Francis Bacon

Dublin, London, Berlin, Paris

Bacon was born in a Dublin nursing home at 63 Lower Baggot Street on 28 October 1909, the son of a retired British army major who bred and trained racehorses in County Kildare and of Christina Firth, an heiress of a Sheffield steel family. He was asthmatic from early childhood — an affliction that kept him off horses and, as his Estate puts it, 'diminished him in the eyes of his father'. His only sustained schooling was two years at Dean Close School in Cheltenham, from 1924 to 1926. By his own account he was expelled from the household in 1926, after his father caught him trying on his mother's underwear.[1]

He went to London at sixteen with no plan, living on a small allowance from his mother and odd jobs. In the spring of 1927 his father sent him to Berlin in the care of a family acquaintance, hoping the trip would cure what he considered his son's effeminacy; the chaperone, in the Estate's phrase, 'took advantage of his charge'. Berlin was Bacon's first overwhelming encounter with a modern city — its opulence and its squalor, its architecture, painting and cinema. After two months he crossed to France, and Paris did the rest.[2]

The Picasso drawings on the rue La Boétie

In Paris he met Yvonne Bocquentin, a connoisseur of art who took him into her house near Chantilly, north of the city, and taught him French. He stayed about three months. At the Château de Chantilly — the great country house whose museum holds one of France's finest old-master collections — he stood in front of Massacre of the Innocents by the French painter Nicolas Poussin, a seventeenth-century picture of a mother screaming as her child is killed, and decided it held 'probably the best human cry ever painted' — an image he was still working against forty years later.[2]

The decisive room, though, was a commercial gallery. In the summer of 1927 Bacon went to an exhibition of drawings by Pablo Picasso at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg — the dealer's gallery at 21 rue La Boétie in the 8th arrondissement, then the most powerful modern-art shop in Paris and the room where Picasso's new work was shown to collectors. Bacon's Estate is careful about the claim, because Bacon himself was not: he 'repeatedly claimed that seeing a Picasso exhibition at Chez Paul Rosenberg gallery in Paris in 1927 triggered his wish to become a painter', and the Estate's own biography says he 'seems to have considered becoming an artist only after' that exhibition. He began making drawings and watercolours, and moved into Montparnasse, the quarter on the Left Bank where most foreign artists in Paris then lived and drank.[2]

What he took from Picasso was a shape rather than a style. In those years Picasso was painting bathers at the French seaside resorts of Dinard and Cannes as boneless, ballooning creatures — 'organic form that relates to the human body but is a complete distortion of it', in the Estate's description — and that distortion is the ancestor of every stretched neck and swollen torso Bacon painted afterwards. His own account of the debt was typically grudging: 'Let's say perhaps that Picasso helped me to see…'[3]

The furniture designer who became a painter

Back in London by late 1928, Bacon did not paint for a living: he decorated. From a studio at 17 Queensberry Mews West in South Kensington he designed rugs and modernist furniture in chrome-plated steel and glass, following the lead of the modernist designers Marcel Breuer and Le Corbusier, and in August 1930 The Studio magazine published his rooms as an example of 'The 1930 Look in British Decoration'. The Australian painter Roy de Maistre found him most of his commissions and taught him the rudiments of oil paint.[4]

The turn came slowly and badly. Crucifixion (1933), painted at twenty-three and, in the Estate's words, 'clearly indebted to the biomorphs of Picasso' — biomorphs being shapes that look organic and alive without being any identifiable creature — was reproduced in the critic Herbert Read's book Art Now and bought by the collector Sir Michael Sadler. Then a one-man show at London's Transition Gallery in February 1934 flopped, and in 1936 the organisers of London's International Surrealist Exhibition — the show that brought Surrealism, the movement built on dream logic and the unconscious, to Britain — rejected his work as insufficiently surreal. He drifted, gambled, and destroyed most of what he had painted; the ruthless editing of his own output never stopped.[4]

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, painted in 1944, was hung in a group show at the Lefevre Gallery on New Bond Street in April 1945: three hunched, stone-coloured creatures on a hot orange ground, their tubular necks ending in mouths. The Estate identifies them with the Furies, the avenging spirits who pursue Orestes — the son who kills his own mother — through the tragedies of the Greek playwright Aeschylus. The triptych 'rivetted the attention of public and critics', was bought by Bacon's friend Eric Hall, and was presented by him to the Tate Gallery, Britain's national collection of modern art, where it still hangs; Tate now holds some fifty works by Bacon.[5][6] He treated the picture as the start of his career and dated himself from it.

The Grand Palais, October 1971

By 1962, when the Tate Gallery gave the fifty-two-year-old a full retrospective — an exhibition surveying a whole career, in this case ninety-odd paintings, with the news of his former lover Peter Lacy's death in Tangier reaching him on the opening day — Bacon was the most conspicuous painter in Britain. Late in 1963 George Dyer entered his life: an East End Londoner with a petty criminal past, twenty-five years younger, and, behind the sharp suits, depressive and insecure. He became Bacon's lover and the most painted face of the decade, usually worked up from photographs taken by John Deakin, the Soho photographer Bacon commissioned to shoot his friends so that he could paint them in their absence, rather than from sittings.[7]

In 1971 Paris gave Bacon the Grand Palais — the vast glass-roofed exhibition hall built on the Champs-Élysées for the 1900 World's Fair — for a retrospective, an honour the Estate of Francis Bacon calls 'exceptional for a living painter'. Two nights before the opening, Dyer was found dead of an overdose of drink and barbiturates in the bathroom of their room at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, on the Left Bank street of the same name. Bacon attended his own opening; the death was kept quiet until it was over.[8]

The paintings that followed are the reason the week is not merely biography. In Memory of George Dyer (1971), Triptych August 1972 and Triptych May–June 1973 make up what are usually called the black triptychs — a triptych is a picture in three panels, the form medieval painters used for altarpieces, and Bacon set his figures on flat black grounds, dissolving from one panel to the next. The Estate describes the last of them as 'a work of monumental and grave simplicity in which the circumstances of Dyer's death are re-enacted': the hunched body, the basin, the light of the doorway.[8]

The flat on the rue de Birague

Rather than avoid the city, Bacon moved into it. In 1974 he bought a flat on the rue de Birague — the short street in Le Marais, the old aristocratic quarter on the Right Bank, that runs from the rue Saint-Antoine into the Place des Vosges, Paris's oldest square — and kept it as a second base for the rest of the 1970s, painting there and seeing the French writers and critics who had taken him up. His 1976 portrait of Michel Leiris — the French writer, ethnographer and critic who moved in Surrealist circles and became one of his closest friends in France — belongs to that Paris life.[8]

His talk had by then become as famous as his pictures: the interviews the critic David Sylvester recorded with him between 1962 and 1974 were published as a book in 1975 and expanded twice more, and in the same year the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York's encyclopedic art museum on Fifth Avenue, mounted a Bacon exhibition. In the mid-1970s he met John Edwards, the East End publican's son who became the great friendship of his last years and his sole heir.[8]

In April 1992, against medical advice, the eighty-two-year-old flew to Madrid to see a friend. Within days he was critically ill and taken to a clinic, where he suffered a heart attack and died on 28 April in the presence of two nuns of the Servants of Mary, a Catholic order whose sisters nurse the sick. He was cremated in Spain with no service, and his ashes were scattered privately in England. In 1998 Edwards gave Bacon's London studio at 7 Reece Mews — its floor a compost of paint tins, slashed photographs and torn books — to the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin's municipal gallery of modern art, in the city where he was born; reconstructed there piece by piece, it opened to the public in May 2001.[9]