Art: The Coroner’s Report

In an era when painting mostly runs to stale geometries, pop playthings and optical gimmickry, an artist who tackles the image of man with originality is a rare figure. Such a man is Britain’s Francis Bacon, but it is unlikely that his portraits will ever hang in any corporation board room. His paintings attack conventional concepts of beauty, plow the flesh and reap a contorted yet keen vision of mortality.

It is a mark of courage for anyone to consent to a Bacon portrait. In fact, the painter rarely has his subject present, prefers to work from photographs strewn about his London studio. Says he: “Sitters inhibit me; if I like them, I don’t want to practice before them the injury that I do to them in my work. In private, I can record the fact of them more clearly.”

Bloody Beef. Man is a grisly fact to Bacon’s eye. With surrealistic swiftness, he slaughters the human form; yet the smithereens seem to scream for recognition. Despite the mayhem he commits with his brushes and his stylistic isolation, he is today considered Britain’s greatest living painter. In a recent poll by France’s Connaissance des Arts, he ranked fifth among the world’s ten favorite living artists. His works are selling for prices up to $17,000.

Bacon achieved this popularity despite his blatantly repellent subject matter: slabs of bloody beef, shrieking popes, and men performing vague erotic gymnastics. In his recent paintings, he has focused on portraiture. In a frenzy since the beginning of the year, he has painted 30, half of which go on view in Paris’ Galerie Maeght this week. The rest the artist cut to bits too small to reach the open market via his trash basket.

Excitement & Horror. Bacon does not accept commissions, and his subjects are quite naturally his closest friends. Frequently he paints Isobel Rawsthorne, wife of Composer Alan Rawsthorne (see opposite page); or the painter Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund. He does not try to provide insights into their specific characters. Says he, “I am really trying to create formal traps which will suddenly close at the right moment recording this fact of man as accurately as I can.”

What fascinates Bacon is the perfect portrait of human tragedy. He resurrects the image of man halfway between life and death like some mad coroner who frames the clotted residue of life. “We exist this short moment between birth and death,” he says. “You are more conscious of sunlight when you see the darkness of the shadows. There is life and there is death, like sunlight and shadow. This must heighten the excitement of life. And then it heightens the horror of it.”

Through a One-Way Window. Some critics have said Bacon only paints his own despair. “I’m a drifter,” admits Bacon, who confesses to living in a hazy homosexual underworld. But, he continues, “I have seen the despair of so many people, whether they are young or old, and it doesn’t appear to be much different whether they are homosexual or heterosexual. It’s possible that loneliness haunts homosexual people more, especially toward old age.” If so, Bacon, now 57, bends his despair to the manner of his art.

In Bacon’s paintings, the real world is a torture chamber. His figures writhe like angry putty, as if viewed in a psychiatric ward through a one-way window. They tumble and melt into a glue without regard for skeletal formality. Yet a humanism exists in Bacon’s work. He may see man as an accident but, as he says, “Somewhere you have to drive the nail home into fact.” The pathology of his vision still affirms life. Says he: “I believe that anything that exists is a violent thing. The existence of a rose is a violence.” For Bacon, man reveals his existence through his agony. In the portraits, the faces are suddenly seized by some tic douloureux, convulsed into a telltale grimace. To trap that instant is the aim of his swirling brush.