Suddenly it seems as if Dublin has become Francis Bacon city. His observation that he would like to return to the city of his birth, but could probably only do so after he was dead, has been borne out. First there was the event that set the bandwagon in motion: the sensational donation of the artist's studio, by his sole heir John Edwards, to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery. There was talk of a treasure trove of Bacon material fossilised in the layers of stuff that had accumulated like geological strata in his Reece Mews studio. A team of archivists was enlisted to disentangle and document an estimated 10,000 separate items. Hints were dropped about the possibility of other Bacon gifts following the studio.
Then IMMA joined in, with its current exhibition of works on paper from the archive of Barry Joule, Bacon's neighbour, long-time friend, helper and archivist. The Oisin Gallery, meanwhile, bought and put on display an early Bacon canvas - a relative rarity since he destroyed most of his early works.
And now, next week, from June 1st, the Hugh Lane celebrates its coup in winning the studio with a major retrospective exhibition of Bacon paintings that will run throughout the summer.
Francis Bacon in Dublin, curated by the quintessential Bacon expert, David Sylvester, offers an unmissable opportunity to assess the work of the man generally described as the most important British artist since Turner.
When he died, a little over eight years ago in Spain, his body was cremated without ceremony or mourners, as he had requested. By the time of his death, he had reached an unassailable plateau of renown. Detractors could carp about self-parody and Grand Guignol as much as they liked: his status as one of the 20th-century's great artists was, and for the moment remains, secure.
The core of his artistic achievement lies in his treatment of the human figure. There is something undeniably compelling about his visualisations of the human body as a kinetic blur of flesh and meat, and of heads as jumbled, contorted masses, often coiled around the black orifice of a mouth that frames a scream. It is customary, and indeed reasonable, to view the extremity of his imagery as reflecting a century of horrors. For his part, he said he painted crucifixions not as religious subjects but as examples of human behaviour. John Berger remarked disapprovingly on his tendency to epater les bourgeois, protesting that we were looking at his paintings rather than at the sites of real atrocity.
While he had a taste for the macabre, Bacon consistently maintained he was not trying to depict horror. What he was after was something different, something encapsulated in his often quoted phrase, "the brutality of fact", or his frequently expressed wish to bypass the eyes of his viewers and communicate directly with the nervous system. Certainly, an undercurrent of violence runs through his work and sometimes takes centre-stage, from the urgent, sexual wrestling of Two Figures (1953) to recurrent images of wounded flesh, blood soaking through bandages and discarded syringes, or the grisly pile of blood-soaked clothing in the central panel of the Triptych inspired by T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes (1967).
FOR the most part, the violence is inwardly directed, self-contained, a condition of the flesh. Fascination and loathing mingle in his views of bodies, whether alone; collapsed in racked, incoherent heaps; or fixed in strained, muscular poses; or in pairs, fiercely grappling in fumbling, messy, carnivorous sexual encounters. Ejaculatory spurts of pigment splashed across the canvas became a stylistic trope.
He trawled an eclectic range of sources for imagery: medical textbooks on diseases of the mouth and radiography, a still from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, a postcard reproduction of Velasquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X (which inspired one of his most celebrated series of paintings), photographs of apes and other animals, Muybridge's sequential studies of The Human Figure in Motion, newspaper and magazine cuttings, photographs of friends snapped by John Deakin, a crucifixion by Cimabue, which he provocatively described as being like a worm crawling down the cross. Many of these images attained an iconic status relating specifically to the use he made of them.
He exploited not just photographic imagery but the pictorial syntax of photography in bravura demonstrations of painting's capacity to appropriate its codes. There was, and still is in some quarters, a widespread assumption that there is no point in painting the human subject now that we have myriad forms of photography at our disposal, but Bacon was one of the figurative painters who proved that there is a level of realism beyond the photographic, while being in no way anti-photography.
On the contrary, he was fascinated by the way photography offered new ways of looking - the way, for example, radiography revealed the skeletal armature. A disembodied spine becomes mysteriously visible in one painting in 1975, but more often he offers gross, fairly visceral anatomical intrusions. In contrast to the livid, fleshy intensity of the figures, though, the backgrounds in his paintings are flat and cursory. They are overtly theatrical spaces furnished with a few minimal domestic props (he rarely ventured out-of-doors in his pictures), including the trademark bare, dangling light bulb and light switch, a mattress on a metal-framed bed, some items of modernist furniture, perhaps ones he had designed himself in the 1930s, and a toilet bowl or basin.
Broadly speaking, whereas in most Western representational painting the spaces between things serve to integrate figures and ground, in Bacon's work the background spaces systematically isolate the figures. They are as exposed as actors on-stage - a condition often emphasised by the superimpositions of a cage-like grid - and subjected to an intrusive, forensic scrutiny.
Despite the apparent bleakness of his painterly vision, backed up by his firm, uncompromising rejection of notions of deity, afterlife and transcendent purpose, Bacon was not usually a gloomy person. Friends, ex-friends and enemies all attest that he was one of those individuals possessed of a crackling, electric energy, that he was an energising presence. It was instantly noticeable that the atmosphere came to life when he wandered into one of his habitual Soho haunts, chiefly the French Pub, Wheelers seafood restaurant or Muriel Belcher's Colony Room, and not only, as Bruce Bernard remarked, because "nearly everyone likes being bought champagne and lunch". The bar staff at the French Pub liked him "for reasons only loosely connected with commerce", and "the real pleasure of these occasions was the spectacle of care being banished with such elan". There is a plausible view, though, that his spectacular generosity was also a peculiarly effective way of controlling people, and on occasion he could turn, especially on friends.
Those places in Soho, with visits to gambling clubs, formed Bacon's daily routine from about 12.30 p.m. Prior to that he painted, from early in the morning, usually with a hangover, which, he said, gave him the necessary clarity of mind. Even into his 70s, he was a dapper figure, with a liking for leather jackets and tight trousers. He hated growing old and, for as long as he could, behaved as if he was young. He bemoaned the fact that, though he could still attract younger men through the sheer force of his personality, once they heard his age, he never saw them again.
Physically and mentally resilient, he sustained a life of perpetual excess and recurrent personal tragedy. His romantic life was, with a few notable exceptions, a sequence of disasters, including his involvement with Peter Lacy, a self-destructive alcoholic. There are echoes of the tragedy of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell in his ill-starred relationship with George Dyer, though in the end Dyer didn't kill Bacon, just himself, taking a fatal overdose and dying wretchedly, on the toilet, in a hotel in Paris on the eve of the opening of Bacon's retrospective there. Bacon never really got over that. The suicide is graphically depicted in Triptych May-June 1973, two years after the event. With uncanny symmetry, the telegram telling him of Peter Lacy's death had arrived on the opening day of his first retrospective at the Tate.
Without question, Bacon's sexuality informs his work, though for a long time this was politely ignored with references to universality and the human condition. The paintings attest that he was an intensely sexual person. The story goes that he was banished from the family home, aged 16, when his father, an ex-army officer who trained horses on the Curragh, discovered him wearing his mother's underclothes. He maintained a fondness for wearing women's underwear, and was particularly fond of fishnet stockings.
He confessed that he was sexually attracted to his volatile, domineering father. It is therefore tempting to see, in his penchant for bruising sexual encounters, a ritualised re-enactment of that attraction, together with the requisite punishment for acting on it, but that is probably a gross over-simplification. He had few qualms about following his sexual impulses wherever they led him.
In the mid-1950s, when he was spending much of each year in Tangier, then home to Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg, the British Consul-General, Bryce Nairn, became alarmed that the artist was repeatedly being mugged in the early hours of the morning. He asked the chief of police if he could do anything, and he promised to look into it. A few weeks later he called on Nairn and reported that, alas, there was nothing to be done: Monsieur liked being beaten up.
There is, though, quite another side to his personal relationships. Much of his social life, including his long, exceptionally harmonious friendship with John Edwards, whom he more or less adopted, seems related to an orphan's instinct to form surrogate families around himself. On one occasion when someone asked him what he would be if he hadn't become an artist he replied: "A mother". And late in life, against the odds and his own expectations, he found a new admirer, a prosperous, handsome Spaniard less than half his age, with whom he embarked on a fulfilling relationship.
The critic Peter Fuller typified those who were ultimately repelled at the apparent nihilism of his work, its determined lack of affirmation. The paradox was that Bacon, a conventionally gifted painter, took on some of the most spiritually charged subjects of western art, but in what has been described as a mood of "negative certainty". Fuller, who felt that it was the artist's duty in a secular age to cling to and promulgate even the illusory comfort of belief, could not in the end accept such bleak directness. Yet there is something so honest and unassuming about Bacon's work, which is always local and direct, that it amounts to a kind of affirmation in itself.
Francis Bacon in Dublin is at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery from June 1st to August 31st. The Francis Bacon Studio is expected to open to the public towards the end of the year. Some material from the studio will be on view during the exhibition.
Francis Bacon was born in a Baggot Street nursing home on October 28th, 1909. His parents were English: Anthony Bacon, an ex-British army officer and horse trainer, and Christina Firth, whose family was in the steel business. Francis left the family home in Co Kildare in 1926, after a row with his father. With a small allowance from his mother, he lived first in London, then Berlin and Paris.
An exhibition of Picasso's drawings prompted him to paint. In London he designed modernist furniture and carpets and also painted, exhibiting his work in various group shows throughout the 1930s. He destroyed most of his early work. Forced out of the Civil Defence because of his severe asthma during the second World War, in 1944 he painted Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifix- ion, a startling triptych which established his reputation and caused an extraordinary outcry. After visiting South Africa in 1950 to see his mother and sisters, he met Peter Lacy, an ex-fighter pilot, and embarked on a long, difficult relationship with him, spending much of each year in Tangier. In London he became a fixture in Soho, where he was at the centre of a close-knit social scene.
He began a 20-year friendship with Lucian Freud, which eventually cooled. His work won gradual acceptance and acclaim throughout the 1950s, including an invitation to exhibit in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1954. From 1960, he showed with the Marlborough Gallery, and the following year moved into Reece Mews, his base for the rest of his life. His small, paint-spattered studio there became a symbol of his approach to life and art.
In 1962, the Tate Gallery held its first retrospective of his work. The following year, he began an intense, fraught relationship with George Dyer, who inspired some of his best figurative painting, and who died two nights before the opening of a major Bacon show at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971. He first met John Edwards in 1974 and they remained friends for the rest of Bacon's life. Despite his advancing age, he kept up a hectic pace, working, drinking and gambling, and was honoured with numerous exhibitions at home and abroad. When he died, of a heart attack in Madrid in 1992, he left everything to John Edwards.