Francis Bacon at the Met

Francis Bacon, who died at the age of 82 in 1992, was the greatest British painter of the 20th Century, and by all odds the most notorious. His famous paintings of Baroque-era popes, distortedly rendering Diego Velazquez's portrait of Innocent X as a succession of screaming funhouse faces, scandalized respectable opinion, while his treatment of gay life made him one of the first artists to unapologetically depict the gritty subculture of homosexual London.

On a political level, Bacon's postwar work seemed to decry violence, while on a personal one he appeared to embrace it. The result was an art that seemed both aesthetically disturbing and morally ambivalent.

Bacon's iconography is now familiar to us, and his bad-boy postures, after Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Greenaway, seem a bit old hat, not to say sentimental. We are really left, in the centenary exhibit of his work recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the art itself. There's a cool, classical ironist behind the Romantic figure painter, and the tension between the two— the eye of a clinician observing a particularly messy operation— is what engages us now.

Yet there's a deeper issue in Bacon's work, the issue that besets modern art in general: how to represent the world in an age of photographic reproduction.

Fine art's dirty little secrets

Before photography, the artist looked directly at the world and depicted it through hand and eye. Afterwards, anyone with a camera could reproduce that same world with a click of the shutter. This easy appropriation included the world of art itself, as the digital camera flashes that have added a new level to the visual pollution of our galleries and museums attest.

At the Met, guards were diligently shooing would-be picture takers away from the Bacons, but I think Bacon himself would have been highly amused. That painters had themselves often worked from photographs was one of fine art's dirty little secrets, but Francis Bacon may have been the first to work only from photographs, film stills and other forms of reproduction.

Even when painting his friends and lovers, he would never pose them, but have photographer friends such as John Deakin give him snapshots to work from. To have museum souvenir-hunters turn his paintings back into photographs might well have seemed a fitting completion of his work to him, or at any rate a reduction back to first principles.

A gambit taken to extremes

What were those principles? I don't think Bacon was merely quirky in insisting on having a prefabricated image to work from (a Velazquez painting might serve too, but only itself in reproduction—Bacon claimed never to have seen the original). He was making a programmatic or, if you will, a philosophic statement— namely, that the modern world could be seen only in mediated form, never directly.

This is a very classic modernist gambit, of course. But Bacon took it to the extreme. Photography had, as it were, usurped the natural world, and banished it to Kantian exile. The photograph was the primary datum of experience now, and art could only work off it, compete with it and, if successful, in some sense displace it. This displacement was the actual artistic gesture, the triumph of art itself.

This conviction, I think, was at the core of Bacon's rejection of the dominant aesthetic of his generation, Abstract Expressionism. In photography, the image of a thing replaced the thing itself, but the Abstract Expressionists, by ignoring both, had retreated into what Bacon regarded as a sterile manipulation of form and color.

Like tennis without a net

The Expressionists might say that, in rejecting the image, they freed themselves from the tyranny of representation in order to project emotions onto canvas directly. But to Bacon (not to mention Picasso and Matisse, among others), that was playing tennis without a net. The real issue was whether art could exist in what Walter Benjamin had called the age of mechanical reproduction, and any art that failed to engage the question— to grapple with the image, particularly the human image—was simply irrelevant.

The matter was not nearly so simple, of course. Picasso himself had broken up the conventional visual field with Cubism, and it was this gesture that made Abstract Expressionism possible, even if Picasso himself had chosen not to follow it. From this point of view, modern art was not about the image— temporality— but about space, reconfigured and reconceived. Photography had little to say about this issue, being in that sense an actually retrograde method for interrogating the world.

Bacon, too, despite his mock obeisance to the photograph, recognized this. The primary question in depicting the human image was, for him, not its color, outline or expression, but its placement in space.

Baboons and the pope

I think the gaping or grimacing features that recur so regularly in his work attest to this spatial instability; they're like the distortions caused by exposure to compressed air or a destructive wind. On a psychological level, one might say, Bacon's gaping mouths are meant to reveal our animal kinship to other primates; thus, in the room that exhibits most of the papal images, figure studies of a chimpanzee and a baboon are included, as well as studies of dogs.

But all the figures, human and animal, seem unlocated. The popes sit on their thrones, and there is no image more apparently grounded than a throne; but Bacon encloses them in the cage patterns characteristic of his early postwar work, thus making them appear suspended in a menacing void— menacing to them and to us.

Or sometimes his figures are seen through drizzling screens of paint, like curtains that leave us uncertain whether the figures stand in front of or behind them (or are rather bombarded by them, like cosmic particles). Rain is spatially disorienting, especially when it appears without signpost or background; and Bacon's existential rain— coming from no apparent source and proceeding to no apparent ground— is particularly riddling.

The spoor of the human

In his later work, these devices are replaced by large slabs of unbroken color, which, even when they suggest a pictorial referent (a bare room, for example), give us no real purchase. Bacon's figures are as isolated, as ungrounded, as they can be, and the twists and gaps in the figures themselves leave them, too, at the margins of substantiality. It is as if Bacon (who adapts many of the devices of Expressionist space) wants to take the image as close to dubiety and unintelligibility as he can, while still leaving an inexpugnable trace, the spoor of the human.

This is a new kind of reality, but one that we can recognize about us everywhere today, and which Bacon was prescient in anticipating, particularly in his sensitivity to photographic processes— the chemical trace that leaves, mysteriously, a simulacrum of the object world. We live, increasingly, in this virtual reality, whose reach has been enormously extended by the computer and the world of video games and simulations that it has generated. Without noticing it, we have largely disappeared into this virtual reality, organized for us by unseen hands, which is now replacing the messy, unframed, chaotic natural world that, in our animal fear of it and our distrust of the instincts that once permitted us to navigate it, we are in the process of abandoning.

Paint itself as a victim

There is no reason why we ourselves should not some day be absorbed into this looking-glass, and that is the mirror Francis Bacon's art holds up to us. Its ambiguity— and perhaps its violence, too— is born of the frisson we experience as we confront this brave new world, which fascinated Bacon himself as its prophet.

One of the things we will lose in it, as he was well aware, is paint itself. A painter friend of mine, recently returned from Venice, remarked to me about how few paintings the Biennale contained, as opposed to videos and installations. What, look at a cloth canvas daubed with vegetable dyes and hung, immovably, on a wall? Titian is as far from us now as a cave dweller.

The one reality we can't escape

Bacon, though, insisted upon paint, as he did upon the material core of humanity, distant and difficult though it had become to our perception (the difficulty was precisely his subject). Two paintings from the Met show may illustrate this for us. In one, his lover, George Dyer, is shown, nude and from the back, sitting on a toilet. He is surrounded by white space except for the piping that conducts Dyer's waste away from him and toward us: a man, in effect, shitting in our faces.

In another, Blood on a Pavement, a smear of blood is all that is left of the absent figure, and the background itself is rendered as three Rothko-like panels (another appropriation from the Expressionists, despite Bacon's expressed disdain for Rothko).

The Dyer portrait is, among other things, the ultimate send-up of the papal thrones; here, Bacon suggests, is where we all sit. We don't see Dyer's waste, but the image makes us inescapably conscious of it: shit is the one natural reality we can't escape, however politely removed by modern plumbing, and however antiseptically white our bathroom walls and fixtures.

Similarly, blood is also our trace: the one testimony to our existence when the murdered corpse has been removed from the scene of the crime. We live, and therefore shit; we die, and therefore bleed: however virtual our reality may become in between, these signatures reveal us.♦


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