve been extraordinary photographs of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered. And the smell of death …”
To link Jesus nailed to the cross with slaughterhouses and an animal’s fear might seem sacrilegious. But Bacon is a non-believer, and the notion of sacrilege has no place in his way of thinking; according to him, “Man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason.” Seen from that angle, Jesus is that accident who, without reason, played out the game. The cross: the final point of the game played out to the end without reason.
No, not sacrilege; rather a clearsighted, sorrowing, thoughtful gaze trying to penetrate to the essential. And what essential thing is revealed when all the social dreams have evaporated and man sees “religious possibilities … completely cancelled out for him”? The body. Only ecce homo, visible, touching, concrete. For “Certainly we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal.”
This is neither pessimism nor despair, it is only obvious fact, but an obviousness that is veiled by our membership in a collectivity that blinds us with its dreams, its excitements, its projects, its illusions, its struggles, its causes, its religions, its ideologies, its passions. And then one day the veil falls away and we are left stranded with the body, at the mercy of the body, like the young woman in Prague who, after the shock of an interrogation, went off to the toilet every three minutes. She was reduced to her fear, to the fury of her bowels, and to the sound of the water she heard refilling the toilet tank as I hear it when I look at Bacon’s Figure at a Washbasin from 1976, or the Triptych May–June of 1973. For that young Prague woman it was no longer the police that she had to face up to but her own belly, and if someone was presiding invisibly over that little horror scene, it was no policeman, or apparatchik, or executioner, it was a God—or an Anti-God, the cruel God of the Gnostics, a Demiurge, a Creator, the one who has us trapped forever by that “accident” of the body he cobbled together in his workshop and of which, for a while, we are forced to become the soul.
Bacon often spied on that workshop of the Creator; it can be seen, for instance, in the pictures called Studies of the Human Body, in which he unmasks the body as a mere “accident,” an accident that could as easily have been put together some other way—for instance, I don’t know—with three hands, or with the eyes set in the knees. These are the only pictures of his that fill me with horror. But is “horror” the right word? No. For the sensation these pictures provoke, there is no right word. What they provoke is not the horror we know, the one we feel in response to the insanities of history, to torture, persecution, war, massacres, suffering. No. In Bacon it is a whole different horror: it comes from the accidental nature, suddenly unveiled by the painter, of the human body.
WHAT IS LEFT TO US WHEN WE HAVE COME DOWN TO THAT?
The face;
the face that harbors “that treasure, that nugget of gold, that hidden diamond” that is the infinitely fragile self shivering in a body;
the face I gaze upon to seek in it a reason for living the “senseless accident” that is life.