Hello, my name is Paul Priestley. Welcome to art History School,
the home of art history for everyone. Today we are going to look at the British artist,
Francis Bacon whose wildly inventive and tortured paintings explore adult subjects
and reflect a life lived to extravagant extremes. Francis Bacon was born on 28 October 1909 in 63
Lower Baggot Street, Dublin to English parents. He was named after, so his father claimed,
his famous ancestor, the English philosopher, scientist and former Lord Chancellor,
Francis Bacon. Edward, his father was a race-horse trainer, a veteran of the Boer War
and worked at the War Office during World War I. His mother was Christina Firth, a steel heiress,
who lived and loved the life of a socialite. His childhood was spent at Cannycourt,
County Kildare, but it was blighted by severe asthma from which he suffered all his life. Bacon
was a shy child, who enjoyed dressing up, this, and his effeminate manner, infuriated his father.
The second of five children, Bacon was often left to his own devices and consequently formed a close
relationship with his nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who would be a major influence on his later life.
With the outbreak of war in 1914, the family moved to London. ‘We lived near Kensington Gardens,’
recalled Bacon, ‘they used to spray the grass with phosphoresence. They imagined the Zeppelins would
see it during their bombing raids and think that it was the lights of London, it was a mad idea.’
After the war, in Dublin, he grew up amidst the early campaigns of the Irish nationalist movement
and in 1924, shortly after the establishment of the Irish Free State, his parents moved to
Linton Hall in Gloucestershire. That year at a fancy-dress party at Cavendish Hall in Suffolk,
Bacon dressed as a flapper with beaded dress, high heels, and a long cigarette holder.
He was very unhappy and repeatedly ran away from school in Cheltenham. Family relations
became abusive and brutal as Bacon came to terms with his emerging homosexuality.
In 1926 Bacon’s father, repelled by his homosexuality, threw him out of the family
home for wearing his mother’s clothes. Bacon aged just 17 arrived in London with little schooling,
and a weekly allowance of £3 from his mother. He lived the life of a vagrant.
In 1927 he moved to Berlin, where he saw Fritz Lang's film Metropolis
and Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, both would influence his work. He was impressed by
Picasso’s 1927 exhibition at the Paul Rosenberg gallery. He said, ‘I went to Paris for a short
time. While there I saw many Picasso’s, and thought, well I will try and paint too’. As a
consequence, he attended the free art academies in Paris and began to learn to draw and paint.
In 1928 he returned to London and established himself and his childhood nanny Jessie Lightfoot
at Queensbury Mews West in South Kensington. He worked as a furniture and interior designer.
One of his patrons, the artist Roy de Maistre, became his mentor and encouraged him to take
up oil painting. Later, in 1930 Bacon shared a studio show with Jean Shepeard and Roy de
Maistre. An early patron was the businessman, Eric Hall, who became Bacon’s lover and supporter.
Picasso was a strong influence and Bacon’s 1933 Crucifixion painting as seen here, was his first
painting to attract public attention. It was in part based on Picasso's The Three Dancers.
The Crucifixion was shown at the Mayor Gallery in London in 1933 and was displayed with a Picasso in
Herbert Read’s book, Art Now. The painting was bought by the art collector Sir Michael Sadler.
In 1934, Bacon organised his first solo exhibition in the basement of a friend’s
house in Curzon Street, London and renamed it ‘Transition Gallery’ for the purpose.
The exhibition was not well received and he responded by destroying his paintings.
1936 saw his paintings rejected by Herbert Read for the International
Surrealist Exhibition. Undeterred in January 1937 Bacon and de Maistre helped Eric Hall organise the
Young British Painters exhibition at Thomas Agnew and Sons Gallery. The show also included works by
British artists Graham Sutherland and Victor Pasmore. For the next few years Bacon created
few paintings and destroyed most of them. At the start of the 2nd World War in 1939
Bacon was exempted from military service because of his asthma. He became a member
of the Air Raid Precaution sector, which involved non-military search and rescue, but was discharged
when he fell ill from the dust and rubble. In 1944 he took the decision to fully commit
himself to painting. With renewed passion he created Three Studies
for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which he later considered as the beginning of his career.
Bacon said the figures in the painting represented the Furies, ancient Greek
goddesses who punished human wrongdoing and are often seen in paintings about the death of Jesus.
To understand this painting, you need to understand the context; the Second World War was
coming to an end. The first photographs and film footage of Nazi concentration camps had become
widely available and some saw Bacon’s painting as a reflection of the horror of the Holocaust.
By 1946 Bacon was a central figure in the artistic milieu of post-war Soho,
charismatic, articulate and well-read, he spent much of his time eating, drinking and gambling
with Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews and friends. On Graham Sutherland’s recommendation Erica
Brausen secured Bacon a contract with the Hanover Gallery, in London who sold, Painting 1946,
to the Museum of Modern Art, in New York in 1948. He said later, ‘My family didn’t want
me to be a painter, they thought I was just a drifter, especially my mother.
It was only when she began to realize I was making money out of it, that we made any contact.’
Painting 1946 was created immediately after World War II, and is a damning image of an anonymous
public figure, probably Neville Chamberlain, the pre-war British prime minister who was known for
carrying an umbrella. His dark suit, deathly complexion and toothy grimace suggest a deep
brutality beneath his proper exterior. In the background, three window shades suggest those
found in an often-circulated photograph of Hitler's bunker, an image Bacon included in
numerous works. The crucified cow carcasses add to the sense of menace in the painting.
Unfortunately, Bacon gambled away the proceeds of the sale of the painting in Monte Carlo.
His first solo exhibition was in 1949 at the Hanover Gallery. For this show he painted a
series entitled ‘Heads’, significant for introducing two important motifs:
the first being the scream. The inspiration for screaming mouths which appear in many paintings of
his late 40s and early 50s paintings was drawn from a number of sources. Medical text books,
the works of Matthias Grünewald and most importantly a still from Eisenstein's 1925
silent film Battleship Potemkin which shows a close-up of a nurse's head screaming in terror.
The second motif was Diego Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, a painting Bacon claimed only
to have seen from reproductions. The Papal theme was obviously significant to Bacon,
possibly because of the church’s attitude to homosexuality. The Heads series also
made greater use of enclosing devices, bars and cages that suggest claustrophobia and anxiety.
1951 saw a period of despair and emotional instability following the death of Jessie
Lightfoot, once his nanny but also a vital emotional pillar and loyal partner in crime. She
acted as his housekeeper and cook, who, bizarrely, often slept on the kitchen table during the day.
Throughout the war Bacon and Eric Hall staged illegal gambling parties where she acted
as hat-check girl and lavatory attendant, diligently extracting large tips from visitors
to help with their finances. Bacon looked after her to the end and was present at her death.
Bacon’s first post-war solo exhibition was at the Hanover Gallery in December
1951 and was followed by his New York debut at the Durlacher Gallery, in October 1953.
The paintings of Popes, which had established his reputation
now alternated with contemporary figures in suits who were similarly entrapped; however,
following a trip to Egypt and South Africa a lighter tonality emerged in some of his paintings.
In 1953, the Hanover Gallery held an exhibition of his paintings that included
Two Figures, a depiction of two men embracing in bed. The image created a huge scandal,
as homosexuality was a criminal offence in England until it was decriminalised in 1967.
In 1954 Bacon visited in Italy, where he made a point of not seeing Velazquez’s painting Pope
Innocent X in Rome and he avoided the Venice Biennale, where his paintings were on display
at the British pavilion with those of Ben Nicholson and Lucien Freud.
During this period he visited Peter Lacey in Tangiers
with whom he had a turbulent affair. He also met the American writer William Burroughs
and the painter Ahmed Yacoubi. Bacon returned regularly to Tangiers until Lacey’s death in 1962.
1957 saw Bacon’s exhibition at the Hanover Gallery inspired by Van Gogh’s ‘The Painter on the Road
to Tarascon. These paintings incorporated a more vibrant palette and bolder brushstrokes
and were quite a contrast to his previous more sombre works.
As he approached his fiftieth birthday, Bacon took stock of his career. He’d had some success,
but was frequently in debt, mainly due to his gambling. In October 1958, he suddenly signed
a contract with Marlborough Fine Art after its directors offered to clear his debts.
They also promised to build up his international profile which they did when they secured Bacon’s
first major retrospective exhibition at the prestigious Tate Gallery in May 1962.
The Marlborough also seemed to find a way to stop him destroying his canvases.
In 1961, Bacon settled in Reece Mews,
South Kensington, where he remained for the rest of his life. At the time he
recorded an interview with art critic David Sylvester in which he described his studio
and working conditions, ‘I work much better in chaos, chaos for me breeds images’ he said.
In 1963-4, Bacon’s international reputation was confirmed with his retrospective at the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York and by the publication of Ronald Alley’s catalogue raisonée of his work.
During the Sixties Bacon achieved a new level of virtuosity and invention. His paintings combined
dramatic brushwork, whipped up impastos and trails of paint often squeezed directly from the tube.
This contrasted with backgrounds often composed of bright, flat expanses of colour.
Despite his heightened success, he refused the Carnegie Institute Award in 1967 and donated
his Rubens Prize towards the restoration of Florence following the flood of 1966.
In October 1971 he was given the rare honour for living artist of a retrospective at the Grand
Palais in Paris. The exhibition was a spectacular success, but two days before it opened his
long-time lover George Dyer committed suicide in their hotel room. This event devastated him
and as a moving memorial to his lover’s death, Bacon painted three large triptychs in 1971,
72 and 73, known as the ‘Black Triptychs’. Throughout the 1970s Bacon travelled regularly
to New York and Paris, and various publications helped establish the idea
that his work was a reflection of the anxiety of modern life. Success continued when in 1973,
he became the first contemporary English artist to have a major exhibition at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In the mid 1970s, Bacon met John Edwards,
who became his constant companion and photographer. Bacon began to retreat from his
formerly boisterous social life to focus on his work and his platonic relationship with
the much younger Edwards. His paintings were now dominated by the triptych, but the figures were
calmer. His reputation, as the greatest British painter since J.M.W. Turner was
being formed and his legendary status was perhaps illustrated in 1977 when the police had to cordon
off the street to the Galerie Claude Bernard, in Paris to funnel the crowds towards the gallery
to see the twenty paintings on show. Major exhibitions of his work followed,
culminating in a second Tate Gallery retrospective in 1985, that later travelled
to Stuttgart, Berlin, Moscow and Washington. His last finished painting, Study of a Bull,
was completed in 1991. The bull appears to be backing into a burning, black void or maybe
escaping it to a heavenly light. It appears this extraordinary painting was completed
by someone who seemed aware death was not too far away. Most of the two-metre-high painting was
deliberately raw canvas and beneath the bull Bacon used real dust from his famously shambolic studio.
As he himself said, ‘Dust is eternal, after all we all return to dust.’
On a visit to Madrid in April 1992, Bacon was hospitalised with pneumonia exacerbated by
asthma. He died on 28 April and was cremated in Spain and, at his request, there was no service.
His ashes were scattered in a private ceremony in England. John Edwards was named as the sole
heir to his estate and in 1998 his studio in South Kensington was acquired by the Hugh Lane
Gallery in Dublin, where it was recreated as a room for visitors to experience.
Francis Bacon was one of the most successful British painters of the 20th century, and many
regard him as one of the world's most important painters. Like any major artistic phenomenon,
his work reflects not only the complex inner world of the artist, but also the time and
circumstances in which he lived and worked. In 2013 his painting "Three Studies of Lucian Freud"
broke the record for the most expensive work ever sold at auction, when it was purchased for $142.4
million at Christie's in New York. Thank you for watching, I hope you
have really enjoyed learning about Francis Bacon, a brilliant, if polarising artist. If you have,
then please subscribe to my channel and do not forget to click the little black bell, because
that will tell you when my next video is released. If you want to support the making of these videos,
then please check out my Patreon channel where you will find lots of interesting rewards in return
for your patronage. Thank you for watching, I will see you in the next video. Goodbye.