GRAHAM SUTHERLAND recommended Bacon to the tastemakers. One of the first was John Rothenstein, who became director of the Tate in 1938 at the age of thirty-seven after serving as the director of museums in Leeds and Sheffield. Just three months after Bacon first wrote to Sutherland, Rothenstein happened upon Sutherland and de Maistre at an exhibition and, said Rothenstein, the two artists “spoke to me with enthusiasm of the work of a strange but gifted painter, Francis Bacon.” Sutherland also talked Bacon up to important collectors, among them Colin Anderson, who would eventually purchase two Bacon paintings and become, in the early 1950s, a patron of the artist.
In 1944 or early 1945, Sutherland even persuaded Kenneth Clark to visit Bacon’s studio. Clark walked into 7 Cromwell Place “with his tightly rolled umbrella” and appeared importantly busy, said one witness, “very much the Director of the National Gallery.” He “gave Bacon’s work a swift appraisal, and said, ‘Interesting, yes. What extraordinary times we live in.’” Then he walked out. Earlier, Sutherland, who was present during the visit, advised Bacon to cultivate figures like Clark: “One could not work in a vacuum.” Once the door closed behind the director, however, Bacon turned to Sutherland and said, “You see, you’re surrounded by cretins.” Bacon’s work would always be, for Clark, too outlandish; Sutherland’s brambly forms, derived from nature, provided for him the right mix of traditional and modern, despair and finesse. But Clark did not, in fact, dismiss Bacon’s art. That same night at dinner Clark said to Sutherland: “You and I may be in a minority of two, but we may still be right in thinking that Francis Bacon has genius.”
Early in 1945, Duncan Macdonald, a director of the Lefevre Gallery, sensed a stirring in the English art world. The war was nearing its end, and Londoners were eager to reclaim their city. Although the gallery traditionally focused on established French and Continental art, it also sometimes exhibited modern English artists, among them Walter Sickert. A spring show of England’s wartime art, thought Macdonald, might give Lefevre a head start in the competition to represent artists in the postwar period. The show would ideally include the three best-known British artists of the time: Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, and Ben Nicholson. Each was in his prime. Each could be presented as a contemporary master.
Macdonald was particularly interested in Sutherland, who was known to be finicky about exhibiting with other artists. Macdonald therefore discussed his ideas for the show with Sutherland and eventually decided to add two modernists from an earlier generation, Frances Hodgkins (a New Zealander living in London) and the widely admired Matthew Smith. It was a shrewd decision. Smith and Hodgkins, as éminences grises from the prewar period, could create an atmosphere of historical continuity while Moore, Nicholson, and Sutherland could represent the vigorous present and future. English art, it would seem to a weary public, was moving ahead. Then Nicholson decided not to participate. Macdonald considered replacing him with John Piper, also a well-known artist during the war, but Sutherland preferred not to exhibit with him. Instead, Sutherland suggested that Macdonald add a wild card to his hand—the almost completely unknown Francis Bacon. Sutherland wrote:
I should really prefer Francis Bacon for whose work you know I have a really profound admiration. It is true that he has shown very little, but nowadays with every Tom, Dick and Harry showing yards of painting without much selection or standard this is refreshing, & his recent things, while being quite uncompromising, have a grandeur & brilliance which is rarely seen in English art.
The inclusion of an unknown would have the additional benefit of making the show more exploratory and less top-heavy with reputation. Sutherland regarded Bacon as, if not a protégé, then one for whom he had served as a mentor, and he would not have failed to notice a few flattering reflections of his own art in Bacon’s painting. In February 1945, Macdonald asked Bacon if he would submit four or five pictures to the exhibition, fewer than half the number requested from the more established figures. The invitation “may have seemed rather intimidating but it also presented Bacon with a challenge,” wrote Martin Hammer in Bacon and Sutherland, “and a real opportunity to make an impact. His response was to devise as large, powerful and hard-hitting a work as he could contrive, at a time when most current work was rather modest in scale and ambition, reflecting economic realities.”
It was probably less the company that excited Bacon than the pressure to finish a painting. He had not exhibited in eight years. His enforced withdrawal had freed him to revise, dither, recoil, experiment, and destroy. A deadline interrupted this cycle, like the music stopping during a game of musical chairs or the roulette ball dropping into place. It therefore had its uses. The pressure to find a lasting image required a momentary clarity: it focused his energy. He might take a radical chance or make the desperate bet. Two and a half weeks before the show was scheduled to open, Macdonald asked Bacon to telephone him. Could they possibly discuss which pictures to exhibit? The call was probably prompted by a concern that Bacon was still working and revising, having not himself decided what, if anything, he was prepared to exhibit.
Before the exhibition, Bacon procured some hard-to-find canvas, probably through the resourceful Sutherland. He may have hoped to paint all his pictures for the show on canvas; he preferred it to fiberboard, the only option available during the war. On the precious new surface he now completed his largest recorded painting to date, Figure in a Landscape (1945), a lushly painted scene of a man—whose head cannot be seen— sitting inside a cavelike ring of darkness. The painting was in Bacon’s more restrained style but was filled with foreboding. The waiting figure could be too shy to emerge—or perhaps was the troll under the bridge.
Bacon required more than one image: Macdonald had asked for four or five. There was unfinished work on fiberboard in his studio (all his pictures then were “unfinished”) including studies for a ghoulish crucifixion scene—far more challenging than Figure in a Landscape—that he may have begun in Steep and continued to develop in London. (In 1944, Graham Sutherland saw some Crucifixion imagery in Bacon’s studio.) Bacon’s presiding theme, in 1945, continued to be the Crucifixion. Many other artists, determined to capture the agony undergone by Western society in two world wars, were also interested in creating one. When Bacon made his Crucifixion of 1933—a beautiful but not especially difficult image—he had been absorbed in surrealism and the elongated figures of Picasso’s Dinard series. It was not surprising that his new work, an echo of the traditional subject of mourners at the foot of the cross, also retained some surrealist and Dinard-like forms. Otherwise, these new studies bore little resemblance to the ghostly painting of 1933. They were joltingly raw, with a crude and visceral surface: there was plenty of spit in the paint. The “mourners” themselves were long-necked, gloating creatures probably inspired by the gruesome Furies of Aeschylus. If Kenneth Clark saw a version of these pictures when he visited Bacon in Cromwell Place, he could be forgiven for leaving promptly and observing correctly, “What extraordinary times we live in.”
After eight long years Bacon did not want to hide or deny his wounding images, which were the culmination of hundreds of earlier efforts that he had concealed and destroyed: Diana Watson’s “flaming forms.” Still, it would take courage to exhibit them. He would not have forgotten the humiliating failure of his “wound” painting at the Transition Gallery. But he was now more confident and experienced at the easel. “If you are going to decide to be a painter,” he would say later, “you have got to decide that you are not going to be afraid of making a fool of yourself.” And besides, Figure in a Landscape offered him some protection. It was a fine picture that no decent critic could dismiss out of hand. But it was not enough, not after a war.
“Flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face,” as Ruskin famously put it, would become—in the decades following the Second World War—a conventional aspiration. It takes some imagination, then, to understand the boldness required of Bacon to exhibit Three Studies in 1945. Denton Welch published, in 1942, a kind of parable in Horizon that brilliantly captured the suffocating social pressure faced by any English artist who wanted to step outside the English drawing room. The putative subject of his “Sickert at St. Peter’s” was a visit Welch made in the mid-1930s to his idol, Walter Sickert, not long after the ageing painter moved to a village near Broadstairs. Its real subject, however, was the exquisitely painful contrast Welch drew between himself and the eccentric and powerful Sickert (one of the few English artists whom Bacon respected). Having cajoled an invitation to tea, Welch—then an earnest, well-educated art student—knocked on the door of the rather grand but run-down house. He experienced a “slight shock” at seeing, as Sickert’s wife opened the door, “a glistening white ‘W.C.’” directly in front of him. He found the floor of the room where they were to have their tea “quite bare.” He looked at “two glittering monstrances” from a Russian church. “They were fascinatingly gaudy and I coveted them.” “The tea cups,” he noted, “did not match.” He checked the hallmarks on the “flimsy and old” spoons. “I felt that at last I was seeing Bohemian life.”
Welch happened to be looking at a Sickert painting of a miner—just emerging from the pit and fiercely kissing his wife—when Sickert himself came into the room. “Huge and bearded, he was dressed in rough clothes and from his toes to his thighs reached what I can only describe as sewer-boots.” (They were probably rubber work boots.) Sickert exclaimed: “That picture gives you the right feeling, doesn’t it? You’d kiss your wife like that if you’d just come up from the pit, wouldn’t you?” Welch found himself “appalled by the dreadful heartiness of the question.” He blushed and “hated him for making me do so.” Later, he was astonished when the painter began “to dance on the hearth in his great sewer-boots. He lifted his cup and, waving it to and fro, burst into a German drinking song. There was an amazingly theatrical and roguish look on his broad face.” Sickert—who, like Bacon, worked from photographs—asked Welch what he thought of a small “carte-de-visite” photograph of a woman. Welch found its subject “quite hideous with a costive, pouchy look about the eyes and mouth,” but felt himself in a “difficult position.” He observed that the photo was so tiny he could not see the subject’s features well but loved the clothes of the period.
Sickert snatched the photograph from me. “Tiny! What do you mean by tiny?” he roared. He held the picture up and pointed to it, as if he were demonstrating something on a blackboard; then he shouted out in ringing tones for the whole room to hear: “Do you realize that I could paint a picture as big as this (he stretched out his arms like an angler in a comic paper) from this ‘tiny’ photograph as you call it?” Horribly embarrassed and overcome by this outburst, I smiled weakly and cast my eyes down so that they rested on his enormous boots …
Sickert said, “Ah, I see that you’re staring at my boots! Do you know why I wear them? Well, I’ll tell you. Lord Beaverbrook asked me to a party and I was late, so I jumped into a taxi and said: Drive as fast as you can! Of course, we had an accident and I was thrown on to my knees and my legs were badly knocked about; so now I wear these as protection.” It had become dark when Sickert helped the young artist and his other teatime visitors with their coats—“as if he were dressing sacks of turnips.” Welch once more noticed the indiscreet “flush-closet” by the front door. Sickert, still dancing and singing, led his visitors to “the creaking stable yard door and stood there with his hand on the latch … ‘Good-bye, good-bye!’ he shouted after us in great good humour. ‘Come again when you can’t stop quite so long!’” At those words, wrote Welch, “a strange pang went through me, for it was what my father had always said as he closed the book, when I had finished my bread and butter and milk, and it was time for me to go to bed.”
In April 1945, the week before the opening at Lefevre, Bacon made his decision about what to exhibit: the three studies of figures at a Crucifixion and his big new painting on canvas. Perhaps he enjoyed the prospect of juxtaposing the muted landscape with the ghoulish creatures at the Crucifixion. The figure in the landscape, half-concealed in the dark, could almost be their waiting audience. He knew that many would find the Furies offensive. He also knew that the finely painted canvas Figure in a Landscape was likely to arouse praise. He did not care much either way. Bacon was now himself, like Sickert, in possession of his “I” and “eye”—prepared, if necessary, to wear sewer boots.
THREE STUDIES FOR FIGURES AT THE BASE OF A CRUCIFIXION (1944)
Like Aeschylus, Bacon hoped to capture the inexpressible—to locate, by going too far, powerful inchoate feelings that lay behind words or the well-trained eye. He might then touch some deeper, more visceral nerve. (He often chose not to depict the eyes of a figure.) Bacon relished Stanford’s actual translations of lines in Aeschylus because, in his rendering, the playwright awkwardly twisted and displaced language into newly raw meaning. One phrase particularly pleased Bacon: “The reek of human blood smiles out at me.” Three Studies have that smell—and that smile. The figures may have placed themselves at the foot of a cross, but they conveyed nothing dolorous, mournful, or tragic. Instead, they appeared delighted at “the reek of human blood.”
The central figure, who “smiles out” at the viewer, carried a special charge. On either side of him, the creatures could be the fanciful inventions of a diseased imagination, like those found in Hieronymus Bosch or the Grand Guignol, and then dismissed as mere monsters. But the central figure, in the position usually occupied by Christ in a triptych, appeared grotesquely familiar, grinning and big-toothed, like the disagreeable relative at a family reunion. The bandage was the brilliant touch. The bandage was a sign of sacrifice in a war. It staunched the blood and closed the wound. It represented healing and heroism. Whose heart had not leapt with sympathy upon seeing a photograph in Picture Post of a maimed soldier or a wounded civilian? Here, the bandage covered the eyes, increasing the focus on the other senses, notably the huge gloating mouth. The bandage became a blindfold that could cover the eyes but not the maw.
On the central figure’s left was a cronelike creature that resembled a bird. She was hunkered down and looking away from the viewer as if she were hiding something. She had heart-shaped shoulders and little bone-twigs for arms that resembled a chicken wing plucked of feather and flesh. She could be hovering over an egg or protecting a piece of bloody meat. On the central figure’s right was a baying creature who, it appeared, stood planted on a small piece of spiky grass. His head was almost entirely mouth, and the mouth was turned upwards like a cup, the better to receive some dreadful nourishment from the sky. All the senses were stimulated by these creatures. The viewer could almost smell the musk, hear the baying, feel the coarse flesh. All three had elongated necks, connecting their heads to repulsively plump bodies, and it was not hard to imagine food or blood pulsing down their gullets. In Three Studies, Bacon—from childhood both fascinated by and fearful of the animal world—found the animal in the man and the man in the animal.
The three figures inhabited a strangely bare environment. Two occupied a space that contained scraps of what could be old furniture—what was left, perhaps, of the European drawing room. The third stood outside the room, but on a piece of grass that was no more welcoming than the room or the furniture; not much remained outside the drawing room either. Behind the figures were bits of melting geometric line that, by failing to define anything specific, evoked a fateful space around the figures that could not be read or brought to order. The space was filled with an extraordinary burnt-orange light, which glowed eerily but did not illuminate. It was a colour to shock wan, grey, war-weary London, where for years there had not been any intense light apart from the bomb flashes and subsequent fires. John Russell would later call these images that Bacon was about to exhibit a key marker: there was English art before, and English art after, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.