Francis Bacon in Your Blood Read Online Free PDF Page A

begin to compare these pictures to – none of the simpering Madonnas with heavenward gazes that I was familiar with, certainly, nor any crucifixions or martyrdoms that I could bring to mind, even in the work of the quirkier artists of the quattro- or cinquecento. Compared to Bacon’s onslaught, all the Christs on the Cross and arrow-studded St Sebastians I’d seen conveyeda degree of serenity, since their suffering was contained within a vast redemptive scheme. Bacon’s writhing figures, on the other hand, clearly had no future and no exit; their suffering took place in anonymous rooms that were vacuums unto themselves, signifying nothing and leading nowhere. Even from the reproductions, one could see how the paint itself revealed pain, as if the skin of the swirling red, green and black oils had been pulled back, the grain cut open, to show the confusion beneath.
    Part of my shock on encountering these brightly blurred images, even in reproduction, was that they seemed so alien to the exuberant bonhomie, the Bacchic joie de vivre, that characterized Bacon when I met him. For sure, his utterances – ‘We come from nowhere and we go nowhere’ – were bleak enough, but they were delivered like a toast, with a glass aloft and a gleaming smile. How could these two extremes be reconciled, the generous well-wisher who offered you everything you wanted and the scourge who stripped life of all meaning and faith? And how did he laugh and drink and enjoy good company while staring into the abyss?
    I was shocked and nauseated by what came over as the systematically wilful distortion of every form – figures corkscrewed, sofas buckled, perspectives skewed; the only straight lines were those that immured these mutant elements in their airless space. I found the screaming popes particularly intimidating, as if I had been made brutally aware of a shameful truth kept hidden for centuries. Was the Pope himself, the head of the Catholic church and spiritual leader of millions, just another victim of bestial emotion and despair? Behind the pomp and dogma of religion, did he dissolve like Bacon’s naked lovers into spasms of lust and rage?
    Seeing so much flesh racked by anxiety and guilt also recalled and strangely validated an intimate, barely avowed anguish in myself, something I tried to keep at bay and not think about. Here, in Bacon’s mise-en-scène, it was translated to a grander, more dramatic plane, framed in gold and exhibited with defiantpanache at one of the country’s foremost museums. If I thought I had been held back by having my art studies cut off at the Renaissance, the imagery now before me so outstripped my understanding that instead of constraint I felt in complete free fall.
    For all my initial reluctance and alarm, deep down I nevertheless had an instinctive inkling of what Francis Bacon’s twisted world was about. I was particularly struck, not only by the brutally pagan, blood-red Crucifixion triptych Bacon had completed especially for the show, but by the way beast changed into man and man into beast, as if the two were in a constant, unpredictable flux. This was something that I had been aware of, in myself and others, in my family and in the youths all thrown together at boarding school. Looking at the Tate catalogue more carefully, trying to take in one alarming image after another, my fascination with Francis accelerated. He seemed to have created a vision in paint that took the pictorial grandeur of the past – the one I had been studying – and reinterpreted it, or rather twisted it, so as to absorb and convey our own specific, post-war anxiety. Once I’d overcome my initial revulsion, which I gradually realized consisted more of shock than disgust, I was aware of a spontaneous kinship with what, a little research revealed, had been dismissed as ‘gratuitous horror’ in many critical reviews. At the same time, underneath