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Performance Artist

WISDOM, RECONCILIATION, ACCEPTANCE: people growing older sometimes seek the burnished values. Bacon was not among them. If he no longer felt like himself, he would still play the part.

Only close friends knew of his deteriorating health as he reached the age of seventy. He confided to Michel Leiris in July 1982 that his asthma had proved so debilitating the previous year that he often could not work. From June 1984 until the end of that year, noted Valerie Beston, Bacon was ill at least four times, with either bronchitis or asthma. On one occasion she wrote: “FB ill—bad asthma.” On another: “Sounds miserable and depressed on phone. Not painting at the moment.” A heavy cold in December led to such a serious attack of asthma that Dr Brass admitted him to the Cromwell, a private hospital in South Kensington. “FB hates it,” wrote Beston. Two days later Bacon discharged himself, “still ill.” A cold leading to a flare-up of asthma, followed by complications, was becoming a pattern. Bacon visited Dr Brass more frequently now, and Brass prescribed Becloforte, an inhaled corticosteroid that worked directly on the lungs to reduce swelling. Becloforte and other steroid medications came with their own set of problems, however, including swelling of facial tissue and what doctors call “moon face.” They also worked against Bacon’s blood pressure medication, and contributed to his insomnia.

Bacon did not ordinarily discuss his health with John Edwards. It was the sunny smile that he wanted from John. In the early to mid-1980s, however, as age continued its assault, Bacon found a new, sympathetic young stranger with whom to discuss his depression and declining health. The flamboyant poet Jeremy Reed, whom The Independent called “British poetry’s glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie,” enjoyed hanging out with young punks and rent boys on Denman Street near Piccadilly Circus, where commuters looked for a bit of rough trade before dinner. At around 6 p.m., the empty hour between the Colony and a restaurant, Bacon himself sometimes explored the “meat rack” under the arches near Piccadilly tube station. He remained fascinated with the theatre of dominance and submission, cold cash and hot love, release, revelation, and obsession—now played out against the haunting backdrop of melancholy and decline. At one point, he became entranced with a beautiful sixteen- or seventeen-year-old runaway even younger than Reed who perhaps reminded him of the Anglo-Irish almost-runaway who arrived in London decades before. Bacon favoured the Regent Palace Hotel off Piccadilly, grown old and squalid with age, which rented out rooms by the hour.

Bacon and Reed met about once a month. Their relationship was not sexual. Typically, Bacon brought a fine bottle into some tawdry place near Piccadilly tube where he and Reed discussed everything from poetry to despair. For Bacon, said Reed, the meetings were almost “a kind of psychotherapy.” Bacon would slip him envelopes containing five hundred pounds (and once a fat two thousand pounds) because poetry, he half-joked, must be supported. The painter presented himself as vulnerable and unmasked: old, tired, and jaded about the art world. He was always tired, he told Reed, but could not sleep. Barbiturates and tranquilizers—Bacon was taking Rohypnol—did not help. Nothing improved his mood—not sex, drugs, or champagne—though alcohol remained a friend. “He only got pleasure,” said Reed, “from drink.” The worst of age was sometimes the boredom and repetition, the daily tape loop of a waning life. (Beckett wrote: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”) What Anne Madden called the “demons of self-doubt” still tormented him, even after all his success, and he often referred to The Waste Land, admiring the poem’s colours and existential dread. He loved, in certain poets, the fume of death. He brought up Genet and Baudelaire. “Death,” he said to Reed, “destroys love or is bigger than love.”

And yet with others, Bacon still appeared marvellously alive—appreciating each day. “Perhaps he had episodes of depression that he didn’t show, but when he was with a friend he was absolutely the same, even at a fairly advanced age,” said Jacques Dupin, who worked with Bacon in the 1980s on two exhibitions in Paris. “Even at eighty he was still very much alive. You couldn’t tell at all that he was old. He had such energy, such intensity in his behaviour.” Towards the end of a private view for Raymond Mason in 1982, Bacon, according to Mason, “held his arm out for his glass to be filled—then, misjudging the trajectory, threw the contents over his shoulder.” Bacon shrugged and laughed: so what? Then, as Mason and six friends looked for a taxi late that November night to take them to the restaurant Rules in Covent Garden, Bacon pushed into the traffic to capture one. “At the sight of all these people trying to pile into his vehicle,” said Mason, “the cabby cried out no, that he had just been fined the day before. We climbed back out, and once again Francis disappeared with astonishing speed and came back with a second taxi.”

At Rules, Bacon waved for champagne as he sat down, his wave resembling the opening flourish of a play. He turned the table into a kind of charmed circle. The world was filled with monsters beyond the table. But one must raise the glass with friends—and tilt at the monsters, who were everywhere. He informed the group at Rules that he had been assaulted on the tube that very day by a ghastly bore who gave him a tiresome lecture about the evils of propaganda. “Dead right you are,” he told the man. “Just think of Christianity.” The man vanished at the next stop. Once, when the art dealer James Birch was a child, his parents brought him to a dinner with Bacon. “I was sitting opposite him at dinner and thinking, ‘What would this man be if not a painter?’ He would be someone in the theatrical world.” The art historian Sarah Whitfield, who met Bacon around 1979, called him “electrifying when he came into the room. He was a performer in that way. Some celebrated people want to hide. He didn’t. He had an infectious laugh—a hoot. Just so genuine … David [Sylvester, her longtime partner] kept a Lord Snowdon photo of Bacon on his bedroom wall—not an original, I think, but a blown-up version. It showed Bacon with a glass in hand, happy.”

Bacon was aware of every eye in an audience. If a waiter appeared indifferent, said Michael Peppiatt, “Francis would have twinkled at him, flirted with him, made him a player”:

I remember once in Paris he ordered, as usual, a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine. The waiter poured it out with tremendous care, and Francis offered him a glass. ‘Oh no, monsieur,’ he said, looking over his shoulder, ‘la direction!’ But Francis wouldn’t allow the management the right of veto. He gave the waiter a glass and told him to sneak into the kitchen with it and drink it later. After a while, the door from the kitchen opened, the waiter peeped out, raised the glass and toasted us.

Bacon liked to turn a table into a band of conspirators. He once said to Anne Madden with a naughty twinkle at lunch, “Now Anne. What about a glass of champagne?” And they ended up, she said, “in a nightclub at 4 a.m.” An element of danger was sometimes necessary. Nothing was worse than a slow death by manners. Bacon was always playing with courtesy and rudeness. Sylvester referred to his “serrated-edge gaiety.” The French art dealer Daniel Lelong considered him “raffiné,” a man of délicatesse, who could become strange, sensual, eruptive, a one-man “deflagration.” Bacon treated the lens of a camera like another eye. A German reporter described him at the opening of a show in the mid-1980s: “Surrounded by photographers gathering round him like insects, Bacon would interrupt his polite chat with an art lover and strike a pose, his mouth slightly open with his eyes looking both frightened and dreamy.”

He tried to look well even when he felt desperately ill. Sometimes, he babied his face with makeup and Avon Pearls and Lace cream and used L’Oréal black hair “colourant” that he purchased at the nearby chemist on Old Brompton Road, occasionally supplemented by the boot polish that he traditionally brushed through his hair. In the early 1980s, he preferred Yves Saint Laurent clothing. A photograph taken by Edward Quinn in 1980 is a carefully composed presentation. Bacon is dressed in an elegant grey suit, with a navy cashmere waistcoat beneath the jacket, and appears much younger than he is. He confided to others: “I’m the most artificial person you’ll ever meet.” He said the same about his painting, of course, and probably meant that only by emphasizing artifice could he bring out the underlying truth; convention would otherwise steal the show.

Daniel Lelong called him “the last great dandy of the twentieth century,” emphasizing that his use of the term had nothing to do with the way Bacon dressed. It referred instead to the way he lived life on a grand scale, indulging pleasure when he was not hard at work in the studio. Grey Gowrie said: “He was a terrific grandee, by which I mean that he had a very aristocratic indifference to what people thought. I’ve only seen that in very high grandees, who, while some can have very nice manners, very courteous, but one nevertheless feels they know who they are and that’s that and they don’t much care what people think of them. Francis was not short on empathy, but he had elements of aristocratic disdain, more psychological than concerned with his pedigree.”

Bacon performed for writers no less than for photographers. He seemed to control the plotline, as most of the profiles were similar. He usually appeared as a man who remains sexually vibrant and miraculously young while living hard—and tormented by art, too. The Bacon persona was seductive, a dream of genius, celebrity, and the fountain of youth. In 1980 Geordie Greig wrote a profile for Now! that began:

In a back street behind Piccadilly you can sometimes see a local resident wearing brown leather boots, tight grey trousers, a blue polo-neck jersey and a fawn anorak with upturned collar. He has cropped hair, a round puffy face and he looks about 50. In fact, he is in his early seventies. His victory over advancing age gives him a slightly spooky Dorian Gray quality. He is that most remarkable and successful of modern British painters, Francis Bacon.

For The Times in 1983, Peter Lennon wrote a profile timed to coincide with the publication in English of Michel Leiris’s new Francis Bacon: Face et profil. Lennon, a chronicler of Beckett in Paris, brought together the “high” of Leiris’s meditations on Bacon with the “low” of a personality profile, an indication of the crossover appeal of Bacon, who would sometimes grant a journalist a day ticket to the imagined life of an artist. Michael Wojas, then the barman behind the bar at the Colony, said that Bacon drank with journalists there “just to get the edge on them.” Anthony Zych, a young artist whom Bacon befriended later in the eighties, noticed that he “got people drunk. That was his defence. Francis himself was often pretending to be drunk. He’d wander around the Colony and go into the loo and empty his glass.” In his profile of Bacon, Lennon made himself part of the story. “I asked him what he thought of old age, which judging by his form he appeared to have pretty well tamed”: “‘It’s a bloody nuisance,’ he said, with a touch of melancholy. ‘Well, you are nearer death. But so long as the brain goes on and one can move about!’” The writer then sacrificed himself—the public expected no less—to Bacon’s bottle:

After that there were only images, of endlessly, circulating bottles of champagne, dark, beaded with moisture, which drew out of the gloom what appeared to be hands with greedy mouths in their palms. And Bacon standing by the bar jaunty in old age. It was one of those evenings where you ask yourself next morning: “What the hell was that all about?”

Sometimes the mask slipped. The photographer Neil Libbert once stopped at the French House for a midday pint when Bacon walked in alone—in his long, belted leather jacket—and ordered a drink. He turned to lean his back against the bar. No one was watching. Libbert sneaked a shot. Bacon’s chin was raised like a turtle straining to escape its shell. His eyes were hooded. His jowls flooded downward. The small spitcurl of hair that he liked to arrange on his forehead was missing. Another time, Libbert caught Bacon with a frank face at his Reece Mews door, an elderly man back from the morning errands, his arms filled with the Daily Telegraph, a bottle of Evian, and a loaf of Sunblest medium-sliced white bread. Peter Conrad, who taught English literature at Christ Church, Oxford, once came upon Bacon at the Royal Opera House in what seemed full operatic attire:

He looked eruptive, like the popes who scream on their thrones in his early paintings. His face was a painting. Boot polish had been applied to his teased hair, with a quizzical wisp of a fringe fixed over his forehead; a thick application of make-up gave his cheeks a feverish heat. His eyes kept watch from inside asymmetrical craters, mementoes of drunken tumbles or of beatings administered by the East End bruisers with whom he consorted. His smile showed off teeth scoured with Vim, and inside his oddly circular mouth his tongue darted as if it were a lizard jabbing at its prey.

Performance artist: Bacon always strove to look young, even in his final years. But sometimes the mask slipped. Photograph by Neil Libbert © Neil Libbert

Photograph by Neil Libbert. © Neil Libbert

Now and then, Bacon disappeared into a health spa to reduce his weight, mend his nerves, and curb his drinking. The rumour would float through the Colony that he had plastic surgery to “tidy away” the jowls and smooth out the moon. His hands, forearms, neck, and large head continued to appear burly and strong, but the proportions seemed increasingly odd—such a large head—and his seductive walk was less persuasive. He still pranced, but there was a wobble, too, like a woman insecure in heels. His opinions became more rigid. “He was marvellous company,” said Anne Madden. “Trenchant, provocative, intelligent about other painters.” But there was no longer any point in arguing with him, she said, as there was a dogma to be maintained. He must “put across his opinion.”

Bacon remained ungenerous about most artists, even those whose star was dimming. It hurt the generous Graham Sutherland that Bacon publicly ignored the helping hand that he had once provided. Sutherland could accept the falling-away of the friendship, but not Bacon’s way of erasing the past. He took to calling Bacon “Miss World.” Bacon continued to mistrust any display of pity that he considered self-admiring. Before he sold his house in Wivenhoe, he was once at the Black Buoy during a lock-in after closing hours (which enabled the patrons to keep drinking) when Pam Dan and her friends began talking about some of the poor people who once lived in Wivenhoe. “There was this little boy,” said Dan. “We always used to give him sixpence every Saturday to get chips for dinner.” Bacon, drunk and belligerent, dismissed such talk as “a load of rubbish.” He began, she said, to rant “about poor people,” saying, “Well, if you’re poor, die. Either make it in this life or just die.’” He did not say such things when sober. But deep in his cups the emotionally starved “little boy” from Ireland could still emerge as a pitiful caricature of the resentful self-made man who would deny others a helping hand. At around two in the morning, when the angry party walked home by taking a shortcut over the railroad tracks, Bacon tripped and “got caught in the railway line and was splattered there.” Someone suggested just leaving him. Someone else pointed out that a train would shortly pass through. “So a couple of the lads got his foot out of the track and walked him to his house in Queens Road.”

In 1982, Bacon’s mordant friend William Burroughs, another nihilist who understood the seductive appeal of a persona, came to London to film a documentary. He and Bacon agreed to be filmed together in the fashionable fly-on-the-wall style while chatting at Reece Mews and walking about London. But Bacon and Burroughs could not be as they once were in Tangier. Bacon politely made tea for Burroughs, rather like an elderly aunt entertaining a relative from out of town, and they engaged in stilted small talk before the camera. On the street, he held the arm of his frail companion. Sometimes, friends worried that age would embarrass Bacon. Paul Conran, the partner of James Birch in their Soho gallery, found the dyed hair troubling—“that orangish cast. Sometimes you would see it leaking down.” And he wondered, “Doesn’t he know that people see through the dye that he’s using to disguise his grey hair?”

Bacon was too perceptive and self-aware not to know. He told Lucian Freud that he dyed his hair because he did not want people to think that he had given up. Bacon was indeed a great dandy; and no great dandy believes perfection is the goal. “Mirrors are the doors,” Jean Cocteau wrote in Orpheus, “through which death comes and goes.” Too well prepared, Bacon would have seemed merely pathetic, pretending and trying too hard. As a dandy whose mask was slipping, he remained something to see.

The response of intellectuals to Bacon differed from that of journalists, but they also responded to him in ways that emphasized drama, masks, and performance. A second influential French intellectual, Gilles Deleuze, now joined Leiris in celebrating Bacon with his 1981 study titled Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. To Deleuze, Bacon’s portraits revealed the figure behind the “mask” more than the face itself. “As a portraitist, Bacon is a painter of heads, not faces, and there is a great difference between the two. The face is a structured, spatial organization that conceals the head, whereas the head is dependent upon the body, even if it is the point of the body, its culmination … Bacon thus pursues a very peculiar project as a portrait painter: to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face.” In a chapter titled “Painting Forces,” he argued that Bacon’s figures “seem to be one of the most marvellous responses in the history of painting to the question, how can one make invisible forces visible?” That, he argued, was the main purpose of both Bacon’s heads and his figures:

… The extraordinary agitation of these heads is derived not from a movement that the series [of heads and figures that Bacon painted in multiples] would supposedly reconstitute, but rather from the forces of pressure, dilation, contraction, flattening, and elongation that are exerted on the immobile head. They are like the forces of the cosmos confronting an intergalactic traveler immobile in his capsule …

Bacon was flattered by the interest of Deleuze, but it was Leiris’s new book, published in 1983, Francis Bacon: Face et profil (translated as Francis Bacon: Full Face and in Profile), that naturally meant the most to him. Leiris, no minimalist, was not restrained in his appreciation. He began his book by likening his gambling friend to some of history’s great performers:

Orestes, only just released from persecution by the Eumenides; Hamlet reassembling his wits after the encounter with the Ghost; … a sort of Falstaff, now jovial now reflective … a lucky gambler, directly aware of every aspect of our contemporary upheavals, and whose elegantly modern silhouette we seem to glimpse at that precise moment, wholly outside clock-time, when he stakes his all on a throw of the dice, a hand of cards or the roulette wheel …

Bacon’s “clean-shaven face,” wrote Leiris, was “at once chubby and tormented, and as roseate as that of some eighteenth-century English empirical philosopher discoursing over his brandy or his sherry.” Bacon was the peer, he argued, of the great writers who confronted the darkness of their century. “Like Samuel Beckett whose apparently non-mysterious sentences are reminiscent of the discreet emanations from a smouldering peat fire, Francis Bacon … expresses the human condition as it truly and peculiarly is today …” He ended with a grand flourish that tied Bacon directly to his Nietzschean roots:

As an authentic expression of Western man in our time, Francis Bacon’s work conveys, in the admirably Nietzschean formula he himself has coined to explain the sort of man and artist he is, an ‘exhilarated despair’, and so—however resolutely it may avoid anything in the nature of sermonizing—it cannot but reflect the painful yet lyrical disturbance felt by all those who, living in these times of horror spangled with enchantment, can contemplate them with lucidity.

If Bacon often seemed to give “performances” in public, his paintings were also taking on a practised air. Many critics who admired Bacon liked his later work less. They found it too “branded”—embalmed, stylized, mechanical, repetitive—and missed the sense of discovery in the earlier painting. In previous periods, Bacon emphasized an immediate visceral response to the paint. In the 1980s, he became more distanced, spotlighting starkly delineated figures against candy-bright and spray-painted backgrounds of the kind that bothered Freud. His painterly props—arrows, bare bulbs, plinths, newspapers—began to seem somewhat repetitive, like a director using the same scenery for different shows. He liked to reprise celebrated aspects of his art. In 1979, he painted Studies of the Human Body with a flaming orange background. Twenty-six pictures followed in the ’80s that included the “Bacon orange” (the unforgettable colour in his breakthrough work, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion). His surfaces grew flatter, and his figures did not deliquesce into ridges of paint. The figures still appeared contorted, but now often rested on plinths and pedestals or were isolated in solitary cages, their movement memorialized.

Some observers considered this distance “classical,” as Bacon restated and clarified his traditional concerns. It was unexpected nonetheless when Bacon took up Ingres as an inspiration. A great draughtsman and nineteenth-century representative of the classical tradition, Ingres did not appear to be a natural progenitor of Francis Bacon. To Eddy Batache, Bacon’s neoclassicism was a reflection of his earlier annoyance at being called an expressionist. He did not like to be “linked with artists he detested, like Beckmann, or had rejected, such as Soutine”:

Wishing to show that his art had nothing to do with Expressionism, this dionysiac who worshipped Van Gogh moved closer to the champions of Classicism, to Seurat but also Ingres, whose Oedipus and the Sphinx and The Turkish Bath he used as inspiration for extremely controlled works … Like Delacroix who, irritated by the excesses of Romanticism, asserted that he was a Classical painter, Bacon also wished to express himself in well-drawn, admirably controlled, clean compositions.

Although acclaimed as a classicist, Ingres also brought to art a powerful undertone of dreaminess and sensual kink. The Turkish Bath, for all its orderly structure, was a feast of the flesh. And Oedipus, as he stared jauntily into the eyes of the sphinx, did not suggest measure, stability, and reserve. That was the strangeness of Ingres: he drew lines that were boundaries but also suggested boundlessness. He combined austerity with sensual abandon. Bacon began to develop a similar perspective. While famously not a draughtsman, Bacon could particularly enjoy the outline of a shape, which was a kind of drawing.

Bacon would also attempt at least seven paintings of what Martin Harrison called “imagined sculptures.” “I would like, quite apart from the attempt to do sculpture, to make the painting itself very much more sculptural,” Bacon told David Sylvester as early as 1974. Few of the “imagined sculpture” paintings satisfied him. The best-known—Study of the Human Body, 1981–82—combined the brilliant cadmium orange palette with another Bacon obsession of the early 1980s: cricket. Only the lower part of the cricketer’s naked torso, from the waist down, is visible above the cricket pads. The painting appears formal, stylized, highly coloured, and static.

To Eddy Batache, the later paintings—owing to their high degree of control—“no longer corresponded with the dazzling richness of [Bacon’s] earlier imagination.” To Reinhard Hassert, they were flatter, lacking the rich “materiality” of the earlier work. Chance and its unexpected gifts were becoming less important. Raymond Mason thought that while Bacon’s “handling was broad and sweeping and more than ever assured,” he was creating “a standardized product, instantly recognizable.” The late paintings were “a kind of ready-made, a Francis Bacon, a saleable object.” By the 1970s, Bacon was destroying fewer paintings. He had become, he said, “much more technically wily … I can manipulate the paint now in a way that I don’t have to get into the kind of marshland which I [need to] extract myself from.” Like Mason, Timothy Behrens—a friend of Bacon’s in the 1960s—missed the marshland. He still believed that “Francis’s own painting was way beyond what anyone else was doing,” but considered him “better when he struggled more, before he learnt that incredible technical dexterity and confidence.” Some early paintings “were (relatively) clumsy, even a bit of a mess,” said Behrens, “as if he’d been genuinely unsure of what he was trying to do.” They were, he wrote, “miles away from the later work, where you get the feeling that all he really wanted was to shock you in the most gorgeous way.”

In fact, Bacon did develop an important late style, but not where he expected to. His most original late work lay in his occasional “artificial” landscapes—the pared-down pictures that Sylvester, for one, particularly admired. Landscape (1978) and Jet of Water (1979) were early examples. Bacon’s first Sand Dune, painted in 1981, stood out among the stylized works of Bacon’s last decade for the sheer physical beauty of its sand, whipped up by the air and swirling above concrete structures. In the Sand Dune of 1983, the sand leaks out of a structure that seems designed to contain it. The writer Colm Tóibín found “a restlessness here which we might also find in Beethoven’s late chamber music—a feeling that Bacon might begin again, that he is searching for some way to make images that he knows will only be possible for artists in the future, if they are even possible at all …” The idea of a figureless figure painting always fascinated Bacon. One of his first mature paintings, Figure Study I (1945–46), depicted an overcoat and a fedora suffused with the presence of an absent man. Bacon’s images of water and sand sometimes concealed a possible figure, as did the tightening in certain images of grass. In the shifting of the sand, he was still searching for a new figure.

BLOOD ON PAVEMENT (1984)

Late one night, outside a pub known for rough trade, Bacon chanced upon blood on the pavement. He was pleased. An atmosphere of physical risk, in which the body might leak, break, or otherwise come undone, continued to attract him. It would have surprised no one if he had made a shocking image of this smear of blood. Instead, he did something rare, creating a contemplative painting, steeped in melancholy, in which he concentrated with power and luminous subtlety the obsessions of a long life.

Blood on Pavement was part of the group of paintings that Bacon made that suggest but do not contain a figure. They usually resemble abstract landscapes, which can include the human clay. This group has certain of the qualities often admired in a so-called late style—in which the elderly artist simplifies the work, taking much away but leaving nothing out. In this case, Blood on Pavement was also an echo of what was probably Bacon’s first important painting, Wound for a Crucifixion, which he regretted destroying in 1934 after the failure of his show at the Transition Gallery.

In Blood on Pavement, the figure has left behind his essence or lifeblood. The blood itself resembles an open wound. The “wound” appears shockingly real, but can also symbolize the many wounds, always ending in death, suffered by humanity. Bacon does not announce this: death is always more interesting unannounced. He stacks three rectangles, placing all the drama in the lively middle rectangle, the smallest of the three, which envelops the wound. The wound itself looks as beautiful as a crushed ruby. The hard black rectangle at the top of the picture—opaque, blank, characterless—weighs upon the wound. Blood is pain, blood is revelation.

Blood on Pavement can appear very modern. It can evoke “blood in the streets” and the shocking violence of the twentieth century. It can also suggest a modern abstract painting—in particular, a Rothko. “Oh, Rothko,” he dismissively told friends. “It’s all mooood.” In Blood on Pavement, Bacon leans his lance into Rothko’s art, making abstraction bleed. He also calls upon the ancients and invokes ritual sacrifice. Blood on pavement is also blood on stone.