"I happen to be very, very full of images."
-Francis Bacon in interview with David Sylvester¹


Bacon speaks here as if he were gorged with images, the casual metaphor expressing a kind of gourmandise, a plenitude resulting from an uncritical devouring of images. "I'm greedy for life; and I'm greedy as an artist." His work touches on the theme of this exhibition, antropofagia at several points. He absorbed images from numerous visual sources both "high" and "low": not only the paintings of van Gogh, of Rembrandt and Velazquez, which he confronts, absorbs and reformulates, but also photographs, including those of Muybridge, plates from medical and natural history textbooks, and newspaper pictures. All were capable of engaging him, nourishing his imagination and prompting responses in his paintings. Many crucial aspects of Bacon's painting can be related to this theme: the physical fact of the human body, the reality of flesh and the violence of sensation, which he continually reworks through paint; the fragmentation of the body, the fusion of bodies in desire, their tension in the extremity of feeling, bodies revealed through x-ray and stripped for sacrifice (as in the Oresteia triptych).

Most of Bacon's images, in his teeming imagination, were of the body, usually human, sometimes animal. A small proportion were probably realized, and of those many were destroyed. Bacon painted himself, dozens of small self-portraits, busts or half-length, and more rarely, from 1956, about seventeen full-length self-portraits; he painted his close friends and lovers, nudes male, female and sometimes of indeterminate gender, and occasionally and shockingly, coupling bodies. The body, its flesh and its openings are Bacon's great subject, as they were Picasso's, and there are significant comparisons and differences in their respective distortions of the human figure. Picasso's manipulations and re-tellings spring from physical desire and fear of another's body, and from a love of formal rhythms. For Bacon there is a desire to intensify and almost consume the living presence of the body, whether his own or another's, to render the physical as a fact in paint. "I'm just trying to make images as accurately of my nervous system as I can."²

He painted himself in a mirror or from photographs; his friends he painted from photographs. He preferred these, together with memories and associations, to the living presence in his room. He was freer that way: "They inhibit me because, if I like them, I don't want to practice before them the injury that I do to them in my work."³ The injury, the distortion is to the painted image, but if it were not an image there would be no visible distortion. It is not, in other words, just a matter of the violent handling of paint, a willingness to allow chance gestures, gougings, smears and slashes of paint free rein on the canvas: his painting is neither expressionist nor abstract in that sense. "The image," he said, "matters more than the beauty of the paint."⁴ It is crucial that the "damage" is done to the image, because the real that Bacon was after is that of the human body in its entirety and the mystery of what we call "human nature." The human body, that is, simultaneously veiled and revealed in paint.

"When talking about the violence of paint, it's nothing to do with the violence of war. It's to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself. And the violence of reality is not only the simple violence meant when you say that a rose or something is violent, but it's the violence also of the suggestions within the image itself which can only be conveyed through paint."⁵

Robert Melville, one of the first critics to recognize Bacon as a major artist, linked him in an early essay in Horizon to the cubism of Picasso and Duchamp of 1910-12, which was "far and away the most beautiful and moving achievement of 20th century painting."⁶ Melville was not implying that Bacon's painting was an anachronism, for he held, with considerable justice, that since then there had, strictly speaking, been "no new developments in painting"-until Bacon. What Picasso and Bacon had in common was a concern with "the ambiguity of the boundaries of the figure in space"-a concern which, as we shall see, was as much philosophical as formal. Bacon did not share the linear/planar configuration of that moment of cubism, but sought to represent through new means the interpenetration of the body with its surroundings, creating similar fluctuations of space and indefinable forms. In the paintings of which Melville speaks, those depicting a man passing through curtains (like the magnificent Study from the human body of 1949), heads half consumed, with open mouths, or with piercing gaze, figures trapped in spare linear boxes, it is impossible to "divorce the facture from what it forms." Melville eschews the opinion, which was becoming increasingly current, that Bacon was the painter of alienation and horror.

Melville also recognises that, as with cubism, it is not a question of an "increasing tendency towards abstraction," as Michael Fried wrote in Arts Magazine. Fried, as a critic in the Greenberg tradition, for whom the purity of the pictorial means, the avoidance of "theatricality" were of absorbing importance, was much more ambivalent about Bacon. He argued that the interlocking of paint and image often does not happen; he felt that figure and setting pull against each other, and, given his predisposition to abstraction, naturally preferred the latter: "broad fields of stained black or blue over which Bacon has painted with a dragging brush simple but elegant railings in bright, dry yellow [. . .]"⁷

Fried noted that the group of paintings after van GoghËs The painter on his way to work (1888), the Study for portrait of van Gogh, marked some kind of a turning point, which he saw in terms of the increased density of paint which encouraged an overall configuration. While it is true that the landscape/background enforces itself in an unprecedented way here, with brilliant colour bands or slashes of paint by comparison with the hitherto dark grounds: curtains, shutters, cages or voids which absorb or contain the figure, the relationship is still one of tension and struggle. Although now in a sense reversed, in that the figure is dark against the colours, this is still the heart of the drama: the black spidery shadow cast by the painter on his way to work in van GoghËs picture devours BaconËs figure.

If anything, however, the paintings which followed this sudden explosion of colour magnify the spatial ambiguity, and simultaneously simplify it, while the bodies are isolated, pressed and squeezed by space.

BaconËs attitude to the human body, and to the very idea of "being human" has much in common with that of the group of dissident surrealists gathered at the end of the 1920s round Georges Bataille and the review Documents. Bacon was, much later, to become a very close friend of one of them, the writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris, and it was Leiris who published an extraordinary essay in Documents in 1930: "LËhomme et son intèrieur," in which certain aspects of BaconËs "images" are prefigured.

Leiris moves the question of the bodyËs ambiguous boundaries, discussed above in connection with cubist fragmentation and distortion, into a challenging philosophical arena; however, in asking the questions what is man, and what is human nature, he places the problem of the bodyËs representation at the very center. His ostensible subject·and one which is wholly in keeping with DocumentsË use of the bizarre to question the idea of a norm·are a series of 17th century anatomical prints by Amé Bourdon from a medical textbook. Recalling an anecdote of a woman watching, repelled, a butcher eviscerating a beef carcass, and exclaiming "Do we have such horrors inside our body?" Leiris by contrast, describes the extraordinary beauty of these plates of bodies flayed to reveal muscles and sinews, dissected to uncover nerves and veins. He celebrates their irresolvably paradoxical nature: skinned and cut in half, these figures pose jauntily as living, caressing their own body or casually holding an ear in one hand. Leiris proposes that the clean surfaces of the conventional nude of academic painting dehumanizes the body, leaves it bereft of any sense of its mysterious reality.