CULTURE SHOCK:The Francis Bacon 'slashed paintings' exhibit at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin puts the artist's turmoil directly in our view, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
WHEN YOU put them up on a gallery wall, objects acquire meaning. This is certainly true of the slashed paintings, destroyed by their creator Francis Bacon, and now on display as part of the Hugh Lane Gallery's intriguing A Terrible Beautyexhibition. In themselves, the torn canvasses may be no more significant than the contents of a writer's waste-paper basket. They are the detritus of the creative process, efforts that failed to meet the artist's standards. Yet placed in the context both of his more achieved works and of the contents of his studio, the violence with which some of the canvasses have been attacked becomes highly suggestive.
Bacon, as the art historian John Richardson suggests in the current issue of the New York review of Books, has strong impulses towards both sadism and masochism. During his childhood in Ireland, he turned up at a fancy dress party hosted by his parents at Cannycourt dressed as a flapper. When his father discovered him wearing his mother's underclothes, he delivered a violent beating.
Subsequently, Bacon came to associate sexual pleasure with cruelty, even with extreme violence. One of his lovers, Peter Lacy, who appears in the Hugh Lane exhibition both in Bacon’s awestruck portrait and in photographs of a suave, handsome man in early middle-age, inspired some of Bacon’s most important works. He also, according to Richardson, “hurled Bacon through a plate glass window. His face was so damaged that his right eye had to be sewn back into place. Bacon loved Lacy even more”.
Conversely, another of Bacon’s most important muses, George Dyer, was subjected to psychological torment and goading. On the day of Bacon’s ascension into the firmament of modern art greatness, with the opening of his exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, Dyer’s third attempt to take his own life proved to be fatal.
If all of this places Bacon closer to the casebook of Sigmund Freud than to the studio of his own friend and contemporary Lucien Freud, it is not necessary to be a brilliant psychoanalyst to get some sense of what was going on. The need to punish or be punished was clearly rooted in shame. Tellingly, Bacon, openly gay throughout his life, had no interest in the gay rights movement. Richardson recalls him remarking, a propos of moves to decriminalise homosexuality in England, that “they should bring back hanging for buggery”. Guilt – and the consequent connection to violence – was too strongly intertwined with sex to be dispensed with.
Richardson sees these cruel relationships as central to Bacon’s work, to the point of arguing that there is a direct link between them and the quality of his art. When Bacon settled with John Edwards in a relationship “less fraught for being platonic, seemingly free of sadomasochistic overtones”, his work, Richardson claims, “lost its sting and failed to thrill”.
It is hard not be uneasy about all of this. From an aesthetic point of view, it is unpleasantly reductive to make such direct connections between the work and the life. As Richardson himself points out, there is a danger of making Bacon “a kind of Michael Jackson of art – an anomalous weirdo of divine power”. From a moral standpoint, there is an obvious discomfort in the notion that Bacon’s art was better when he was involved in violent relationships than when he was not. And yet, even without necessarily going all the way with Richardson, it is hard to gainsay the obvious ways in which his best paintings are indeed related to his sadomasochistic desires.
Paradoxically perhaps, it is pain that humanises Bacon's art. There is a studied coldness to his images of the naked body isolated in a space that Richardson memorably calls "a photographer's studio in Hell". The studio materials that are now on view at the Hugh Lane give us the sense of a lurid, almost voyeuristic interest in violence, death and disease. The sources he used include deliberately sensational and explicit depictions of terrible brutality, such as the French propaganda publication The True Aspects of the Algerian Revolution, showing the aftermaths of murders. He does not seem to have been greatly interested in the people shown in these images, merely in the strange dispositions of their bodies.
And yet when he places his formalised versions of these images within the abstract spaces of his canvasses, something truly strange happens. Instead of becoming more distant, more removed from their sources in the real horrors of the 20th century, they become almost unbearably real. They are saturated with pain itself – not a metaphysical angst but a visceral bodily agony. They almost literally scream out from the frame.
And just as the paintings become the bearers of pain, they also seem to inflict it. Bacon brings into painting what Antonin Artaud had brought into drama – a theatre of cruelty. What Artaud meant by that phrase was not, of course, physical violence, but the psychic shock that he felt the audience needed. He imagined theatre as a ritual power aimed at shattering the facade of daily illusions and stripping reality down to its essence.
Even if Bacon’s art has its roots in an actual, rather than a metaphysical cruelty, the important thing about it is that it transcends those origins.
It reaches for a shock value that has nothing to do with the lurid sadism that may hover around it. It is the shock of the human body from whose depiction all trace of both classical ideals and romantic heroism has been stripped. Contorted in an agony or an ecstasy that are indistinguishable from each other, it becomes again shockingly beautiful. In the complicity that great art enforces we, too, end up deriving pleasure from this pain.
fotoole@irishtimes.com