Francis Bacon (artist)

• 1. Introduction

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  Francis Bacon was born on the 28th of October 1909 at 63 Lower Baggot Street in Dublin, into a world of racehorses, Sheffield steel money, and a father who would have him horsewhipped. He died on the 28th of April 1992, in a private clinic in Madrid, his asthma finally having consumed him at 82. Between those two dates he produced roughly 590 surviving paintings and destroyed what critics suspect was a comparable number. What kind of painter destroys so much of his own work? What does it mean that a man who spent his twenties drifting through gambling dens and Soho drinking clubs became, by middle age, one of the most expensive living artists on Earth? And how does a picture of a screaming pope, distorted almost beyond recognition, come to be called tender? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Expelled and Drifting

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  At a fancy-dress party at the family home, Bacon dressed as a flapper with an Eton crop, a beaded dress, lipstick, high heels, and a long cigarette holder. His father caught him wearing his mother's underwear shortly after, and threw him out of Straffan Lodge near Naas in County Kildare. He was still a teenager.

  From that point forward, Bacon navigated life largely on instinct and charm. He arrived in London in the latter half of 1926 on an allowance of three pounds a week from his mother's trust fund, reading Friedrich Nietzsche, avoiding rent, and occasionally resorting to petty theft. He was sacked from a telephone-answering job at a women's clothing shop on Poland Street in Soho for writing a poison pen letter to the owner.

  In 1927, at 17, he moved to Berlin, where he watched Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, both of which would filter through his paintings for decades. He then spent a year and a half in Paris, living three months near Chantilly with a pianist named Yvonne Bocquentin to improve his French, and visiting the Musée Condé at the Château de Chantilly, where he first saw Nicolas Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents. He referred to it repeatedly in his later work.

  Back in London in 1929, he moved into a studio at 17 Queensberry Mews West in South Kensington, sharing the upper floor with Eric Allden, his first collector, and his childhood nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. That same year he met Eric Hall, the patron who would become both lover and patron in what Bacon's own account describes as a torturous and often abusive arrangement.

• 3. The Crucifixion That Changed Everything

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  By 1944, after years of interrupted painting, abandoned canvases, and gambling debts severe enough to force him onto the unprimed reverse sides of his own work, Bacon completed Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The painting's debut in 1945 caused what the critic John Russell later described as a clear line between painting in England before the triptych and painting after it, a rupture no one could confuse.

  The path to that work was circuitous. A 1933 canvas titled Crucifixion, partly based on Picasso's The Three Dancers of 1925, attracted some public attention, but when it was not well received, Bacon abandoned painting for nearly a decade. He tried instead to suppress and destroy his earlier output. He visited Paris in 1935 and bought a secondhand book on anatomical diseases of the mouth, containing hand-coloured plates of open mouths and oral interiors. The book haunted him for the rest of his life.

  In the winter of 1935-36, Roland Penrose and Herbert Read visited his studio at 71 Royal Hospital Road in Chelsea while selecting work for the International Surrealist Exhibition. They saw three or four large canvases but found his painting insufficiently surreal for inclusion. Bacon recalled that Penrose told him directly: "Mr. Bacon, don't you realise a lot has happened in painting since the Impressionists?"

  The three studies themselves drew together everything Bacon had absorbed: Picasso's biomorphs, his own interpretations of the Crucifixion, and the Greek Furies. He himself regarded works painted before the triptych as irrelevant. The 1946 painting titled Painting, sold to the Hanover Gallery, brought him enough money to decamp immediately to Monte Carlo, where he became obsessed with the Casino and fell so deeply into debt that he painted on the backs of earlier canvases, a practice he maintained for the rest of his life.

• 4. The Screaming Mouth

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  A photographic still that Bacon kept in his studio showed a close-up of a nurse's head, screaming in panic, broken pince-nez spectacles hanging from her blood-stained face. The image came from Eisenstein's 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin, specifically the Odessa Steps sequence. Bacon first saw the film in 1935 and returned to it frequently, and the still became a permanent fixture of his working environment.

  The screaming mouth as a pictorial motif drew from several other sources as well. Kathleen Clark's 1939 book of X-ray photographs fed directly into his imagery. Matthias Grünewald's contorted figures provided another layer. The mouth, Bacon once said, served as a catalyst for the work itself, a shape he used when painting the chimera. The motif appears in one of his earliest surviving works, Abstraction from the Human Form, and by the early 1950s it had become, in the assessment of his biographer Michael Peppiatt, so central that fully understanding its origins and implications would mean being far closer to understanding the whole of Bacon's art.

  The Pope series channelled all of this. Bacon based the paintings largely on Velázquez's 1650 Portrait of Pope Innocent X, held at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome. He viewed that specific painting in person only once, much later in life, though he kept extensive source imagery otherwise. His popes, stripped of hierarchical power, become isolated figures in claustrophobic, undefined spaces. Head VI, the best known of the 1949 Heads series, pairs vestments with an open, screaming mouth. David Sylvester, the critic who spent years in conversation with Bacon, described it alongside the 1953 Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X as the finest popes Bacon produced.

• 5. Soho, Gambling, and the Colony Room

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  Muriel Belcher ran The Colony Room at 41 Dean Street in Soho. She had held a 3-to-11 p.m. drinking licence for the private-members bar, and when Bacon joined the day after its 1948 opening, she adopted him as a "daughter", gave him free drinks and ten pounds a week, and asked him in return to bring in friends and rich patrons. He was delighted to comply.

  The Colony Room was the social hinge of Bacon's middle life. Its regulars in 1948 included Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Patrick Swift, John Minton, and the Vogue photographer John Deakin. He also met the art critic David Sylvester that year in another context; Sylvester had been writing about Bacon since at least 1948 and would go on to conduct the extended interviews that formed the most detailed record of Bacon's thinking about his own work.

  Bacon's gambling never loosened its grip. In 1958 he aligned with Marlborough Fine Art, who remained his sole dealer until his death in 1992. Under the ten-year contract Marlborough advanced him money against current and future paintings, with prices set by canvas size. A 20-by-24-inch painting was valued at 165 pounds. A 65-by-78-inch canvas fetched 420 pounds. The contract called for him to supply roughly 3,500 pounds worth of pictures per year, a target not always met when the Casino held more appeal.

  At the 30th of April 1951, his childhood nanny Jessie Lightfoot died at Cromwell Place. Bacon was gambling in Nice when he learned of it. She had lived with him through most of his adult life, from the shared studio at Queensberry Mews West through Monte Carlo and back to London. Stricken, he sold the Cromwell Place apartment almost immediately.

• 6. George Dyer and the Black Triptychs

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  Bacon met George Dyer in 1963 at a pub, though a widely repeated story placed the encounter as a burglary of Bacon's flat. Dyer was around 30 years old, from London's East End, and had lived, as Bacon knew, between theft and prison. His compact, athletic build belied what Michael Peppiatt described as a docile and inwardly tortured personality, though he gave off the air of a man who could land a decisive punch.

  Bacon's previous lover, Peter Lacy, who died of alcoholism the day before Bacon opened his Tate retrospective in 1962, had a reputation for tearing up Bacon's paintings and beating him in drunken rages. With Dyer the dynamic reversed. Bacon became the dominating personality, drawn to Dyer's vulnerability. Dyer was impressed by Bacon's confidence and regarded him as a protector. The portraits Bacon made of Dyer during the mid-to-late 1960s were, in the judgement of critics including Michel Leiris and Lawrence Gowing, uncharacteristically tender. Dyer himself observed about the paintings, with choked pride: "All that money an' I fink they're reely 'orrible."

  By 1970 the affair had deteriorated to Bacon simply providing Dyer with enough money to stay more or less permanently drunk. In October 1971, Dyer joined Bacon in Paris for a retrospective at the Grand Palais, at the moment Bacon was described publicly as Britain's greatest living painter. Dyer had planted cannabis in his own flat and phoned the police to attract Bacon's attention, and had attempted suicide more than once. On the morning of the 24th of October, when Bacon returned to their hotel with Terry Danziger-Miles and Valerie Beston, they found Dyer's body. Dyer had taken an overdose of barbiturates. They persuaded the hotel manager to delay announcing the death for two days.

  Bacon continued with the retrospective. John Russell, writing at the time, noted that Bacon displayed powers of self-control to which few could aspire. Over the following two years he painted the three Black Triptychs, each detailing moments immediately before and after Dyer's death. The loss joined a sequence of bereavements: four other friends had recently died as well. Bacon told friends only later that daemons, disaster and loss now stalked him, as if his own version of the Eumenides.

• 7. The Studio and the Legacy

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  Bacon died on the 28th of April 1992 in the Clinica Ruber in Madrid, his asthma having developed into a severe respiratory condition that left him unable to speak or breathe well. He bequeathed an estate then valued at eleven million pounds to his sole heir, John Edwards, with whom he had settled into what Bacon described as a platonic and somewhat fatherly relationship in his later years.

  In August 1998, Edwards and Brian Clarke, installed as sole executor of the estate by the High Court after ties with Marlborough Fine Art were formally severed, donated the contents of Bacon's studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. A team of archaeologists, art historians, conservators, and curators mapped the location of over 7,000 items before moving and rebuilding the studio, original doors, floor, walls, and ceiling included. The database built from that process contains entries on approximately 570 books and catalogues, 1,500 photographs, 100 slashed canvases, 1,300 leaves torn from books, and 2,000 items of artists' materials.

  The auction prices have continued to climb. By 1989 he was the most expensive living artist after a triptych sold at Sotheby's for over six million dollars. In 2013, Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold at Christie's New York for 142.4 million dollars, at that moment the highest auction price ever paid for a work of art, surpassing the fourth version of Edvard Munch's Scream. In 2016, Martin Harrison and others published a five-volume Catalogue Raisonné documenting 584 paintings, the most complete accounting yet of what Bacon left behind after destroying so much of the rest.