Francis Bacon – In the Mirror of Photography: Collecting, Preparatory Practice and Painting 9783110720648, 9783110720624

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Francis Bacon – In the Mirror of Photography

Katharina Günther

Francis Bacon – In the Mirror of Photography Collecting, Preparatory Practice and Painting

De Gruyter

Thank you to the Estate of Francis Bacon for supporting this publication. This text was accepted as a doctoral thesis at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of ­Cologne in 2019 and successfully defended there.

ISBN 978-3-11-072062-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-072064-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022931104 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter De Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Francis Bacon, Portrait of George Dyer Staring into a Mirror, 1967, oil on canvas, 198  × 147.5 cm, private collection, Europe. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. Alle Rechte vorbehalten/ Bild-Kunst/ DACS 2021. J. P. Müller, My System: 15 Minutes’ Work A Day For Health’s Sake (London: Link House/Athletic Publications, 1939), Exercise 13, ill. no. 82. Cover design: Kerstin Protz, De Gruyter Typesetting: SatzBild GbR, Sabine Taube, Kieve Printing and binding: Beltz Grafische Betriebe GmbH, Bad Langensalza www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents

1. Introduction     7 1.1. A Private Passion – Bacon’s Attitude towards Photography     16 1.2. State of Research     26 1.3. Luck and Chance – Painting 1946 as a Case Study     32 1.4. The Iceberg – Research Material and Definition of ‘Photographic ­Reference’     44 2. The Studio – Analysis of the Working Environment     48 2.1. ‘A Little Corner of South Kensington’     48 2.2. ‘Cat in a Cage’ – Francis Bacon in Reece Mews     68 2.3. ‘A Heap of Broken Images’ – Preparatory Processes     85 2.4. Drawing a Line – Drawings versus Photographs     127 3. Comparative Analyses – Bacon’s Paintings and their Photographic ­References     139 3.1. Spatial Setting and Photography     139 3.1.1. Spatial Settings – Abstract, Elusive, Unreliable     140 3.1.2. The Stage Set – Figure and Ground     157 3.2. Figure and Photography     172 3.2.1. ‘Collage is not my medium’ – The Construction of the Figure     172 3.2.2. Figure, Outline, Materiality – Closest to and Furthest Away from the Photograph     194 3.3. Narrative, Identity and the Use of Photographs     211 3.3.1. ‘I don’t want to tell a story, I have no story to tell’     213 3.3.2. Portrait and Identity – No Less than Life Itself     232 3.4. Colour and Photography – ‘Colour is a most mysterious thing’     254

Table of Contents

4. Conclusion – ‘A Sponge that Absorbs Everything’     270 5. Appendix     283 Bibliography     285 List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings     308 Acknowledgements     411 Picture Credits     412 Colour Plates     414 Triptychs     444

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‘Das erste, was jeder Historiker lernen muss, ist, sich zu bescheiden. Es gibt so unendlich viel, was er gerne wüßte und niemals wissen wird. Aber auch da, wo wir nicht dabei waren, dürfen wir mitunter den Versuch wagen zu erschließen, was sich abgespielt haben mag, indem wir etwa ganz allgemein fragen, unter welchen Bedingungen ein Bildwerk zustande kommen kann.’1 Ernst Gombrich ‘One learns by looking. That’s what you must do, look.’2 Francis Bacon

The British painter Francis Bacon (1909–1992) is famed for his idiosyncratic depiction of the human body, screaming popes, and distorted portraits. In an era dominated by abstract art, Bacon reinvented figuration in a manner shocking and compelling in equal measure; shocking, however, less for the representation of actual horror and violence, which is often made too much of, but rather for its blunt insistence on a fact of life: that we all inhabit a mortal body. How the elusive protagonists on his canvases came about, and how he constructed his strange yet compelling compositions, has long been obscure. The following study, which is predominantly technical in nature, aims to shed light on the genesis of his paintings. 1

2

‘The first thing a historian has to learn is to content oneself. There is an infinite number of things he would like to know but will never know. But even where we were not present we may try to deduce what might have happened by asking in a general manner under which circumstances a work of art may have come into existence,’ translation by the present author, from Ernst H. Gombrich, Wege zur Bildgestaltung: Vom Einfall zur Ausführung, Gerda Henkel lecture, ed. by Rheinisch Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Gerda Henkel Stiftung (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1989), p. 5. There is an English translation in Ernst H. Gombrich, Topics of Our Time: Twentieth-Century Issues in Learning and in Art (London: Phaidon 1992), p. 219, but this is edited and altered. Michel Archimbaud, Francis Bacon: In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud (London: Phaidon 2010), orig. pubd in French (Paris: J-.C. Lattès, 1992), p. 157.

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1  Francis Bacon, Two Seated Figures, 1979, oil on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, private collection.

2  Francis Bacon, Seated Figure, 1979, oil on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, private collection.

Without a confession or an eye-witness, solving a criminal case depends on the collection of evidence. The genesis of Francis Bacon’s paintings is like such a case. As the artist was invariably reticent about his working methods and never allowed any critic to observe the process, not much is known about the origins of his iconography or his working methods. The art historian, not unlike a detective, must thus rely on an analysis of circumstances, and of objects found at the locus delicti, if one wishes to understand how the artworks came into being. The present analysis will look for answers in the artist’s studio. For in this instance, fortunately, a vast collection of pieces of evidence is available for examination. Since 2001, the contents of Bacon’s last studio at 7 Reece Mews, London, have been accessible for research purposes at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.3 The torn book pages, crumpled newspaper cuttings, and battered photographs, as they are both reference mate3

Tate Britain had decided against taking the material and it was difficult to preserve it in situ, see ­Geordie Greig, ‘Francis Bacon’s studio leaves town’, Sunday Times, 30 August 1998, pp. 8–9, p. 8; Sarah ­Thornton, ‘Francis Bacon claims his place at the top of the market’, The Art Newspaper, 194 (29 August 2008) [accessed 31 July 2021]; Barbara Dawson, ‘Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty’, in Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, ed. by Logan Sisley, exh. cat. Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2009/2010 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), pp. 50–69, p. 51; more information on the removal process can be found in Barbara Dawson, ‘Francis Bacon’s Studio: The Dublin Chapter’, in Francis Bacon’s ­Studio, by Margarita Cappock (London: Merrell, 2005), pp. 11–21.

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3  Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), p. 94.

4  RM98F112:55: Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), p. 95.

rial and a result of the process, hold the key to a better understanding of the inception of Bacon’s paintings. In 1979 Bacon and David Sylvester discussed the problem of creativity for contemporary painters. Sylvester flippantly summarised the issue as ‘they don’t really know what to paint.’4 Bacon countered ‘I suppose it’s that I’m not short of images at all; I have thousands of them. That’s not a problem. I don’t see why it should ever be a problem for a painter – for any real painter. By saying that, I don’t think I’m a real painter either, but I happen to be very, very full of images.’5 What sounds like a self-confident comment from the highly inventive artist that Bacon was, could, however, also be read as an accurate description of his infamously chaotic working environment at 7 Reece Mews, which was full to the brim with images of all sorts. Might there indeed be a direct connection between the pictures on the studio floor and those on Bacon’s canvases, and if so, what is the nature of this relationship? What role do they play within his creative process?

4

David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, rev. and enl. edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009), pp. 165–166. 5 Ibid.

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What motivates my line of enquiry may be illustrated by taking a close look at two works from 1979, the year in which Bacon claimed to be ‘very full of images’.6 Two Seated Figures and Seated Figure resemble each other in their choice of subject, anonymous seated men in dark suits and hats, and in their colour scheme: the monochrome beige of the ground and the off-white of the walls (figure 1 and 2). Although on separate canvases, the three protagonists seem to share the same pictorial space. This impression stems from their common origin: all figures derive from the same photographic illustration, a double-spread showing director Allan Dwan, his assistant Arthur Rosson, and an unknown man on a movie set in Santa Barbara in 1913, published in Kevin Brownlow’s book The Parade’s Gone By from 1968 (figure 3 and 4).7 Not only did Bacon borrow the figures, he also adopted the separation of the three men by the margins of the pages for his distribution of the figures on two canvases. The book, tattered and gummed up, and two loose leaves featuring the image used to create Seated Figure, were found in Bacon’s studio. Hypotheses The present study is based on two hypotheses. First, Bacon’s iconography stems from the pre-existing, mostly lens-based imagery he collected in his studios for this purpose (including original photographic prints, mechanically reproduced photographs in books and newspapers, reproductions of film-stills and photographic reproductions of artworks). The direct photographic references known during Bacon’s lifetime and those discovered afterwards are no exceptions or lucky finds, but symptoms of a well-rehearsed, deliberate, and consistent appropriation practice. In fact, it may well be that all his paintings were based on photographic material, a claim which has been made in the past,8 without, however, underpinning it with any data. Second, the working process can be deciphered by carefully investigating Bacon’s working documents and environments, through comparative analysis of the source item and the finished canvas, and by tracing the appropriation process from one to the other. This allows us to track the exact construction of a work, to determine which, how many, where, and how pre-existing images were fed into a painting. We may then detect and interpret recurring patterns and methodologies, providing us with an in-depth insight into Bacon’s creative process, which will help us better understand his work.

6 Ibid. 7 Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), pp. 94–95, the copy found in Bacon’s studio (RM98F110:67) is so gummed up that it can barely be opened; RM98F112:55 and RM98F110:79: two torn leaves of the same page from this publication relate to Seated Figure, 1979. The latter comes from the 1973 edition of the book. ‘RM98FXY:Z’ are archive numbers which were assigned to the items in the Francis Bacon Studio Archive at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. 8 Cf. Martin Hammer, ‘Francis Bacon: Painting after Photography’, Association of Art Historians Art ­History (April 2012), pp. 355–371, p. 357.

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Background In 2010 I was commissioned by the Estate of Francis Bacon to examine Bacon’s studio material at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. The one-year project focused on around 4000 items bearing images, including original photographic prints, books, newspapers, magazines and postcards, torn out leaves and fragments of pages. The goal was to fill the gaps in the knowledge of these items, and to gain a deeper understanding of their relationship to Bacon’s finished canvases. Almost 20 years after the artist’s death, the research on his studio material was still incomplete. At the start of the research, for about 1300 items in the Francis Bacon Studio Archive the publication of origin was still unknown, subjects of photographs or printed leaves had not been identified, or other relevant data, for instance which pages of a book had been torn out, was missing. The endeavour, which required meticulous field work combing through the material itself as well as archival research in a variety of libraries and archives in Ireland and the UK, turned out to be more than rewarding. Over 400 items were conclusively identified, and altogether over 1000 files in the museum’s database were enriched with relevant new information from the author’s research and existing publications on Bacon. Additionally, over thirty new relations between specific studio items and finished paintings were discovered. These links are characterised by striking formal coherences between the pre-existing, mostly photographic image, and its painted counterpart. The results of the project were used to update the museum database at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane where they are now available for future research, and some of the most compelling links were published in Francis Bacon: Metamorphoses in 2011.9 This text draws on information gathered and thoughts conceived during the Francis ­Bacon Archive Fellowship, but the process of identifying studio material and establishing and collecting formal one-on-one links continued afterwards. The principal objective of the past few years has been to find suitable art historical approaches for a plethora of novel data to contextualise and interpret it adequately. The following study is the result of these efforts. A further research project with The Estate of Francis Bacon fed into this book. In 2011, I assessed the estate of the art critic David Sylvester at Tate Britain, in particular the unedited interviews with Bacon, which are referenced throughout this book.10 Goals, Value, Methodology The cornerstone of the present study is the identification of the studio material. Knowing when a torn leaf was published, or when a photograph was taken, is of crucial importance because only an image which existed before a canvas was conceived can arguably be its source. In the past, studio items were often published and integrated into a discussion without this information, which led to chronologically impossible combinations.11 Knowing   9 Katharina Günther, Francis Bacon: Metamorphoses (London: The Estate of Francis Bacon, 2011). 10 TGA200816–TGA200816/12/25, Hyman Kreitman Library and Archive, Tate Britain, London (in the following ‘HKA:’). 11 See some items in Margarita Cappock, Francis Bacon’s Studio (London: Merrell, 2005), for example her relating RM98F130:153: torn leaf, Mary Louise Grossman and John Hamlet, Birds of Prey of the World

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the date of the items also allows for careful quantitative and chronological assessment of the studio contents. Likewise, only when the subject of a newspaper cutting or a Polaroid picture is known is it possible to better understand these subjects, their relationship to their painted equivalent and to Bacon; only then can qualitative evaluations of topics and subjects among the studio contents be made. Formal like-for-like links had sporadically been discovered before among the studio items,12 but the number of hitherto unknown direct transpositions of reference material I discovered during the Francis Bacon Archive Fellowship made it clear, that these links should be taken more seriously as a field of research in their own right. In addition, the role of the space and its contents should be re-evaluated: it should be considered to be more than a generic source of inspiration or a snapshot of the artist’s general interests. Newly discovered links were combined with those recognised earlier in secondary literature in an attempt to fully grasp the extent and nature of the phenomenon. To date, such direct formal links have never comprehensively been collected, analysed and interpreted, and it is the goal of this study to fill this gap. This is the background against which the nature of the relationship between lens-based imagery and painting will be analysed. For, as Frank Van Deren Coke knew, ‘through a comparison of paintings and their photographic sources we gain a better understanding of how the camera affects an artist’s work. Much is revealed about the artist when we see what he keeps, what he omits, what he modifies. […] The disparities between a photograph and a painting can illuminate the nature of the artist’s modus operandi, thus shedding light on the creative process.’13

In the comparative analysis, special attention will be given to the state of the material. It was ruthlessly manipulated, utterly altered and re-formulated, sometimes almost beyond recognition. Since these alterations turned out to feed directly into the painted iconography in combination with the pre-existing shapes and forms, Martin Harrison’s idea that the original photographic prints and printed reproductions in the studio served Bacon as an equivalent of ‘traditional artist’s preliminary drawings or sketches’14 forms a vital point of reference for this study. Yet, there is much more to the process. Certain regularly occurring techniques and procedures in Bacon’s preparatory and appropriation practice predetermine character-

(London: Cassell, 1965), pp. 36–37, to Francis Bacon, Landscape near Malabata, Tangier, 1963, p. 135 and p. 137. 12 For example, in 1999 Martin Harrison related RM98F1A:40: torn leaf, mounted on support, affixed with two paper-clips, Thomas Wiseman, Cinema (London: Cassell, 1964), p. 158, film still from Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, 1959, to Bacon’s Study of Henrietta Moraes, 1969, see Martin ­Harrison, ‘Points of Reference. Francis Bacon and Photography’, in Francis Bacon: Paintings from the Estate 1980–1991, exh. cat. (London: Faggionato Fine Arts, 1999, London: Faggionato Fine Arts, 1999), pp.13–22, p. 21. 13 Frank Van Deren Coke, The Painter and the Photograph: From Delacroix to Warhol, rev. and enl. edn (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), p. 1. 14 Martin Harrison, ‘Latent Images’, in Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, ed. by Logan Sisley, exh. cat. Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2009/2010 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), pp. 70–87, p. 71.

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1. Introduction

istic effects of the finished canvases, for instance the physical and narrative isolation of the figure, which suggests that Bacon used the appropriation process itself as a stylistic device. This analysis aims to decode Bacon’s working process and the technical construction of his paintings, and to find out what was important to the artist within this process. It may help refute prevailing myths and misconceptions, and remove Bacon scholarship from the influence of the artist’s editing hand. Where applicable, I will discuss the meaning of the finished painting, but this is not the main focus of this study. The analysis of how Bacon used photographs is a case study, however, which should certainly be seen in a wider context. From the invention of photography to the present day, painters from Edgar Degas to Gerhard Richter have collected and used photographs as inspiration, tool, and conceptual springboard. Points of contact and differences to his fellow painters will be addressed throughout. I will reference photo and media theory from Walter Benjamin to Jean Baudrillard, and historical accordances and differences, technical and otherwise, to single artists, groups, and methods from collage to chance procedures will be pointed out and evaluated. Structure This book is divided into three main parts and a fourth concluding chapter. Part one introduces the artist’s own attitude towards photography and discusses his public image and the current state of knowledge versus the results of the present research. Part two focusses on Bacon’s working material and environment, while part three is dedicated to an extensive comparative analysis of pre-existing imagery and finished paintings. Chapter 1.1. identifies the artist’s ambiguous attitude towards photography as a defining motivation of his appropriation practice, and discusses the resulting secrecy regarding his methods in context. This withholding of information shaped the contemporaneous state of research, in which the impact of photography on Bacon’s art was discounted as a generic influence (chapter 1.2.). Today the studio material is still under-researched, its discussion is determined by misconceptions, and there is no consensus on its role for Bacon, within the working process and for the finished canvas; sometimes, its analysis is rejected outright. The analysis of Painting 1946, 1946 and its photographic points of reference in chapter 1.3. serves as an introduction to the formal analysis in chapter 3, and, as a first case study, will be used to debunk the artist’s story of the accidental emergence of his iconography. Chapter 1.4. will show that Painting 1946, 1946 is not an exception but rather an example of a consistent working method, by introducing the research results which form the basis of this study: a definition of, and a list of one-on-one links between photographic base images and finished paintings (List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings). Chapter 2 focusses on the studio contents and environments, mainly drawing on information concerning Bacon’s last and best documented studio at 7 Reece Mews. Chapter 2.1. describes how the photographic material in the studio, in combination with the choice of topics, form a hyper-figurative starting point consistent with art which revolves around the human body and experience. Just like Bacon’s painting, a lot of the material

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is closely related to his private life and in the encapsulated studio space, it constitutes a highly personal, tailor-made simulacrum.15 The ensuing chapter (2.2.) takes a closer look at the overall intentionality of the space, the dynamics of how material entered and left the studio, and how and when it reached its quantitative peak – all of which is closely interwoven with and guided by the creation of Bacon’s paintings. The peculiar aesthetics of the working documents determined by deliberate manipulations, but also by accidental decay, will be unravelled in chapter 2.3. I will describe how the handling and editing of the material helped Bacon to grasp pictorial elements, rehearse and test their distortion, and prepare them for the consequent transposition into oil paint. I will elucidate how, by comparison, Bacon’s actual sketches are of minor significance for the working process and the finished painting (2.4.). On the basis of selected examples, the relationship between source images and their final painted version will be explored in detail in chapter 3, approaching the formal elements spatial setting, figure, and colour separately. The spatial setting was usually abstracted during the appropriation process, which is consistent with Bacon’s minimal backgrounds, deny­ ing naturalistic perspective (3.1.). One setting may refer to several sources, and, as will be elaborated in the second part of the chapter, figure and ground are usually lifted from different sources, which reaffirms the isolation of the figure on the canvas. Chapter 3.2.1. traces how the figure itself is built up. Often assembled from several sources, which are combined as pictorial fragments on the picture plane or blended and merged, some deformations, such as an incohesive body image, sometimes find their origin in this fragmentary process. The limitations of this line of enquiry and Bacon’s use of photographs will be laid out in the following chapters. I will explain how photograph and painting are closest to each other in the outlines of forms and shapes, but furthest apart in their contrasting materiality (3.2.2.). I will then show that the narrative in a source item is often not adopted in the painting, with the latter usually not communicating a clear narrative at all (3.3.1.). The next ­chapter (3.3.2.) will explore similar patterns in relation to identity. Taking Bacon’s portraits based on photographs as an example, I will discuss how the identity of the subject in the photograph is often not consonant with the one on the canvas. Bacon used alien photographic sources to add emotive aspects to his portraits, and identity and likeness in Bacon’s work are indeed fluid. He not only borrowed figures and objects from his image bank, but colours, too (3.4.). Yet, as I will show, colour and form often stemmed from different ­sources and the borrow­ed colour was not confined to its shape of origin. Bearing this in mind, it seems unlikely that, when Bacon painted his popes after black and white i­llustrations of

15 Simulacrum is here understood not only as a mere simulation of reality, but, following Jean Baudrillard’s idea that it has the power to become a truth in its own right, the hyperreal, see Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of Simulacra’, in Simulations, by Jean Baudrillard (New York: Semiotext[e] 1983), pp. 1–79, p. 2; Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. by Mike Gane, rev. edn (Los Angeles/ London/­Singapore/New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007), pp. 71–72.

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­ iego Velázquez’ ­Portrait of Innocent X, 1650 in purple instead of red, this was a mistake.16 D The last chapter (4.) will evaluate Bacon’s work with and from photographs per se, and situate this practice in the wider context of modern art, where the engagement with photo­ graphy, and a focus on material and abstraction versus figuration, were major trajectories. In Francis Bacon – In the Mirror of Photography. Collecting, Preparatory Practice and Painting, we will learn by close and comparative looking, and by the evaluation of circumstantial evidence. We will encounter a dense web of tightrope walks between figuration and abstraction, the teasing evocation and withdrawal of narrative and identity, and a hinting at a naturalistic spatial setting only to disappoint. This tension will keep us on our toes. In light of Dawn Ades’ assumption that ‘Bacon is not so much using the photograph as ­attacking it, challenging its status as record or fact through his transformations’,17 the simultaneous fascination for and proximity to, and rejection and subversion of the photograph can be seen as another polarity in Bacon’s work. We will see that Bacon used the photograph as a hyper-figurative starting point from which he almost immediately moved his own image ‘very much further away from the photograph’18 during the preliminary stages as well as during the execution of the painting, until its final emancipation through the choice and handling of material. Following Gombrich’s advice quoted above, the analyses will be executed with due caution. We have to accept that with Bacon himself long gone, many details about his ­motivations, interests and actions must forever remain in the realm of speculation. Yet, on the basis of the contents of 7 Reece Mews, ‘asking in a general way under which circumstances a work of art may have come into existence’19 will, as we will see, prove fruitful, and valid. I will show that the photographic material Bacon collected was pivotal for his painting as a formal starting point for the canvases, on which he worked in solitude and seclusion, his only company the torn book pages and crumpled photographs. Yet it is important to underline that I do not consider, nor do I mean to imply, the photographic material to be the only influence on Bacon’s painting, nor that Bacon was influenced only via pho­to­g­ra­ phy. ‘My whole life goes into my work’,20 the artist explained, and he absorbed art and life outside the walls of his studio and beyond what he found in books and magazines. Any analysis of Bacon’s relationship to another artist, for instance, rather than prioritizing the reproductions in his possession, must also take into account if and when he had access to

16 Cf. David Sylvester, Looking back at Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), pp. 42–44, ­Martin Harrison, ‘Francis Bacon’s Study for a Portrait, 1953’, in Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, by Christie’s, catalogue (London 2011), pp. 87–94, pp. 91–92. 17 Dawn Ades, ‘Web of Images’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by Dawn Ades and Andrew Forge, exh. cat. ­London: Tate Gallery, 1985; Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1985/1986; Berlin: Nationalgalerie, 1986 (London: Thames and Hudson in association with Tate Gallery 1985; New York: Abrams, 1985), pp. 8–23, p. 22. 18 Sylvester 2000, p. 235. 19 Gombrich 1989, p. 5. 20 Francis Bacon in conversation with Michael Peppiatt, in: Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait: Essays and Interviews (New Haven, CT/ London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 21.

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1. Introduction

original works, and should qualify what Bacon absorbed from the work in the flesh.21 For example, to accurately judge the impact of Walter Sickert’s paint application on Bacon, it has to be taken into account that due to its tonality it is difficult to photograph, but also that Bacon may have seen originals on a variety of occasions,22 and in 1971 bought Sickert’s Granby Street, 1912–1913.23 Thus, the present study should be understood as a focussed but not an exclusive approach.

1.1.  A Private Passion – Bacon’s Attitude towards Photography Throughout his career Bacon talked frequently and extensively about photography. While he did not make his engagement with the medium a secret altogether, the artist’s own words are only illuminating apropos his general attitude towards the medium, and tell of a passionate, yet complicated relationship. However, they are of limited help when attempting to gain a detailed understanding of the nature of Bacon’s relationship to photography in terms of his collecting habits, preparatory work, and adoption process. As a consequence, any evaluation of his working methods must depend almost exclusively on the analysis of the studio contents and their connection to his finished canvases. Ambiguities In many respects, Bacon expressed a positive, even enthusiastic attitude towards lens-based imagery. He explained that ‘99 percent of the time I find that photographs are very much more interesting than either abstract or figurative painting’,24 and that he had ‘always been haunted by them’.25 He expressed an insatiable craving for everything the medium had to offer and emphasised his desire to look ‘at every type of photograph’,26 which, by his own account, ranged from an aerial view of a crowd on a square in St. Petersburg during the Revolution,27 photographs of footballers and boxers,28 X-ray photography,29 stop motion studies by Muybridge30 to pornographic images.31 According to Bacon, photographs pro-

21 This point would certainly require further study. 22 Cf. Rebecca Daniels, ‘Francis Bacon and Walter Sickert; “Images which unlock other images”’, in Francis Bacon – New Studies: Centenary Essays, ed. by Martin Harrison (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), pp. 56–87, pp. 62–63, p. 66, p. 82 and p. 84. 23 Cf. Martin Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), p. 78. 24 Sylvester 2009, p. 32. 25 Ibid. 26 Bacon to Bragg in: Documentary, ‘Francis Bacon’, prod. and dir. by David Hinton, ed. by and with Melvyn Bragg interview, for The South Bank Show, London Weekend Television, 1985. 27 Cf. Bacon to John Rothenstein in: ‘Introduction’, in Francis Bacon. Catalogue Raisonné and Documentation, by Ronald Alley and John Rothenstein (London: Thames & Hudson, 1964), pp. 7–21, p. 17. 28 Sylvester 2009, p. 116. 29 Cf. ibid., p. 32, see also pp. 46 and 47. 30 Cf. ibid., p. 30. 31 Cf. Bacon to Bragg in Francis Bacon 1985.

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1.1.  A Private Passion – Bacon’s Attitude towards Photography

vided valuable inspiration for him in depicting the human body32 and, more specifically, the body in motion.33 Bacon was fascinated by the absoluteness and immediacy of the camera picture and its ability to trap and eternalise a fugitive moment or sensation. ‘There it is. It is itself and there is nothing else,’34 he commented admiringly, and noted that his art aspired to ‘the same immediate effect than that you see in this photograph of this wild […] animal after the kill.’35 For him, this intense experience of the moment was closely related to a notion of mortality, which added ‘poignancy’36 to the image. And yet, his passion did not come without ambiguities and qualifications, and a wish to distance his art from the medium.37 For Bacon also regarded photography as fundamentally different, even inferior to painting as an art form.38 For him, a photograph was ‘a means of illustrating something and illustration doesn’t interest me.’39 Bacon voiced his indifference towards art photography40 and emphasised that ‘the last thing I want to be is photographic in any way’41 and that he aimed to take his own images ‘very much further away from the photograph’.42 In a delicate balance of push and pull, absorption and rejection, the camera vision formed a vital starting point and an endless source of inspiration, but also a potent counterpoint and negative motivation for his art. This ambiguity is a determining factor in Bacon’s work with and from photographs. From Bacon’s point of view, painters in the past might have aimed to record and illustrate their environment, but this task now fell to the camera, which was much better at it.43 As a consequence, he believed, painting had to re-invent itself by coming down to something more ‘basic and fundamental’,44 something ‘extreme […] where you unlock the areas of feeling which lead to a deeper sense of the reality of the image’.45 Bacon concluded that ‘photography altered completely this whole thing of figurative painting’,46 and the positioning of his painting between figuration and abstraction,47 and the interweaving of

32 Cf. Sylvester 2009, pp. 46, p. 116, p. 199. 33 Cf. Bacon to Rothenstein in: Rothenstein 1964, p. 17. 34 Francis Bacon 1985. 35 Ibid. 36 Peter Beard, ‘Francis Bacon: Remarks from an Interview with Peter Beard’, in Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings 1968–1974, ed. by Henry Geldzahler, exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975), pp. 14–20, p. 15. 37 Cf. Harrison 2009a, p. 71. 38 Cf. Sylvester 2009, pp. 57–58, HKA: TGA 2008/16/16/4/2/9, 1973, ‘Bacon Interviews IIIc’, ‘October 1973 IIIC’, p. 42. 39 Archimbaud 2010, p. 12, for a similar comment see also Sylvester 2009, p. 30. 40 Cf. Archimbaud 2010, p. 12. 41 HKA: TGA ? IVa-b September 1974, p. 14. 42 Sylvester 2000, p. 235. 43 Cf. Sylvester 2009, pp. 65–66, see also p. 176; and Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985. 44 Sylvester 2009, p. 66. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid, p. 12. 47 Ibid.

17

1. Introduction

icon and material he was so adept at,48 were amongst the consequences he drew from this. Bacon echoed an attitude which had been a crucial factor in the development of many early 20th century avant-garde positions.49 From its inception, the alleged truthfulness of the camera – albeit not always perceived as aesthetically pleasing – had pressured painters into following its high standards of literal accuracy.50 From the turn of the century, however, painters started to revolt against the supremacy of photography and artists such as ­Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Georges Braque, and André Breton proclaimed in a similar manner to ­Bacon the necessity for change but also the positive effect, the relief brought by the ­camera.51 Kirchner claimed that ‘today photography takes over exact representation [so that] painting, relieved from this task, gains its former freedom of action’52 while Picasso declared that ‘photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. […] So shouldn’t painters profit from their newly acquired liberty … to do other things?’53 These ‘other things’ came in a variety of shapes and forms; all tendencies towards abstraction, for example, can be interpreted as at least partly motivated by the competition with the camera.54 A Closer Look Denied While Bacon talked freely about photography in a universal, non-specific way, one hopes in vain for more detailed information on his working methods and engagement with single photographs – that, he deliberately kept out of the public eye. As soon as interviewers started asking more concrete questions, Bacon became tight-lipped and evasive, and often contradicted more affirmative comments made on other occasions. When Michael Peppiatt asked Bacon in 1989 if he was still looking at ‘books of photographs’55 the latter bluntly answered ‘no’56 and changed the subject. In attempts to downplay the intensity of his use of photography, Bacon argued that ‘I know people think I’ve often used it, but that isn’t true’,57 48 Cf. Francis Bacon, ‘A Painter’s Tribute’, in Matthew Smith: Paintings from 1909 to 1952, exh. cat. ­London: Tate Gallery, 1953 (London: Tate Gallery, 1953), p. 12. 49 Cf. Coke 1981, p. 95. 50 Cf. Aaron Scharf (1968), Art and Photography, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 66–67, pp. 211– 227; see also David Campany, ‘Survey’, in Art and Photography, ed. by David Campany (London: ­Phaidon, 2003), pp. 12–45, p. 18. 51 Cf. André Breton in the preface to an exhibition catalogue on Max Ernst’s photomontages, Paris, 1921, cited from Dawn Ades, An Introduction to Photography & Surrealism, booklet for exhibition L’Amour fou: Photography & Surrealism, London: Hayward Gallery, 1986 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1986), p. 2; Kirchner cited in Heinrich Schwarz, ‘Art and Photography: Forerunners and Influences’, in Art and Photography: Forerunners and Influences: Selected Essays by Heinrich Schwarz, ed. by William E. Parker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 109–117, p. 111; Braque cited in Coke 1981, p. 299. 52 Kircher quoted from Schwarz 1987, p. 111. 53 Picasso quoted in Coke 1981, p. 299. 54 Cf. Coke 1981, p. 299. 55 Peppiatt 2008b, p. 193. 56 Ibid. 57 Archimbaud 2010, p. 12.

18

1.1.  A Private Passion – Bacon’s Attitude towards Photography

and that he was only ‘at one time’58 preoccupied with the medium anyway. Comments on his actual preparatory and adoption process are scant and uninformative. He merely explained how ‘suddenly this image [the painted subject] […] began to form itself [after seeing photographs]’,59 ‘that thing [the painted subject] came out of it [the photograph]’, that he somehow made ‘something of the feeling’60 when seeing a photographic reproduction and that photographs ‘bring up’61 and ‘breed’62 other images for him. The role of photographs was described by Bacon with a variety of terms ranging from ‘triggers of ideas’,63 ‘dictionary’,64 ‘record’,65 ‘tool’,66 ‘aide-mémoire’,67 to ‘stimulation’,68 or that they were employed as ‘my models and my subject matter’.69 These terms may seem contradictory, the common denominator, however, is that they ascribe to the photograph an auxiliary, preliminary role. How a photograph was a ‘stimulation’ or a ‘trigger of ideas’ is hard to decode but their role as ‘tool’ and ‘model and subject matter’ will be unfolded in the following analysis. Only on rare occasions did Bacon publicly profess an interest in specific publications, for instance a book with ‘beautiful hand-coloured plates of diseases of the mouth’70 he had bought in Paris and the medical textbook Positioning in Radiography.71 He was more open in private, and in a letter to his friend Sonia Orwell in 1954 he raved about the book Il Mondo Cambia. Storia di Cinquant’anni, which he described as containing ‘some of his most significant pictorial stimuli’.72 Likewise, the unedited versions of the interviews with David ­Sylvester contain more information on specific publications than the published ones. Bacon for example talked about a ‘small […] German book […] where they have put all

58 Ibid., p. 14. 59 Edward Behr, ‘I Only Paint for Myself’, interview with Francis Bacon, published as part of ‘Agony and the Artist’, by Carter S. Wiseman, Edward Behr and Patricia W. Mooney, Newsweek, 24 January 1977, pp. 46–49, p. 49. 60 Bacon to Bragg in Francis Bacon 1985. 61 Ibid. 62 Sylvester 2009, p. 14. 63 Ibid., p. 30. 64 Ibid., p. 73. 65 Archimbaud 2010, p. 12. 66 Ibid., p. 16. 67 Ibid., p. 15. 68 Ibid., p. 101. 69 Bacon to Bragg in Francis Bacon 1985. 70 Sylvester 2009, p. 35, Bacon probably referred to Ludwig Grünwald, Atlas-Manuel des Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses Nasales (Paris: Bailliere et fils, 1903), two fragments of the publication were found in Bacon’s studio, no page numbers, tab.5, fig.1: ‘Epulis’ [RM98F105:140J]. 71 Cf. Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985; likely regarding K.C. Clark, Positioning in Radiography (London: Heinemann, 1942) [e.g. RM98F93:13]. 72 Francis Bacon, letter to Sonia Orwell, 1954, as paraphrased in Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels, Francis Bacon: Incunabula (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008), comment no. 62, no page numbers.

19

1. Introduction

­ embrandt’s self-portraits together’73 and ‘a small book of Géricault that I’ve got’,74 but R these statements were edited out, possibly at Bacon’s request. Bacon only very sporadically pointed out direct photographic references for his paintings, as he did when elaborating that the right panel of Triptych, 1991 was indeed a ‘painted photograph’.75 Overall, he clearly disapproved of this line of enquiry and remained reticent on that matter throughout his career.76 The same pattern was repeated when visual records showed the material he had in his studios. Bacon regularly allowed pictures to be taken of the studio in its entirety, and even invited film crews into the small space of Reece Mews. Numerous well-known photog­ raphers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cecil Beaton, Ian Berry, Michael Holtz and Don McCullin,77 captured the mess with or without the artist present, and Melvyn Bragg interviewed Bacon in Reece Mews for the BBC Southbank Show in 1985.78 These photographs communicated an unspecific idea of the role of photography for the artist and unwittingly promoted his precept of the accidental working process. To the public it certainly had to appear a lucky accident that, from that undefined, chaotic conglomeration of a myriad of images, he managed to create his iconic masterpieces; this is epitomised by the caption to a photograph of the gloomy looking painter in his work space from Newsweek in 1977 reading ‘Bacon in his studio: Struggling with chance’.79 No critic was allowed to study Bacon’s working documents in depth and in detail. Visitors usually ‘got no further than the spartan bed-sitting room’80 and when Bacon was not in the mood to see guests the ‘drawbridge went up’81 and the property became a­ ltogether inaccessible. Most of the time, the studio was a ‘no-go area’,82 and even if allowed into the small working space, visitors recalled a feeling of unease, as if they were entering f­ orbidden

73 HKA: Folder TGA 2008/16/16/4/2/9 ‘Bacon Interviews IIIb, July 1973 IIIb, R-9, Bacon likely referred to RM98F108:33: Wilhelm Pinder, Rembrandts Selbstbildnisse (Königstein im Taunus: Karl Robert Langewiesche, 1945). 74 HKA: TGA 2008/16/16/4/2/9, ‘Bacon Interviews IIIc’, ‘October 1973 IIIC’, p. 10; Bacon might have meant Klaus Berger, Géricault et son Oeuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), a fragment of p. 41, Théodore Géricault, Couple Amoureux (detail), c.1815, is mounted on cardboard together with two other images [RM98F8:95]. 75 ‘I’ll go on until I drop’, Francis Bacon’s last interview, interviewer Richard Cork for Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio 4, first broadcast 17 August 1991 [accessed 16 March 2019], the photograph is The Estate of Francis Bacon, studio item: Jacques Saraben, Francis Bacon, 1973. 76 Cf. Harrison 2009a, p. 71. 77 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Royal Academy, 1952; Cecil Beaton, Overstrand Mansions, 1960; Ian Berry, Reece Mews, 1967; Michael Holtz, Reece Mews, 1974, Don McCullin, Reece Mews, 1982; cf. also ­Margarita Cappock, Francis Bacon: Spuren im Atelier des Künstlers (Munich: Knesebeck, 2005), pp. 63–64. 78 Francis Bacon 1985. 79 Behr 1977, p. 46. 80 Peppiatt 2006a, footnote 43 on p. 60. 81 Barry Joule in conversation, 17 September 2013. 82 Michael Peppiatt, ‘Francis Bacon’s Studio’, Burlington Magazine, 148.1240 (July 2006), 495.

20

1.1.  A Private Passion – Bacon’s Attitude towards Photography

territory in which touching – let alone scrutinising the working documents – felt like a ­sacri­lege.83 According to Peppiatt, Bacon did not take any chances and locked away ­important studio items in a sea-chest.84 Bacon authorised the publication of photographs allowing the study of single studio items only three times. Sam Hunter documented an intimate insight into Bacon’s studio at Cromwell Place in 1950 and two photographs of a selection of printed material were published two years later in the Magazine of Art (figure 39).85 It was not until 1975 that new reproductions of single photographs and book pages from the studio featured in ­Sylvester’s Interviews with Francis Bacon.86 After that, Bacon only agreed one more time to working documents being published, in Wieland Schmied’s Francis Bacon: Vier Studien zu einem Porträt in 1985.87 Single items can be seen in film documentaries, such as ‘Sunday Night Francis Bacon’ in 1966, in which Sylvester interviewed Bacon for the BBC,88 and in The South Bank Show in 1985.89 And yet, while in the first TV programme Bacon can be seen plucking specific leaves and publications from the floor with Sylvester, Bacon took a more cautious stance in the latter, and Bragg was denied the same privilege. Instead, a selection of torn pages and photographs was arranged on a table in the living area of Reece Mews as if to remove the material and its discussion spatially and intellectually from the painting process. Bacon never consented to being filmed or photographed while actually painting or working with the studio material. The documents we have seem staged, unnatural, and detached from his true procedures. A series of photographs shows Bacon in front of a canvas with a working document, Helmar Lerski’s portrait of the painter, c.1929–1930, placed on

83 Cf. Hugh Marlais Davies, ‘Interviewing Bacon, 1973’, in Francis Bacon – New Studies: Centenary ­Essays, ed. by Martin Harrison (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), pp. 88–123, p. 91, Brian Clarke, ‘Detritus’, francis-bacon.com, [n.d.] [accessed 31 July 2021]. 84 Cf. Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, pubd. in relation to the exhibition Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, Norwich: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, 2006; Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2007; Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2007 (New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 11; no other records of such a container, or its content, exist. 85 Sam Hunter, ‘Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of Horror’, Magazine of Art, 45.1 (January 1952), pp. 11–15, p. 12, they were reprinted several times, for example in Lawrence Alloway, ‘Introduction’, in Francis ­Bacon, exh. cat. (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in collaboration with the Art Institute of ­Chicago, 1963/1964, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1963), pp. 12–25, p. 21. Bacon kept one of Hunter’s photographs in his studio, see RM98F1A:201. 86 Cf. David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), for example, p. 33 fig. 31, p. 39, figs. 36–37. 87 Wieland Schmied, Francis Bacon: Vier Studien zu einem Porträt (Berlin: Frölich & Kaufmann, 1985), p. 144, p. 147, and p. 148. 88 Documentary, ‘Sunday Night Francis Bacon’, dir. by Michael Gill and with David Sylvester interview, BBC Television, 1966. 89 Francis Bacon 1985.

21

1. Introduction

5  Photograph, Barry Joule, Francis Bacon in the Reece Mews studio, c.1980s.

an easel at eye level (figure 5),90 and two more show him with brush in hand leaning over what looks like a torn page from a book and a sketchbook.91 Another series features Bacon holding a brush, seemingly working on the centre panel of Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1984 (figure 6).92 And yet, multi-coloured fingerprints and paint marks on the studio items indicate that they were held up, handled or placed below the canvas during the painting process, and Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards indeed looks finished, while Bacon’s static posture does not match descriptions of his painting process as physical and dynamic.93 These are symbolic images, revealing more how Bacon did not work instead of confirming how he worked.

90 Photograph, Barry Joule, Francis Bacon in the Reece Mews studio, c.1980s, reproduced in: David Alan Mellor, The Barry Joule Archive – Works on Paper attributed to Francis Bacon, pubd. in relation to the exhibition of the same name, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2000 (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2000), p. 1, ‘Francis Bacon in studio with 1928 [sic] Lerski, Berlin photograph and un­ finished canvas, 1982’. 91 Ibid., p. 2, ‘Francis Bacon painting in a sketchbook, 1988’, and p. 12, ‘Francis Bacon painting on a photograph, 1988’. 92 Photograph, John Edwards, Francis Bacon painting the centre panel of Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1984, two fragments are RM98F107:23 and RM98F105:140O, a complete print is owned by The Estate of Francis Bacon. For the painting see figure 97 on p. 248. 93 Cf. e.g. Self Portraits with Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton, ed. by Richard Buckle (London: Vintage Publishing, 1991), p. 322.

22

1.1.  A Private Passion – Bacon’s Attitude towards Photography

6  The Estate of Francis Bacon, studio item: photograph, John Edwards, Francis Bacon painting the centre panel of Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1984.

The reasons for Bacon keeping his engagement with photography out of the critic’s eye were manifold. A major factor was photography’s long struggle for acceptance in the realm of the fine arts. In 1859, Charles Baudelaire famously argued that photographs were used only by painters of ‘too slender talent or too lazy to complete their studies’.94 John Ruskin later denied the photograph even the auxiliary role he had first ascribed to it, stating that it will ‘give you nothing valuable that you do not work for’.95 He was particularly critical of the mechanical nature of the process. According to Ruskin, the definition of art was ‘human labour regulated by human design’96 only. While in America, for example, the relationship between photography and art had been discussed more positively and more constructively from the 1930s onwards,97 the British post-war art establishment remained critical.98 Arguments had not changed much since Baudelaire and Ruskin. In 1956, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Sir Leigh Ashton, refused to acquire photographs as art objects because ‘photography is a

94 Charles Baudelaire, letter on the ‘Salon de 1859’ to Jean Morel, editor of Revue Française, Revue Française, 10 June – 20 July 1859, as cited in Scharf 1979, p. 145. 95 Scharf 1979, p. 99, see also pp. 95–101. 96 Ruskin quoted from Scharf 1979, p. 99. 97 Cf. e.g. Beaumont Newhall, Photography: A Short Critical History, pubd. in relation to the ­exhibition Photography 1839–1937, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1937 (New York: The Museum of ­Modern Art, 1938); see also Schwarz 1987, which was first published in 1949. 98 Cf. Harrison 2009a, p. 71–73.

23

1. Introduction

­ urely ­mechanical process into which the artist does not enter’.99 Jacques Salomon argued p in relation to an exhibition of works by Édouard Vuillard in 1964 that this mechanical quality clashed with the organic nature of painting and Salomon identified a struggle when the painter had tried to integrate photographs in his works, whereas the ‘sketches found their place naturally’.100 The act of adoption itself was regarded with scepticism, too, for ‘the idea of an artist imitating the achievements of someone else, even if only partially, suggests a crippling lack of imagination, even fraud’,101 because it clashed with the contemporaneous emphasis ‘on the concept of personal liberty […]’,102 as Keith Roberts pointed out. Such resentment persisted in contemporary art writing, the indignation perhaps increasing the more acknowledged and beloved an artist was. Scholarship struggled to accept that Jan Vermeer van Delft used the camera obscura ‘wholesale’103 for large parts of his compositions and similarly, the exhibition Picasso and Photography as late as 1999 was reviewed with ‘sensational headlines such as “Picasso Exposed” as if a fraud was uncovered’.104 Thus, Bacon was well-advised to conceal his appropriation practice from photographs if he did not want to jeopardise his career and put himself in danger of being severely misunderstood.105 His secrecy did not, however, protect him from criticism. For the little that was known, the paintings in the 1962 Tate retrospective were slammed for their ‘extraordinary dependence on second-hand imagery, even second-hand imagination’.106 Another danger was narrow and misguided interpretations of his paintings on the basis of potential, or actual photographic sources beyond his control, and Bacon lamented an ‘overemphasis on the photograph’107 in people’s perception of his work. In line with this, he usually offered little clues towards their meaning. In 1971, Lawrence Gowing based an essay on Bacon mentioning Positioning in Radiography as a source of inspiration,108 and, for example, saw references to radiography in the depiction of Muriel Belcher’s nostril in Miss Muriel Belcher, 1959.109 Bacon criticised that ‘[…] perhaps Lawrence Gowing has a bit over-emphasised it; this is always the trouble of telling people about sources of things –   99 Sir Leigh Ashton as cited in Harrison 2009a, p. 72. 100 Jacques Salomon, ‘Vuillard and His Kodak’, in Vuillard et son Kodak, exh. cat. London: Lefevre Gallery, 1964 (London: Lefevre Gallery, 1964), pp. 2–15, p. 3. 101 Keith Roberts, ‘Introduction’, in Art into Art: Works of Art as a Source of Inspiration, exh. cat. London: Burlington Magazine at Sotheby & Co., 1971 (London: Sotheby’s, 1971), pp. 3–4, p. 3. 102 Ibid. 103 Philip Steadman, Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 1. 104 Martin Harrison, ‘Francis Bacon: Lost and Found’, Apollo: The International Magazine of Art and ­Antiques, 161 (2005), pp. 90–97, p. 97, Harrison refers to The Sunday Times: Culture, 7 February 1999 (front cover). 105 Cf. Harrison 2009a, pp. 71–73. 106 Norbert Lynton, ‘London Letter: Bacon, Davie, Kokoschka’, Art International, 8.6 (1962), pp. 68–69, p. 68, as cited in Harrison 2009a, p. 73. 107 Sylvester 2000, p. 235. 108 Bacon talks about Positioning in Radiography with David Sylvester in Sylvester 2009, pp. 30–31. 109 Cf. Lawrence Gowing, ‘Positioning in Representation’, Studio International, 183.940 (January 1972), 14–22, p. 14.

24

1.1.  A Private Passion – Bacon’s Attitude towards Photography

is that they over-emphasise these sources […].’110 After a museum visit Bacon reportedly ­triumphantly exclaimed that ‘no critic will ever know where that one came from!’111 Furthermore, Bacon saw himself in the tradition of the Old Masters and his paintings ‘were to deserve either the National Gallery or the dustbin’.112 The autodidact must have been aware that he was inferior to his heroes in some technical aspects, for example, he could not draw.113 Maybe his dependence on photography therefore did not fit into his self-perception, let alone his public image, especially since, as pointed out above, Bacon somewhat shared the idea of the inferiority of photography as an art form. In this context, he may have also aimed to dissociate himself from contemporaneous Pop Art positions. For him, ‘Pop Art is made for kicks’.114 While he shared with them an acute awareness of how mass media would come to define post-war Britain, and had an eclectic taste in the collection of printed matter which included ‘Low Art’ sources from magazines and advertisements, he never made it the core of his art and remained a traditional painter as regards media and techniques.115 Subsequently, Bacon, who deemed talking about technique ‘a waste of time’,116 may have simply regarded other topics as more relevant, and might have preferred to discuss his ability as a colourist over his exact use of photographs.117 Such concealment is not unusual in the history of art and Bacon may have had the same reservations as many of his predecessors. Because Michelangelo Buonarroti feared the ‘judgment of history’,118 he burnt much of his preparatory work before his death to prevent the public from seeing his struggles, and to maintain the illusion that his works had been immaculate from the beginning.119 ‘I know artists are secretive about their methods – they are today, and there’s no reason to suppose they were ever any different,’120 David Hockney stated on the use of optical aids. Many artists, including Bacon, may have feared that the sober, sometimes banal reality of planning, constructing, and executing a painting, brought to light by a step-by-step dissection of the working process, may not live up to, or take away from the magic of the finished masterpiece, and consequently belittle the genius and

110 HKA: TGA 2008/16/16/4/2/9, 1973, pp. 41–43. 111 John Russell (1971), Francis Bacon, rev. edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), p. 180. 112 Ibid., p. 28. 113 Bacon’s sketches will be discussed in chapter 2.4. 114 Bacon to Peppiatt, in Peppiatt 2008, p. 17. 115 Cf. Victoria Walsh, ‘Real Imagination is Technical Imagination’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, exh. cat. London: Tate Britain, 2008/2009; Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009 (London: Tate Pub., 2008), pp. 74–88, p. 74. 116 Andrew Durham, ‘Note on Technique’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by Dawn Ades and Andrew Forge, exh. cat. London: Tate Gallery, 1985; Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1985/1986; Berlin: Nationalgalerie, 1986 (­London: Thames and Hudson in association with Tate Gallery 1985; New York: Abrams, 1985), pp. 231–233, p. 232. 117 Cf. Hugh Marlais Davies, telephone conversation with the author, 7 June 2016. 118 Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of Michelangelo (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), p. 20. 119 Cf. Hartt 1971, p. 20. 120 David Hockney (2001), Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (­London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), p. 14.

25

1. Introduction

reputation of the artist. Of course, this is not the goal of the present study. To the contrary, it will show how much creativity and inventiveness lie in Bacon’s methods and techniques. The pressure is even higher when it comes to the artist’s peers. Joan Miró kept his sketches secret because they would have brought him into discredit with his fellow Surrealists, who cherished the subconscious over the sketchpad.121 Bacon was reportedly so alarmed by a request to bequeath his working material to an archive that he immediately disposed of a large amount of it.122 Thus, at the root of Bacon’s engagement with photography lies a deeply ambivalent attitude towards the medium: it is simultaneously a valued starting- and an important counterpoint. This insight is vital for a better understanding of Bacon’s somewhat contradictive behaviour and methodologies, for it expressed itself in the obsessive collection and employment of photographic images, which, however, he kept to himself, and in their immediate, radical subversion.

1.2.  State of Research ‘Oh yes – Bacon uses photographs’123 In principle, it is a long-known fact that Francis Bacon’s art draws on lens-based imagery. In 1949, Robert Melville first pointed out formal similarities between the gaping mouth in Bacon’s Head VI and the screaming woman from Sergei Eisenstein’s silent movie B ­ attleship 124 Potemkin, 1925. While contemporaneous writing often discussed his relationship to photo­graphy, the discussion was mostly superficial and did not take a prominent place in Bacon scholarship until after his death. Only a handful of essays and two book chapters targeted the phenomenon in more detail, including David Sylvester’s discussion of Bacon’s stylistic proximity to news pictures in 1952,125 and Hugh Marlais Davies’ investigation of ‘The Adaptation of Photographic Sources’ in his Ph.D. thesis from 1975.126 The lack of more profound discussion and seriousness is a direct result of Bacon only very rarely revealing any in-depth information.

121 Cf. Sylvester 2000, p. 205. 122 Cf. Dennis Farr, ‘Francis Bacon in Context’, in Francis Bacon: A Retrospective, exh. cat. New Haven, Conn.: The Yale Centre for British Art, 1999; Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1999; San Francisco: Museum of Modern Art, 1999; Fort Worth: Museum of Modern Art, 1999 (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Trust for Museum Exhibitions, 1999), pp. 18–24, p. 225, footnote 2, quoted from Harrison 2005a, p. 83. 123 Russell John 2001, p. 70. 124 Cf. Robert Melville, ‘Francis Bacon’, Horizon, 20.120–1 (December 1949–January 1950), pp. 419–23. 125 David Sylvester, ‘The Paintings of Francis Bacon’, Listener, 3 January 1952, pp. 28–29. 126 Hugh Marlais Davies, Francis Bacon: The Early and Middle Years, 1928 – 1958 (New York/London: ­Garland Publishing, 1978), pp. 119–153: ‘The Adaptation of Photographic Sources’; other examples are Russell John 2001, pp. 54–71: ‘The Prehensile Image’; Anonymous, ‘Mr. Francis Bacon’s New Paintings: Extraordinary Use of Photographs’, The Times, 13 November 1953, p. 10.

26

1.2.  State of Research

Yet observant critics have sporadically spotted new photographic references; ­Muybridge’s motion studies in particular were regularly connected to Bacon’s work.127 Further­more, on the basis of Sam Hunter’s photographs, John Rothenstein in 1962 established a connection between a news photograph of Pope Pius XII which Bacon held in his studio and Pope III, 1951, underlining the immediate significance of the studio contents.128 In their 1964 catalogue raisonné, Rothenstein and Ronald Alley suggested a photographic starting point for thirty-six out of the 230 featured works, hinting at the potentially high number of formal links in existence.129 In the same year, Frank Van Deren Coke juxtaposed twelve Bacon paintings with photographic sources from reference books in The Painter and the Photo­graph. From Delacroix to Warhol,130 illustrating their close pictorial proximity. In ­studies on the shared history of painting and photography, such as The Painter and the Photograph, Bacon was mentioned regularly.131 The fact that Bacon needs to be placed and can fruitfully be discussed within this tradition has been largely ignored in Bacon scholarship to date, and Rothenstein relating Bacon’s interest in Muybridge to painters such as Thomas Eakins, Ernest Meissonier, and Georges Seurat in 1974 is a rare exception.132 Such comments and observations did not make a noticeable impact, however. No one connected the dots and extrapolated from the known formal references to a deliberate and consistent working method based on the photographic material the artist collected in his studios (see List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings). Instead, the prevailing opinion, as shaped by influential authors such as Russell and Hunter, was that ‘it would be quite untrue to suggest that there is a one-to-one relationship between this photograph [photograph of the Petrograd Riots in 1917], or any other photograph, and what Bacon does in his painting’,133 as claimed by the first, and that the reference images in the studio were of no of direct relevance for his iconography, for ‘at the one end stand his paintings, unique and extremely personal inventions. At the other are tables littered with newspapers

127 For example, David Boxer suggested the mouth of the creature in the centre panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, might have been inspired by the German magazine ­Simplicissimus, 29.9 (28 May 1923), p. 107, Th. Th. Heine, cartoon ‘Wie sieht Hitler aus?’, hier ‘Oder ist der Mund die Hauptsache?’, David Wayne Boxer, ‘The Early Work of Francis Bacon’ (Ph.D. thesis, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore 1975), p. 50. 128 Cf. John Rothenstein, ‘Introduction’, in Francis Bacon, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1962, London: Tate Gallery, 1962), no page numbers. 129 Cf. Ronald Alley and John Rothenstein, Francis Bacon Catalogue. Raisonné and Documentation (­London: Thames & Hudson, 1964, cat. nos. 8, 25, 29, 30, 33–40, 45, 53, 55, 56, 58, 67, 74, 75, 89, 92–94, 98, 100, 102, 108, 111, 117, 127, 129, 135, 159, 182, A9, D8. 130 Cf. Coke 1981, pp. 113–115, ill. nos. 264–273, pp. 167–170, ill. nos. 367–378. 131 See Scharf 1979, p. 220; see also Otto Stelzer (1966), Kunst und Photographie: Kontakte, Einflüsse, Wirkungen (Munich: Piper, 1978), e.g. pp. 162–166; see also Gordon Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975, pp. 206–207, pp. 209–210, ill.  nos. 184–188. 132 Cf. John Rothenstein, ‘Francis Bacon’, in Modern English Painters: Wood to Hockney (London: Mac­donald and Jane’s, 1974), pp. 157–175, p. 166. 133 Russell John 2001, p. 58.

27

1. Introduction

photographs and clippings’,134 as stated by the latter. Similar points of view were repeated, for example, by Gilles Deleuze who claimed in 1981 that ‘at no point does he [Bacon] ever integrate the photograph into the creative process’,135 and Wieland Schmied, who stated in 1985 that Bacon was not influenced by single photographs but rather by the mere existence of photography.136 Directly reflecting Bacon’s scant information policy, during his lifetime the idée reçue amongst art historians was that photography was an important but generic influence. This allowed Russell to remark that ‘most people think in an unfocused way that “Oh yes – Bacon uses photographs”’.137 This idea was fostered, if not forced by Bacon. There is much to suggest that the painter was not only careful about what and how much information to release on his working methods but also directly controlled what was written about him. For example, Russell in his 1971 monograph introduced ‘point[s] of departure’138 for Bacon’s paintings in Muybridge but, as pointed out above, in the same publication denied the existence of any pictorial one-on-one links. Perhaps this reserved conclusion which contradicted his own analysis, as Harrison has suggested, was the result of Bacon’s editing hand;139 he also denied Russell access to more source material for the second edition of his book.140 Other cases are known in which Bacon, when he did not like the content, simply denied the author the reproduction rights for an essay or a book or asked for the publication to be put on hold.141 Thus, if critics did not want to risk the publication of their work, like Russell, they had to make concessions. The Missing Link After Bacon’s death in 1992, the emergence and accessibility of material the analysis, publication, and display of which he had not allowed during his lifetime triggered a paradigmatic shift in writings on the artist.142 The largest, and arguably most important set, were the thousands of tattered magazines, paint-spattered photographs and folded and torn

134 Hunter 1952, pp. 11–12. 135 Gilles Deleuze (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. by Daniel W. Smith (London: ­Continuum, 2008), p. 65. 136 Cf. Schmied 1985, p. 41. 137 Russell John 2001, p. 70. 138 Ibid., p. 65. 139 Cf. Harrison 2009a, p. 72. 140 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 83. 141 Cf. Martin Harrison, ‘Bacon’s Paintings’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, exh. cat. London: Tate Britain, 2008/2009; Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009; New York: ­Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009 (London: Tate Pub., 2008), pp. 40–49, p. 45; Walsh 2008, p. 74; Harrison 2005b, p. 97. 142 Three biographies were published after Bacon’s death: Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (London: Vintage, 1993), Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (London: Crown, 1993), and Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), several sets of sketches were exhibited in the show Francis Bacon: Working on Paper, ed. by Matthew Gale, exh. cat. London: Tate Gallery, 1999 (London: Tate Gallery, 1999).

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fragments of book pages from his last studio at 7 Reece Mews, which attracted attention not only for their quantity, but also for their peculiar, curiously compelling aesthetic and the impressive range of subjects. Finally, Bacon’s own collection of photographic material could be studied in detail, which shifted the discourse on his relationship to photography from a general to a more concrete level. Few scholars analysed the material before 2001143 and it was not until 2005 that two landmark publications assessed and evaluated the torn book leaves and fragile photographs in greater depth. Margarita Cappock’s Francis Bacon’s Studio144 provided an overview of certain groups of material and, for the first time, allowed a closer look at a variety of single items. Martin Harrison’s In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting145 from the same year embedded the working processes in an extensive art historical study, which included Bacon’s immediate historical and art historical context as well as biographical and psychological interpretations of his work. In 2008, Francis Bacon: Incunabula146 featured a large number of full-page reproductions of selected pieces and short explanations of their significance for the artist and his work. Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in 2009 is the only exhibition to date with a pronounced emphasis on the studio contents, and its catalogue contains illuminating essays on Bacon’s relationship to photography in general but also to single photographers, such as Peter Beard.147 Today, there is barely a publication on Bacon which does not reproduce photographs of the studio material and no exhibition is staged without displaying photographs of Reece Mews and original working documents. The enthusiasm for researching them did not last, however, and the initially steady flow of essays has recently started to run dry.148 After the opening of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation in Monaco in 2014 and the publication of the new catalogue raisonné in 2016,149 Bacon scholarship is at present dominated by different topics. Since the material from Reece Mews became accessible for research, a number of new one-on-one links between the battered photographs and crumpled news pictures and ­Bacon’s paintings have been discovered.150 For a while it appeared that no author wanted to publish without discovering a new connection – no matter how vague – or at least interpret

143 Cf. e.g. Harrison 1999, p. 21. 144 Cappock 2005a. 145 Harrison 2005a. 146 Harrison, Daniels 2008. 147 Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, ed. by Logan Sisley, exh. cat. Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2009/2010 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009); Rebecca Daniels, ‘Francis Bacon and Peter Beard: The Dead Elephant Interviews and Other Stories’, in Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, ed. by Logan Sisley, exh. cat. Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2009/2010 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), pp. 134–151. 148 One of the more recent examples is Hammer 2012a. 149 Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, ed. by Martin Harrison (London: The Estate of Francis Bacon, 2016). 150 Cf. e.g. Daniels 2009b, p. 136, RM98F16:278: Peter Beard, detail of contact sheet, running boxer dog with muskrat in its mouth, and Francis Bacon, ‘Dog’, 1967.

29

1. Introduction

an already known one, reminiscent of the ‘search for tantalizing iconographic keys in an archive fever’151 that David Alan Mellor diagnosed in 2009. And yet, there is no consensus on the importance and meaning of the image-image links, and the relationship of the studio material to Bacon’s paintings. Just like past scholarship failed to acknowledge the direct connection between the hints towards Bacon’s interest in photography in his works and the actual photographic material in his studio, today’s research struggles to grasp the direct and immediate connection between Bacon’s painted iconography and single, specific items from Reece Mews. Often, the material is only superficially introduced and quoted to prove or refer to the artist’s general interest in a topic.152 Studio items and other photographic sources are regularly suggestively juxtaposed with formally unrelated paintings and direct borrowings from studio material are left unanalysed and unexplained,153 which is potentially misleading in the first case and unsatisfying in the second. Conversely, the importance of actual and potential source material is at other times utterly overestimated. Martin Hammer dedicated a whole book to Bacon’s presumed extensive appropriation of Nazi-propaganda, concluding that during the 1940s and 1950s Bacon made ‘Hitler and Nazi Germany one of the principal subjects of his art’,154 ignoring the fact that such sources might have been just one of many disparate pictorial references. Other critics doubted the value of the studio contents as a research resource altogether and disputed whether Bacon had incorporated any of it directly at all. The material was described as an ‘incredible pile of rubbish’155 and its removal to Dublin as ‘most bizarre’.156 The display of working documents alongside Bacon’s paintings in Tate’s 2008 retrospective was harshly dismissed, too. The ‘tatty memorabilia’157 should be passed over as a ‘mere sideshow’158 because neither logic nor a better understanding of their genesis could ‘illuminate’159 Bacon‘s paintings and ‘establish his place in posterity’.160 Even Chris Stephens, one of the curators of the show, and Barbara Dawson, who lent the material to Tate, are quoted as being ‘careful to insist that it would be a mistake to draw too many direct inferences between

151 David Alan Mellor, ‘Framing Bacon: Reception and Representation from Little Magazine to TV Screen, 1945–1966’, Visual Culture in Britain, special issue: Bacon Reframed: A Themed Issue on Francis B ­ acon, 10.3 (2009), pp. 227–234, p. 229. 152 Cf. Dawson 2009, p. 55. 153 Cf. Francis Bacon: Five Decades, ed. by Anthony Bond, exh. cat. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2012/2013 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), pp. 92–93, pp. 156–157. 154 Martin Hammer, Francis Bacon and Nazi Propaganda (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), p. 7. 155 Sally Vincent, ‘The Born again Dubliner’, Guardian, 12 May 2001 [accessed 31 July 2021]. 156 Ibid. 157 Rachel Campbell-Johnston, ‘Francis Bacon at the Tate Britain’, Sunday Times, 9 September 2008 [accessed November 2014]. 158 Ibid. 159 Ibid. 160 Ibid.

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what was found there and finished canvasses’.161 This attitude is echoed by Rachel Tant who is convinced that the studio merely had a generic significance for the artist,162 while Michael Peppiatt in 2009 makes a general ‘atmosphere of visual excitement, with incongruous couplings and chance associations,’163 responsible for Bacon’s painting. Maybe at the core of such criticism and resentment lies a concern voiced by Nicholas Chare, who pointed at the risk ‘of replacing looking at the artist’s works with scrutinizing his source materials.’164 Yet, how can a discussion of Bacon’s relationship to photography take place without a careful examination of the most obvious source: Bacon’s own collection of photo­graphic material? How can Bacon’s working methods be explored without a close look at his working environment? How can the impact of the artist’s editing hand and rigid patterns of interpretation be overcome without the collection of new factual data? For, this ‘pile of rubbish’,165 these ‘tatty studio relica’166 happen to hold crucial clues to a better understanding of Bacon’s working process, the genesis of his iconography, and vital aspects of his finished canvases. As such, as Harrison underlined, their examination ‘is no more or less relevant than the study of a traditional artist’s preliminary drawings or sketches’,167 which is usually not understood as sabotaging an artwork’s artistic impact and creative value. Most of the time, research into this material tends to focus on a single topic or person. Indeed, an analysis and interpretation of overarching mechanisms, dynamics, and processes involved in the handling of the material is exceedingly rare. Most scholars considered the physical alterations of the studio items determined by folds, tears, and paint marks insignificant during Bacon’s lifetime, and their importance is in fact still contested. Where they fed into a painting they were dismissed as ‘exceptional cases within a sea of origami’.168 Since 1999, however, Harrison repeatedly underlined their deliberateness and their significance for the painted iconography, which led him to conclude that ‘they [the transformed items] were, in effect, his preliminary studies.’169 Also in 1999, Matthew Gale was the first one 161 Aida Edemariam, ‘Francis Bacon: Box of Tricks’, Guardian, 5 September 2008 [accessed 31 July 2021]. 162 Cf. Rachel Tant, ‘Archive’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, exh. cat. London: Tate Britain, 2008/2009; Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009 (London: Tate Pub., 2008), pp. 164–168, p. 168, she quotes Harrison 2005a. 163 Peppiatt 2008b, p. 37. 164 Nicholas Chare, After Francis Bacon: Synaesthesia and Sex in Paint (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), p. 48; Raymond Lucas also addressed the questionable shift in the meaning of archive items when single items are rendered valuable by their display in Dublin, see Raymond Lucas, ‘The Sketchbook as Collection: A Phenomenology of Sketching’, in Recto Verso: Redefining the Sketchbook, ed. by Angela Bartram, Nader El-Bizri and Douglas Gittens (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 191–205, p. 196. 165 Vincent 2001. 166 Campbell-Johnston 2008. 167 Harrison 2009a, p. 71. 168 Martin Hammer, ‘Francis Bacon: Dublin and Compton Verney’, Burlington Magazine, 152.1282 (­January 2010), 59–61, p. 60. 169 Harrison 1999, p. 21; see also Martin Harrison, ‘Bacon’s Incunabula’, in Francis Bacon: Incunabula, by Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008), pp. 7–13, p. 7.

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1. Introduction

to point out that Bacon equally valued the effects of the ‘enriching decay’170 of his studio contents, accidental alterations such as material fatigue which evolve over a period of time, during the preparatory stages of a painting and the subsequent painting process. Marcel Finke has recently investigated Bacon’s working methods in more detail and his Ph.D. thesis Prekäre Oberflächen. Zur Materialität des Bildes und des Körpers am Beispiel der künstleri­ schen Praxis Francis Bacons published in 2015171 is the first and only thorough study on this subject. With the exception of Prekäre Oberflächen, there has not been a comprehensive study of the studio contents for over fifteen years. The fact that Bacon systematically accumulated and transformed the photographic material in his studio to serve a deliberate and well-­ rehearsed preparatory and appropriation practice has not been fully appreciated by ­Bacon research to date. A systematic collection and examination of the pre-existing imagery-­ painting links has never been executed. Francis Bacon: Metamorphoses172 is the first and until now the only publication focussing on a comparative analysis of Bacon’s iconography and its photographic sources of inspiration, and the present study is an attempt to expand and deepen this initial effort.

1.3.  Luck and Chance – Painting 1946 as a Case Study Initiated and promoted by the artist himself, the idea that Bacon’s iconography emerged by accident still reverberates in contemporary Bacon scholarship. Yet, the analysis of the studio contents reveals that the artist’s statements were contradicted by his actions. The photographic material he collected in fact directly informed the shapes and configurations on his canvases. The following chapter functions as an entry point into the comparative analysis of Bacon’s paintings and their formal references in chapter 3, by contrasting how the artist presented himself with the reality of his procedures. Bacon regularly singled out Painting 1946, 1946 as the paradigm of the accidental genesis of his imagery, which makes this work an ideal point of departure for testing the validity of his claims. ‘I don’t really know how these particular forms come about‘173 The significance of luck, chance, and accident is the issue the artist and his interviewers discussed most consistently and frequently. From one of the earliest statements in 1953174 170 Matthew Gale, ‘Francis Bacon: Working on Paper’, in Francis Bacon: Working on Paper, ed. by ­Matthew Gale, exh. cat. London: Tate Gallery, 1999 (London: Tate Gallery, 1999), pp. 13–36, p. 15. 171 Marcel Finke, Prekäre Oberflächen: Zur Materialität des Bildes und des Körpers am Beispiel der künstle­ rischen Praxis Francis Bacons (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2015), see also previous efforts: Marcel Finke, ‘”I Don’t Find It at all Violent Myself”: Bacon’s Material Practice and the Human Body’, in Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, ed. by Logan Sisley, exh. cat. Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2009/2010 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), pp. 122–133. 172 Günther 2011. 173 Sylvester 2009, p. 100. 174 Cf. Bacon 1953, p. 12.

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1.3.  Luck and Chance – Painting 1946 as a Case Study

to the last interview in 1991,175 Bacon emphasised the role this played in his art as well as his belief that it is the accidental image which has the strongest impact of all.176 Bacon rated chance as no less than ‘one of the most important and fertile aspects’177 of his work. Hardly any interviewer ever challenged these claims in conversation. Richard Cork was a rare exception when he expressed doubts on the basis of the ‘very complicated’178 nature of Bacon’s canvases, but only provoked an evasive response from the artist.179 Bacon struggled to clearly define what he meant by chance and accident and claimed repeatedly not to know what chance even was.180 Often, Bacon’s statements are contradictory. He said that it may have been ‘inspired chance’181 which had influenced his work, but in the same conversation explained that he was neither ‘inspired [nor] gifted’.182 He denied any proximity to ‘trance-like’183 states, which did not stop him from regarding himself ‘not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance. […].’184 Bacon used terminology ranging from ‘chance’,185 ‘accident’,186 and ‘luck’187 via ‘instinct’188 to the less frequently used ‘hazard’,189 ‘unconscious’,190 ‘non-rational’191 or the feeling of being ‘in a fog’.192 These terms have in common that they appear to describe something that the artist did not willingly intend and decide: something which defies control. What the unknown force might be is hardly narrowed down by what Bacon thinks it is not. For example, he rejects the spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism as a reference due to its alleged ‘sloppiness.’193 However, Bacon claimed to share with Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism an awareness of the psychological structure of the mind in the vein of Sigmund Freud, elaborating that the elements of ‘control’ and ‘surprise’ which determine his working process tally with Freud’s

175 Cf. ‘I’ll go on until I drop’ 1991; see also Sylvester 2009, p. 53; Archimbaud 2010, p. 87; Beard 1975, p. 16; and Davies, H. M. 2009, p. 109. 176 See also Sylvester 2009, p. 53; Archimbaud 2010, p. 87; Davies, H. M. 2009, p. 109; and Beard 1975, p. 16. 177 Sylvester 2009, p. 52. 178 ‘I’ll go on until I drop’ 1991. 179 Ibid. 180 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 98; see also Beard 1975, p. 16. 181 Sylvester 2009, p. 96. 182 Ibid., p. 100. 183 Ibid., p. 96. 184 Ibid., p. 140. 185 Archimbaud 2010, p. 87. 186 Ibid., p. 81. 187 Bacon 1953, quoted from Durham 1985, p. 231. 188 Archimbaud 2010, p. 73. 189 Sylvester 2009, p. 98 and p. 104. 190 Archimbaud 2010, p. 84. 191 Sylvester 2009, p. 58. 192 Archimbaud 2010, p. 87. 193 Sylvester 2009, p. 94, cf. also p. 92.

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1. Introduction

distinction of the conscious and unconscious.194 Yet, on another occasion he claimed to draw on psychoanalytical references simply to avoid ‘metaphysical’195 explanations. The intention of his proclaimed working method, it appears, is to create somewhat stronger, more immediate and more powerful paintings by circumnavigating the brain and creating images in an irrational, accidental manner.196 By the same token, chance helped Bacon, according to himself, to avoid the detested notion of illustration because the image created by accident would bypass the artist’s own intellectual decisions too.197 Bacon pointed out that he employed a certain editing process, however. Once provoked into existence, accidental emanations should be subject to the artist’s ‘instinct, self-criticism, and critical sense’,198 he thought. Thus, luck and chance are always balanced by skill and decision, but maintaining an air of mystery, he explained that their effects were indistinguishable.199 Some comments stand out from the usual narrative, and every so often Bacon admitted that he developed his imagery in relation to specific pictorial sources of inspiration. For example, he acknowledged the reference to photographic reproductions of Diego ­ Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650 for his own Pope series, photographs of his sitters for portraits, and also mentioned that the figure in the right panel of Three Studies for a ­Cruci­fixion of 1962 was inspired by Cimabue’s Crucifix, Santa Croce, c.1265.200 No critic has ever addressed these contradictions in conversation with Bacon, nor investigated the matter any further. Instead, the hints towards an alternative interpretation of his processes went unheard, and were overshadowed by the story of the fortuitous working method. Often, it is not entirely clear what aspect of his work Bacon referred to when he claimed that chance played a significant role in his art. An accurate localisation within his practice, however, is key for a correct evaluation of his comments. For instance, chance – albeit of the deliberately provoked and controlled kind – played an important part in his paint application and the alterations of the studio items by decay (see chapter 3.2.2. and 2.3.). For the ­present analysis, the most relevant aspect within Bacon’s considerations on luck, accident, and chance is their alleged role in the development of his iconography. Surprisingly, the artist himself claimed to be completely oblivious as to the genesis of this imagery. He stated that he did not know ‘how these particular forms come about’201 and that he did not know how ‘these marks that have happened on the canvas evolved into these particular forms’202 and that ‘things [images] just drop in like slides’.203

194 Archimbaud 2010, p. 84. 195 Ibid. 196 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 120. 197 Cf. ibid., p. 58. 198 Sylvester 2009, p. 149. 199 Cf. ibid., p. 52. 200 Cf. ibid., p. 14, p. 24 and p. 38. 201 Ibid, p. 100. 202 Ibid. 203 Ibid., p. 136.

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1.3.  Luck and Chance – Painting 1946 as a Case Study

In general, it is a somewhat futile task to cross-check an artist’s comments by comparing it with the truth his work tells. Artwork and artist’s statement are different entities and no artist is obliged to accurately explain his work to the public. Why should a magician reveal their tricks? On the contrary, Bacon is not the only artist actively editing the perception and interpretation of his work. Joseph Beuys’ fabricated story to explain why he used felt and fat, a purported reference to the Crimean Tatars wrapping him up in those materials after his plane crashed in WWII, is equally infamous and persistent in art history.204 Yet in Bacon’s case, a closer look at the validity of his words is necessitated by the persistence of the idea in scholarship to a degree which makes it difficult to introduce alternative approaches. To date, critics prefer the idea of the ingenious masterpiece emerging out of thin air to analysing technical facts and necessities. For instance, Rachel Campbell-Johnston was convinced that ‘curators [of the 2008 Bacon retrospective at Tate] ask us to think about the processes of making,’ but this, she said, ‘will not establish his place in posterity through technical analysis’ because ‘[Bacon’s] works are not illuminated by logic’ and ‘at the heart of his works lies an essential mystery’.205 Scholars are only reluctantly starting to evaluate the artist’s assertions more carefully, and voices like Dexter Dalwood’s, who, endorsing Cork’s objections, remarked in 2008 that ‘to simply accept Bacon’s version of how images floated into his head and then appeared on the canvas is to detract from his great skill as a painter’206 are still scarce. Yet this is the line of enquiry that should be pursued – not to diminish Bacon’s art but to highlight a highly creative and unique working process. Painting 1946, 1946 Bacon usually resorted to Painting 1946, 1946 as a paradigmatic example of how he embraced chance procedures (plate I). He claimed to have adopted a passive role in its creation, having been guided by inexplicable ‘accidents’ as he explained to David Sylvester in 1962: ‘Well, one of the pictures I did in 1946, the one like a butcher’s shop, came to me as an accident. I was attempting to make a bird alighting on a field. And it may have been bound up in some way with the three forms that had gone before, but suddenly the lines that I’d drawn suggested something totally different, and out of this suggestion arose this picture. I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another. […] It suddenly suggested an opening-up into another area of feeling altogether. And then I made these things, I gradually made them. So that I don’t think the bird suggested the umbrella; it suddenly suggested this whole image.’207

204 Cf. Frank Gieseke and Albert Markert, Flieger, Filz und Vaterland: Eine erweiterte Beuys Biografie (­Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1996), pp. 71–77. 205 Campell-Johnson 2008. 206 Dexter Dalwood, ‘Exhibition Reviews, Francis Bacon, London’, Burlington Magazine, 150.1269 (­December 2008), 841–842, p. 841. 207 Sylvester 2009, p. 11.

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1. Introduction

Over the course of his career, Bacon reiterated the same narrative,208 with a variation provided by Russell who added in 1971 that according to the artist, Painting 1946 began as a ‘chimpanzee in long grass’,209 which then led to the bird alighting on a field. The artist’s comments have long been taken at face value and scholarship to date seizes upon them. After Rothenstein and Alley, John Russell, and Hugh M. Davies before him, Michael Peppiatt still repeated the story of Painting 1946’s accidental genesis in 2009.210 Bacon claimed that he ‘couldn’t say where any of these elements [in Painting 1946] came from.’211 However, by closely analysing his working material we will be able to determine that they probably originated in the images he collected in his studio. The composition, along with the motif of the umbrella, is based on a torn and overpainted leaf mounted on cardboard, which was discovered among the studio contents.212 The photogravure from J.A. Hammerton’s Peoples of all Nations: Their Life Today and Story of Their Past published between 1922–1924, shows two young Asian boys on a dusty road, with one of them carry­ing a large umbrella (plate II). On close inspection of the work in the flesh, one notices the margin of primed canvas around the right edge of the umbrella and parts of the carcass on the same side.213 The shape of these motifs must therefore have been decided at an early stage of the painting process and was not altered during its development. Their shape cannot have been accidental, and was not determined by ‘one continuous accident mounting on top of another’. It appears the page from Peoples of all Nations provided the artist with an intriguing found picture and a convenient starting point for further creative explorations in equal measure. Judging by the elements Bacon adopted, he might initially have been attracted to the powerful image of the dark cavity underneath the umbrella. Bacon seems not to have liked the original layout of the image, though. He drew a simple, rectangular construction on the photogravure which encloses the figures. It gives the picture a more symmetrical composition, a new spatial arrangement and a stronger focus on the umbrella. This novel arrangement distinctively echoes in Painting 1946, especially with the umbrella being slightly off centre here, too. Harrison has suggested that a source of inspiration might have been Masaccio’s fresco of the The Holy Trinity, c.1426–1428.214 If this crucifixion, which is famous

208 For example, Archimbaud 2010, p. 80–81. 209 Russell John 2001, p. 24. 210 Cf. Rothenstein 1964, p. 12; see also Alley, Rothenstein 1964, p. 40; Davies, H. M. 1978, p. 70; Russell John 2001, p. 24; Peppiatt 2006a, p. 17, Peppiatt leaves Bacon’s claim uncommented. 211 Bacon to Michael Peppiatt in 1989, see Peppiatt 2008b, p. 191. 212 RM98F1:23: torn leaf, drawn over and mounted on support, Peoples of all Nations: Their Life Today and Story of their Past, ed. by J.A. Hammerton, 7 vols (London: The Fleetway House, 1922–1924), I, p. 147, see Günther 2011, p. 9. 213 I am very grateful to Danielle King, Lilian Tone, and Michael Duffy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to have organised for me to see the original work in their Conservation Department on ­17 ­February 2015. 214 Masaccio’s fresco of the Trinity, c.1424–1428, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, see Harrison 2005a, p. 51, caption to ill. no.47.

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1.3.  Luck and Chance – Painting 1946 as a Case Study

for its central perspective, indeed had a share in the genesis of Painting 1946, it may have motivated Bacon to create an equally balanced, symmetrical composition and to adjust the composition of the photogravure accordingly. In Hunter’s photographs we can see an overpainted magazine page among the working material in Cromwell Place, which in all probability served as the base for the car in F­ igure Getting out of a Car from c.1944 (figure 73 and 76).215 This indicates that the purposeful alteration of photographic material was already an established process in the mid-1940s. Therefore, while it is impossible to date the drawing on the photogravure from Peoples of All Nations, it is conceivable that Bacon manipulated the page with the two Asian children during the preparatory stages of Painting 1946. Bacon must have invested a certain amount of time and thought away from the canvas to develop and execute the new composition on the photogravure. That the painting process was thus interrupted, or preceded by preparatory work, of course belies Bacon’s claim that the work’s genesis was accidental. The prominent umbrella in Painting 1946 features in two works that directly precede it, in Study for Man with Microphones from the same year and in Figure Study II, 1945–1946. Instead of following the dictates of chance, not only did Bacon hark back to a found image but, moreover, repeated an already rehearsed motif.216 The repetition and further development of a motif, however, is no accident but an established artistic strategy.217 Since Peoples of all Nations was published well before Study for Man with Microphones and Figure Study II were made, this image may have triggered the inclusion of an umbrella in these paintings as well. Interestingly, the photogravure much later also provided the exact shape of the umbrella in the right panel of Triptych 1974–1977, 1974–1977 (plate VI). Consistent with Bacon’s avowed dependence on chance, he explained that ‘I didn’t foresee those [umbrellas in Triptych 1974–1977]. This was a very unforeseen painting.’218 Other elements of its iconography draw on pre-existing imagery too. The upper half of the figure’s face is subsumed by the black void underneath the umbrella and ends abruptly above a red moustache. Again, this element did not come about purely by chance but was appropriated from a chromolithograph in Ludwig Grünwald’s Atlas-Manuel des Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses Nasales from 1903, showing the chin, lower lip, and

215 The Mercedes from the picture was directly adopted for the painting. However, the upper part of the torn page was overpainted by the artist: torn leaf, overpainted, Heinrich Hoffmann, ‘The Führer Who Commands’, Picture Post, 13 July 1940, leaf photographed by Sam Hunter in the Cromwell Place studio, 1950, illustrated in: Francis Bacon, ed. by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, exh. cat. (London: Tate Britain, 2008), p. 16, ill. no. 2, cf. Chris Stephens, ‘Animal’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, exh. cat. London: Tate Britain, 2008/2009; Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009 (London: Tate Pub., 2008), pp. 90–95, p. 92. If photographed in the overpainted state, the magazine page must have been altered previously, which indicates that it was indeed used for Figure Getting out of a Car. 216 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 50. 217 Cf. Martin Harrison, ‘Painting, Smudging’, in Francis Bacon – New Studies: Centenary Essays, ed. by Martin Harrison (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), pp. 143–167, p. 154. 218 Sylvester 2009, p. 138.

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1. Introduction

teeth of a man with scurvy (plate III).219 The significance of this publication for Bacon and the proximity to his oeuvre is underlined by the fact that two fragments of Atlas-­Manuel des Maladies de la Bouche were found in the studio, which scholars in the past linked to the centre panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944.220 It is likely this very publication Bacon remembered buying in Paris in the late 1920s, and which he then averred to have become ‘obsessed by’.221 Bacon edited out the lower lip and the fingers holding it down, but other elements from the medical illustration are recognisable, for instance the dominant chin and the number of teeth, including the dark rims on their bottom caused by the disease.222 The upper teeth are barely visible in both images, unlike the prominent red moustache. Most significantly, the fragmentary nature of the illustration echoes strongly in this work. The black underneath the umbrella is perfectly homogenous and entirely smooth; nothing indicates that a complete face had ever been considered, which means that Bacon adopted the predetermined omission. In the book, the upper half of the face was left out for didactical reasons – to focus on the diseased areas of the mouth – but this was transformed by Bacon into an eerie gesture. Bacon only painted flowers around the mid-1940s223 and chose to depict a rose only once, here, in Painting 1946. With the help of the studio material, I was able to trace its origins in photography. Formal coherences indicate that it was informed by the hand-tinted photographic reproduction of a yellow tea rose ‘Amelia Earhart’ as portrayed in J. ­Horace McFarland’s Roses of the World in Color from 1937 (plate IV).224 The publication has completely disintegrated but a single torn leaf featuring a different variety was found in Reece Mews.225 This item, once identified and dated, led to the yellow blossom relevant to ­Painting 1946 in the same publication. The shape of the petals in the photographic reproduction match those of the painted blossom, with only little variation; its leaves were appropriated precisely. Not only was the overall shape borrowed from the pre-existing image but Bacon adopted its colour one-on-one. Contrary to his usual attitude, Bacon admitted in 1973 that ‘the yellow button hole [in Painting] was from an image in a photo and I liked that colour.’226 The present approach confirms Bacon’s claim and illustrates the significance of this and similar statements, and the necessity to re-evaluate them carefully. The dark colours of the foreground contrast strongly with the striking shades of pink in the blinds and the background. Pink hues must have preoccupied the painter around 1946, 219 Grünwald 1903, tab.1, fig.1. 220 Cf. Boxer 1975, p. 39. 221 Sylvester 2009, p. 35. 222 Six, straight, upright teeth and two crooked ones on the outside are visible in both the illustration and the painting. 223 See e.g. Figure Getting out of a Car, c. 1944 and Figure Study I, 1945. 224 J. Horace McFarland, Roses of the World in Color (London: Cassell, 1937), p. 6, ‘Amelia Earhart’, see Günther 2011, p. 9. 225 RM98F105:93: J. Horace McFarland, Roses of the World in Color (London: Cassell, 1937), pp. 163–164, recto: ‘The Polyantha Rose, Mlle. Cécile Brunner’. 226 Davies, H. M. 2009, p. 122.

38

1.3.  Luck and Chance – Painting 1946 as a Case Study

as paint samples from Study for Man with Microphones, c.1946–1948 show that this now overpainted work contained large areas in a similar colour.227 Reminiscent of the repeated depiction of the umbrella, the recurrent use of the same colours makes it unlikely that they appeared by chance. We also know how much effort went into achieving the matt pink of the background. Bacon is reported to have mixed it from pastel hues because oil paint did not produce the right tone.228 Deliberately working on creating a specific ­colour, of course, contradicts the story of the accidental genesis of Painting 1946.229 If it was B ­ acon’s goal to achieve a specific colour, he must have had a clear idea of it in mind or may indeed have had the colour in front of him. A powdery muted pink, not unlike the one in the background of the painting, featured frequently in fashion magazines of 1946.230 That Bacon took an interest in fashion magazines at that time is indicated by a fragment from Vogue, April 1947 found in the studio.231 An advertisement on the inside cover of Vogue, March 1946, for instance, promoted a lipstick of ‘a surprise colour, a new colour, an angelic, ethereal, rose-­ tinted, perfectly Heavenly Pink’232 on a monochrome pink background strongly resembling the one in Painting 1946. Bacon occasionally wore make-up himself and the light pink in Triptych – Studies of the Human Body, 1970, has in the past been connected to his colour schemes.233 Thus, an advertisement for lipstick might have been of particular interest to the artist. The colours in the background of Painting 1946 have faded dramatically since the mid-1940s and the colours of the blinds have turned from raspberry to pink.234 Keen to keep the original character of the work intact, Bacon suggested to the Museum of Modern Art, the owner of the work, to fix it himself with an emulsion paint, but his offer was rejected.235 During the course of the negotiations, Bacon sent samples of the colours he would like the blinds and background to be to the museum.236 While one of them is a torn leaf from a book Bacon overpainted in a dark purple, the other one, meant for the background itself, is 227 Cf. Joanna Shepard, ‘A Game of Chance: The Media and Techniques of Francis Bacon’, in Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, ed. by Logan Sisley, exh. cat. Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2009/2010 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), pp. 152–175, p. 156. 228 Cf. Eugena Ordonez, ‘Technical Report on Painting 1946’, MoMa Conservation Archives (6 May 1985), quoted from Shepard 2009, footnote 12 on p. 155, p. 174. 229 Cf. Shepard 2009, footnote 12 on p. 155, p. 174. 230 Vogue, March 1946, inside cover, lipstick advertisement, ‘Gala’, see also Vogue, April 1946, p. 20: advertisement for ‘Laeta Ramage’, and the background of the captions on pp. 82–83 and p. 93: advertisement for ‘Yardley Hand Cream’. 231 The Estate of Francis Bacon, studio item: fragment of leaf, mounted on support, George Platt Lynes, Christopher Isherwood, 1946, Vogue, April 1947, p. 71. 232 Vogue 1946a, inside cover, lipstick advertisement, ‘Gala’. 233 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 93, caption to ill. no.87. 234 Cf. MoMA Conservation Archives, letter, 9 May 1984, from Antoinette King to William Rubin. 235 Cf. MoMA Conservation Archives, letter, 24 September 1970, from Francis Bacon to William S. ­Liebermann, and letter, 2 November 1970, from William S. Liebermann to Francis Bacon. 236 The two samples were sent to the Conservation Department of the Museum of Modern Art New York by the artist in 1971. They are now held as part of the in the conservation files on Painting 1946. In 1984, Bacon changed his mind and wanted the colours to be preserved as they were, see MoMA Conservation Archives, letter, 9 May 1984, from Antoinette King to William Rubin.

39

1. Introduction

a cutting from a page with a printed pink colour. Thus, again, Bacon picked a pre-existing hue, just like he might have done initially. The composition, the umbrella, the figure’s chin, the rose in its button hole, and the ­colour in the background of Painting 1946 are all atrributable to found imagery and the artist’s own manipulation of that material. To integrate all sources into a cohesive picture, Bacon must have invested time and thought into their arrangement on the picture plane and balancing out their varying sizes on the canvas. The result is a complex yet harmonious work, which stands in stark contrast to the artist’s assertions on how his images came about. The treatment of space and depth alone, for example, are clearly well thoughtthrough: the white railing is closest to the viewer, then comes the seated figure, behind it are the carcasses of meat and at the very back are the blinds, all arranged in a well-balanced vertical symmetry. This overall consistency is impossible to create on a whim but it requires thought and planning to achieve the desired effect. As we have seen, the development of the iconography in Painting 1946 was guided by a conscious process of deliberately picking, choosing, combining, and editing source material. It must therefore be re-classified: rather than being a prime example of an accidental working process, it is a prime example of a deliberate and elaborate working practice based on the manipulation and appropriation of mechanically reproduced illustrations and photographs. Beneath the Surface The present study shows that Bacon’s insistence on the accidental emergence of Painting 1946’s imagery is untenable. None of the sources identified so far depict an ape and a bird. Can traces of these animals be found on the canvas? Indeed, the lower part of the painting was subject to several alterations. A number of white curved lines shimmer through the dark layers of paint of the figure’s suit and legs. Close to the white railing in the foreground, circular pink and purple structures are barely covered up by the present surface. Yet none of the shapes bears any resemblance to any kind of animal. The conservation department of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, kindly provided an X-radiography of Painting 1946, which allowed a more detailed reconstruction of the development of the work (plate V).237 Such an image may reveal traces of previous efforts and earlier versions of the present state, provided they were executed with pigments containing heavy metals such as lead and chromium traditionally used in white hues.238 The radiograph confirms that the upper part of the painting underwent only minor changes, and was planned out to show only the garlands, the hanging carcass, and the umbrella in the exact manner in which they are visible today. With the help of the X-radiography, we

237 I am most grateful to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for sending me the image and allowing me to use it in my analysis. 238 Cf. Mauro Matteini and Arcangelo Moles, Naturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungsmethoden in der Restau­rierung, illustrated by Andreas Burmester (Munich: Callwey, 1990), pp. 62–72.

40

1.3.  Luck and Chance – Painting 1946 as a Case Study

are also able to define more accurately the nature of the alterations in the lower half of the composition. The X-radiography image reveals parts of a fantastic creature with bulky shoulders and two bestial legs ending in a pair of paws. The left leg of the creature is positioned directly underneath the leg of the suited man, indicating that the development of the later figure is closely connected to the earlier figure. The shape of the shoulders is echoed above the limbs; Bacon seems to have changed their size once. The exaggerated anatomy resembles anatomies in preceding paintings, such as the left panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 and Study for a Figure, c.1945. If Bacon originally intended to create a figure in the manner of the linear, sculptural creatures in these works, but in the end decided to commit to the painterly, human figure we know today, the X-radiography of Painting 1946 supports this work’s great significance as a turning point in his overall stylistic development. However, the repetition of an already established motif would, again, not have been the result of an accident. Moreover, the creature neither resembles a chimpanzee nor a bird. Instead, its claws are reminiscent of a big cat and the overall appearance is stiff and static, unlike an alighting bird, despite the fact that Bacon insisted that Painting 1946 emerged out of the ‘memory of a photograph, of something alighting’.239 Judging from the X-radiography, the iconography in Painting 1946 was not developed out of an attempt to paint a monkey and a bird and there is no reason not to regard the alterations revealed by the radiograph as pentimenti, simple changes of heart. Instead, the current imagery was inspired by a mixture of the memory of previous works and a set of photographic sources of inspiration and executed, as argued above, following the shapes and forms of that printed material. A Familiar Agent In the 20th century, chance as an element of artistic practice was explored by artists ranging from Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, and Jean Arp via Jackson Pollock to Gerhard Richter and Fischli & Weiss. The notion of chance was related to various forms of expression including the ready-made, collage, expressionist painting, performance, and participation art.240 Even though the manner and context in which it was employed differ widely, all approaches challenge the very definition of what constitutes a work of art and what determines the role of the artist.241 At the beginning of the last century, Duchamp was one of the first artists to systematically explore the properties of chance. He experimented with the random shapes created by falling threads in a standardized process in Three Standard Stoppages, 1913–1914. 239 HKA: TGA 2008/16/16/4/2/9 ‘Bacon Interviews IIIa’, Interview III, December 1971, FB 37. 240 Cf. Margaret Iversen, ‘Introduction: The Aesthetics of Chance’, in Chance: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. by Margaret Iversen (London/Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), pp. 12–27, p. 12. 241 Cf. Meredith Malone, ‘Introduction’, in Meredith Malone, Chance Aesthetics, exh. cat. St. Louis, MO: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2009/2010 (St. Louis, MO: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2009), pp. 3–7, p. 3.

41

1. Introduction

­ ooden templates following the curves thus created were later integrated in The Large W Glass, 1915–1923.242 By employing chance to create his forms, Duchamp successfully avoided any ‘authorial or artistic agency’.243 Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Law of Chance), 1916–1917, by the Dadaist Jean Arp was made according to a similar principle. Dada utilised chance as a means to startle the social establishment and, in conjunction with unconventional materials like printed news images, to defy artistic conventions.244 Influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theories on the unconscious motivation of everyday ‘accidents’ such as slips of the pen, from the mid-1920s, André Breton, the forward thinker of Surrealism, shaped its theory and practice.245 On the basis of Freud’s writing, he promoted the idea that beauty lies in the accidental, a ‘chance encounter’246 in the street or an intriguing ‘”trouvaille” or lucky find spotted amidst the detritus of a flea market’.247 Breton’s Surrealism employed chance to bypass consciousness and intentionality to allow ‘access to an otherwise inaccessible reality’.248 Breton’s ideas are seized on, for example, in Max Ernst’s frottages such as Forest and Dove, 1927 and André Masson’s automatic drawings. Bacon admired Duchamp but the more significant point of contact with chance as an artistic agent was probably Surrealism. While having an ambivalent relationship with the movement, Bacon was, according to himself, greatly influenced by it in the early stages of his career.249 In painting, Bacon respected Ernst and Masson, admired Luis Buñuel’s films, and was well-familiar with Surrealist magazines such as Documents and Minotaure.250 ­Bacon knew Breton’s writings and, as Harrison suggested, his comments on luck and chance might well be owing to surrealist automatism.251 When Bacon talks about images which emerged ‘without the brain interfering’252 and coming ‘straight out of the unconscious’253 it appears he is echoing Breton’s wish to sidestep conscious decision to gain access to novel visual experiences.254 Bacon himself, however, rejected any overlap of his practice with surrealist automatism.255 And yet, what distinguishes Bacon most from all positions mentioned above, 242 Cf. Dario Gamboni, ‘Stumbling Over/Upon Art’, Cabinet Magazine: Chance, 19 (Fall 2005) [accessed 31 July 2021]. 243 Iversen 2010, pp. 12. 244 Cf. e.g. Malone, ‘Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object’, in Meredith Malone, Chance Aesthetics, exh. cat. St. Louis, MO: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2009/2010 (St. Louis, MO: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2009), pp. 70–71, p. 70. 245 Cf. André Breton, Manifeste du Surréalisme (Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1924); see also Iversen 2010, p. 20. 246 Iversen 2010, p. 20. 247 Ibid. 248 Cf. ibid., p. 20. 249 Cf. Sylvester 2000, p. 245; see also Archimbaud 2010, p. 128. 250 Cf. Ades 1985, p. 12; see also: Michael Peppiatt (1996), Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, revised and updated (London: Constable, 2008), p. 63. 251 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 36. 252 Sylvester 2009, p. 120. 253 Sylvester 2009, p. 120. 254 Cf. Iversen 2010, p. 20. 255 Cf. Harrison 2009b p. 154.

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1.3.  Luck and Chance – Painting 1946 as a Case Study

is the fact that his avowed precept of luck and chance in the genesis of his iconography did not tally with his methods. For example, the umbrella, as can be seen in Painting 1946, Study for Man with Microphones, Figure Study II and Triptych 1974–1977 might be a ‘staple of Surrealist phallic symbolism’256 but the way it came into existence was most unsurreal. Instead of emerging from of the artist’s unconsciousness it was borrowed from a pre-­existing image. The Not-So-Accidental Working Process Ultimately, Bacon’s concept of chance remains elusive and unspecific. The ensuing vagueness and inconsistency perhaps indicate that Bacon’s aim was neither a deliberately constructed concept, nor a defined practice like the one Duchamp developed to create his Standard Stoppages or the Surrealist use of frottage. The fact that he nonetheless insisted on and promoted his dependence on chance suggests that it may have been Bacon’s aim to connect the notion of fortuitousness with his work in a general way and make that an inherent part of his public image. To entice the public and his critics to believe that his ­iconography was based on chance procedures released Bacon from any obligation to explain his work with photographs, and from having to explain their relationship to the ­finish­ed painting. His efforts may therefore be rated as a diversionary tactic. Bacon was taking advantage of the inherent nature of chance itself, as defined by William Wollaston, who elaborated that it ‘seems to be only a term, by which we express our ignorance of the cause of any thing’.257 Bacon’s tactics turned out to be successful: the alleged working principle paired with Bacon’s resistance towards a detailed study of his working environment successfully prevented further inquiries and deeper insights into his actual procedures. The aura of inexplicability certainly spurred the interest in his work. Bacon had success­ fully created a ‘personal mystique’258 by deliberately cultivating a fictional dependency on luck and chance which ‘overrule[d] more mundane explanations’259 of his work. This exciting story, unfettered by the tedious details of everyday struggle, was gratefully accepted in scholarship and perpetuated by writers and critics. Bacon’s comments also contain an element of self-idealisation and self-promotion underlining the uniqueness and therefore monetary and intellectual value of each work: ‘[…], how can I recreate an accident?’ ­Bacon asked, ‘it’s almost an impossible thing to do.’260 The analysis of Painting 1946 and its ­formal references demonstrated that Bacon’s insistence on the accidental occurrence of his ­icono­graphy has to be firmly rejected. While chance certainly played an important role in other aspects of his work, it does not in relation to the origin of his imagery.

256 Harrison 2005a, p. 50. 257 William Wollaston, ‘Relig. Nat. v.83’, in The Oxford English Dictionary, ed. by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), III, p. 10. 258 Shepard 2009, p. 153. 259 Ibid. 260 Sylvester 2009, p. 18.

43

1. Introduction

1.4. The Iceberg – Research Material and Definition of ‘Photographic Reference’ The last chapter described how the iconography of Painting 1946, 1946, the one work that Bacon so emphatically presented as paradigmatic for the accidental genesis of his imagery, was in reality developed with the help of pre-existing images. In the following chapter, I will demonstrate that what holds true for this work applies to large parts of Bacon’s oeuvre, if not to every painting he ever created. In 1999, David Sylvester entitled an essay in the exhibition catalogue of the show Francis Bacon: Working on Paper at Tate Britain, which displayed Bacon’s newly emerged sketches, ‘Bacon’s Secret Vice’.261 The text, as well as the exhibition, drew their impact from the fact that Bacon had always denied executing any. Sylvester explained that he had been aware of some sketches since the early 1960s, but had kept that knowledge to himself.262 In light of the amount of material he was now confronted with, Sylvester called the ones he had seen ‘the tip of the iceberg.’263 The more significant ‘secret vice’, however, was Bacon’s work with and from photographic material. In that sense, the photographic reference material for his paintings known during his lifetime was in fact the true ‘tip of the iceberg’. The ‘body of the iceberg’, an extensive collection of one-on-one connections between photographic source material and painted iconography, will be assessed and examined here for the first time. To delineate the relationship between two images is by its nature a difficult business. What might at first sight look self-evident is on closer inspection hard to pin down, ­elusive, and subjective. Most importantly, the reasons for claiming a connection, beyond the projections and associations of the recipient, need to be determined by looking at qualities ­inherent in the pictures themselves.264 To that end I will study formal correspondences between pictorial elements: compositional building blocks like figures, spatial settings, or fragments thereof, and colours. These correspondences are mainly defined in terms of the matching of outlines of bodies and spaces. This also includes the positioning, dimensions, and proportions of limbs and perspective lines, their positioning on the picture plane, and ­ entioned their arrangement in relation to each other. Stylistic and generic references will be m but are not the main focus of this study. A connection can only conclusively be established when a reference image pre-dates the painting in question, which makes the identification and dating of the torn book pages and fragments and shreds of newspapers a crucial first

261 David Sylvester, ‘Bacon’s Secret Vice’, in Francis Bacon: Working on Paper, ed. by Matthew Gale, exh. cat. London: Tate Gallery, 1999 (London: Tate Gallery, 1999), pp. 9–11. 262 Cf. ibid., p. 9. 263 Ibid., p. 9. 264 Cf. Peter Geimer, ‘Vergleichendes Sehen oder Gleichheit aus Versehen? Analogie und Differenz in kunst­ historischen Bildvergleichen’, in Vergleichendes Sehen, ed. by Lena Bader, Martin Gaier and Falk Wolf (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), pp. 44–68, p. 57, cited from Guido Isekenmeier, ‘In Richtung einer Theorie der Interpiktorialität’, in Interpiktorialität. Theorie und Geschichte der Bild-Bild-Bezüge, ed. by Guido Isekenmeier (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013), pp. 11–86, p. 13.

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1.4.  The Iceberg – Research Material and Definition of ‘Photographic Reference’

step.265 The date of publication does not, however, have to be synonymous with the date of acquisition, or the date when the artist first saw an image, and this also has to be taken into account. Other criteria can help to argue in favour of a connection. The closest possible correlation is established when alterations to a working document are echoed directly in a painting. Any other supposed association is a matter of likelihood. It is for instance very likely that the artist saw an image which was found in Reece Mews, or which is known to have been there, or in any of his other studios at some point. And whenever working documents show fingerprints or other signs of heavy use such as crumpling, they are more plausible candidates than undisturbed ones. If an image cannot be associated with a studio, the connection to a painted subject depends on additional clues, for instance quotes from the artist mentioning the material, observations from friends or critics who saw the image, its availability to the artist in London or another place he is known to have travelled to or lived in at a certain point in time, and a pronounced interest in the subject. List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings In an unprecedented attempt, long-known links mentioned in publications on the artist and newly discovered ones were compiled in a single file, List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings. The first entry, the earliest known reference to photographic material, is Crucifixion, 1933. It draws on an inverted reproduction of an X-ray of a rib cage from Atlas-Manuel des Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses Nasales, 1903 (figure 7 and 8).266 Bacon was to employ the same technique almost 30 years later when he inverted a photographic reproduction of Cimabue’s Crucifix, Santa Croce, c.1265, which he used as the base image for the figure on the right panel of Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962,267 and he appears to have reversed several source images over the course of his career.268 At this early stage of his career, in Crucifixion, 1933 Bacon already imaginatively fused a photographic source with influences from fine art, specifically Picasso’s Baigneuse aux Bras Levés, 1929, and the same artist’s Crucifixion drawing after Grünewald, 1932.269 The list forms the core of the present study. It neither pretends to be exhaustive nor exclusive and will have to be extended in the future, when further analysis of Bacon’s working material yields more hitherto undetected references. The list includes the date of publication, bibliographical data, and photographer of each source item, and specifies whether 265 Cf. Martin Harrison, ‘Introduction’, in Francis Bacon: Metamorphoses, by Katharina Günther (London: The Estate of Francis Bacon, 2011), p. 3. 266 Grünwald 1903, no page numbers, ‘Sclérose du lobe inférieur du poumon gauche’ (inverted). 267 Sylvester 2009, p. 14, RM98BC9: Paolo D’Ancona, Les Primitifs Italiens du XIe au XIIIe Siecle, (Paris: Editions d’Art et d’Histoire, 1935). 268 See, for example, the first frame of the fourth row from Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 27, ‘Man Performing Standing Broad Jump’, which informed ‘Figure on a Dais’, 1958, cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 556. 269 Cf. Sylvester 2000, pp. 13–15; Herbert Read suggestively juxtaposed Picasso and Bacon in Herbert Read, Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of Modern Painting and Sculpture (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), ill. nos. 106–107.

45

1. Introduction

8  Ludwig Grünwald, Atlas-Manuel des ­ aladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des M ­Fosses  Nasales (Paris: Bailliere et fils, 1903), ‘Sclérose du lobe inférieur du poumon gauche’, no page ­numbers, inverted.

7  Francis Bacon, Crucifixion, 1933, oil on canvas, 62 × 48.5 cm, private collection.

the item is linked to a painting by alterations, if it was found in the studio or with the help of the studio contents, and when and by whom the link was discovered. When no name is mentioned, they were identified by the present author. Only direct formal links which meet the requirements pointed out above were included; I decided against including hints at groups and series of material. Lost sources mentioned or suggested by important authors or friends were given the benefit of the doubt and have been included. Where necessary and available, bibliographical data and archive numbers were added to existing data from secondary literature. A first assessment of the entries shows how far-reaching and all-­embracing ­Bacon’s appropriation practice was. Altogether 369 out of 584 paintings by Bacon included in the 2016 catalogue raisonné and an additional 5 lost and destroyed ones were related to one, but often to more, pre-existing images. The list includes suggestions of photographic sources where the base image is lost, or in which the work in question can only be connected to a group of images or a publication, and not to one concrete picture. Direct formal links to photographic source material were found for all decades of Bacon’s career, in all genres, for all types of subjects, and for all formal elements. The fact that such a large and over the course of Bacon’s career consistent number of works is informed by photographic source material indicates that the same may apply to his entire oeuvre. As a consequence, the contents of the Reece Mews studio have to be radically reinterpreted. They can no longer be seen as mere by-products or remnants of the working process, but have to be understood as direct working tools and active agents in the genesis of Bacon’s iconography.

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1.4.  The Iceberg – Research Material and Definition of ‘Photographic Reference’

The ‘Baconian Element’ 270 The studio items and Bacon’s finished works are two separate entities of different art historical significance, and articulating how they relate to one another can illuminate Bacon’s art only to a degree. The artist himself did not regard his image bank as part of his artistic oeuvre, nor as a manual for the interpretation of his paintings – to comment on or to be seen alongside them – and should not be misinterpreted as such.271 To the contrary, he withheld such items from critics and the public alike, and the collection of photographic material he had in Reece Mews only became accessible after his death. The photographic sources of his art therefore do not represent the ‘hidden truth’ of a painting, and tracing these is not the resolution of a riddle Bacon set for art historical scholars. Bacon’s attitude towards them is also reflected in the way photographic sources were handled during the preparatory ­stages of a painting and the appropriation process itself. They are treated as mere tools, often stripped of their narrative and identity, dismembered, drastically reformulated and ruthlessly subjected to the artist’s own creative vision. What Bacon left to the world, what he wanted to be known for, what was supposed to reach and touch his audience, what was to be judged by critics and posterity, his claim to a place in the National Gallery and in art history alongside his heroes from Michelangelo to Van Gogh, were his paintings, and only his paintings. These, of course, amount to more than the sum of their pictorial sources and it would be a sign of fatal ignorance to believe that a Bacon painting may be exhaustively explained by naming its iconographic references. ‘When all has been said and written, when Velázquez has been matched with the Münchner Illustrierte and Muybridge with the exhibits in the Black Museum, there remains something not yet defined: the irreducible Baconian element, the something put into painting by Bacon and nobody else,’272 Russell rightly qualified the significance of the present approach. This ‘Baconian element’ is shaped by the artists’s entire existence, his imagination and enormous creativity – a universe which the present analysis can only scratch the surface of. We can however, on a technical level, decipher how Bacon constructed his canvases from pre-­ existing material, thus shedding light on the working process and methods of one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

270 Russell John 2001, p. 73. 271 Cf. Günther 2011, p. 4. 272 Russell John 2001, p. 73.

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Part two of this study will focus on what can be deduced about Bacon’s working processes from a close look at his working environment and materials. It will aim to unravel how the space and its contents are connected to his painting.

2.1.  ‘A Little Corner of South Kensington’ In the autumn of 1961, Francis Bacon moved into 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, ­London (figure 9).1 The cluttered studio space on the first floor of the modest mews house, only measuring 8 by 4 metres,2 was to remain the centre of Bacon’s artistic activity until his death in 1992 and the main site where, for the last three decades of his life, he generated his ­iconic masterpieces. In 1998, its entire contents, including the staircase and the paint-blotched walls, were relocated to Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in Ireland, where they have been on display and accessible for research since 2001. ‘A little corner of South ­Kensington moved to Ireland, his birthplace,’ Bacon’s close friend and sole heir John ­Edwards commented, ‘I think it would have made him [Bacon] roar with laughter’.3 The Francis Bacon Studio Archive forms a rare opportunity to analyse a painter’s work from photography on the basis of his own collection of lens-based imagery and with its help, any discussions of Bacon’s engagement with photography can eventually be pushed from an abstract to a concrete level. An analysis of the archive at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane not only illustrates the extent and intensity of the artist’s interest in photography 1 2 3

Cf. Martin Harrison, ‘Chronology’, in Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, ed. by Martin Harrison (­London: The Estate of Francis Bacon, 2016), pp. 74–101, p. 87. Dawson 2005, p. 12. John Edwards, ‘Foreword’, in 7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon’s Studio, by Perry Ogden (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), pp. 10–13, p. 13.

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9  Perry Ogden, Francis Bacon’s 7  Reece Mews studio, London, 1998.

but reveals concrete facts and details about his employment of the medium. It ­allows to care­fully trace Bacon’s hitherto little explored working methods with the help of a close analysis of the material itself, its arrangement and dynamics, and comparative analysis with his paintings. Often, as was the case with Bacon, but also, for example, with Pablo Picasso and the Paris Nabis, the photographic working material painters used was kept private and only became available after their death.4 If at this point it is not preserved, precious keys to a b ­ etter understanding of their work are lost forever. Walter Sickert claimed that J.M.W. ­Turner’s studio was ‘crammed with negatives’5 but since none of them ever emerged, his statement can neither be confirmed nor dismissed and their evaluation in relation to Turner’s art is not possible. Only few of the original items that Sickert himself used

4

5

As Anne Baldassari pointed out, only a few of Picasso’s photographic sources of reference had been published before, for example, in Roland Penrose, Portrait of Picasso (London: Lund Humphries, 1956) and Jaime Sabartes, Picasso documents iconographiques (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1954), cf. Anne ­Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), p. 7; the N ­ abis never exhibited their photographs, Elizabeth W. Easton, ‘Introduction’, in Snapshot: Painters and ­Photo­graphy, Bonnard to Vuillard, ed. by Elizabeth W. Easton, exh. cat. Amsterdam: The Van Gogh Museum, 2011; Washington: The Phillips Collection, 2012; Indianapolis: The Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2012 (New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 1–11, p. 1. Walter Sickert, letter to The Times, 15 August 1929, quoted from Scharf 1979, p. 338, see also p. 100.

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to paint from survive today.6 Who knows how many collections of photographs employed by painters never came to public attention? It is therefore crucial to underline that Bacon scholarship would have taken a very different turn if Edwards had not seen the significance of the studio contents and decided to make the multi-coloured mess accessible for art historical examination. The present field of research simply would not exist. As valuable as it is, the Francis Bacon Studio Archive’s status as a research resource needs qualification. Over three decades before 1961, Bacon produced paintings in spaces other than his South Kensington atelier and most material he consulted there is lost today, for instance a reproduction of Nadar’s portrait of Charles Baudelaire documented by Sam Hunter in Cromwell Place in 1950.7 The fact that he worked in different places parallel to painting in Reece Mews is often overlooked, too. In 1975 Bacon bought a studio at 14 rue du Birague, Paris,8 where he created, for example, Three Studies for Self-Portrait, 1976,9 and he also painted in his friend Denis Wirth Miller’s house in the small town of Wivenhoe.10 Those venues are to date very little explored and Bacon may have kept different material there and worked in slightly different manners.11 Furthermore, the Francis Bacon Studio Archive gives a good indication but not a comprehensive overview of Bacon’s source material because the studio was cleared out on a regular basis.12 Thus, more, and different printed matter was present there in the past. The Weight of Figuration Most of the working material, around 2500 items, are mechanically reproduced photographs printed in books, magazines and newspapers, and on postcards, or fragments thereof. Around 1500 items are original photographic items. They come as gelatin silver prints, Polaroids, passport strips from photo booths but also as contact sheets, negatives and transparencies, and were taken by acclaimed photographers ranging from John Deakin to Henri Cartier-Bresson and Peter Beard, but also include pictures taken on behalf of Marlborough Gallery, Bacon’s dealers since 1958, and a few private pictures. Gilles Deleuze attested that Bacon had no interest in the aesthetic value of a photograph13 and, by his own account,   6 Some are reproduced in, for example, Sickert: Paintings, ed. by Wendy Baron and Richard Shone, exh. cat. (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1992; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), e.g. p. 292, fig. 201.   7 Cf. Hunter 1952, p. 12.   8 Cf. Harrison 2016b, p. 92.   9 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 1102. 10 Cf. Katharina Günther, ‘The Wivenhoe Chapter – Francis Bacon and Denis Wirth Miller’, Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation News, 2015 [accessed 31 July 2021]. 11 For example, the floor of 14 rue du Birague is empty and tidy in comparison to the studio in Reece Mews, see series of photographs by Edward Quinn, Francis Bacon in his studio in Paris, 1979, for example, website of The Estate of Francis Bacon [accessed 31 July 2021]. 12 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 83 and Edwards 2001, p. 11. 13 Cf. Deleuze 2008, p. 64.

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Bacon did not like art photography.14 This is confirmed by him accumulating mainly documentary and scientific photography and photojournalism, street photography, portrait and nude photographs. A minority of sources contains non-photographic illustrations only. Photography had long been understood as a paradigm of the truthful, accurate and most detailed rendering of reality superior to the human eye and from its invention pressur­ ed painters into following its high standards.15 Karl Dauthendey commented that people were ‘embarrassed by the clarity of these figures [in the daguerreotype] and believed that the little, tiny faces of people in the pictures could see out at them, so amazing did the unaccustomed detail and the unaccustomed truth to nature of the first daguerreotype ­pictures appear to everyone.’16 Anne Baldassari elaborated in relation to Picasso’s photographic working material that ‘[…] photography never abdicates its unique semantic ability to “resemble”’, for, she explains, ‘simultaneously index and icon, its aptitude for creating a technico-theoretical analogon of the object turns it into a site of insurmountable tension where the question of representation is physically anchored in the real world. […] …, it is perceived as the most convincing representation of reality – literally speaking, a twin image of reality.’17 Bacon himself repeatedly underlined photography’s superiority in documenting the world.18 The material in Reece Mews includes beacons of representational precision. The motion studies by Muybridge, for example, allow the close observation of human and animal anatomy in movement, which is too fast to be grasped by the human eye.19 Thus, on Bacon’s tightrope walk between figuration and abstraction, the source material he held in his studio formed the hyper-figurative point of departure. From here onwards, Bacon shifted the weight of the image towards abstraction. In a highly transformative preparation, appropriation, and painting process, which will be discussed in detail in the following chapters, by his own account, he aimed to take ‘it [the painted image] very much further away from the photograph’20 and its inherent figuration. For, as we will see, the artist ignored the advantages the medium brought to the table in terms of truthfulness and amount of detail, but eventually only very loosely referred to the shape of a figure and perspective lines (chapter 3.1. and 3.2.2.). A first amplitude towards abstraction can be felt in Bacon’s choice of material, too. The painter did not focus his collecting efforts on the perfect, accurate photograph only but also kept seeming mistakes,

14 Cf. Archimbaud 2010, p. 12. 15 Cf. Campany 2003a, p. 17; see also Scharf 1979, pp. 66–67, pp. 211–227; see Elizabeth C. Childs, ‘Habits of the Eye: Degas, Photography and Modes of Vision’, in The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso, ed. by Dorothy Kosinski, exh. cat. San Francisco: Museum of Modern Art, 1999; Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2000; Bilbao: Fundación del Museo Guggenheim, 2000 (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1999), pp. 70–87, p. 75; Coke 1981, p. 7. 16 Karl Dauthendey quoted in Walter Benjamin, ‘A Short History of Photography’, Screen, 13.1 (Spring 1972), pp. 5–26, p. 8. 17 Baldassari 1997, p. 243. 18 Cf. for example Sylvester 2009, pp. 65–66 and p. 176; and Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985. 19 Cf. Scharf 1979, p. 211; see also Childs E. 1999, p. 75. 20 Sylvester 2000, p. 235.

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such as double exposures, like the one featuring George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio by Deakin,21 and photographs of poor quality. In early newspapers and books, of which Bacon owned plenty, printed photographs were often grainy and blurry, and colours were warped.22 Often, the camera vision was perceived as too precise and was therefore deemed unaesthetic by academic painters, and was edited accordingly. Delacroix made several changes to an Odalisque, 1857 based on a photograph for that reason, and altered, for example, the extreme foreshortening of the thigh.23 Bacon, in contrast, embraced the novel aesthetics photography produced and deliberately employed the idiosyncratic figuration it offered to circumvent traditional modes of representation. About an aerial photograph of the riots in St. Petersburg in 1917 he enthused to John Rothenstein that ‘”not one of these hundreds of figures looks remotely like a conventional figure; each one, caught in violent motion, is stranger and at first sight less intelligible than one could possibly have imagined it. Could anything,” he asked, indicating an off-balance L-shaped form in the foreground, “be more utterly unlike the conventional concept of a man running?”’24 Many of the photographs in Reece Mews are snapshots, instantaneous and candid camera photographs which trap human beings in unusual situations, and capture them in mundane, unflattering ways, which Bacon gratefully absorbed in his paintings.25 The centre panel of Three Studies of the Human Head, 1953, references a candid camera photograph of Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent speaking from Time magazine26 and a walking figure in Statue and Figures in a Street, 1983, is based on an early instantaneous photograph; both sources were found in the studio.27 For Bacon the photograph served as a stirrup to overcome the academic tradition in figurative painting but also as a hyper-accurate figurative starting point which had to be broken and overcome. ‘Every type of photograph’ 28 Similar to Bacon’s painting, the studio contents are often described and interpreted following old stereotypes and misconceptions. In 1952, Hunter came to the conclusion that ‘violence is [the] common denominator’29 of the material he photographed in Cromwell 21 Cf. RM98F114:82: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964. 22 Cf. Peter Rose Pulham, unpublished section of manuscript of BBC broadcast, August 1951, cited from Harrison 2005a, pp. 109–110, see also p. 107. 23 Cf. Scharf 1979, p. 125. 24 Rothenstein 1964, p. 17. 25 Cf. also Richard Calvocoressi, ‘Bacon: Public and Private’, in Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, exh. cat. Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2005; Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2005/2006 (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland in association with the British Council, 2005), pp. 9–10. 26 Cf. Günther 2011, pp. 44–45: RM98F248:10: TIME, Atlantic Edition, 62.3 (20 July 1953), p. 25. 27 RM98F125:36: fragment of leaf, Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), caption: ‘121. Anon., Details from instantaneous photograph. 1860s (?)’. 28 Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985. 29 Hunter 1952, p. 12.

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Place. Bacon’s art hit the nerve of a post-war world determined by an overall bleak condition humaine, which to date colours discussions not only of his work but also of his working material.30 While Bacon had a soft spot for gruesome murder and crime stories – he collected books such as Mafia: Fact and Photo Series,31 and owned a special issue of Le Crapouillot, on ‘Le Crime et les Perversions Instinctive 1938’32 – it would be wrong to reduce his visual cornucopia to blood and horror. As pointed out before, the artist himself underlined his global interest in photography by explaining that he had looked ‘at every type of photograph,’33 and said, ‘I don’t really care what the photographs are, they just interest me.’34 In line with this, he owned a wide range of material on the most diverse topics, including, but not limited to gardening, cookery, the animal kingdom, art, medical textbooks, politics and current affairs, archaeology, history, sports, private snapshots, commissioned photographs, and reproductions of his own paintings. Many publications the artist consulted and appropriated from, such as Roses of the World in Color,35 The Dancer’s World,36 and Street Children37 defy obvious notions of horror and violence altogether. In fact, any narrow categorisations have to fall short and cannot do justice to Bacon’s pronounced passion for collecting. ‘Our greatest obsession is with ourselves’ 38 And yet, there is a common denominator which is, unsurprisingly, consistent with Bacon’s painting for which the torn leaves, books and newspapers were supposed to provide pictorial springboards. The main subject of Bacon’s art is the human, and to a lesser degree, the animal figure, which he negotiated in numerous studies and portraits. ‘Art is an obsession with life and after all, as we are human beings, our greatest obsession is with ourselves. Then possibly with animals, and then with landscapes’, 39 he explained. The focus of the working documents is the human and animal body in the widest sense, their behaviour,

30 Cf. Sam Hunter, ‘Francis Bacon’s Endgame: Humanism Revisited’, in Francis Bacon: Important Paintings from the Estate, exh. cat. New York: Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, 1998/1999 (New York: Tony ­Shafrazi Gallery, 1998), pp. 14–70, p. 14: ‘Bacon’s preoccupation with terror was both melodramatic and psychological in impact, and it often seemed drained off directly from the catastrophic photojournalism of the war’; Cappock introduced ‘War‘ and ‘Assasination Attempts’ in her categorisation of material, Cappock 2005a, p. 87 and p. 98. 31 RM98F93:14: Enzo Catania, Norman Lewis: Mafia: Fact and Photo Series (Milan: Idea Editions, 1978). 32 RM98F105:110: Le Crapouillot, special issue on ‘Le Crime et les Perversions Instinctive 1938’, Paris, May 1938. 33 Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985. 34 Ibid. 35 RM98F105:93: J. Horace McFarland, Roses of the World in Color (London: Cassell, 1937), pp. 163–164, ‘The Polyantha Rose, Mlle. Cécile Brunner’. 36 RM98F93:1: Michael Peto and Alexander Bland, The Dancer’s World (London: Collins, 1963). 37 RM98F131:43: torn leaf, B.S. Johnson and Julia Trevelyan Oman, Street Children (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964). 38 Sylvester 2009, p. 63. 39 Ibid.

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and its implications in its day and age. Only few publications focus on plants and inanimate objects.40 Some groups of material were designed to serve as working tools for artists and pictorial starting points for figures and likenesses. They provided for Bacon photographic substitutes for the study of the nude and human anatomy in the flesh. On one occasion, Bacon himself described photographs as ‘my models and my subject matter’.41 The flat photograph had already conveniently resolved a major issue of painting for the artist, namely how to translate reality into two dimensions.42 Bacon held an extensive collection of copies of Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion43 and Animals in Motion44 which allowed the close observation of the interplay of muscles and joints, and the positioning of the limbs when executing particular actions. Books such as the Atlas of Foreshortening: The Human Figure in Deep Perspective45 offer a range of postures, which serve as technical help for the accurate depiction of the body in perspective. Deakin’s photographs serve that purpose, too. For Bacon Deakin shot two series of their mutual friend Henrietta Moraes reclining on her bed in the nude and one of a semi-nude Dyer in the Reece Mews studio.46 For his female figure studies, Bacon depended heavily on these pictures. The homosexual painter was, as ­Sylvester underlined, not used to seeing naked women in the flesh and indeed, for his female nudes, barely used poses other than those found there.47 This is a common process in the history of painting and photography, however, which was employed by many of Bacon’s predecessors, including Gustave Courbet and Eugène Delacroix. Since the invention of the medium, artists have used photographs to avoid having to pay for a live model, and kept them in the studio as reference material to study at their convenience.48 The same applies to portrait photographs, which, from the early days of photography, were gratefully embraced by artists. They accurately rendered the subject 40 See RM98F130:46: C. J. Fraser, Off-Highway Trucks of the Road, Including Highway Locomotives and Outback Trucking in Australia (Sparkford: Haynes Publishing, 1985); J. Horace McFarland, Roses of the World in Color (London: Cassell, 1937), pp. 163–164, ‘The Polyantha Rose, Mlle. Cécile Brunner’. 41 Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985. 42 See Erika Billeter, Malerei und Photographie im Dialog von 1840 bis heute, orig. pubd. in relation to the exhibition of the same name, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, 1977 (Berne: Benteli, 1979), p. 6. 43 RM98F125:20: Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955); RM98F200:3: Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (London: Chapman and Hall, 1931). 44 RM98F1A:21: Eadweard Muybridge, Animals in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955), p. 191, ‘The Gallop’ ‘Rotatory-Gallop.’ ‘Stride, Photographed Synchronously from Two Points of View. Dog (Mastiff).’. 45 RM98F109:2B: John Cody, Atlas of Foreshortening: the Human Figure in Deep Perspective (Van ­Nostrand Reinhold: New York, 1984). 46 Cf. e.g. RM98F130:179: photograph, John Deakin, Henrietta Moares on a bed, c.1961; RM98F1A:44: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964. 47 Cf. David Sylvester, ‘Francis Bacon and the Nude’, in Francis Bacon: Studying Form, exh. cat. London: Faggionato Fine Arts, 2005 (London: The Estate of Francis Bacon and Faggionato Fine Arts, 2005), pp. 13–39, p. 36. 48 Cf. ibid., p. 131.

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and helped avoid lengthy, tedious sittings. Bacon had Deakin shoot several series of friends and lovers and of himself, but also possessed photographs of friends he had taken himself. Everything else in the studio is, in a broad sense, an extension of those initial impulses. However, Bacon did not study the human and animal figure via photography in artificial, precast and predictable settings only, but also in real life with all its delights, obscurities, and chasms. After all, in his art, Bacon saw an ‘attempt to remake the violence of reality itself’.49 Bacon claimed that he had nothing to say about the human condition, but Lorenza Trucchi pointed out that this must not be confused with indifference.50 She underlined that ‘with Samuel Beckett, Bacon could repeat that “the only possibility of renewal lies in opening your eyes and seeing the present-day disaster, a disaster which can’t be understood but which must be permitted to come in because it is the truth”’.51 And Bacon’s eyes were wide open. Painting from photography is ideally suited to support that wish, because the source medium documents the human disaster in all its facets and with indexical immediacy,52 and allows to collect illustrations of it. Publications on a wide range of sports including boxing, football, athletics, swimming, dance, and tennis for Bacon served the same purpose as Muybridge’s motion studies. These publications at times show the body under extreme strain, which results in unusual, unaesthetic postures and perspectives. Examples are several volumes on boxing, including Boxing: The Great Champions,53 and A Pictorial History of Wrestling.54 The latter shows fighters falling and stumbling and trapped in unnatural poses and tight embraces, one of which Bacon adapted for the left panel of In Memory of George Dyer, 1971.55 Sometimes the camera captured the moment of the boxer’s fist’s impact on their opponent’s face, displacing soft tissue, jaw bones, and noses, a dislocation that perhaps Study of a Portrait of a Man and the centre panel of Three Studies for Portraits (including Self-Portrait), both 1969, refer to.56 Such aesthetics were cherished by Bacon, who enthused how ‘many people are improved in their looks when they’ve had their nose broken and pushed in. That’s again a curious thing if you’ve ever looked at boxer’s heads. Sometimes their good looks have been enormously improved by having their nose broken.’57 He also considered mummies to be works 49 50 51 52 53 54

Sylvester 2009, p. 81. Cf. Bacon quoted from Lorenza Trucchi, Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), p. 1. Trucchi 1976, p. 1. Cf. Susan Sontag, ‘In Plato’s Cave’, in On Photography (New York: Delta, 1978), pp. 3–26, pp. 3–4. RM98F105:9: Gilbert Odd, Boxing: The Great Champions (London: Hamlyn Books, 1974). RM98NF55: Graeme Kent, A Pictorial History of Wrestling (London: Spring Books, 1969), p. 126, see Günther 2011, p. 36 and 37. 55 Graeme Kent, A Pictorial History of Wrestling (London: Spring Books, 1969), p. 126, see Günther 2011, p. 36 and 37. 56 RM98F130:170: torn leaf, overpainted, Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of Boxing (London: Spring Books, 1959), no page numbers; RM98F94:8: Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of Boxing (London: Spring Books, 1959), Bacon bookmarked p. 212, which features a photograph of Carmen Basilio hitting Ray Robinson’s jaw. 57 HKA: TGA 2008/16/16/4/2/9 ‘Bacon Interviews IIIc’, ’October 1973 IIIC’, Index and draft, 65 pages, incomplete, ‘October 1973 IIIc’, p. 26.

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of art and admired the scar-adorned faces of African tribes as ‘remarkable things’.58 In the meantime, he dismissed the Indian people in Richard Lannoy’s photographs as ‘too beautiful’.59 Publications such as How to Judge Character from the Face. A Complete Explanation of ­Character as it is Shown by the Size, Proportion and Texture of Each Feature,60 and ­Anthropometry and Anatomy,61 Skin Deep: The Mystery of Tattooing62 – provided a detailed survey of the body, skin and face. All interest was centred on the human body, which Bacon studied from all perspectives and angles. Bacon’s fascination went beyond the body‘s external boundaries: a large part of his collection concerns the internal organs and functions of the body. Brenda Marshall saw this explicitly reflected in his painted figures, where ‘corpses, faeces, blood and screams are the daily stuff’.63 In one of the oldest publications, Encyclopädie der Menschlichen Anatomie from 1834,64 Bacon inserted a photograph of himself taken by Peter Stark in 1975,65 perhaps in an attempt to bookmark the illustration of an écorché of a man who somewhat resembles his friend John Edwards. This indicates that Bacon closely studied subcutaneous human anatomy, a practice not uncommon among artists since the Renaissance.66 That he possessed numerous medical textbooks, including a variety of editions of Positioning in Radiography,67 also echoes his predecessors’ efforts to understand the internal workings of the body. The Culture of the Abdomen: The Cure of Obesity and Constipation,68 An Atlas of Regional Dermatology,69 and The CIBA Collection of Medical Illustrations70 provide detailed visual information on certain aspects of the body but, with their focus on the sick body in abnormal states, are also acute reminders of its vulnerability and ephemerality. The human body in great distress and, ultimately, its mortality is addressed graphically in books such as 58 Ibid., p. 24 and p. 26. 59 Richard Lannoy, letter to the author, 2014. 60 RM98F238:2: Jacques Penry, How to Judge Character from the Face: A Complete Explanation of ­Character as it is Shown by the Size, Proportion and Texture of Each Feature (London: Hutchinson, 1952). 61 RM98F137:3A: J.S. Barrington, Anthropometry and Anatomy (London: Encyclopedic Press, 1953). 62 RM98F22:49A: Ronald Scutt and Christopher Gotch, Skin Deep: The Mystery of Tattooing (London: P. Davies, 1974). 63 Brenda Marshall, ‘Francis Bacon, Trash and Complicity’, in Francis Bacon – New Studies: Centenary Essays, ed. by Martin Harrison (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), pp. 209–231, p. 209. 64 RM98F131:65A: Encyclopädie der Menschlichen Anatomie, ed. by Theodor Richter (Leipzig: ­Baumgärtners Buchhandlung, 1834). 65 RM98F131:65B: Peter Stark, Francis Bacon, photograph, 1975. 66 Cf. Hartt 1971, p. 21 and comment on p. 117, plate 132E; also Marshall 2009, p. 214. 67 For example, RM98F1:69: K.C. Clark, Positioning in Radiography (London: Heinemann, 1939), RM98F93:13: K.C. Clark, Positioning in Radiography, 3rd edn (London: Heinemann, 1942), and RM98F109:3: K.C. Clark, Positioning in Radiography, 8th edn (London: Heinemann, 1964). 68 RM98F105:139Y: Frederick Hornibrook, The Culture of the Abdomen: The Cure of Obesity and Constipation (London: Heinemann, 1935), fig. 19 and 20, [facing p. 56]. 69 RM98F8:9: G. H. Percival and T. C. Dodds, An Atlas of Regional Dermatology (Edinburgh: E. and S. ­Living­stone, 1955), p. 31. 70 RM98F137:9: Frank H. Netter, The Ciba Collection of Medical Illustrations (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 1965), III, p. 107 and p. 109: ‘Digestive System, Part 1, Upper Digestive Tract’.

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Robert Capa’s Images of War71 and A Colour Atlas of Forensic Pathology.72 Thanatos and eros exist in close proximity in Bacon’s art and atelier, and the human body as an object of sexual desire is explicitly shown in Physique-Pictorial,73 Illustrierte Sittengeschichte,74 and Geschichte der Erotischen Kunst. Das Individuelle Problem.75 Bacon also had many books and images of the human figure clothed and resting in more trivial, mundane settings and situations, as exemplified by the images in Peoples of all Nations. Their Life Today and Story of their Past,76 Faces of Destiny: Portraits,77 and Il Mondo Cambia. Storia di Cinquant’Anni78 but especially by the photographs in newspapers and magazines documenting society events, illustrating lifestyle reportages and advertising. ‘An act of man’s behaviour’ 79 Bacon’s perspective on humanity was unsentimental, his aim was to grasp and acknowledge the full spectrum of the human disposition. As an atheist he famously saw the crucifixion not as a religious symbol of salvation but as a form of capital punishment and an example of human behaviour.80 Human behaviour is represented in the studio in myriad news photo­ graphs which document current affairs, politics, the latest fashion, society gossip, sports, and violent conflicts. Bacon collected a wide range of English newspapers and magazines, ranging from The Independent,81 Time,82 and Life Magazine,83 Queen,84 The Spectator,85

71 RM98F93:4: Robert Capa, Images of War (New York: Grossmann Publishers/Paragraphic Books, 1964). 72 RM98F101:14: G. Austin Gresham, A Colour Atlas of Forensic Pathology, World Medical Atlases, XII, (London: Wolfe Medical, 1975). 73 RM98F94:1: Physique Pictorial, 11.3 (1 March 1962). 74 RM98F136:17: Supplement for Eduard Fuchs, Illustrierte Sittengeschichte, II, ‘Die Galante Zeit’ (­Munich: Albert Langen, 1909). 75 RM98F1A:136: Eduard Fuchs, Geschichte der Erotischen Kunst: Das Individuelle Problem (Munich: ­Albert Langen, c.1923). 76 RM98F1:23: torn leaf, drawn and mounted on support, Peoples of all Nations: Their Life Today and Story of their Past, ed. by J.A. Hammerton, 7 vols (London: The Fleetway House, 1922–1924), I, p. 147. 77 Two pages, figs.78–81, from Yousuf Karsh, Faces of Destiny: Portraits (London: George G. Harrap, 1947), inserted in RM98F197:2: Tancred Borenius, Rembrandt: Selected Painting, 3rd edn (London: Phaidon, 1952). 78 RM98F106:13: Leo Longanesi, Il Mondo Cambia. Storia di Cinquant’anni (Milan: Rizzoli, 1949), no page numbers. 79 Sylvester 2009, p. 23. 80 Cf. ibid. 81 RM98F1:63: leaf from The Independent Magazine, 12 October 1991. 82 RM98F248:10: TIME, the weekly newspaper, Atlantic Edition, LXII number 3, 20 July 1953, p. 25. 83 RM98F16:188: LIFE Magazine, 44.3 (19 February 1968). 84 RM98NF98: fragment of leaf with illustration by Don Bachardy of Igor Stravinsky and a notice of Bachardy’s first exhibition, Queen, London (27 September 1961), p. 4. 85 RM98f21:68: The Spectator, 27 July 1985.

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Evening Standard,86 The Guardian,87 Sunday Times Colour Section,88 The Illu­strated London News,89 to Vogue90. He also owned French magazines, including a great number of Paris Match magazines.91 Of his most important sources, the magazine Picture Post published between 1938 and 1957, only a handful of fragments survived.92 Some books focus on politics, for instance Karl Marx. A Political Biography.93 Street life is captured in numerous publications from The Streets of East London,94 London. City of Any Dream,95 to A World Observed.96 Bacon looked through the camera lens into the abyss with publications such as The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov ­German Atrocity Trials97 and The True Aspects of the Algerian Rebellion.98 ‘[…] we are fed […] partly through photography – all the facts of past ages and of all types of imagery […],’99 Bacon said; a statement echoed by the multitude of history books in Reece Mews. Publications including 100 Years in Pictures: A Panorama of History in the Making,100 Révolution d’Octobre,101 and Edwardian Album: A Photographic E­ xcursion

  86 RM98F16:106: leaf torn from newspaper, Evening Standard, 10 February 1971, featuring ‘News on Camera’, p. 3.   87 RM98F110:8: Sunday Times Magazine, 13 November 1988, inserted: fragment from Guardian, 2 ­December 1988.   88 RM98F114:140: fragment of leaf, mounted on cardboard, Sunday Times Colour Section, 18 February 1962, p. 18.   89 RM98F130:166: fragment of leaf, mounted on cardboard, The Illustrated London News, 268.6986.2 (September 1980), p. 37. Transparent tape attached to the fragment. Fragments come from RM98F237:2: copy of magazine (see RM98F130:166), pages 37 and 38 are torn out.   90 The Estate of Francis Bacon, studio item: fragment of leaf, mounted on support, George Platt Lynes, Christopher Isherwood, 1946, Vogue, April 1947, p. 71.   91 For example RM98NF79: leaf from French magazine Paris Match, 23 July 1966, RM98NF196MAG: Paris Match, 31 August 1979, pp. 48–53 and RM98F23:6: torn leaf, Paris Match, 2 June 1978, p. 99, article ‘Horreur a Kolwezi’ on the rescue of European hostages taken by rebel and militant groups in the city of Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of the Congo.   92 RM98F1A:25: fragment from Picture Post, 7 January 1950, pp. 37–38, cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 88.   93 RM98F169:2: Fritz J. Raddatz, Karl Marx: A Political Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, 1979).   94 RM98F114:142: William Fishman and Nicholas Breach, The Streets of East London (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1979).   95 RM98F114:40: torn leaves, Erwin Fieger and Colin Macinnes, London: City of Any Dream (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965).   96 RM98F114:73: Dorothy Bohm, A World Observed (London: Hugh Evelyn Limited, 1970).   97 RM98F22:116: torn leaf, I.F. Kladov, I.F. Kotomtsev et al., The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the ­Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials (London: Hutchinson, 1944), no page number.   98 RM98F12:26: Ministère de l´Algérie, Cabinet de Ministre, The True Aspects of the Algerian Rebellion ([n.p.]: 1957).   99 HKA: TGA2008/6/4/2/9 Folder 2, Bacon Interviews Via+VIIa, p. 21. 100 RM98F105:64: David Churchill Somervell, 100 Years in Pictures: A Panorama of History in the Making (London: Odhams Press, 1951). 101 RM98F101:5: Frédéric Chapsal and Madeleine Rossif, Révolution d’Octobre (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1967).

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into a Lost Age of Innocence102 document times since the invention of photography and helped the artist to embrace not only contemporary but also past human behaviour. The photographs in these books were of special significance for the artist, who explained that he was fascinated by historic photographs because ‘those people, who were walking about and never felt that death would come to them […] are quite suddenly gone. All those sepia-colored people walking in the streets of their time, and you think, “Now they’re all dead”, which adds poignancy’.103 Bacon’s statement echoes a phenomenon which Roland Barthes described as noeme, photography’s ability to relate to the future and the past simultaneously saying, as it were, ‘this will be and this has been’,104 for instance recording the moment before someone’s death. This reminder of mortality, a quality inherent in photography, must have resonated strongly with an artist who was acutely aware of death.105 It manifested itself, for example, in his adoption of a photograph of a rhinoceros hit by a hunter’s bullet from Stalking Big Game in Equatorial Africa, published in 1924, in his painting Rhinoceros, 1952.106 The same sentiment may have informed his perception of photographs of friends and lovers. After their death, their photographs remained with him as painful reminders of their absence and as a memento mori, from which he obsessively painted long after they were dead, and which, just like himself, were subject to a slow process of physical decay. ‘Pity the meat!’ 107 Bacon’s collecting habits are repeated in his books on the animal kingdom. He studied animal anatomy in Muybridge, but additionally accumulated all sorts of publications on domestic animals end exotic wildlife in diverse environments, as exemplified by Hunting Wildlife with Camera and Flashlight. A Record of Sixty-Five Years’ Visits to the Woods and Waters of North America,108 The Great Apes. A Study of Anthropoid Life,109 many books

102 RM98F15:59: torn leaf, Nicolas Bentley, Edwardian Album: A Photographic Excursion into a Lost Age of Innocence (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1974). 103 Beard 1975, p. 15. 104 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, transl. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 96. 105 Cf. Archimbaud 2010, p. 153. 106 Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (London: Heinemann, 1925), Chapter VIII, plate 6: ‘The second ball made it spin around and collapse on its forelegs’, in Alley and Rothenstein 1964, Appendix B Destroyed, D8 Rhinoceros. 107 Deleuze 2008, p. 17. 108 RM98F244:6: George Shiras, Hunting Wildlife with a Camera and Flashlight: A Record of Sixty-five Years Visits’ to the Woods and Waters of North America, 2nd edn (Washington: National Geographic Society, 1936). 109 RM98F136:18: Robert M. and Ada W. Yerkes, The Great Apes A Study of Anthropoid Life, 3rd edition (London: Yale University Press, 1945).

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on birds, such as Birds of the Night,110 They Live in Africa: Nature’s Paradise,111 and Police Animals of the World.112 Bacon’s preoccupation with animal photographs far exceeded the search for an alternative subject, however. Much has been written about Bacon philosophically and representationally blurring the line between humans and animals, famously so by Gilles Deleuze.113 According to him, Bacon as a portraitist captured the ‘animal spirit’114 of man and established flesh as the zone of indiscernibility between the species.115 Bacon himself explained that, for him, human and animal movement were closely intertwined.116 Both share their mortal existence in flesh, so that Bacon found ‘if I go into a butcher’s shop it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal’.117 Images of slaughterhouses, books on bullfighting, but also cookery books reflect this attitude.118 ‘The history of art from pre-historic times right up to today’ 119 Artists have a professional interest in their contemporaries and predecessors so that Bacon’s large collection of books on art of all periods is not a surprise find. From the invention of the medium, photographers produced books with photographic reproductions of artworks and before John Ruskin drastically changed his mind he used daguerreotypes as a basis for his architectural drawings and recommended photographs of Old Master drawings as study aids.120 According to Aaron Scharf, the gathering of records of past and present art had multiplied the opportunities for artists,121 a development which was not lost on Bacon. He stated that ‘[…] to be a painter now, I think that you have to know, even if only in a rudimentary way, the history of art from pre-historic times right up to today’,122 and this persuasion resonates in his own collection of art books which helped him realise his aspiration to such knowledge. Bacon took full advantage of the age of mechanical reproduction and, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, brought the cathedral into his studio123 by accumulating countless books 110 RM98F137:6: Eric J. Hosking, Cyril Newberry and Stuart G. Smith, Birds of the Night (London: Collins, 1945). 111 RM98F213:39: Jen and Des Bartlett, They Live in Africa: Nature’s Paradise (London: Collins, 1967). 112 RM98F246:7: James Cramer, Police Animals of the World (London: Cassell, 1968). 113 Deleuze 2008, pp. 15–16. 114 Deleuze 2008, p. 15. 115 Ibid., p. 16. 116 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 116. 117 Ibid., p. 46. 118 RM98F108:81: Terence and Caroline Conran, The Cook Book: The Complete Guide to Selecting, Preparing and Presenting Good Food (London: Mitchell Beazley, 1980), p. 84, ‘Poultry’; RM98F108:8: Peter Buckley, Bullfight (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958). 119 Sylvester 2009, p. 199. 120 Cf. Scharf 1979, pp. 96–99. 121 Cf. Ibid., p. 313. 122 Sylvester 2009, p. 199. 123 Cf. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. by J.A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 6.

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with photographic reproductions of art. Bacon bought books on prehistoric art, including Lascaux Paintings and Engravings,124 ancient art, for example Kunst der Klassischen Antike125 and König Echnaton und die Amarna-Zeit. Die Geschichte eines Gottkünders,126 and medieval art, as represented by Les Primitifs Italiens du Xie au XIIIe Siecle.127 Many books, including Der Isenheimer Altar des Matthias Grünewald,128 The Raphael Cartoons,129 and The Drawings of Michelangelo130 focus on Renaissance art, and an there is an abundance of works on 17th-century artists including Rembrandt van Rijn and Diego Velázquez to continue the timeline.131 Volumes on Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Théodore Géricault, and John Singer Sargent represent the 19th century but Bacon also owned publications on an array of modern avant-garde positions, for instance on Georges Seurat, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Bonnard, and Chaim Soutine.132 Despite his insistence on his solitary position in the art world,133 he was, of course, aware of his more immediate predecessors and contemporaries, as books on Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, René ­Magritte, Valerio Adami, and Gilbert & George confirm.134 Bacon was friendly with many 124 RM98F128:39: Anette Laming, Lascaux Paintings and Engravings (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959). 125 BB4.06: Herbert A. Cahn, Kunst der Klassischen Antike (Zurich: Galerie André Emmerich, 1975). 126 RM98F105:91: Kurt Lange, König Echnaton und die Amarna-Zeit: Die Geschichte eines Gottkünders (Munich: Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliches Lichtbild, 1951). 127 RM98BC9: Paolo d´Ancona, Les Primitifs Italiens du XIe au XIIIe Siecle (Paris: Editions d’Art et d’Histoire, 1935). 128 RM98F245:17: George Scheja, Der Isenheimer Altar des Matthias Grünewald (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1969). 129 RM98FNF49: John White, The Raphael Cartoons (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1972). 130 RM98F15:41: Frederick Harrt, The Drawings of Michelangelo (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), pp. 283–286. 131 RM98F108:33: Wilhelm Pinder, Rembrandts Selbstbildnisse (Königstein im Taunus: Karl Robert Langewiesche, 1945) and RM98F104:5: Enrique Lafuente, Velazquez (Ohio: World Publishing, Editions d’Art Albert Skira, 1960). 132 BB17.03: Anita Brookner, Ingres, The Masters, XVI (London: Knowledge Publications, 1965); Klaus ­Berger, Géricault et son Oeuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), a fragment of p. 41, Théodore ­Géricault, ­Couple Amoureux (detail), c.1815, is mounted on cardboard together with two other images [RM98F8:95]; RM98F104:6: Ellen Gross and James Harithas, Drawings by John Singer Sargent (Washing­ton: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1967); RM98F110:2: Roger Fly and Anthony Blunt, Seurat (­London: Phaidon 1965); BB18.29: Lawrence Gowing, Matisse 1869–1954: A Retrospective (London: The Hayward Gallery/The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1968); RM98FNF106: Lawrence Gowing, Water­ colour and Pencil Drawings by Cézanne (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1973); RM98F198:4: Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Mondigliani (London: Beaverbrook Newspapers, 1958); RM98F114:137: Various authors, Bonnard (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1984); RM98F1A:149: Monroe Wheeler, Soutine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1950). 133 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 67. 134 RM98F16:90: Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective, ed. by William Rublin, exh. cat. (New York: The ­Museum of Modern Art, 1980); RM98F16:96A: The almost complete works of Marcel Duchamp, exh. cat. (­London: Tate Gallery, 1966), BB16.05: Pere Gimferrer, Magritte (New York: Rizzoli, 1987); RM98F114:36: Valerio Adami and Anton Mengs, ‘Adami: Peintures à la Forme Close.’ Repères: Cahiers d’Art Contemporain, 47, Galerie Lelong, Paris (1988); BB6.07: Daniel Farson, With Gilbert & George in Moscow (London: Bloomsbury, 1991).

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of his colleagues and owned publications on the work of, for example, Michael Andrews, Vladimir Veličković, and Louis le Brocquy.135 In line with his own efforts the collection focusses on painting, but Bacon’s art books also include publications on sculpture, for instance In Rodin’s Studio: A Photographic Record of Sculpture in the Making.136 After all, the photographic reproductions of sculptures conveniently translated the three-dimensional object into two dimensions too. There is an emphasis on figurative art, but some publications focus on abstract tendencies as exemplified by Kandinsky: Aquarelles & Dessins137 and Johannes Itten’s The Art of Color.138 Books providing a general overview such as Art and Everyman: A Basis for Appreciation139 are present as well as more specialized approaches including Black and White from Manet to Kiefer.140 The number of books on a single topic can be impressive. For example, at the end of his life, Bacon owned 31 publications on Ancient Egypt alone and 17 on Michelangelo, some of which are present in multiple copies.141 Consequently, such publications’ power as vessels of chance is low in contrast to, for instance, magazines and newspapers which cover more general and less predictable news imagery. Luck and chance are relinquished in favour of an intellectual decision. And yet, due to the loss of material in regular clear-outs of the studio,142 such numbers and proportions are neither written in stone nor are they reliable proof for Bacon’s interest in one or the other artist, or their significance for him, and must not be misunderstood as such. For instance, eight publications on Velázquez are consistent with Bacon’s claim that he had been obsessed with photographs of Portrait of Innocent X, c.1650, to which his many variations of the painting testify, but the small number of books on Picasso found in the studio in 1998, only two, does not call into question the great influence the Spaniard had especially on Bacon’s early work.143 Bacon may have owned more books on Picasso in the past, but these were perhaps discarded at some point. In the mix amongst reproductions of works by other artists were those of Bacon’s own paintings. This is of particular 135 RM98F245:10: David Sylvester and Lawrence Gowing, Michael Andrews (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1980); RM98NF110: K.H. Hering and A. Paroles, Vladimir Velickovic (Düsseldorf: Kunst­halle Düsseldorf Grabbeplatz, 1975); RM98NF189MAG: Serge Faucherau and Proinsias Maccanas, ­Louis le Brocquy (Charleroi: Palais des Beax-Arts, 1892). 136 RM98F110:11: Albert E. Elsen, In Rodin’s Studio: A Photographic Record of Sculpture in the Making (Oxford: Phaidon, 1980). 137 RM98F22:60: Kandinsky: Aquarelles & Dessins, exh. cat. (Paris: Galerie Berggruen, 1972). 138 RM98F114:67: Johannes Itten, The Art of Color: The subjective experience and objective rationale of color (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1961). 139 RM98F11:121: Margaret H. Bulley, Art and Everyman: A Basis for Appreciation, II (London: B.T. ­Batsford, 1952). 140 RM98F21:33: Reinhold Hohl, Black and White from Manet to Kiefer (Basel: Galerie Beyeler, 1985). 141 See database of Bacon’s books on the website of Trinity College, Dublin: [last accessed 1 August 2021]. 142 Cf. Edwards 2001, p. 11; Farr 1999a, p. 225, footnote 2, cited from Harrison 2005a, p. 83. 143 For a detailed account of Bacon’s assimilation of Picasso in his early work see Martin Harrison, ‘French Connections’, in Francis Bacon: La France et Monaco/France and Monaco, ed. by Martin Harrison (Paris: Albin Michel, 2016), pp. 56–77, pp.56–65.

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significance since these too, like all other items, were subjected to a process of willed decay and ruthless alteration, which subsequently fed into the new iconographies of canvases down the line. Thus, an already transformed image was transformed again, and maybe again, in an ongoing process of digestion and delivery. Besides expanding Bacon’s knowledge, the collection of art books and reproductions fulfilled another important role. It has been noted from early on in Bacon’s career that his painting not only draws on High Art but on Low Art sources from photography, movies, and newspapers too.144 Bacon saw an urgent need for renewal, for, through the reproduction of art, one was so ‘saturated’,145 he thought, ‘that one just longs for new images and new ways by which reality can be created.’146 Those new images were lured into existence by a new category of pictures, namely photographs, and their combination with traditional Fine Art. Drawing on photographs, and combining them with a profound knowledge and understanding of art history, created novel, powerful imagery. Low Art and High Art were literally equalised and blended on the studio floor as ‘images’,147 which allowed immediate mingling and reciprocal fertilization reminiscent to Bacon declaring that in his mind, Muybridge and Michelangelo were ‘mixed up’.148 Visual culture in a wider sense is represented in Reece Mews by numerous books on film, covering publications from the mid-1940s to the early 1980s, including Close-Ups from The Golden Age of the Silent Cinema from the Fabulous Jorifin Collection, 1978,149 and literature on directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Sergei Eisenstein, Ingmar Bergman, and Alain Resnais.150 Bacon also owned publications discussing photography on a meta level, for instance History of Photography,151 The Photographic Art. Pictorial Traditions in Britain and America,152 and La Chronophotographie avant le Cinématographe.153

144 Cf. e.g. Melville 1949, p. 420; and Russell John 2001, p. 39. 145 Sylvester 2009, p. 179. 146 Ibid. 147 Harrison 2009a, p. 71. 148 Sylvester 2009, p. 114. 149 RM98F234:4: fragment of page, John Richard, Paul Elby and Roland Liot, Close-Ups from the Golden Age of the Silent Cinema from the fabulous Jorifin Collection (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1978), pp. 315– 316. 150 RM98F24:62: Perry Georges, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Dutton Vista Picture Back (London: ­Studio Vista, 1965) pp. 71–74; RM98NF26: Yon Barna, Eisenstein (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973); RM98F246:6: John Simon, Ingmar Bergman Directs (London: Davis-Poynter-Limited, 1973) and ­RM98F1A:213:62: Gaston Bounoure, Alain Resnais (Paris: Seghers, 1962). 151 RM98F102:14: Peter Turner, History of Photography (London: Hamlyn, 1988). 152 RM98F114:97: Mark Weaver, The Photographic Art: Pictorial Traditions in Britain and America (­London: Herbert, 1986). 153 RM98F105:32: leaf from Michel Fizot, La Chronophotographie avant le Cinématographe (Beaune: Association des Amis de Marey et Ministere de la Culture, 1984).

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Simulacrum For Russell, ‘Bacon is not the kind of artist who sits cowering in a remote rectory and relies on photographs to whip up his imagination,’154 but in fact this assessment comes close to the truth. Bacon’s studio was an encapsulated space. ‘If I work, I don’t want to see people’155 he explained. Barely anyone was ever allowed in and only few people watched him paint.156 Early attempts to paint portraits from life were soon abandoned and Bacon is not known to have ever drawn or painted in situ. Unlike many of his predecessors, he only occasionally took up the camera himself and never developed his own photography into a serious part of his preparatory practice. Whatever the artist had experienced before, whatever he had observed and absorbed during the day, once he approached the canvas, he was on his own. Bacon entirely and consistently isolated himself from the external world and cut himself off from first-hand experience so that forms and faces, shapes, bodies, and colours disappeared but were only present as memories – and surrogates in myriad illustrations that subsequently formed the core of his iconography. Bacon did, however, collect the whole world in Reece Mews, creating his very own, tailor-made simulacrum of it: news and current affairs, his friends, history, science, and art were all present in the form of photographic reproductions in books, newspapers, magazines, and original photographic prints. As Rothenstein remarked, ‘Bacon’s direct observation of nature, then, is casual; it is the photograph that serves as the window through which he looks at the world, […]. He even prefers, I think, to study the Old Masters through the medium of the photograph’.157 The latter is confirmed by a vast collection of art books, and by Bacon stating, for example, that Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, 1512–1516, ‘looked much better in all the photographs […] and somehow I prefer it in books to when I really saw it’.158 Other indicators suggest that Bacon valued the secondary experience via the photograph higher than studying the original. About Battleship Potemkin he said that ‘oddly enough, it’s not so much the whole movie that’s moving for me as certain shots that very often are captured by papers or by these movie reviews […]; and they suggest all kinds of things to me, much more than the silent film itself.’159 The significance of the mechanical reproduction became especially palpable when he created a whole series of paintings based on Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888, in the mid-1950s. Out of all paintings by the artist he admired so much, Bacon chose the one which had been destroyed in World War II and which was now exclusively available as an illustration,160 thus translating 154 Russell John 2001, pp. 70–71. 155 Archimbaud 2010, p. 159. 156 A rare example was John Edwards, cf. Edwards 2001, p. 13. 157 Rothenstein 1964, pp. 16–17. 158 HKA: TGA2008/6/4/2/9 Folder 2, Bacon Interviews VIA+VIIa, VIa, 1979, pp. 13–14. 159 HKA: Transcript of BBC interview ‘Francis Bacon Talking to David Sylvester’, transmitted Saturday 23rd March 1963. Recording: 12th October 1962, p. 21. 160 The Painter on the Road to Tarascon is lost since WWII and is presumed to have burnt during the Allied air raids on Magdeburg but Bacon may have known the work in colour from Wilhelm Uhde,

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into action Benjamin’s observation that a reproduction can ‘place the copy of the original in situations beyond the reach of the original itself.’161 Many of the publications and photographs in Reece Mews not only mirror the world in general, but patently refer to events and aspects of Bacon’s biography. The artist was born in Dublin and spent parts of his childhood in Ireland, which is the subject of books such as Ireland from Old Photographs,162 and he lived through two world wars, represented in the studio in publications including Total War: Causes and Courses of the Second World War.163 Bacon may have first come into contact with Egyptian art in Berlin in the late 1920s at the Neues Museum, or at the British Museum in London, but his interest may also have been spurred on and nurtured by his acquaintance with the Egyptologist, Guy Brunton.164 Thus, the aforementioned König Echnaton und die Amarna-Zeit and Egyptian Art echo what he had discussed and seen in the flesh. For most of his adult life, Bacon lived in London and knew it well, but he still owned a whole collection of material on the city, including Tony Armstrong Jones’ London.165 The same applies to Paris, which he visited regularly, but which features in The Streets of Paris, for example.166 Books on big game hunting and African wildlife, for instance, Adventures in Wildest Africa,167 reflect Bacon’s travels to South Africa. Many books, such as Bullfight,168 are consistent with Bacon’s fascination with the corrida, which he regarded as ‘a marvellous aperitif for sex’,169 and which he witnessed on his journeys to Spain and the South of France. Books on cricket, including An Illustrated History of Australian Cricket,170 may be a reference to Eric Hall, Bacon’s partner in the 1930s and 1940s, who was an enthusiastic cricket fan, and with whom Bacon attended cricket matches.171 The significance of some books in the atelier, for instance Adventures in Man’s

Vincent Van Gogh in Full Colour (London: Phaidon, 1951), cf. David Alan Mellor, ‘Film, Fantasy, History in Francis Bacon’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, exh. cat. London: Tate Britain, 2008/2009; Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009 (London: Tate Pub., 2008), pp. 50–63, p. 53, or an earlier edition: Wilhelm Uhde, L. Goldscheider, Vincent Van Gogh (London: Phaidon, 1951), the painting is pl. 69. 161 Benjamin 2008, p. 6. 162 RM98F239:4: Maurice Gorham, Ireland from Old Photographs (London: B.T. Batsford, 1971). 163 RM98F130:91: torn leaf, Peter Calvocoressi and Guy Wint, Total War: Causes and Courses of the ­Second World War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, either 1974 or 1979). 164 Cf. Harrison 2016b, p. 77. 165 RM98F107:8: Tony Armstrong Jones, London (London: Weidenfels & Nicholson, 1958). 166 RM98F106:26A: Richard Cobb and Nicholas Breach, The Streets of Paris (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1980). 167 RM98BC33: torn leaf, J. E. Burns, Adventures in Wildest Africa: On a Big Game Hunting Expedition (London: Walker & Sons, 1949), p. 14. 168 RM98F108:8: Peter Buckley, Bullfight (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958). 169 Russell John 2001, p. 143. 170 Cf. e.g. RM98NF50: R.S. Whitington, An Illustrated History of Australian Cricket (London: Pelham, 1972). 171 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 118; see also Sylvester 2000, p. 254.

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First Plastic: The Romance of Natural Waxes172 and Patrick Stirling’s Locomotives,173 is difficult to decipher. And yet those books, too, may have had a direct link to Bacon’s life and experience. For example, it came to light that he read an equally seemingly random book, Fundamentals of Soil Science,174 from which Bacon borrowed the texture of the ground in Two Men Working in a Field, 1971 at his sister’s farm in Rhodesia, where he was ‘intrigued by the field patterns in the countryside and particularly by the ochre soil’.175 Bacon’s preference for the photographic substitute over life studies becomes especially poignant in the photographs he commissioned from Deakin. Friends and lovers were readily available for him to paint in person. Significantly, the photographs of Dyer from which Bacon later painted numerous seated nudes were taken in the studio itself, thus his partner posed in the place where Bacon produced his painting. But instead of painting him there directly, the artist referenced the resulting gelatin silver prints, as if he wanted to maintain a barrier between real life and his art production.176 Read along these lines, the studio material bears the traits of a visual biography, albeit compiled from secondary experience, from what other people have seen and witnessed. It also means that at least parts of Bacon’s collection of publications were no chance findings but were deliberately acquired as visual substitutes. This practice set the scene for a unique relationship between the source image and the painted subject. Bacon is often seen as a painter of a universal condition humaine and the fact that his art is also highly personal has been appreciated more only recently.177 And yet, Bacon’s own experience is noticeably expressed in his art. The circular railings which appear, for example, in Painting 1946, 1946, resemble those of the roulette tables he frequently visited,178 he encountered the big game he painted in the early 1950s on his travels to Africa, and Dyer features in numerous paintings, including several related to his death. These images were derived from photographs. In the preparatory stages of a painting in the studio photographs replaced real life and later formed a new reality in his paintings. Bacon himself was aware that image-based mass media culture would change our perception into a preconceived vision of the world, saying that ‘one’s sense of appearance is assaulted all the time by photography and by film. So that, when one looks at something, one’s not only looking at it directly, but one’s also looking at it through the assault that has been made on one by photography and film.’179 This sentiment fed directly into his working process, in which initially, as Bernd Kiefer rightly pointed out, ‘no real body can be found, only more 172 RM98F138:4: Nelson S. Knaggs, Adventures in Man’s First Plastic: The Romance of Natural Waxes (New York: Reinhold, 1947). 173 RM98F114:86: L.T.C. Rolt, Patrick’s Stirling’s Locomotives (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964). 174 RM98NF32: C.E. Millar, L.M. Turk and H.D. Foth, Fundamentals of Soil Science, 4th edn (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1965). 175 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 968. 176 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 158. 177 Cf. ibid., p. 118. 178 Cf. ibid. 179 Sylvester 2009, p. 30.

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body pictures, as the artist doubted the immediate perception of physical appearance in the media age’.180 The detour via photography may have been employed as a deliberate conceptual device. Bacon summarized his artistic pursuits: ‘[…] realism has to be re-invented. It has to be continuously re-invented. In one of his letters Van Gogh speaks of the need to make changes in reality, which become lies that are truer than the literal truth. This is the only possible way the painter can bring back the intensity of the reality which he is trying to capture. I believe that reality in art is something profoundly artificial and that is has to be re-created. Otherwise it will be just an illustration of something – which will be very second-hand.’181

The indexicality inherent in the medium of photography makes it, even if the artist to an extent uses it as a tool to distance himself from his life, perfectly suited to nevertheless establish and retain a link to reality.182 The process of photography itself makes it a ‘trace’183 of reality because it always starts as ‘(light waves reflected by objects) – a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be,’184 which ties it firmly to its referent. Yet, according to Bacon, ‘changes’, even ‘lies’ need to be introduced into art to produce ‘artificiality’ to be able to create ‘intensity’.185 These ‘lies’ are the photographs relating to, but not depicting Bacon’s own experience, which adds a crucial element of artificiality to his painted imagery. Once appropriated on the canvas, they ‘re-create’ reality but avoid ‘literal truth’ and his detested ‘illustration’, here understood as illustrating one’s own experience. This thinking and working method is reminiscent of contemporaneous ideas in media theory such as Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreality. In hyperreality, photographs and media images form a new, independent reality of their own, which becomes a truth in its own right with no connection to the real. According to Baudrillard, mass media causes ‘the collapse of reality into hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another reproductive medium such as advertising or photography. Through reproduction from one medium into another the real becomes volatile, it becomes the allegory of death, but it also draws strength from its own destruction, becoming the real for its own sake, a fetishism of the lost object which is no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denegation and its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal.’186

And yet, Bacon’s paintings are not entirely without reference. Although accessed via photography, and sometimes unrelated photography, Bacon had real bodies and situations in mind. For example, behind the figures in Two Figures there is first of all Muybridge, but 180 Bernd Kiefer, ‘Allegorien des Körpers: Bacon, Mapplethorpe und die Vor-Bilder der Postmoderne’, in ­Unter die Haut: Signaturen des Selbst im Kino der Körper, ed. by Jürgen Felix, Filmstudien, 3 (St. ­Augustin: Gardez!, 1998), pp. 13–24, p. 17 [translation by the present author]. 181 Sylvester 2009, p. 172. 182 Cf. Baldassari 1997, p. 243. 183 Susan Sontag, ‘The Image World’, in On Photography (New York: Delta, 1978), pp. 153–182, p. 154. 184 Sontag 1978, p. 154; cf. also Barthes 1982, pp. 5–6. 185 All terms Sylvester 2009, p. 172. 186 Baudrillard 2007, pp.71–72.

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after that the bodies of Lacy and the artist himself. ‘I very often think of people’s bodies that I’ve known, I think of the contours of those bodies that have particularly affected me, but then they’re grafted very often onto Muybridge bodies,’187 he said. Although hidden below layers and layers of photographs, once the onion has been peeled, real bodies and situations emerge. With photography, a simulacrum of reality, Bacon brought the world into his studio. It constituted an encyclopaedia of human life, including his own, which allowed him to study and scrutinise the world in general, but also his own personal world, at his leisure and without distraction. As the subjects of his attention were unaware of his study, they acted naturally and without restraint. Photography allowed Bacon to grasp and understand the world on a detached meta-level, which, in return, paved the way for interpreting and connecting disparate experiences and observations in his paintings. This remove from first-hand experience added the grain of artificiality required to avoid plain, direct illustration.

2.2.  ‘Cat in a Cage’ – Francis Bacon in Reece Mews Out of all studios Bacon worked in, 7 Reece Mews was arguably the most important. ‘The moment I saw this place I knew that I could work here’,188 Bacon recalled his first visit. Since 1961, out of 331 surviving paintings only 21 were created elsewhere.189 Its significance is underlined by references to the place in a variety of works including Triptych, 1977, and Study of a Man Talking, 1981.190 The previous chapter described how the contents of 7 Reece Mews functioned both as a private simulacrum of the outside world and, on a technical level, a hyper-figurative starting point for Bacon’s art. The present chapter will further elaborate on the relationship between the studio material and Bacon’s paintings. A number of characteristics of the studio set-up will be described to show the overall intentionality of the space, but I will also address how the inherent dynamics of the space and the general behaviour of its contents were interlinked with Bacon’s art. Like a well-oiled machine, studio and artwork were welded together in causal relationships and a process of reciprocal influence, ranging from the dimensions of Bacon’s ‘large’ canvases corresponding to those of the doors and the staircase, so that it was just about possible to retrieve them from the atelier,191 to the fact that Bacon blocked

187 Sylvester 2009, p. 116. 188 Sylvester 2009, p. 189. 189 See Harrison 2016a: 19 were completely or partly painted in Paris (pp. 1072, 1074, 1076, 1078, 1082, 1084, 1102, 1110, 1126, 1140, 1150, 1152, 1154, 1158, 1166, 1176, 1190, 1202, 1206), one in Wivenhoe (p. 822), one in South Africa (p. 870) and one at the Royal College of Art in London (p. 906). 190 The first references RM98F17:125: a re-photographed fragment of a photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964; the second draws on RM98F125:12: Edward Quinn, Francis Bacon and John Edwards, standing in front of Carcass of Meat and Bird of Prey, finished 1980 in the Reece Mews studio, 1979. 191 Sylvester 2009, pp. 83–84.

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2.2.  ‘Cat in a Cage’ – Francis Bacon in Reece Mews

the windows192 and had a skylight installed to catch more of the northern light he preferred when working.193 After all, the artist himself created the environment and set the rules for this game. Since Bacon was free to choose the place and way of working, free to buy, keep, and use whatever he wanted, the material in it, its arrangement, and its subject matter must be regarded as the framework of his art. The studio was an active, purposeful agent. Its sole function was to produce the novel, intriguing imagery in his paintings, and Marshall McLuhan’s statement that ‘environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible’194 should certainly be kept in mind here. Luck and chance, by contrast, played only a limited and deliberately directed and controlled role. While this assessment might sound self-evident since it concerns an artist’s studio which, by definition, is supposed to accommodate the production of art, Reece Mews and its contents have until now been denied a clearly defined role.195 As pointed out before, instead, they are often still presented as separate, strangely detached entities, reminiscent of the physical and conceptual gap Sam Hunter identified between the pictures he saw in Cromwell Place in 1950 and Bacon’s iconography,196 and the idea that both are connected by an immediate appropriation process is still contested.197 The key to a deeper understanding of the idiosyncratic room, however, lies in Bacon’s paintings. It is, of course, possible to enjoy, analyse, and interpret Bacon’s work without the studio material in mind, as it was intended to be perceived, but his working documents and environment can only be deciphered in conjunction with his finished canvases. Only a comparative analysis between the two can close the gap introduced by Hunter, while at the same time making palpable the raison d’être of Reece Mews in all its quirky facets. Raison d’être Russell described Bacon in the studio as a ‘big cat in a cage’,198 who spent his time day-­ dreaming to conjure up new images. In reality, he conjured up images from the studio floor. The artist himself emphasised that he wanted to paint, ‘not hunt for newspaper cuttings’,199 but it seems that this is exactly what he did. In a highly creative process, these were then combined and transformed into his painted masterworks. The leaf torn from a cookery book

192 Cf. survey plans of the studio, ill. no.9, p. 14 in Cappock 2005, and photograph of Bacon’s studio, 1992, endpaper in: Francis Bacon: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New Haven: The Yale Centre for British Art, 1999; Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1999; San Francisco: Museum of Modern Art, 1999; Fort Worth: Museum of Modern Art, 1999; New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Trust for Museum Exhibitions, 1999). 193 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 190. 194 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 68. 195 Nicholas Chare interpreted it as space of sexual pleasure, see Chare 2012, p. 39. 196 Cf. Hunter 1952, pp. 11–12. 197 Peppiatt stated that the idea that Bacon had ‘culled specific ideas’ from his working material would be ‘naïve’, Peppiatt 2008, p. 37. 198 Russell John 2001, p. 21. 199 Bacon in a letter to Sonia Orwell, 1954, cited in Harrison 2008b, p. 12.

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10  Francis Bacon, ‘Chicken’, 1982, oil, pastel and dry transfer lettering on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, private collection.

11  RM98F108:81: Terence and Caroline Conran, The Cook Book: The Complete Guide to Selecting, Preparing and Presenting Good Food (London: Mitchell Beazley, 1980), p. 84, ‘Poultry’, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

with a photographic illustration of dead fowl which informed the creature in ‘­Chicken’, 1982 (figure 10 and 11),200 the manipulated page with a film-still from Alain Resnais’ ­Hiroshima, Mon Amour, 1959, used for the likeness of the sitter in Study of ­Henrietta ­Moraes, 1969,201 and the paint-spattered photographic portrait of Bacon by Jacques ­Saraben from 1973 which features as an image in Three Portraits – Posthumous Portrait of George Dyer; Self-Portrait; Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1973, Study from the Human Body and Portrait, 1988, and T­ riptych, 1991202 were all found in the studio. In fact, the majority of identified links between a painted subject and a pre-existing source image listed in List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings were found in the studio, or with the help of a studio item.203 This necessitates a re-evaluation of the working documents, of their position 200 RM98F108:81: Terence and Caroline Conran, The Cook Book: The Complete Guide to Selecting, Preparing and Presenting Good Food (London: Mitchell Beazley, 1980), p. 84, ‘Poultry’. 201 RM98F1A:40: torn leaf, mounted on support, affixed with two paper-clips, Thomas Wiseman, Cinema (London: Cassell, 1964), p. 158, film still from Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, 1959. 202 The Estate of Francis Bacon, studio item: Jacques Saraben, Francis Bacon, 1973. 203 Found ‘with the help of a studio item’ means that a photographic source was, for example, on a page in a book which Bacon held in the studio, but which he had torn out and which is today lost. The page in question can, however, be seen in a complete reference copy of the publication. This applies, for instance, to the pictorial source for the bird in the left panel of Two Figures Lying on a Bed with

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and significance within the working process. The large number of iconographical references found among the material from Reece Mews proves that these are no coincidental findings but constituents of a well-rehearsed studio practice in which the artist did not draw on images he had seen elsewhere but borrowed pictorial elements from those which he kept inside the atelier for that purpose – his ‘image bank’.204 The material therefore does not merely present an insight into the artist’s interests in general, nor is it a source of generic inspiration: it was accumulated to produce formal starting points for his art. Everything else, the collection, arrangement, and handling of the material, was subordinated to this premise. ‘Triggers of ideas’205 Over 7000 objects were unearthed from the atelier in 1998. Around 3000 are painting ­materials and, for example, slashed and unfinished canvases. The majority, however, are ‘flat items’ containing images. A staggering 4000 objects are publications of all sorts, but also torn leaves from books, magazines, original photographic prints, fragments of photo­ graphs, postcards, newspapers, and newspaper cuttings. This number includes nearly 600 more or less intact books, each containing dozens if not hundreds of photographic reproductions, drastically increasing the actual number of images in the studio.206 Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa207 alone comprises 113 photogravure plates and Positioning in Radiography, of which Bacon owned at least two editions,208 features way above 1300 black and white plates, depending on the edition. A single newspaper fragment could of course also contain more than one image. In short, at the time of the artist’s death the studio contained an almost unfathomable number of images. On the one hand, by surrounding himself with such an immense quantity of pictures of all sorts, Bacon in Reece Mews created a mirror image of the modern mass media landscape, which, too, is distinguished by a myriad of images, a phenomenon described by                 

­Attendants, 1968, p. 236 from Jen and Des Bartlett, They Live in Africa: Nature’s Paradise (London: Collins, 1967). The studio copy of the book is RM98F213:39, but the page in question is missing. 204 Lawrence Gowing, ‘Francis Bacon: The Human Presence’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by Lawrence G ­ owing and Sam Hunter, pubd. in relation to the exhibition of the same name, Washington: Hirshhorn ­Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1990; Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1990; New York: ­Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1990 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), pp. 11–26, p. 28. 205 Sylvester 2009, p. 30. 206 Bacon kept another 670 books in the kitchen and bedroom at Reece Mews and at Dales Farm. These have now been archived and are listed in the database of Bacon’s books on the website of ­Trinity ­College, Dublin [last accessed 20 March 2019]. 207 See RM98F1A:62: torn leaf, Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (London: Heinemann, 1925), plate 17, ‘Annoyed Individual Snapping at Its Neighbour’. 208 E.g. RM98F93:13: K.C. Clark, Positioning in Radiography (London: Heinemann, 1942) and RM98F109:3: K.C. Clark, Positioning in Radiography (London: Heinemann, 1964).

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William Burroughs as a ‘continual barrage of images’,209 and in which Gilles Deleuze felt ‘besieged by photographs’.210 Possibly in reference to Burroughs, whom Bacon knew well from his days in Tangier,211 the artist himself professed to live in times in which one was ‘bombarded by images all the time’.212 On the other hand, the presence of this enormous number of potential picture donors solved an essential problem: Bacon never faced a blank canvas. Deleuze, primarily referring to the contemporaneous mass media age, argued that ‘it is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface. […] The painter has many things in his head, or around him, or in his studio. […] a whole category of things that could be termed “clichés” already fills the canvas, before the beginning.’213 Yet this observation not only applies to Bacon’s absorption of modern image culture in general, but relates in concrete ways to the studio. Before Bacon started to paint, images waited for him next to his brushes, they littered the studio floor, they were everywhere; he could not make his way to the canvas without encountering one. Unsurprisingly, Bacon repeatedly articulated that he had no issues coming up with images to paint. As quoted in chapter 1, Bacon stated that ‘I suppose it’s that I’m not short of images at all; I have thousands of them. […] I happen to be very, very full of images.’214 On another occasion he explained that he had a ‘vast well of images within yourself out of which things keep coming’215 at his disposal. Such comments inadvertently make good descriptions of his studio space, which provided him with an endless number of ideas and concrete sources. For it is crucial to understand that the role of the material was not limited to providing generic inspiration, mere ‘triggers of ideas’216 and ‘stimulation’,217 but that photographs were ultimately, by Bacon’s own account, also his ‘models and […] subject matter’.218 Tidal Waves The material in Reece Mews was in constant flux. Regular clear-outs, executed by Bacon himself but also by Valerie Beston and later John Edwards, were an inherent part of its dynamics.219 Many items known to have been in the South Kensington atelier were not found there after Bacon’s death. For example, a page from Atlas-Manuel des Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses Nasales which features in a 1964 documentary and

209 William S. Burroughs and Daniel Odier, The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (London: ­Penguin, 2008), p. 34. 210 Deleuze 2008, p. 61. 211 Cf. Farson 1993, pp. 138–144, and p. 159. 212 Archimbaud 2010, pp. 147–148. 213 Deleuze 2008, pp. 61–62. 214 Sylvester 2009, pp. 164–166. 215 Beard 1975, p. 16. 216 Sylvester 2009, p. 30. 217 Archimbaud 2010, pp. 100–101. 218 Francis Bacon 1985. 219 Cf. Edwards 2001, p. 11; Farr 1999a, p. 225, footnote 2, cited from Harrison 2005a, p. 83.

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one half of a double-spread from Paris Match with photographs of a public punishment in Pakistan that appears in the 1985 Southbank Show220 are lost today. Most likely these, and many other working documents, were disposed of. That way, Bacon made sure that his pool of images never became stale, and lost its power to excite and surprise him. Existing images ‘[bred] other images’221 for him and the occasional part-exchange of his image bank prevented inbreeding and stagnation, while at the same time creating space for new interests. New images created novel, unexpected juxtapositions and inter-pictorial encounters, which triggered new ideas for his iconography. A permanent stream of new material guaranteed a permanent supply of potent image donors, mirroring the contemporary mass media landscape in which ‘information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information’.222 Furthermore, Bacon was keen to never let the well run dry. Russell remarked that some of the material ‘composted beyond the point of no recovery’223 leaving it entirely unreadable, which meant that disintegrated fragments had to be replaced with new, undisturbed images to ensure a sufficient picture supply. This renewal at times involved a substantial amount of material. Edwards recalled that soon after he first met Bacon in 1976, he discarded ‘ten dustbin bags’224 and when it was suggested to him to bequeath the contents of Reece Mews to an archive this allegedly motivated Bacon to sweep up ‘everything’ in ‘two plastic sacks’225 and burn them.226 As a result, almost two thirds of, for example, the printed publications found in the studio after Bacon’s death, 428 out of 690 books, date from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.227 It is therefore not surprising that most formal one-on-one links were also discovered for paintings of the 1970s to 1990s, for which reference material is available in the Francis Bacon Studio Archive. At the same time, the reason might also be the more naturalistic style of the artist’s late work, which makes links easier to detect. The regularity of the disposals is supported by photographs of the studio, which, over the years, show varying amounts of material. This

220 Grünwald 1903, table 13: ‘Fig 1.– Ulcérations typhiques’ and ’Fig. 2. – Herpès pharyngé’ can be seen in ‘Francis Bacon’, dir. Pierre Koralnik, prod. by Alexandre Burger, Radio Télévision Suisse Romande, 2 July 1964; the counterpart of RM98F130:15: leaf torn from Paris Match, 30 June 1978, ‘Puni Selon le Coran’, with pictures of a public punishment in Pakistan, appears in Francis Bacon 1985; see also page from Picture Post, 8 February, 1941, pp. 20–21, ‘The Man on the Spot: Antonescu before Hitler and his Gang’, which features in Sunday Night Francis Bacon 1966. 221 Sylvester 2009, p. 14. 222 McLuhan and Fiore 2008, p. 63. 223 Russell John 2001, p. 65. 224 Edwards 2001, p. 10. 225 Farr 1999a, p. 225, footnote 2, quoted from Harrison 2005a, p. 83. 226 Ibid. 227 Assessment based on database of Bacon’s books on the website of Trinity College, Dublin [last accessed 20 March 2019]. The file contains all identified books, or torn pages of books, which were found in the studio space but does neither include original photographic prints nor newspapers. The books found in Dales Farm were not included in this calculation.

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suggests that after a clear-out, the artist soon recreated the previous status quo. Edwards remembered having disposed of material in 1976228 but photographs of Bacon in his working space in 1977 depict him among large piles of books and newspapers.229 Images seem to have entered and vacated Reece Mews like tidal waves. After Bacon’s death in 1992, the accumulation and disposal, manipulation, decay, and appropriation of photographic material, which must have been fascinating to observe in motion, came to a permanent end. The machinery stopped forever and the reconstructed studio in Dublin today is a static relic of its former dynamics.230 The disposal of material, however, was neither haphazard nor was it ever wholesale.231 A considerable amount of material remained in Bacon’s possession for a long time. It was believed that all items Hunter photographed at Cromwell Place in 1950 were lost232 but a plate from Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa, published in 1925,233 featuring two quarrelling hippopotami, survived all further removals and clear-outs. The Italian publication Il Mondo Cambia, which Bacon had enthused about in 1954, and a torn and manipulated page from it were found in Reece Mews too.234 Thus, even during a period of rapidly changing work spaces after 1951,235 Bacon held onto specific items and publications, which may be indicative of a targeted interest in certain imagery. This is encouraging for investigations of paintings dating from before 1961. In fact, it was possible to establish several dozen formal links between studio items and works executed prior to his move to Reece Mews, for example between Head, 1956 and a plate from König Echnaton und die Amarna-Zeit, showing an Ancient Egyptian plaster mask of King Akhnaton.236 In some c­ ases, Bacon seemed to have regretted the loss of specific material. Almost his entire ­collection of Picture Post magazines, whose significance for Bacon and their close relationship to his painting is well acknowledged,237 is not preserved. Maybe in an attempt to replace them, Bacon bought two copies of the compilation album Picture Post 1938–50 published in 1970 and 1979.238 228 Edwards 2001, p. 10. 229 Carlos Freire, Francis Bacon in his studio, 7 Reece Mews, London, 1977. 230 Cf. also Lucas 2014, p. 196. 231 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 83. 232 Cf. Harrison 2008b, p. 10. 233 RM98F1A:62: torn leaf, Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (­London: Heinemann, 1925), plate 17, see Hunter 1952, p. 12. 234 Bacon in a letter to Sonia Orwell, 1954, cited in Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no. 62, no page numbers; RM98F106:13: torn leaf, overpainted, Leo Longanesi, Il Mondo Cambia. Storia di Cinquant’anni (Milan: Rizzoli, 1949), no page numbers. 235 Cf. Harrison 2016b, pp. 84–87. 236 RM98F105:91: Kurt Lange, König Echnaton und die Amarna-Zeit: Die Geschichte eines Gottkünders (Munich: Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliches Lichtbild, 1951), ‘23 Echnaton. Gips. Berlin’, see Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 101–102. 237 Cf. e.g., Peppiatt 2008a, p. 155; Hammer 2012b, p. 45; Daniels 2009a, p. 76, footnote 108 (p. 251); Ron Belton cited in Harrison 2008b, p. 9. 238 Picture Post 1938–50, ed. by Tom Hopkinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) [RM98F109:21] and 1979 [RM98F16:72].

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2.2.  ‘Cat in a Cage’ – Francis Bacon in Reece Mews

Peaks of Interest Detailed analysis of the Francis Bacon Studio Archive allows us to make some quantitative and chronological assessments, which confirm how densely the image bank is interwoven with the painting process. Conclusions should be drawn with caution, however, due to the aforementioned clear-outs and because a book’s date of publication may not be synonymous with its date of acquisition. Quantitative analysis is therefore not necessarily fruitful for all lines of inquiry. As explained earlier, for instance, setting the significance an artist presumably had for Bacon against the number of publications found in the studio is of little value. And yet, some aspects of the image bank are worth noting. For example, there seems to be a relationship between when and how much material on a specific topic was brought into the studio and when and how often this topic appeared in Bacon’s paintings. Certain subjects are present in the oeuvre throughout Bacon’s life, and he consistently collected material related to these subjects. Books on birds entered Bacon’s studios at least between 1944 and 1985, and, in line with this, he painted birds, or bird-like creatures, regularly between the mid-1940s and the late 1980s, for example in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1950, Seated Figure, 1974 and ­Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981.239 In other cases a peak in the occurrence of certain subjects appeared to run parallel to, or was triggered by, the increased acquisition of related material. In some instances the relationships of cause and effect are well-known. The portraits Bacon commissioned from Deakin between the late 1950s and 1970 were a decisive factor in Bacon developing into a prolific portrait painter.240 Another loose chronological congruity between the acquisition of material and the appropriation from it regards paintings of the corrida, an interest which was possibly triggered by Michel Leiris sending Bacon his book Miroir de la Tauromachie in 1966.241 Bacon painted several works concerned with bullfighting between 1967 and 1991, but the theme was particularly emphasised in 1969, when he created Study for Bullfight No.1, Study for Bullfight No.2 and Second Version of Study for Bullfight No.1. Books on the sanguinary sport found in Reece Mews were published between 1958 and 1976, thus roughly coinciding with the peak of the artist’s interest in the topic as indicated by his painting. Five of the twelve books on bullfighting were indeed published in 1967, the year when Bacon started exploring the subject on the canvas, namely two copies of The Life and Death of the Fighting Bull242 and

239 The earliest surviving book on birds is RM98F21:61: Eric J. Hosking, Cyril Newberry and Stuart G. Smith, Birds of the Night (London: Collins, 1944), the latest is BB12.05: Robert Burton, Bird Behaviour (­London: Granada, 1985). 240 Cf. Harrison 2009a, p. 80, for their dates see also Harrison 2005a, p. 132, caption to ill. no.133. 241 Michel Leiris and André Masson, Miroir de la Tauromachie (Paris: GLM, first published 1938), see ­Harrison 2016a, p. 900. 242 RM98F93:17 and RM98F136:4: John Marks, The Life and Death of the Fighting Bull, photographs by José Suárez (London: Cassell, 1967).

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three copies of the Swords of Spain.243 A photograph published in the first is the base image of the animal and torero in Study for Bullfight No.1 in 1969 (plate XXX and XXXI).244 17 books on Michelangelo were unearthed from Reece Mews, the oldest one dating from 1953, consistent with Bacon’s focus on the human figure from 1949 onwards.245 The collection includes at least four copies of Hartt’s The Drawings of Michelangelo published in 1971, and while references to the Renaissance master can be found throughout Bacon’s oeuvre, it may not be a coincidence that two explicit pictorial quotes appear in Figures in Movement and Study from the Human Body (Man Turning on Light), both from 1973 – chronologically close to the likely acquisition of a large amount of material on that artist.246 The cumulative occurrence of large groups of specific material at a time when subjects were of particular importance in Bacon’s iconography suggests a possibly causal relationship, maybe even a targeted acquisition in preparation, and the pursuit of specific imagery. The same year this work was painted, he claimed that ‘after all, drawings of Michelangelo mean more than anything to me.’247 Such rigid temporal correlations cannot always be drawn. We do not know when exactly Bacon bought My System. 15 Minutes’ Work A Day For Health’s Sake.248 Bacon may have owned it for a long time before he knew what to do with it and a picture from this publication fed into the composition of Portrait of George Dyer Staring into a Mirror in 1967. Both Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, from 1944 and Triptych 1974–1977, 1974–1977, reference (different) images from Schrenck-Notzing’s Phenomena of Materialisation, 1929,249 with 33 years between the pictorial quotes. Sometimes, the exact same item was used repeatedly in relation to different paintings. The picture from Peoples of all Nations, published 1922–1924, which was mentioned before and which had influenced Painting 1946, Bacon kept for almost thirty years before it provided the exact shape of the umbrella in the right panel of Triptych 1974–1977, 1974–1977. Thus, a considerable amount of time could pass between the first and second employment of a 243 RM98F93:11, RM98F93:19 and RM98F93:20: Robert Daley, The Swords of Spain (London: Allen Lane Penguin, 1967). 244 Working material from Bacon’s Paris Studio, today held by the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation: John Marks, The Life and Death of the Fighting Bull, photographs by José Suárez (London: Cassell, 1967), p. 92, fig. 45. 245 The oldest surviving book on Michelangelo is RM98F94:5: Johannes Wilde, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Michelangelo and his Studio (London: The Trustees of the British Museum, 1953). 246 The first relates to Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Resurrection of Christ; floating above the tomb, with terrified onlookers (soldiers), 1532–33, in Hartt 1971, fig. 350, the second to, same artist, ‘Nude Seen from the Rear’, 1534 and 1545 (?), RM98F15:41: Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of Michelangelo (­London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), p. 285, fig. 406. 247 HKA: TGA 2008/16/16/4/2/9 ‘Bacon Interviews IIIb, July 1973 IIIb, p.R-28 and R-29. 248 J. P. Müller, My System: 15 Minutes’ Work A Day For Health’s Sake (London: Link House/Athletic ­Publications, 1939), Exercise 13, ill. no.82. Bacon held an undated edition of this book: RM98F108:69. 249 RM98F138:1: Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920), fig. 38: ‘Second Flashlight Photograph by the Author, 11 August, 1911’, and fig. 194.

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picture. Other images were used frequently and consistently once they came into Bacon’s possession. The crossed legs of George Dyer in the studio from photographs taken by John Deakin in c.1965 appear in 20 works between 1966 and 1990, and form a prime example of Bacon repeatedly referencing the same source.250 Unusual Juxtapositions Delacroix kept his daguerreotypes in an album251 and Richter carefully documented his photo­graphic sources of inspiration in Atlas,252 but such neatness was not Bacon’s. Loose pages, fragments of photographs, newspaper cuttings, and paint-spattered books were scattered over the ground, creating an ankle-deep, multi-coloured image cornucopia, which in its extent and messiness matched and was possibly inspired by Walter Sickert’s ­Broadstairs atelier.253 While the room was divided into loose ‘zones’254 – for example, the space behind the canvas was filled mostly with empty champagne boxes and unfinished canvases – no ­order can be identified in terms of the arrangement of subjects. There was no dedicated spot for images of wild animals or street scenes and no place was reserved for original photo­graphic prints alone. The only exception is the wall opposite the entrance door, which was dedicated to illustrations of Bacon’s own work. On the floor, and on a small desk opposite the door, the most diverse topics, narratives, subjects, and histories congregated, clashed, and fertilised one another. This picture chaos is the most notable and most noted feature of the studio. A photograph of the studio before the removal to Ireland captures maybe half a square metre of the picture carpet and illustrates the range of topics and media which came together there (plate VII).255 There is a book on Georges Seurat,256 Peter Beard photographs of African wildlife,257 pictures of Bacon’s sister Ianthe Knott,258 and one of Deakin taken by the painter himself.259 They are accompanied by photographs by Deakin of Lucian Freud260 and

250 For example, Portrait of George Dyer Talking, 1966, Two Studies of George Dyer with Dog, 1968, Study for Self-Portrait, 1976, Triptych, 1983, Study for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1988, and Painting, 1990, cf. Katharina Günther, ‘”Take it very much further away from the photograph” – How Francis Bacon (1909–1992) appropriated the photographs of John Deakin (1912–1972)’, British Art Journal, 19.3 (Winter 2018/2019), 96–105, p. 97. 251 Cf. Scharf 1979, p. 123 and p. 343. 252 Gerhard Richter. Atlas, ed. by Helmut Friedel (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006). 253 Cf. e.g. Harrison 2005a, p. 79; see also Daniels 2009a, p. 56. 254 Cf. Dawson 2005, p. 17. 255 Perry Ogden, 7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon’s Studio (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), photograph on pp. 30–31. 256 RM98F110:2: Roger Fry and Anthony Blunt, Seurat (London: Phaidon, 1965). 257 RM98F107:14: Peter Beard, black and white photographic contact sheet with 34 images of men and dead elephants, Africa, not dated. 258 RM98F108:15: possibly Francis Bacon, photograph of Bacon’s sister Ianthe Knott, c.1960s. 259 RM98F110.4: black and white photograph, John Deakin, Golden Lion Pub, Soho, probably by Francis Bacon, 1950s. 260 RM98F1:55: John Deakin, Lucian Freud in a Street, c.1964.

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Dyer261, a news photograph of the Prague spring,262 a handwritten note,263 and a piece of cardboard the artist used to try some aerosol paint on,264 a picture from a newspaper of a cricket match,265 and an illustration of Bacon’s Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud (­sideways), 1971.266 And this is just the first visible layer. The ‘Cham dandies’ from Peoples of All ­Nations267 peak out from underneath the cricket match, and a few levels down we just so see the top of the head of Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Blue Dress, 1659.268 The images are trapped in a game of disguise and exposure, they physically come very close to each other to form immediate juxtapositions. Materiality did not play a conceivable role and original and mechanically reproduced photographs, handwritten notes, and illustrations merged in a democratic bouquet of visual information. In the arrangement of material, for once, we encounter a true element of chance, albeit of the provoked and well-nurtured kind. It was still the artist who consciously decided to bring heaps of material into the small studio space and dump them on the floor, it was he who advanced the miscibility of images by tearing them out, which facilitated more immediate, and immediately visible, contact. The folding of leaves provoked further juxtapositions, and the image on the verso of a sheet encountered that on the recto. This way, the picture of a man carrying a dumbbell from The Human Figure in Motion was able to sneak into a series of a man carrying a boulder, and King Haakon of Norway in parliament was suddenly accompanied by his wife Queen Maud reading to their son Olav.269 On some occasions, Bacon seemed to have fostered these encounters, for instance by inserting torn leaves from one publication into another, thus a leaf from Yousuf Karsh’s Faces of Destiny: Portraits was found in a book on Rembrandt van Rijn where it faced a reproduction of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1659.270

261 RM98F16:5: John Deakin, George Dyer in a Street in Soho, c.1963. 262 RM98F1A:88: celebration during the ‘Prague Spring’, fragment from Paris Match, 23 March 1968, p. 56. 263 RM98F1:48: handwritten note by Bacon on verso of Lay & Wheeler, Fine Wine Merchants, Colchester, 1983 Bordeaux Vintage Report. 264 RM98f107:11: envelope with handwriting and aerosol paint on it, not dated. 265 RM98F17:1: piece of newspaper with black and white photographic illustration (cut-out) of cricketer (batsman) attached to white piece of card with sellotape. 266 RM98F1:49: leaf from Francis Bacon, exh. cat. (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1985; Berlin: National­ galerie, 1986) colour illustration of Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud (Sideways), 1971. 267 RM98F1:23: torn leaf, over-drawn and mounted on support, Peoples of all Nations: Their Life Today and Story of their Past, ed. by J.A. Hammerton, 7 vols (London: The Fleetway House, 1922–1924), I, p. 147. 268 Probably RM98F17:29: leaf torn from book, Jonathan Brown, Velázquez: Painter and Courtier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Diego Velázquez, Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Blue Dress, 1659. 269 RM98BC25: torn leaf, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901), verso, ‘Man Walking and Carrying 50-lb. Dumbell in one hand (.099 second)’; RM98F22:61J: torn leaf, unidentified book, p. 35. 270 RM98F197:2: Tancred Borenius, Rembrandt: Selected Paintings, 3rd edn (London: Phaidon, 1952), two pages, figs.78–81, from Yousuf Karsh, Faces of Destiny: Portraits (London: George G. Harrap, 1947),

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By Bacon’s own account, this chaotic arrangement was essential for his work. ‘I feel at home here in this chaos because chaos suggests images to me’,271 he explained, and Bacon conversely felt creatively ‘castrated’272 in a tidy work space. This chaos indeed was the visual and conceptual bedrock of an idiosyncratic appropriation process and anticipated traits of the finished canvas. Bacon said about the studio that he did not understand an image as a single entity but in the context of other images, and by his own account observed and absorbed how they influence each other.273 This attitude is reflected in his working procedures. A myriad of images were in the studio and Bacon’s paintings, too, were almost never based on one photographic source alone but most of the time were informed by several pictorial springboards. The figure in the right panel of Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1984 is an assemblage constructed from a photograph of Edwards, and one of Freud (figure 97 to 99).274 Analogous to the anarchic combination of topics on the ground, diverse, seemingly unrelated sources were combined in a single painting. Figure Getting out of a Car, c.1944, incorporates, amongst other possible sources, parts of a picture of Hitler in his car at a Nuremberg Rally and one of a gardener from a book on the history of morals.275 It may include the combination of Low Art and High Art, as when a figure by Michelangelo and a portrait photograph of Dyer both informed Painting, 1978.276 The specific way in which images were stored in Reece Mews was distinctly intended to aid in breaking traditional modes of representation and creating novel, unpredictable images which incorporate all pictures available to modern man. Just like on the wooden planks of Reece Mews, in his works, too, these were layered, mixed and mingled in a process which will be elaborated in the following chapters. Some features of the working space prepared the way for, and perhaps inspired, formal properties of Bacon’s paintings more directly. For many of them it is difficult to assign a fixed viewpoint.277 While the figure in Man Getting Up from a Chair, 1968, for instance, is positioned parallel to the picture plane, the floor is viewed from an elevated position. The image chaos in Reece Mews offered a kaleidoscopic range of perspectives. If understood as a picture plane itself, the floor, with thousands of different photographs shot from all sorts of different perspectives, anticipated the lack of a cohesive viewpoint on the canvas. 271 Sylvester 2009, p.190. 272 Ibid p. 191. 273 Cf. Archimbaud 2010, pp. 147–148. 274 RM98F1A:87: John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a Bed, c.1964, RM98F8:46: Francis Bacon, John Edwards, late 1970s to early 1980s. 275 torn leaf, overpainted, Heinrich Hoffmann, ‘The Führer Who Commands’, Picture Post, 13 July 1940, leaf photographed by Sam Hunter in the Cromwell Place studio, 1950, illustrated in: Gale and Stephens 2008a, p. 16, ill. no. 2; RM98F136:17: supplement for Eduard Fuchs, Illustrierte Sittengeschichte, II, ‘Die Galante Zeit’ (Munich: Albert Langen, 1909), the painting and its sources will be dicussed in more detail in chapter 3.2.1. 276 RM98F107:28: colour photograph cut-out of George Dyer’s head in profile with paint around outline, c.1960s and cf. eg. RM98F108:42: torn leaf, Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of Michelangelo (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), pp. 107–108. 277 Cf. Schmied 2006, p. 20.

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Often, as will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3.3., Bacon’s art does not ­offer a plain narrative or a clearly identifiable identity for a subject. The image anarchy in Reece Mews facilitated the depletion of narrative and identity, for the nature of the ­material and its sheer quantity undermined an imperative story. Susan Sontag pointed out that ‘crushed hopes, youth antics, colonial wars, and winter sports are alike – are equalised by the ­camera. Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events’278 and Burroughs knew that the ‘barrage of ­images’279 leads to visual and intellectual blindness because it ‘makes haze over everything, like walking around in smog, we don’t see anything.’280 Furthermore, taking images out of their o ­ riginal context in a book or an article weakens their power as signifiers carrying meaning, which fore­shadows the drastic emptying of the material of narrative and identity during the a­ ppropriation ­process. Commitment At some point, from the thousands of images Bacon surrounded himself with, he picked one, or more, to use as a pictorial starting point for a painted subject. He then focussed his lens and boiled down the picture universe in Reece Mews to one painted subject. Many details of the process remain unknown, but comparing the knowledge on Bacon’s appropriation practice with the results of technical examinations of his paintings is illuminating in so far as it shows how the immediacy of the process developed, as it changed completely over the course of his career. Until the late 1940s, Bacon’s canvases were loaded with many layers of sometimes very thickly applied paint. Study for Man with Microphones, c.1946–1948, was exhibited the same year but reworked about two years later, and displayed under the new title Gorilla with Microphones in 1962.281 Bacon slashed the canvas in 1971 but kept the fragments in his studio.282 Cross-sections of the fragments revealed that in some places the final version is 20 layers thick.283 The relief-like appearance of Head II, 1949, is the result of 16 layers.284 From the cross-sections of Gorilla with Microphones we know that the layers were applied in different manners. Sometimes, ‘layers blend into one another, indicating that Bacon was working rapidly, applying his paint wet-in-wet’;285 at other times, he allowed the paint to dry first and continued painting on top of his previous efforts.286 Much time could pass between the reworking of a canvas. Study for Man with Microphones remained unchanged for two years before Bacon altered it, and Figure Getting out of a Car, c.1944, existed long 278 Sontag 1978a, p. 11. 279 Burroughs and Odier 2008, p. 34. 280 Ibid. 281 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 182. 282 Cf. ibid. 283 Cf. Shepard 2009, p. 156. 284 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 190. 285 Shepard 2009, p. 156. 286 Cf. ibid., p. 156.

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enough to be photographed before it was revised and later retitled Landscape with Car, c.1945–1946.287 Bacon said about his Head-series that he used heavy impasto because ‘[…] textures should be very much thicker’,288 for he aimed to paint ‘like Velazquez but with the texture of a hippopotamus skin’.289 Mingling visceral haptics with Old Master painting may have been one motivation, but a whole series of pentimenti was another. X-ray examinations of works from that period confirm that during the process of building up the layers, pictorial elements were finished to a large degree before moving on to the next stage. Gorilla with Microphones bears some linear structures which suggest an ‘intermediate state’ (between the two known and photographed ones) while ‘blurred shapes [are] indicative of the multiple revisions carried out’.290 The portrait of a bald man is hidden underneath the current right panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944,291 and Figure in a Landscape, 1945, underwent ‘many revisions’292 including painting out the grin of the machine-gun operator. And, as mentioned in the previous chapter, a biomorphic creature preceded the seated man in Painting 1946, 1946. During that time Bacon’s paintings were evidently subject to a lengthy process of alteration, transformation and exploration of pictorial opportunities. The known photographs of works of the period, documenting various stages, suggest that other paintings at the time were based on pre-existing imagery too. Formal starting points for the present state of Painting 1946, 1946, have been discussed in detail earlier in chapter 1.3. Furthermore, the figure in the finished state of the left panel of the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion merges both a Muybridge motion study and an image from Schrenck-Notzing’s Phenomena of Materialisation while the mouth of the creature in the centre panel was informed both by an illustration in Atlas-Manuel des Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses Nasales293 and one from the German magazine Simplicissimus.294 The portrait revealed by X-rays in the right panel does not bear a direct relation to the final stage of the triptych, but it, too, while also resembling Bacon’s then partner Eric Hall, may have been lifted from news photographs of the Nazi leader Julius Streicher.295 Figure Getting out of a Car, which Bacon later disguised in Landscape with Car,

287 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 174 and p. 182. 288 Bacon cited in Sylvester 2000, pp. 66 and 68. 289 Bacon cited in Russell John 2001, p. 35, see also Sylvester 2009, p. 18. 290 Shepard 2009, p. 158. 291 Harrison 2016a, p. 146. 292 Ibid., p. 160. 293 Cf. Boxer 1975, p.39, RM98F105:140J: two fragments from Ludwig Grünwald, Atlas-Manuel des ­Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses Nasales (Paris: Bailliere et fils, 1903), no page ­numbers, tab. 5, fig. 1: ‘Epulis’. 294 Cf. Boxer 1975, p.50, Simplicissimus, 28.9 (28 May 1923) 107: Th. Th. Heine, cartoon ‘Wie sieht Hitler aus? ’, hier ‘Oder ist der Mund die Hauptsache? ’. 295 Cf. Hammer 2012b, p. 68.

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is based on an erotic illustration of a gardener but echoes a Muybridge motion study too.296 Thus, before Bacon committed to the pictorial references used for the present version of a painting, often several sources were sounded and translated into paint. Pre-existing images were picked, appropriated to some extent and then discarded, sometimes in quick succession, sometimes after a break and period of contemplation. In relation to building up layers of thick impasto, Bacon admitted in 1962 that at times he had misjudged the capacity of the canvas and that consequently it became so ‘clogged’297 it was impossible to continue working on it. Bacon, who was self-taught, was at the time still developing his technique and exploring the handling of painting materials.298 In this period a similar inexperience and indecisiveness may have determined his appropriation process and iconography, and he may have needed the security of seeing a finished or at least half-finished figure on the canvas to decide whether to keep or alter it. Afterwards, several changes in Bacon’s technique required – or were the result of – a different handling of his source material. In the late 1940s Bacon’s work became more decisive in its execution. He started to paint on the unprimed side of the canvas, which impedes the correction of mistakes, and applied thinner and fewer layers of paint.299 Bacon used scumbling, which allows us to see previous efforts, and left large areas of the canvas bare in paintings such as Head VI, 1949 and Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1950. Any alterations would ruin the effect of lightness and translucency. By 1961, Bacon had reversed his desire for ‘thick’300 textures, instead aiming to ‘paint as thin as is possible to make image’.301 Bacon explained that he generally started the painting process by outlining the shape of a figure on the canvas and after that figure and background developed in tandem.302 This statement is confirmed by unfinished paintings such as ‘Seated Figure’, c.1978. Technical examinations also suggest that figure and background were executed in reserved spaces which were allocated by underdrawings from the outset.303 ‘Once initial marks had been made Bacon remained faithful to the established scheme,’304 the conservator Joanna Shepard explained,

296 RM98F136:17: Eduard Fuchs, Illustrierte Sittengeschichte, II, ‘Die Galante Zeit’ (Munich: Albert ­Langen, 1909), colour plate ‘Die Gärtnerin. Galanter französischer Farbstich von Moret nach Aug. De Saint-­ Aubin’, between pp. 200–201 and Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (London: ­Chapman & Hall, 1901), plate 173, ‘Woman with Newspaper, Sitting down on floor’. 297 Sylvester 2009, p. 18. 298 Cf. Stephen Hackney, ‘Francis Bacon (1909–1992): Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a ­Crucifixion, 1944’, in Paint and Purpose: A Study of Technique in British Art, ed. by Stephen Hackney, Rica Jones and Joyce Townsend (London: Tate Gallery, 1999), pp. 176–181, p. 179, cited in Shepard 2009, pp. 152–175, footnote 23. 299 Cf. Shepard 2009, p. 160. 300 Bacon quoted in Sylvester 2000, pp. 66–68; see also Sylvester 2009, p. 18; Russell John 2001, p. 35. 301 Handwritten note by Bacon in RM98F137:2: J. A . Mauduit, Quarante Mille Ans d’Art Moderne (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1954), front inside cover. 302 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 195. 303 Cf. Shepard 2009, p. 160; see also ‘Three Figures’, c.1982. 304 Shepard 2009, p. 164; Elke Cwiertnia, ‘Francis Bacon: Materials and Techniques’, in Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, ed. by Martin Harrison (London: The Estate of Francis Bacon, 2016), pp. 66–73,

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and few exceptions are known. Figure and background were executed in different materials and applied using different techniques, and a margin of bare canvas often surrounds the figure, making it hard to adjust the shape and positioning of the figure because the artist would risk losing ‘the dynamic contrast between the bare canvas in the reserved spaces and the precisely textured surrounding areas.’305 Thus, during the later decades Bacon had to pick and stick with a source from a painting’s inception, which of course renders absurd all claims that his iconography emerged fortuitously. Instead, it indicates a self-confident, targeted appropriation process, in which the main elements were chosen before the canvas was approached. Punctum Bacon’s experience of the contemporaneous media landscape was of being ‘bombarded by images’.306 Only few would ‘stick in your mind’,307 but some he found had ‘a considerable effect’.308 The same can be said about the bombardment of pictures he exposed himself to voluntarily in the studio, and out of which every once in a while he picked an image to transpose into a painted masterpiece. Why this image or the other remained in his mind and what the criteria were for it having an effect is difficult to trace. A case-to-case study recommends itself, because only the fact that Bacon did borrow an element from a pre-­ existing image proves his interest in a particular picture. On that basis, an interpretation of the choice can be attempted. Some source images are emotionally highly charged, for instance the photograph of a dead child murdered during Second World War from The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials, 1944,309 whose shape informed the shadow in Still Life – Broken Statue and Shadow, 1984 (figure 77 to 79). Other images are visually very powerful. The photograph of a dramatically lit chamber in an Egyptian pyramid,310 which distinctly informed the linear structure in Oedipus and Sphinx – Portrait of Muriel Belcher, both 1979, gains its impact from the sharp interplay of light and shadow (plate XVIII and XIX). Some sources are directly linked to the subject of a painting. It seems logical that in the middle of creating a series on Vincent Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888, Bacon picked a reproduction from a book on Van

p. 71: ultraviolet light revealed that the reflected head in the right panel of In Memory George Dyer, 1971 had begun in a different position. 305 Shepard 2009, p. 171. 306 Archimbaud 2010, p.147. 307 Ibid. 308 Ibid, p. 148. 309 RM98F22:116: torn leaf, I.F. Kladov, I.F. Kotomtsev et al., The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the ­Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials (London: Hutchinson, 1944), no page number. 310 RM98F110:38: torn leaf, Kurt Mendelssohn, The Riddle of the Pyramids (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974), p. 134, ill. no.37.

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Gogh with a figure on a road as source image for the fifth work of the group (plate XIV).311 In some instances, the motivation for choosing a particular image may come from Bacon’s own experiences. For example, the torn leaf from a book on psychology312 which formed the basis for the shadow in Still Life – Broken Statue and Shadow, 1984 was an illustration for an article on the Oedipus complex. This may have resonated with the artist, who, by his own account, had been ‘sexually attracted’313 to his father. Moreover, the verso of the leaf features an illustration of Ingres’ Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1808, a variation of which, ­Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, 1983, Bacon had painted the year before. More examples will be discussed in the following chapters. And yet, I am well aware that judgments on the visual and psychological impact of a picture mainly reflect the present author’s point of view and may have been perceived differently by the artist. Deducing reliable rules to predict Bacon’s interest in certain images from the known pairings is of course impossible. Some sources appear banal, and their significance for the artist is difficult to decode. It remains hard to grasp why a picture of a theatre stage with a cleaning bucket314 ended up providing the formal reference for the floorboards in Blood on the Floor – Painting, 1986, for instance (plate XVI and XVII). Even when we know that a particular source may be related to the subject of a group of paintings, as pointed out above in relation to Bacon’s Van Gogh variations, it does not give an indication as to why that particular image was chosen over another one relating to Van Gogh, or why one aesthetically and emotionally forceful image was chosen over another. ‘Bacon’s mind worked in unpredictable ways, and it was certainly not because an image caught his attention that he believed in its underlying substance,’315 Peppiatt rightly claimed. At the end of the day, we can only speculate as to why particular images were selected as sources for a painting. Reminiscent of Roland Barthes’ idea of the punctum the attraction may have lain in an unsuspected, random, and very subjective detail.316 The term describes an element in a photograph which interrupts its intellectual studium by evoking an intense sensation and so grabbing the viewer’s attention.317 While it is provided by the photograph, it is activated by individual, personal experience, and may remain hard to describe or locate.318 What is experienced as punctum can therefore be different for every viewer and Bacon’s reasons for being attracted to one or the other picture may elude us forever.

311 RM98F130:156: torn leaf, Jos de Gruyter, The World of Van Gogh Le Monde de Van Gogh Die Welt von Van Gogh, photographs by Emmy Andriesse (The Hague: Daamen, 1953), p. 141. 312 RM98F17:149: torn leaf, Didier Anzieu et al., L’Oedipe un complexe universel: Les grandes découvertes de la psychanalyse (Paris: Tchou, 1977), no page number. 313 Sylvester 2009, pp. 71–72. 314 RM98F93:1: Michael Peto and Alexander Bland, The Dancer’s World (London: Collins, 1963), no page numbers. 315 Peppiatt 2006a, p. 10. 316 Cf. Barthes 1982, p. 51 and p. 55. 317 Cf. ibid., p. 27 and p. 42. 318 Cf. ibid., pp. 51–53 and p. 55.

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2.3.  ‘A Heap of Broken Images’ – Preparatory Processes

The Twist The past chapter aimed to show how closely the studio space, its contents, and Bacon’s paintings were interlinked and determined by each other. It explained that the studio’s sole purpose was to provide pictorial starting points for his canvases, a function Bacon carefully maintained. The following chapter will show that Bacon regarded his studio material not only as an ‘image bank’ from which to borrow found figures and forms, but that he also subjected the book pages and photographs to a unique preparatory practice in which the image was altered and advanced until he found it suitable for translation into oil paint.

2.3.  ‘A Heap of Broken Images’ – Preparatory Processes ‘A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.’319 T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, 1922

Off limits for most visitors, sitters, and friends, the studio at 7 Reece Mews was indeed a wasteland devoid of human presence. Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist fragmentary concatenation of narrative elements it was, however, filled to the brim with ‘heaps of broken images’:320 torn and paint-spattered book pages, fragments of photographs, and crumpled newspaper cuttings. The following chapter will explore how, and why, these images were ‘broken’. The first chapter on Bacon’s working environment discussed what the painter held in the studio in terms of media and content. The second one explored why the material was there and it also unpicked some quantitative and qualitative dynamics within it. Both chapters underlined the intentionality of the space and its processes, and broadly described how both are inextricably intertwined with Bacon’s painting. This chapter will work its way forward to a more granular level and take a closer look at the state of the working documents themselves, what Bacon did with them, and investigate what happened to them in the studio, respectively. Most explorations of Bacon’s working process start too late. For Hammer ‘the first stage seems to have been stating the image by, in effect, drawing it out on the canvas,’ to then ‘edit, or to wipe [it] off and replace with an alternative possibility’,321 if necessary. But to ignore what happened before the canvas was approached, would be to miss vital steps in the genesis of Bacon’s iconography. For the accumulation of photographic material in Reece Mews had only one purpose, namely to support the creation of a painting. But Bacon rarely borrowed an image precisely as he found it. Davies noted that ‘as early as Figure in 319 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and other Poems (Orlando/Austin/New York/San Diego: HMH Books, 2014), p. 30. 320 Ibid., line 22. 321 Martin Hammer, ‘Contradiction and Continuity in the Art of Francis Bacon’, in Francis Bacon: Critical and Theoretical Perspectives, ed. by Rina Arya (Oxford/New York: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 121–168, pp. 143–144.

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a ­Landscape of 1945 Bacon was using the camera’s way of seeing things, the observing of half the subject in shadow, the dissolving of one image into another and the distortion of space and anatomy peculiar to monofocal vision, but he rarely adapts the photographic image in a literal manner.’322 Some deviations were inspired and sometimes directly predetermined by interventions to the source material. This was part of an extensive and consistent preparatory practice in which conscious and targeted editing and manipulation, as well as embracing accidental alterations of the photographic base image played a vital role.323 The source item occupied a hybrid role: on the one hand, it provided a pictorial starting point but on the other, it was also subject to further creative steps, which helped Bacon to make the image truly his own and to prepare it for its transformation into oil paint. The identification of the crumpled fragments of book pages and tattered newspaper clippings is especially rewarding here because it allows us to fully grasp the alteration of a working document in comparison with its undisturbed original state.324 Of course, while the reformulation of the studio items was vital for Bacon’s art, it was not imperative, nor was it a criterion for inclusion in the appropriation process. Some figures were borrowed relatively unaltered, for example the male nude in Study of a Nude, 1952 which originated from a frame in Muybridge’s motion series ‘Man Performing Standing Broad Jump’.325 In the case of a diving bird from LIFE The Birds,326 the source item is left undisturbed and the bulk of the metamorphosis of the animal which forms the basis of several fantasy creatures in paintings including the left panel of Triptych – Studies from the Human Body, 1970 and Study for the Eumenides, 1982 was executed on the canvases. Alternatively, what may be considered a particularly disturbing Baconian distortion indeed originated from a photographic source: the upper jaw of the head in the right panel of Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, 1967 is missing because it draws on the photograph of a heavily wounded WWI veteran, who had lost this part of his face (figure 95 and 96).327 Thus, as with all aspects of his art, Bacon did not follow any dogmatic rules, but he made sure to create a situation in which opportunities for innovative changes to his figurative starting points would arise. To date, the nature of the alterations is as under-researched as their significance is undervalued. Despite the fact that the typical signs of the studio dynamics can already be spotted on the items Sam Hunter photographed in Cromwell Place in 1950, and on every occasion thereafter when Bacon’s working material entered the public realm, their physical 322 Davies H. M. 1978, p. 119. 323 Cf. also: Finke 2009a, p. 131. 324 Cf. Günther 2018, p. 100. 325 Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 163, ‘Man Performing Standing Broad Jump’. 326 RM98BC36: torn page, mounted on cardboard, The Birds LIFE Nature Library, ed. by Roger Tory ­Peterson et al. (New York: Time Life Books, 1963), p. 55. 327 RM98F244:11: John Masters, Fourteen Eighteen (London: Michael Joseph Publishers, 1965), p. 85: ‘A facial injury (from Nie wieder Krieg)’.

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state and appearance were not considered relevant in contemporaneous writing.328 Today the working documents are accessible for research and have become omnipresent in exhibitions and publications, but the decisive role their state played in how Bacon’s imagery came about is still largely ignored. Due to the deliberateness of the alterations and the fact that they echo directly in Bacon’s paintings, Harrison described the studio material as Bacon’s equivalent of ‘traditional artist’s preliminary drawings or sketches’.329 All following analysis will show that this is true, but the extent, the techniques and mechanisms, and the intentions involved have not yet satisfyingly been assessed and interpreted. Until now Marcel Finke has been the only to discuss Bacon’s ‚material practice‘ in detail.330 He argues that the distressed item served the artist as a ‘philosophical tool’331 to think about the relationship between the physical condition of images and the bodies they depict, underlining the role of the accidental decay of the item and its value as a transformed three-dimensional object.332 While it is important to emphasise both the physical state of the working documents and their slow demise, his considerations remain on an abstract, theoretical level, and miss the direct, concrete relevance for the painted iconography as flat images. Finke also omits deliberate more conventional two-dimensional alterations such as over-drawing, and ignores media-related issues of the image-image transfer. The present approach draws on, but also aims to expand Harrison’s and Finke’s positions by providing a more extensive and in-depth comparison with Bacon’s finished works, a comprehensive study of the alterations’ overall purpose, their consequences for the iconography, and their positioning in the appropriation process. I will outline how, on a technical level, the alterations in the source item helped Bacon to grasp the figure, and how Bacon used these to rehearse and predetermine alterations in the appearance of the painted iconography. Their purpose was to tip the balance from the figuration in the base image towards abstraction. The naturalistic, photographic rendering of the figure was undermined and its mechanical nature challenged to further remove the image from its photographic origins. Process-based, accidental modifications added an impersonal, artificial layer of distance, a Van Goghian ‘lie’ about reality to the image from the simulacrum of the studio. Pale Bones In line with Bacon’s general reticence as to the details of his relationship to photography, information on how he worked with the studio contents is scant. Bacon addressed their

328 See for example the images of working material published in Hunter 1952, p. 12; and e.g. Sylvester 1975, p. 33. 329 Harrison 2009a, p. 71. 330 Finke 2015. 331 Finke 2009a, p. 131. 332 Cf. also Finke, 2015, pp. 336; Marcel Finke, ‘Francis Bacon’s Alter Ego? Critical Remarks on the Barry Joule Collection’, in Francis Bacon – New Studies: Centenary Essays, ed. by Martin Harrison (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), pp. 125–141, p. 128.

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physical state only a handful of times, disclosing that ‘photographs are profoundly suggestive to me all the time and often when I’ve trodden on them, for instance, a thousand times – as you know, I live in the most appalling disorder so the photographs get trodden,’333 and that ‘my photographs are very damaged by people walking over them and crumpling them and everything else’.334 On another occasion he mentioned ‘scratches’335 and ‘stains’336 on photographs but never addressed other accidental alterations, let alone targeted manipulations.337 The exact nature of Bacon’s preparatory work needs to be pieced together from the analysis of the items found in Reece Mews. Despite their scarcity, Bacon’s comments provide precious hints on the process. He mainly seems to have cherished two aspects. The first is how physical interventions profoundly transform an image and turn it into something new. ‘They [the trodden photographs] even get changed into other things and those, often, in themselves are extremely interesting,’338 he stated, and another time he enthused how ‘discarded newspapers changing colour in the sunlight, bones and carcasses that have been in the sea or sun and sand for a long time, gradually change into other things. There is a kind of beauty in that – a kind of magic’.339 And yet, it was not the novelty per se that counted. As an artist drawn to tightrope walks and delicate balances to achieve maximum impact, here Bacon rated highly the tension between the familiar original, which was not to be entirely abandoned, and its new visual connotations. ‘This [walking over them] does add other implications to an image of Rembrandt, for instance, which are not Rembrandt’s’,340 he declared. His comment that ‘one’s always hoping to renew them [pre-existing images]’,341 made in relation to his use of Cimabue’s Crucifix, Santa Croce, c.1265, as a pictorial springboard for Crucifixion, 1965, is illuminating in this context too. Bacon often acted upon this principle of renewal in the pre-stages of a painting. Studio items, such as a book page featuring an Ancient Egyptian sculpture of a seated scribe342 which is half colour photographic illustration of an antique relic, half tears, paint splotches, folds, and omissions, manifest this manner of thinking.343 Thus, Bacon did not rely on the new aesthetics of photography alone to create unprece-

333 HKA: ‘Interview Va’, Transcript of videotape recordings made by London Weekend television, April 1975, directed by Derek Bailey and transmitted in Aquarius on 30 November 1975. 334 Sylvester 2009, p. 38. 335 Beard 1975, p.15. 336 Ibid. 337 Beard 1975, p. 15. 338 HKA: ‘Interview Va’, Transcript of videotape recordings made by London Weekend television, April 1975, directed by Derek Bailey and transmitted in Aquarius on 30 November 1975. 339 Beard 1975, p. 16. 340 Sylvester 2009, p. 38. 341 Ibid., p. 14. 342 RM98F131:44: Werner and Bedřich Forman, text by Milada Vilímková, Egyptian Art (London: Peter Nevill, 1962), plate 20, ‘Seated Scribe. White limestone. Traces of gesso and pigment. Height 0.51 m. Found in 1893 at Sakkara. Vth Dynasty’. 343 For a similar thought see Harrison 2009b, p. 150.

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dented and anti-traditional imagery, the further metamorphoses of the photographs also triggered and predetermined a novel, unexpected iconography on the canvas. Second, the alterations also carried a conceptual meaning. ‘Because the places I live in, or like living in, are like an autobiography, I like the marks that have been made by myself, or other people, to be left. They’re like memory tracks for me. […] For instance, this door, somebody broke it in a rage or something; well, I’ve left it because I like it like that, also the broken mirror and the papers on the floor’,344 Bacon said. Thus, the scratches on the photograph, the blotches of paint on the newspaper fragment, and the tear in the book page may for Bacon have represented personal manifestations of the passage of time, reminiscent of battered antiquities of which he said that ‘quite apart from the aesthetic thing, one goes into this whole question of time, this time has passed, this time has eaten away these parts of the image or damaged them away […] it’s hard to know very often where you dissolve the aesthetic sense from the time sense.’345 In a certain manner, the studio contents became symbols of mortality which echoed his own and any other living being’s aging and physical deterioration, imbuing the studio item itself with the notion of life. Chance and Process The studio contents were altered by deliberate manipulations of the artist, by overdrawing, mounting, cutting out- and off, pasting over, and by targeted folding, but also by chance processes including crumpling, tears, random folds, abrasion, material fatigue, and paint blots. Deliberate manipulation and chance processes were equally important as creative changes to the image and both fed into Bacon’s iconography in equal measure. Sometimes, they came together in one item. The page torn from the book Il Mondo Cambia346 was both drawn over by Bacon and deliberately folded, but also features random blots of paint and a large vertical tear which is probably accidental (figure 12). While chapter 1.3. argued that chance did not play a role in the genesis of Bacon’s iconography itself, accidental alterations, which the artist passively allowed, were an inherent part of his preparatory work. Chance is an important factor in how and where a photograph rips apart after it has been handled and walked over numerous times. The position of a paint blot on a book page which lay in front of the canvas while the painting process was underway was random too. Bacon not only tolerated, but gratefully embraced these alterations, he ‘recognised the productivity of material change and, even more importantly, knew how to exploit it.’347 While the alterations themselves were often arbitrary, their existence was not entirely incidental. As pointed out before, Bacon was conscious of and had full control over

344 Beard 1975, pp. 15–16. 345 HKA: Folder TGA 2008/16/16/4/2/9 ‘Bacon Interviews IIIc’, ‘October 1973 IIIC’, Index and draft, 65 pages, incomplete ‘October 1973 IIIc’, pp. 21–22. 346 RM98F16:295F: torn leaf, overpainted, Leo Longanesi, Il Mondo Cambia. Storia di Cinquant’anni (­Milan: Rizzoli, 1949), 1949. 347 Finke 2009a, p. 132.

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12  RM98F16:295F: torn leaf, overpainted, Leo Longanesi, Il Mondo Cambia. Storia di Cinquant’anni (Milan: Rizzoli, 1949), no page numbers, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

his working environment. He alone was responsible for the ‘most appalling disorder’348 in which he painted. By the time of his death the modest 32 square metres of the studio held over 7500 items, 4000 of which contained images. Since Bacon scattered many of them across the floor, due to the physical restrictions of the space he inevitably had to walk over them (the impact of other people’s movements was probably negligible), and mechanical damage had to be expected. The effect must have been enhanced by a dynamic, physical painting process, during which the artist moved in front of the canvas as if ‘fencing with an unseen opponent’349 while ‘excitedly running backwards and forwards to the canvas with gazelle-springing leaps’.350 From the studio’s posthumous state and photographs taken during Bacon’s lifetime, we know that no precautions were taken to protect the gelatin silver prints, torn leaves, and newspaper cuttings from the effects of the painting process. Instead, they were left on the floor right in front of the easel. Numerous smudgy fingerprints on the book pages and photographs indicate that they were picked up by the artist, unmindful of, or perhaps to the contrary fully aware of and welcoming the traces he left.

348 HKA: ‘Interview Va’, Transcript of videotape recordings made by London Weekend television, April 1975, directed by Derek Bailey and transmitted in Aquarius on 30 November 1975, p. 6. 349 Edwards 2001, p.13. 350 Buckle 1991, pp. 322.

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These working conditions are well-documented for at least the thirty years Bacon worked in Reece Mews. That he never changed them leads us to one conclusion – that he appreciated these conditions, including the devastating but at the same time highly rewarding effects on its contents. In that sense Bacon’s studio is vaguely reminiscent of the rationalised set-up of Duchamp’s Standard Stoppages, albeit in a much less literal, a more intuitive, and infinitely wilder version. The working environment seemed to have only slowly developed into the ankle-deep chaos we know today. Bacon’s neighbour Mollie Craven remembered a table in the centre of the room, which was an ‘enormously high-heaped affair with a mountain of papers and magazines’351 in the studio at Glebe Place in the early 1940s and Hunter reported that in Cromwell Place in 1950, working documents were still kept on tables too.352 They can be seen on a table (together with scones and a tea kettle) in a photograph Hunter took in Cromwell Place of the artist.353 The studio dynamics then were presumably more civilized. Hunter’s photographs of an – admittedly small – selection of material show that images were moderately paint-spattered, but neatly cut out and overpainted and that mechanical interventions such as folds played only a minor role. Photographs of the studio at ­Overstrand Mansions from 1957, however, feature books and newspapers in a pitiful state on the ground.354 At some point between 1950 and 1957, most likely after Bacon abandoned Cromwell Place in 1951, the material must have moved to the floor, which opened up revolutionary new options regarding the alteration of images. Maybe some effects, such as folding and crumpling, then started life as true accidents, but Bacon soon understood their creative potential so that he later fostered and facilitated their occurrence, and consciously accepted if not eagerly anticipated and even simulated and repeated these accidental processes to provoke the desired result.355 This time span also coincides with Bacon befriending the photographer Nigel ­Henderson.356 Until then, Bacon had employed more traditional techniques such as overdrawing and made relatively conventional distortions to his painted figures including omissions, bulging and tapering, but it may be speculated that Henderson’s example allowed Bacon to fully grasp the potential of physical, self-referential, process-based interventions to his source material. Henderson himself experimented extensively with photography and

351 Mollie Craven in Farson 1993, p. 36–37. 352 Cf. Hunter 1952, pp. 11–12. 353 Sam Hunter, Francis Bacon in Cromwell Place, 1950, frontispiece in Hammer 2012b. 354 For example, Douglas Glass, Bacon’s Studio in Overstrand Mansions, Battersea, 1957, Harrison 2005a, p. 80, ill. no.73. 355 Cf. Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no. 21, no page numbers. 356 Cf. Martin Harrison, ‘Francis Bacon: Extreme Points of Realism’, in Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real, ed. by Armin Zweite, exh. cat. Düsseldorf: K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2006/2007 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), pp. 37–55, p. 50.

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the photographic process. He created photograms using string, wool, tissue paper,357 debris from bomb sites, bottles, ice, elastic bands, and negatives, or drew on unexposed film.358 He also made so-called ‘stressed photographs’, one of which, The Bathers, c.1953, was found in Bacon’s studio (plate VIII).359 It derived from a single glass lantern slide which Henderson had found in an antique shop.360 Henderson reversed its tonality in the darkroom, tilted the negative and distorted the depicted figure.361 The print was then folded and re-photographed, not unlike Bacon painting folded photographic material.362 Bacon first referenced The Bathers directly in c.1965 in an untitled painting which he destroyed in 1973 (plate IX).363 For this work, he appropriated the stooping figure in the centre of the photograph. Maybe he regretted giving up on this base image and the concept behind it, and decided to start a new attempt, because in the same year he painted Study from the Human Body (Man Turning on Light) whose figure, but even more so its genesis is reminiscent of The Bathers (plate XI). The muscular figure leaning forward to reach a light switch on the canvas in its posture resembles the central figure in Henderson’s photograph, while its legs also echo a Michelangelo drawing (plate X).364 Yet the figure was carefully lifted from a Muybridge study of a pugilist striking a blow365 – including the fold of the source page which resulted in a Henderson-like modification of the working document and in the painted version of the figure in the extraordinary split, or ‘double’ back (plate XII). Bacon, however, probably needed the additional catalyst of moving into Reece Mews to allow such alterations to appear more prominently and openly in his work. Study for Self-Portrait, 1963 is the first surviving painting to feature paint marks resembling those on many studio items. The curious rendering of the subject in Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror, 1968 directly references a fold in a photograph or a book page, maybe a more complete version of a specific fragment of a George Dyer photograph by John Deakin,366 while the reflection in the mirror is reminiscent of torn book pages and photographs. Accidental alterations to the source material produced interesting, new, and un­expected ways of rendering the human figure, which positively undermined any academic ­tradition.

357 Cf. Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson, Parallel of Life and Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), p. 21. 358 Cf. Anthony d’Offay, Nigel Henderson – Paintings, Collages and Photographs, exhibition booklet, ­London: Anthony d’Offay, 1977 (London: Anthony d’Offay, 1977), no page numbers. 359 RM98F23:77: photograph, Nigel Henderson, The Bathers, c.1953, cf. Harrison 2006, pp. 37–55, p. 50. 360 Cf. Harrison 2006, p. 50. 361 Cf. ibid. 362 Cf. ibid. 363 Cf. Harrison 2006, p. 50 and Martin Harrison, ‘Lost Bacons’, in Francis Bacon: Shadows, ed. by Martin Harrison (London: The Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing, supported by Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation Monaco, in association with Thames & Hudson, 2021), Francis Bacon Studies IV, pp.218–241, p. 231. 364 RM98F15:41: Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of Michelangelo (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), p. 285, fig. 406: ‘Nude Seen from the Rear’, 1534 and 1545 (?). 365 RM98F11:91: torn leaf, folded, attached to support, inserted in plastic bag, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion, ((possibly) London: Heinemann, 1901) plate 63, ‘Pugilist. Striking a Blow’. 366 RM98F105:140V: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in a Street in Soho, c.1963.

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Moreover, just as the iconography itself originated from found material not invented by the artist, thus adding the desired artificiality to his art, Bacon, an excessive gambler, relied on luck and chance to modify images. ‘Real imagination is technical imagination’,367 he said, and by letting the passage of time and the studio dynamics take over parts of the creative development of his imagery, Bacon, like Duchamp with his Standard Stoppages, bypassed ‘authorial or artistic agency’.368 Productive Categories The manipulation of photographs by artists is not unheard of in the shared history of photography and art, in fact artists have made alterations to photographs since photography was invented, for instance by adding colour.369 Motivations and manifestations vary, however. Auguste Rodin, for example, used photographs of his own unfinished sculptures to evaluate their progress and to indicate subsequent adjustments.370 Some painters responded to found imagery. It is known that Edvard Munch, James Ensor and George Grosz enhanced picture postcards with their own figures.371 Picasso frequently drew on newspaper cuttings, altering figures and faces, and adding new elements in inventive ways.372 None of these alterations were intended to feed directly into a painting, however, and when Picasso presumably uses a cut-out from a photographic portrait of himself as a stencil for a drawing in a letter to Max Jacob373 this is a rare exception that is of little significance. Gerhard Richter regards his overpainted photographs not as preparatory work but as finished artworks in their own right.374 Another example of a painter working with manipulated photographic material is the German artist Karl Marx.375 Bacon’s treatment and use of photographic material was highly idiosyncratic. It revolved around the mostly found, pre-existing image, which was further developed and ‘improved’ by a number of alterations until it was deemed fit to serve as a basis for the painted iconography. His approach, provoking and embracing unintentional alterations and decay 367 Francis Bacon, interview from Time, New York, 1952, quoted in The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors, ed. by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, exh. cat. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1955; Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1955; Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum, 1956; San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1956 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), p. 60. 368 Iversen 2010, p. 12. 369 Cf. Coke 1981, p. 233. 370 Cf. Musee Rodin, ‘Rodin and Photography’, Musee Rodin, [n.d.] [accessed 5 July 2021]. 371 Cf. Arne Eggum, Munch and Photography (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 150– 151. 372 Cf. Baldassari 1997, e.g. p. 239, fig. 268, and p. 215, fig. 247. 373 Cf. Baldassari 1996, p. 204: Pablo Picasso, drawing on letter to Max Jacob, July 1902. 374 As such they are exhibited and discussed, for example in Gerhard Richter: Übermalte Fotografien, ed. by Markus Heinzelmann, pubd. in relation to the exhibition of the same name, Leverkusen: ­Museum Morsbroich, 2008; Geneva: Centre de la photographie Genève, 2009 (Hatje Cantz: Ostfildern-Ruit 2008). 375 Cf. Karl Marx: Skizzenbücher 1955–1998, ed. by Dieter Bachmann, special edn (Cologne: Salon, 2007).

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during this process, has neither precedent nor parallel. The extent, intensity, and consistency with which photographic material was changed and manipulated, and then fed into painted subjects, is singular in the history of art. Most importantly, Bacon’s practice stands apart for making distorting, sometimes drastic structural changes to the figure, which anticipated the distortions and the undermining of naturalistic figuration in the painted iconography. Here, Bacon put his own twist on the traditional use of photographs by painters, and perverted its original role as supplier of figurative accuracy and detail. The following paragraphs will delineate how Bacon’s working documents were altered and manipulated. I will divide techniques and processes into three loose categories. The first category comprises the alterations and manipulations that directly affect the rendering of the figure, the second those that affect other elements of the source image, and the third those which do not have an immediate effect on the image at all. These are no strict and dogmatic divisions, however, and often different intentions and results overlap, intersect, and coalesce. The Figure Alterations in the figure often profoundly ruptured its integrity. The antithesis to traditional anatomical drawing, meant to ‘help the artist investigate the structure of the body and its musculature,’376 Bacon used the book pages and photographs to seek out and implement ways of dismembering and distorting it. One frequently used device is the isolation of a detail, which Bacon accomplished using a variety of techniques. The artist drew attention to the crotch of a wrestler in a Muybridge study by encircling the area in pen (figure 13), and achieved the same in another frame by overpainting everything but a circular area containing parts of the torso and the arm of a pugilist with dark paint.377 In other cases a detail is created by physical interventions to the item, for instance by folding a colour photograph of Gilbert de Botton horizontally in half.378 On several occasions Bacon focussed on the body and its posture by disguising the head and face, folding back the edges of a torn leaf from a publication on the Greek museums, so that the heads of two Ancient nude male sculptures were omitted.379 A similar result was achieved by covering the face of dancer Nathalie Million in a photograph published in the book L’Esquisse380 and a cricket player whose picture features in An Illustrated History of Australian Cricket with brown Sellotape381 376 Hartt 1971, p. 19. 377 RM98F112:44: Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901), p. 217, ‘Some Phases in a Wrestling Match’; RM98F8:19: Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), lower half of plate 64, ‘Man Shadow Boxing’. 378 RM98F1:35: colour photograph, unknown photographer, Gilbert de Botton, 1980s. 379 RM98F24:39: torn leaf from Manolis Andronicos, Manolis Chatzidakis and Vassos Karageorghis: The Greek Museums (Athens: Ekdotike Athenon SA, 1975), plate 60–61. 380 RM98F1:64: torn leaf, Joelle Bouvier and Regis Obadia, ‘L’Esquisse’, (Paris: Collection Angle d’Ailes, 1991), plate 60, Delahaye, Nathalie Million in ‘La Chambre’, 1988. 381 RM98F16:214F: fragment of leaf, R.S. Whitington, An Illustrated History of Australian Cricket (London: Pelham, 1972), p. 92.

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13  RM98F112:44: Eadweard Muybridge, The Human in Motion (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901), p. 217, ‘Some Phases in a Wrestling Match’.

(figure 14), a practice reminiscent of the omission of the head of the seated figure in Figure in a Landscape, 1945. The effect becomes more powerful when pictorial elements are physically isolated. In three photographs of Dyer taken by Deakin, Bacon, in a dramatic gesture, vertically cut the figure of his lover and muse in half.382 Likewise, the upper and lower half of a profile photograph of the actor John Barrymore reproduced in Close-Ups from the Golden Age of the Silent Cinema383 were separated from each other. Often, the focus is more condensed, laying the emphasis on the positioning of limbs, such as in two fragments from The ­Drawings of Michelangelo384 torn from the rest of the leaves in such a way that only the 382 RM98F17:110, RM98F17:108, RM98F17:112: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964. 383 RM98F234:4: fragment of page, John Richard, Paul Elby and Roland Liot, Close-Ups from the Golden Age of the Silent Cinema from the fabulous Jorifin Collection (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1978), pp. 315– 316. 384 RM98F130:123ver: fragment of torn leaf, Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of Michelangelo (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), pp. 55–56; RM98F130:168: fragment of torn leaf, Frederick Hartt, The

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14  RM98F16:214F: fragment of leaf, R.S. Whitington, An ­Illustrated History of Australian Cricket (London: Pelham, 1972), p. 92.

striding legs of two figure studies are left. Near vertical folds frame the limbs and further strengthen the emphasis. Another example is a photograph Deakin made of Dyer which disintegrated to a point at which only Dyer’s crossed legs remained in the centre of an irregular fragment (figure 71).385 The compartmentalisation can become even more granular. One fragment features a single leg from a page with a reproduction of a Michelangelo study while from another Deakin photograph of Henrietta Moraes, only parts of her face are left (figure 15).386 While some interventions, for instance encircling, are clearly deliberate, others may have been accidental, or partly accidental. For example, Bacon probably consciously altered the leaf from Close-Ups from the Golden Age of the Silent Cinema, since the fold is precisely horizontal and divides the page in even halves. In contrast, the print of Dyer cross-legged was probably simply frequently handled, folded, thrown back on the floor and picked up again. In both cases, the strain to the item caused material fatigue and ultimately led to the loss of physical elements at an incalculable moment in time, and, in the case of the Deakin fragment, resulted in an unpredictable shape. These alterations come with a number of implications. They establish a selective emphasis on a particular element in the figure, a posture or a gaze, which, when actively created, indicates a strong interest by the artist. Accidental fragmentation was allowed presumably in the hope of stumbling across a new idea. As such, the cuttings, snippets, and fragments of photographic material in the studio may for Bacon have had the same significance as studies of hands, limbs, and other details had for traditional painters from Michelangelo to Delacroix.387 And yet, those fragments did not start life as details but were extracted Drawings of Michelangelo (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), pp. 69 and 70. 385 RM98F233:1: fragment of photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964. 386 RM98F24:74: fragment of photograph, John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes in the French House pub, Soho, late 1950s; RM98F105:139N: fragment of leaf, Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of Michelangelo (­London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), pp. 55–56. 387 Cf. Harrap’s Ilustrated Dictionary of Art & Artists, ed. by Diana Davies (London: Harrap, 1990), p. 524.

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15  RM98F24:74: fragment of photograph, John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes in the French House pub, Soho, late 1950s, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

from an intact image. A naturalistic rendering of the figure is distinctively undermined here by dismantling and detaching a detail from its anatomical context. This deconstruction of pre-existing figures is pivotal for the further journey of the pictorial elements. It cultivates the found image part as a building block in a fragmentary appropriation practice, in which figures were freely constructed from a variety of formal starting points.388 The interest in splintered and ‘damaged’ images may for Bacon have laid in the tension between the compromised and the whole, as is indicated by his comments on Ancient Art. On several occasions, he underlined how much he cherished the Elgin Marbles, and the head of the Egyptian king Sesostris III, because ‘it’s the difference between the very grand and clear head with this ambiguity which is added by the way the nose in fact has been broken’,389 which has given it another ‘facet, another depth in a way, another layer’.390 As previously pointed out, Head, 1956 derived from a photographic illustration of the battered plaster mask of King Akhnaton at the Ägyptisches Museum, Berlin.391 Just like a skin disease, it is the visibility of the imperfection, the open vulnerability and the decay, or, to quote from Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orpheus, ‘death at work’,392 which attracted the artist. The same may have applied to the source material which already came in ‘fragments’, which includes many of the illustrations of the Michelangelo studies, and the photographic details in books such as How to Judge Character from the Face.393

388 Cf. Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no. 197, no page numbers. 389 HKA: Folder TGA 2008/16/16/4/2/9 ‘Bacon Interviews IIIc’, ‘October 1973 IIIC’, p. 27. 390 Beard 1975, p. 15. 391 RM98F105:91: Kurt Lange, König Echnaton und die Amarna-Zeit: Die Geschichte eines Gottkünders (Munich: Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliches Lichtbild, 1951), ‘23 Echnaton. Gips. Berlin’. 392 In Jean Cocteau’s 1950 movie Orpheus, the character Heurtebise observes that ‘You only have to watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you will see death at work like bees in a glass hive’. Bacon (mis-) quoted Cocteau in Sylvester 2009, p. 133. 393 RM98F238:2: Jacques Penry, How to Judge Character from the Face: A Complete Explanation of Character as it is Shown by the Size, Proportion and Texture of Each Feature (London: Hutchinson, 1952).

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16  RM98F16:221F: torn leaf from unidentified magazine, photographic illustration of Lee ­Harvey Oswald’s assassination by Jack Ruby, c.1963, ­collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

Folds in the material alter the proportions of depicted bodies and faces, and change the positioning of anatomical elements. In a mechanical reproduction of the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination by Robert Jackson from 1963 on a torn leaf from a magazine,394 the homicide detective Jim Leavelle, handcuffed to Oswald, is captured leaning back in surprise and terror when Kennedy’s assassin is shot (figure 16). Multiple folds emphasise this effect and move the man’s shoulder further behind the centre of gravity while also further bowing the head, which results in an extreme S-shape. In a colour photograph on a torn page from Paris Match,395 a white horse on an Irish country estate is distorted almost, but only almost, to unrecognizability by folds: the front of its head is missing, just like the lower part of its raised leg, and the neck and chest are radically condensed. The omission of parts of the image is a regular consequence of folds. In a photographic print of Dyer by Deakin,396 a fold considerably reduced the width of the sitter’s nose and led to the eyes being closer to one another. Folding can also lead to the sometimes-­ curious combination of separate images, which were originally on different sides of a leaf, or in different positions on the same page. A fragment of a page from How to Judge Character

394 RM98F16:221F: torn leaf from unidentified magazine, photographic illustration of Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination by Jack Ruby, c.1963. 395 RM98NF79: leaf from French magazine Paris Match, 23 July 1966. 396 RM98F17:162: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in a Street in Soho, c.1963.

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17  RM98F1:3: torn leaf, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300, illustration of Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

from the Face397 with close-up photographs of human eyes is folded overleaf so that the eye on the verso of the page is now positioned in a 90-degree angle to the one on the recto. Finke observed that a number of items in the studio were manipulated in the same way: the lower part of a book page or photographic print are folded and sometimes fixed so that they form a triangular ‘handle’.398 He concluded that the aim of this technique was to create a working tool that was stable and easy to hold up.399 While this technique may have had practical reasons, it also affected the depicted image. For example, the lower part of a leaf with a reproduction of Velázquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X 400 is folded like the lower part of a fan. Some of these folds were fixed with paper clips, and folds in the upper part have made the figure of the pope narrower (figure 17). Anatomical elements were moved and shifted in manners similar to the effects of folding on the studio items in paintings such as Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud (sideways), 1971 and the best-known direct adoption of distortions from folds occurs in the appropriation of a nude from Muybridge’s ‘Woman

397 RM98F130:173: fragment of leaf, Jacques Penry, How to Judge Character from the Face: A Complete Explanation of Character as it is Shown by the Size, Proportion and Texture of Each Feature (London: Hutchinson, 1952), plate D-6 and D-7. 398 Cf. Finke 2009a, p. 129. 399 Cf. ibid. 400 RM98F1:3: torn leaf, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300: illustration of Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650; cf. also: RM98F17:98, RM98F16:262.

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­ ichard, 18  RM98F90:8: fragment of page, John R Paul Elby and Roland Liot, Close-Ups from the Golden Age of the Silent Cinema from the fabulous Jorifin Collection (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1978), p. 316, photographic illustration of actress Mildred Davis, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

19  RM98F1:19, RM98F16:299F (reassembled): fragments of photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the living area of Reece Mews, c.1965, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

Walking Downstairs, Picking up Pitcher, and Turning’401 in the left panel of Crucifixion, 1965, which deconstructed the body of the subject and made it look as though it collapsed into itself (figure 60). A highly powerful means of sabotaging figuration are tears and cuts, because they not only bend but interrupt anatomical coherence. Moreover, once a part of a figure is detached from the rest, it gains a certain freedom of movement. Like in Cubistic distortion of anatomy, a black and white photographic reproduction of film star Mildred Davis is torn and folded over in such a way that the mouth ends up in a vertical position parallel to her nose (figure 18), and two parts of Moraes’ shin in a photographic print by Deakin are shifted against each other so that the lower part is now positioned higher up, as if originating directly from the back of her thigh.402 This is not unlike the rendering of the legs in Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe, 1968, and the incoherent assemblage of body parts in Triptych, 1970. Bacon tore a gelatin silver print of Dyer in the living area of 401 RM98F105:147: torn leaf, overpainted, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 124: ‘Woman Walking Downstairs, Picking up Pitcher, and Turning’. 402 RM98F90:8: fragment of page, John Richard, Paul Elby and Roland Liot, Close-Ups from the Golden Age of the Silent Cinema from the fabulous Jorifin Collection (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1978), p. 316, photographic illustration of actress Mildred Davis, lower half of RM98F234:4; RM98F130:179: photograph, John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961.

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20  Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Portraits (including Self-Portrait), 1969, oil on canvas. Triptych, each panel: 35.5 × 30.5 cm, private collection, Switzerland.

Reece Mews into small fragments, but later reassembled and fixed them with transparent tape (figure 19).403 The dented and battered faces, actually depicting Bruce Bernard and Denis Wirth Miller, in the left and centre panel of Three Studies for Portraits (including SelfPortrait), 1969, are a direct result of this treatment (figure 20).404 Collages are rare among the studio contents. Only two items emerged in which fragments of disparate images were combined in an attempt to formulate a new figure, but both are only held together with pins so that the collage can be dismantled at any point to keep the dynamics of the image bank going. None of them seem to have led to a known painting. One consists of a photographic reproduction of ‘Papa’ Jimmy Yancey from A ­Pictorial History of Jazz, pinned together with a reproduction of Rembrandt’s Self-­ Portrait at the ­Easel, 1660 (figure 21).405 Bacon matched up the two halves of Yancey’s and ­Rembrandt’s face but the result remains uneasy and incohesive. On another occasion the artist combined two images from Positioning in Radiography with a safety pin.406 While the legs were attached to the torso in a manner that was anatomically coherent, their dimensions clash. Similar to tearing and cutting, the collage detaches a pictorial element from its original figurative context but also combines it with a new, alien counterpart so that the most prominent effect here must be the destruction of a clear identity and a whole, unified body image. 403 RM98F1:19, RM98F16:299F (reassembled): fragments of photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the living area of Reece Mews, c.1965. 404 Cf. Finke 2009a, p. 131. 405 RM98F129:50: fragments of pages, Tancred Borenius, Rembrandt: Selected Paintings, 3rd edn (­London: Phaidon, 1952), plate 79, illustration of Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait at the Easel, 1660, and Orrin Keepnews and Bill Brauer Jnr., A Pictorial History of Jazz (London: Robert Hale Limited, 1955), pp. 79–80, see Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no. 163, no page numbers. 406 RM98F112:65: fragments from K.C. Clark, Positioning in Radiography (London: Heinemann, 1939) joined together with safety pin.

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21  RM98F129:50: fragments of pages, Tancred Borenius, Rembrandt: Selected Paintings, 3rd edn (London: Phaidon, 1952), plate 79, illustration of Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait at the Easel, 1660, and Orrin Keepnews and Bill Brauer Jnr., A Pictorial History of Jazz (London: Robert Hale Limited, 1955), pp. 79–80, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

Numerous working documents are covered in thick, single blots of paint, a carpet of tiny speckles, smudgy dashes and smears, and powdery pigment marks in an array of colours. Once on a leaf, it is impossible to separate the paint mark from the depicted scene, but the blots and dots, spatters and dashes interact with the image, and with it form a new entity. Like visual parasites they corrode the image by merging with it. As alien, abstract stumbling blocks, they sabotage the reading of pictorial content, blur and undermine features and outlines, and deform the figure. As such, conceptually they are the direct predecessors of the ‘non-rational’407 marks Bacon implemented on the canvas. Countless blots, strokes and smears in purple, yellow, blue, red and grey cover a fragile fragment of a reproduction of a filmic close up of the moment in the Odessa step scene in Sergei ­Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, 1925 when the woman is shot.408 Barely an inch of the leaf is spared, and the right eye and cheek of the screaming woman is only just recognisable under the blots and dashes. Together with multiple folds and tears, they forcefully shift the image towards an existence as a new pictorial entity only loosely reminiscent of the original. In other cases, paint marks undermine the shape of a depicted body and dissolve its boundaries. In a small photograph of Peter Lacy, a green blot reaches from the outside into his right shoulder and arm (figure 22), while a grey dash flattens the top of the head, and a yellow one penetrates the shoulder of a nude in the centre of a colour reproduction of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ Le Bain turc, 1862.409 The fingerprints on the edges of 407 Sylvester 2009, p. 58. 408 RM98F12:13: page torn from unknown French movie magazine, film-still of the screaming woman from Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, mounted on brown card. 409 RM98F130:167: photograph, mounted on torn leaf, Francis Bacon, Peter Lacy, c. early 1950s, William S. Smith, History of Egyptian Sculpture and Painting, published on behalf of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (London: The Oxford University Press, Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1949); RM98F232:1ver: torn leaf,

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22  RM98F130:167: photograph, ­mounted on torn leaf, Francis Bacon, Peter Lacy, c. ­early 1950s, William S. Smith, History of ­Egyptian Sculpture and Painting, ­published on behalf of the Museum of Fine Arts ­Boston (­London: The Oxford University Press, ­Geoffrey Cumber­lege, 1949), (detail), ­collection: ­Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

items can have a similar effect, so that the body of the reclining nude on the right side of the illustration is half obscured by multiple layers of paint.410 Sometimes, paint blots outright annihilate parts of a figure, such as the left leg of a Muybridge wrestler reproduced in a Bacon exhibition catalogue.411 Other blots subvert the figure’s rendering within its outlines, such as red and green marks on Dyer’s nose and below his eye in a black and white print by Deakin.412 As extrinsic elements which are unrelated to the sitter’s anatomy, they disturb the truthful figuration conveyed by the photograph. Some marks are so prominent and bold that they compete with the figure in the pictorial space, for example a large blot of white paint on a photograph of Bacon by Henri Cartier-Bresson.413 They may develop shapes so suggestive that they almost become equal to a figure and take its place within a composition, an example of which is the organic black splash on a book page with a photograph of a Nazi Nuremberg rally, which in this instance may have triggered the idea of using the image as a background for a number of figures, including the animal in Dog, 1952 (figure 56 and 57).414 While most

mounted, The Art Foundation Colourprints, series II (French Painting since 1800) No. 1, colour photographic illustration of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Le Bain Turc, 1862. 410 RM98F232:1ver: torn leaf, mounted, The Art Foundation Colourprints, series II (French Painting since 1800) No. 1, colour photographic illustration of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Le Bain Turc, 1862. 411 RM98F149:18: torn leaf, John Rothenstein, Francis Bacon, The Masters, LXXI ([n.p.]: Knowledge ­Publications, 1967), ‘3. Wrestling Men Illustration from ‘The Human Figure in Motion’ by Eadweard Muybridge’. 412 RM98F17:75: colour photograph of George Dyer, 1960s, RM98F1A:184: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in a Street in Soho, c.1963. 413 RM98F22:88: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Francis Bacon in his Studio, 1971. 414 RM98F105:64: David Churchill Somervell, 100 Years in Pictures: A Panorama of History in the Making (London: Odhams Press, 1951), p. 26, ‘1936 Nazi Rally at Nuremberg’.

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23  RM98F93:2: cover, Jean Charbonneaux, Les Sculptures de Rodin (Paris: Fernan Hazan, 1949), collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

paint marks are likely accidental by-products of the painting process, some, for instance on a photographic reproduction of a Hercules statue by Michelangelo, might have been applied deliberately.415 This supports the earlier hypothesis that originally random alterations were mimicked and integrated into Bacon’s range of techniques. A variety of elements in Bacon’s paintings in their appearance and effect resemble the paint marks on the studio items. Bacon adopted their power to subvert and disturb plain illustration and figuration, but, by thoughtfully integrating them in the composition, deliberately employing and carefully staging them, tamed their accidental nature and turned them into highly effective, idiosyncratic stylistic devices. Small black spatters of paint are arranged exclusively around the dark rectangle framing the head of the figure in Study for Self-­Portrait, 1964. In the left panel of Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, 1964 some larger blots affect, and bond together, the figure, the seating device, and the ground. Single, thick, usually white dashes of paint on top of the otherwise completed painting start featuring prominently in the 1960s. In works such as Studies of the Human Body in Motion, 1970 they are reminiscent of, for example, a long, thin drop of light pink paint next to a photographic reproduction of Rodin’s The Bronze Age (figure 23).416 Some

415 RM98BC27: torn leaf, Martin Weinberger, Michelangelo: The Sculptor (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul and New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), figs 69.1, 69.2, and 70, cf. Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no. 21, no page numbers. 416 RM98F93:2: cover, Jean Charbonneaux, Les Sculptures de Rodin (Paris: Fernan Hazan, 1949).

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24  75-04, Francis Bacon, Three S­ tudies for a Portrait of Peter Beard, 1975, oil on canvas. Triptych, each panel: 35.5 × 30.5 cm, private collection.

25  RM98F8:62: torn leaf, Francis Bacon, exh. cat. (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1985; Berlin: Nationalgalerie, 1986), ill. ­nos. 91–92, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

paint marks may have directly informed a painting. In a photograph of Bacon by Cecil ­Beaton from 1960,417 Bacon’s right eye is disguised by a gestural, dark smear of paint, which reappears in Head, 1962, where a black stroke of paint leads from the right eye up towards the top of the head. 417 Cecil Beaton, Francis Bacon in the Battersea studio, 1960, paint spattered and crumpled, illustrated: Peppiatt 2006a, cover image (softback edition).

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26  RM98F16:232: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964, ­collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

In some cases, Bacon seemed to have further cleaned up the wild, fortuitous aesthetics of the blots and developed them into a more sophisticated painterly element, for instance the black circles on Gilbert de Botton’s chin and throat in Study for a Portrait of Gilbert de Botton, 1986 (figure 49). They may resemble accidental paint marks like those on a reproduction of Freud’s portrait of Bacon,418 yet were not thrown or dripped onto the canvas but were carefully painted. (75-04) Three Studies for a Portrait of Peter Beard, 1975 and (75-05) Three Studies for a Portrait of Peter Beard, 1975 feature similar black and white circular additions (figure 24). Seeing paint spattered on reproductions of these works torn from an exhibition catalogue found at Reece Mews419 is a poignant reminder of the origin of the effect, and of the transient life of images in the studio (figure 25). Some treatment left holes in the physical item. A gelatin silver print by Deakin showing Freud in his atelier420 was folded diagonally across the left shoulder of the sitter. The item tore apart next to this fold, and a fragment of the print folded over itself, resulting in an oblong hole absorbing parts of Freud’s shoulder and arm. Probably due to excessive crumpling and folding, a photographic print showing Dyer in Reece Mews by the same photographer421 was torn in various places (figure 26). As a consequence, a triangular piece of the print was 418 RM98F16:25: torn leaf, John Rothenstein, Francis Bacon, The Masters, LXXI ([n.p.]: Knowledge ­Publications, 1967), pp. 5–6, illustration of Lucian Freud, Portrait of Francis Bacon, 1952.­ 419 RM98F8:62: torn leaf, Francis Bacon, exh. cat. (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1985; Berlin: ­National­galerie, 1986), ill. nos. 91–92. 420 RM98F112:08: John Deakin, Lucian Freud in his studio, c.1960s. 421 RM98F16:232: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964.

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27  RM98F1:21: photograph, unknown ­ hoto­grapher, Francis Bacon in Reece Mews, p late 1970s–1980s, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

28  Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait, 1987, oil and aerosol paint on canvas, 35.5 × 30.5 cm, private collection, New York.

lost from where Dyer’s eyes are placed in the image. The positioning suggests that Bacon may have triggered or supported this alteration. Some alterations hover between two- and three-dimensionality and concern the surface texture of an item. Not only the actual folds but their traces on the material alter the appearance of an image. They leave thin white lines where the printed surface has broken to reveal the supporting material, and sometimes cover the image like anti-illustrational spider webs, thwarting and foiling figuration. A leaf torn from Claude Roger-Marx’s 1960 Rembrandt monograph showing Self-Portrait at the Easel, c.1660422 is criss-crossed by numerous traces of folding, which ‘add other implications to an image of Rembrandt […] which are not Rembrandt’s’.423 The surface of items such as a colour portrait photograph of Bacon in Reece Mews is affected by crumpling and creasing (figure 27).424 As a result, the surface bulges and reflects light in unexpected ways, subdividing the surface and distorting the face, an effect Bacon may have emulated in the highlights around the chin and the mouth in its painted counterpart, Self-Portrait, 1987, and perhaps in his use of aerosol

422 RM98F130:122: torn leaf, Claude Roger-Marx, Rembrandt (New York: Universe Books, 1960), p. 319, fig. 141. 423 Sylvester 2009, p. 38. 424 RM98F1:21: photograph, unknown photographer, Francis Bacon in Reece Mews, late 1970s–1980s.

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29  RM98F16:9: photograph, John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

30  Francis Bacon, Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho, 1967, oil on ­canvas, 198 × 147 cm, collection: Staatliche Museen ­Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

spray paint, which creates an equally fidgety surface (figure 28). New visual implications are added to the image which are at odds with the precise and truthful rendering of the subject in the photograph. Original photographic prints are more susceptible to surface losses, it seems, as can be seen in a likeness of Rawsthorne photographed by Deakin (figure 29).425 Harrison observed that a seemingly random white dash in Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho, 1967 references the surface abrasion on this item (figure 30).426 The aim of some deliberate treatment seems to have been to preserve alterations to the figure, which underlines their great significance for the artist. Many of the folds and tears are held in place with the help of paper clips. In a photographic print of Freud by Deakin427 these alterations obscure half of the sitter’s body and face. A page torn from a catalogue of

425 RM98F16:9: photograph, John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964. I re-dated this series of photographs to c.1964 because the rendering of the head of the subject, especially its turn, in Study for Portrait (Isabel Rawsthorne), 1964, bears a striking resemblance to Deakin’s photographs of Rawsthorne and how she is portrayed in the first paintings of her, for which it is believed that Deakin’s photographs served as a pictorial starting point, such as Three Studies for Portrait of Isabel ­Rawsthorne, 1965, see Harrison 2016a, p. 779. 426 Cf. Harrison 2009b, p. 162. 427 RM98F24:70: John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964.

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Bacon’s own work showing an illustration of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe, 1963428 was mounted on a piece of cardboard without, however, mending the tear in the paper leading through the hip and right leg of the figure. The folds in a page with the Muybridge motion sequence ‘Pugilist. Striking a Blow’,429 which informed Study from the Human Body (Man Turning on Light), were secured with special care (plate XI and XII). The fold was held in place at the bottom of the page with a small paper clip, which also attached the page to a cardboard support. A second, larger paper clip also fixed it to the support. The whole item was then inserted into a transparent plastic bag – maybe in the hopes of achieving additional effects. The item was then fixed to the bag on the outside with a third, large paper clip. Few wilful modifications such as drawings or overpaintings affect the figure in the surviving images from Bacon’s atelier other than creating a focus and hinting at its fragmentation. Among the handful of exceptions is a folded fragment of a photograph of Moraes by Deakin, on which Bacon changed the course of the sitter’s collar bone with a curvy line, while another is the reproduction of a Michelangelo drawing, in which the artist altered the positioning of the glutes with two cone-shaped lines.430 Furthermore, Bacon framed one out of two Muybridge wrestlers in blue paint thus, that, while his arms embracing the second wrestler remain visible, his head was omitted. On a double exposure of Dyer’s head in a Deakin photograph,431 Bacon covered one of the two options with paint, indicating the one he must have preferred. The alterations in the appearance of the figure caused by overpainting a photographic reproduction of the boxer Max Schmeling432 informed the figure in the right panel of Crucifixion, 1965 (figure 59 and 61). And yet, judging from the items unearthed from Reece Mews in 1998, for the most important element in Bacon’s painting, the figure, he seemed to have reserved the most unconventional accidental and physical alterations, to achieve unpredictable, startling contortions and a maximum degree of novelty. Other Pictorial Elements Many alterations do not concern the structure of the figures themselves but have an impact on their pictorial context. Bacon vertically folded back both outer edges of a photograph of himself by Deakin, and framed an Oryx with two vertical green brushstrokes in a p ­ hotograph

428 RM98F16:6: torn leaf, mounted on support, Francis Bacon, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. ­Guggenheim Museum, 1963), p. 72, iIllustration of Francis Bacon, Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe, 1963. 429 RM98F11:91: torn leaf, folded, attached to support, inserted in plastic bag, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901), plate 63, ‘Pugilist. Striking a Blow’. 430 RM9817:124: fragment of photograph, John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961, RM98NF112: unknown book on Michelangelo Buonarroti, p. TAV. CCXXX. 431 RM98F1A:80: torn leaf, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901), ‘Some Phases of a Wrestling Match See Series 20’; RM98F15:70A: John Deakin, Lucian Freud in his studio, c.1960s. 432 RM98F130:170: torn leaf, overpainted, Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of Boxing (London: Spring Books, 1959), no page numbers.

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31  RM98F110:24: torn leaf, overpainted, A. Radclyffe ­Dugmore, Camera Adventures in the African Wilds (London: ­William Heinemann, 1920), p. 139, ­collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

published in Camera Adventures in the African Wilds (figure 31).433 In both cases, the background is marked as less significant, directing the attention to the figure. These interventions are comparable to the artist physically separating his own from John Edwards’ figure in a black and white photograph434 by tearing it in half. The same result is achieved when parts of a composition are obscured. For example, in a picture of two men in an open-top car from an unidentified French magazine435 everything but a rectangular space around the two figures is covered in green paint. Bacon overpainted the entire background of a page torn from the 3D children’s book Adventures in Wildest Africa: On a Big Game

433 RM98F16:39: 1960s, B&W photograph of Francis Bacon in a trench coat; RM98F110:24: torn leaf, overpainted, A. Radclyffe Dugmore, Camera Adventures in the African Wilds (London: William ­Heinemann, 1920), p. 139. 434 RM98F11:10: fragment of B&W photograph of John Edwards walking in the street, photograph from London Weekend Television documentary on Francis Bacon. 435 RM98F16:295R: fragment of leaf torn from unknown French book, black and white photographic illustration of an early 20th century car.

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32  RM98F129F: torn leaf, overpainted J. E. Burns, Adventures in Wildest Africa: On a Big Game Hunting Expedition (London: Walker & Sons, 1949), p. 6, ill. no. 3, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

Hunting Expedition436 following the curved line created by the top of the heads of a group of people (figure 32). As pointed out earlier, a similarly modified page formed the base of Figure Getting out of a Car, which features the car in the foreground of the photographic source but nothing else.437 An extreme version of isolating pictorial elements is cut-outs. Eight stencils were found in the studio, including full figures, heads and arrows.438 Paint marks around the edges of, for example, a profile of Dyer from a Deakin print439 which informed many paintings including Study for Head of George Dyer, 1967, suggest that the artist traced his partner’s silhouette from the stencil on the canvas, possibly, as indicated by pinholes in the working document, while it was attached to the canvas. Since Bacon never squared up his working documents and canvases, these are the only instances in which we can immediately follow the transposition from source image to painted subject. Such technical shortcuts are not unprecedented in the history of painting and Bacon’s procedure might be compared to, for example, projecting a photograph440 or, before its invention, a shadow silhouette onto the canvas.441 One might reason that following the shape of a face with scissors or a knife could be a fruitful method of exploring and studying its form. Yet the imprecise and rough nature of Bacon’s stencils contradicts this idea, as does his rendering of the respective ­figure. In 436 RM98F129F: torn leaf, overpainted J. E. Burns, Adventures in Wildest Africa: On a Big Game Hunting Expedition (London: Walker & Sons, 1949), p. 6, ill. no. 3. 437 Cf. Stephens 2008, p. 92. 438 RM98F107:28: photograph, documentary film stock, ‘Francis Bacon’, prod. and dir. by David ­Hinton, ed. by and with Melvyn Bragg interview, for The South Bank Show, London Weekend Television, 1985. RM98F130:82: cut-out from photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in a Street in Soho, c.1963; RM98F105:68: Peter Hill Beard, The End of the Game (Glasgow: William Collins and Son, 1977), p. 63; RM98F8:131A: cut-out of photograph, Peter Stark, Francis Bacon, c.1974. 439 RM98F130:82: cut-out from photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in a Street in Soho, c.1963. 440 Cf. Scharf 1979, p. 57. 441 Cf. Gombrich 1989, p. 6.

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Study for Head of George Dyer, Bacon deviates wildly from its shape by introducing protruding lips – or scar tissue – and by omitting the entire back of the head. The stencil thus only delivered a loose idea of the shape and proportions of Dyer’s head. Interventions in a photo­graphic item according to the methods described above did not add to the face or body itself: their most prominent effect was the full focus on, and also the narrative isolation of the figure by depreciating or annihilating its pictorial context. This is logical as Bacon himself declared that the human figure was his main interest. Alternatively, Bacon also took a found picture as a starting point to create a new, or considerably altered spatial setting. So-called ‘space-frames’, linear rectangular structures which evoke an often-compromised sense of perspective and enclosure, are a signature motif in Bacon’s paintings from 1949 onwards. Similar cubical devices can be found on several items from the image bank, but two of them might be of special significance. One intervention is likely contemporaneous with and another one probably predates the feature’s first occurrence on the canvas. As pointed out before, Bacon painted a rectangular structure on a photogravure plate from Peoples of all Nations from 1922–1924 ,442 which created a more symmetrical perspective and a focus on the umbrella. All these characteristics were then adopted in Painting 1946 (plate I and II). The space-frame itself does not feature in Painting 1946, however, and may in this case only have served as a technical tool, employed during the preparation of the work. A few years later, Bacon enclosed two women in a detention camp, one of them carrying a baby, with the same device on the page torn from Il Mondo Cambia. Storia di Cinquant’anni discussed before.443 The book was published in 1949, the year Bacon started experimenting with the first detached space-frames in works such as Head IV (Man with a Monkey) and Head VI, which makes this item a potential catalyst for the decision to use them openly in his finished works. Although it has to be underlined that the drawings on the book pages themselves cannot conclusively be dated, this potential chronology allows for interesting speculations: it is possible that the use of space-frames on found imagery predated their appearance in Bacon’s painting. It has been argued in the past that the device was inspired by a working process:444 Harrison suggested that the frames ‘bear a close resemblance to the Chinagraph markings that photographers employ on their contact prints to indicate the precise area of the negative that requires enlargement,’445 an idea which is supported by Bacon’s statement to ‘cut down the scale of the canvas by drawing in these rectangles which concentrate

442 RM98F1:23: torn leaf, over-drawn and mounted on support, Peoples of all Nations: Their Life Today and Story of their Past, ed. by J.A. Hammerton, 7 vols (London: The Fleetway House, 1922–1924), I, p. 147. 443 RM98F16:295F: torn leaf, overpainted, Leo Longanesi, Il Mondo Cambia. Storia di Cinquant’anni (­Milan: Rizzoli, 1949). 444 Of course, plenty of other stimuli are conceivable for the emergence of the device, ranging from ­Giacometti’s wire frames to photographs published in Picture Post, see, for example, Daniels 2009a, p. 76. 445 Harrison 2005b, p. 95.

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the image down’.446 Among the material unearthed from Reece Mews are several contact sheets with markings either pointing out a single frame or a detail of a shot.447 Two photographs of Peter Lacy from the 1950s illustrate Bacon’s familiarity with this technique too. In one of them,448 Lacy’s figure was framed in pen to indicate the area which was to be enlarged, like on a contact sheet. This area was then re-photographed including parts of the original pencil frame – both items now carry precursory space-frames.449 Thus, the motif may initially have merely been an instrument for Bacon to further develop the composition of found images. But, inspired by the technique’s power to condense and focus an image, later the process itself – as with so many other elements in Bacon’s art – entered the art and the tool took centre stage as painted stylistic device. Bacon continued to use space-frames in his preparatory work. A Cinerama premiere programme from 1952450 featuring the image of a man in a suit is interrupted by numerous vertical stripes typical for this screening technique. It appears that Bacon first drew another space-frame on the found image in blue paint and only later filled in the resulting outer planes with a dark blue paint. The distinct night blue, the vertical stripes, the presence of a linear cube, combined with a man wearing a suit, together with the date of the image is likely to make this manipulated image a starting point for the Men in Blue-series of 1953 and 1954.451 It reverberates strongly in the works Study for a Portrait, 1953, End of the Line from 1953, and Study for Figure V, 1956, amongst others. Curved spaces, sometimes determined by railings, are a familiar feature in many paintings, such as Study for Portrait on Folding Bed, 1963. These spatial situations were practiced with the help of the studio material too. With two simple parallel, semi-circular brushstrokes on a photograph of Ad Reinhardt sitting on a ladder in front of his paintings,452 Bacon transposed the figure into a typically artificial, rounded space. Another similar sketched setting is oddly detached from the related picture. Bacon drew railings, a plinth and a platform on a photograph of British soldiers in a WWI trench, published in The Great War: 1914–1918, A Pictorial History,453 but neither seem to relate to any of the depicted figures or the pre-­ existing space (figure 33). If anything, the two parallel railings are similar in their positioning within the composition to the bridge in Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny, which features

446 Bacon quoted in Sylvester 2000, p. 40. 447 Cf. e.g. RM98F15:18: black and white photographic contact sheet, Francis Bacon, 22 October 1971–25 October 1971, RM98F100:6: fragment, black and white photographic contact sheet, two semi nude wrestlers, date unknown. 448 RM98F22:64: Peter Lacy in North Africa, c.1950s. 449 RM981A:147: Peter Lacy in North Africa, c.1950s. 450 RM98F17:109: Cinerama premiere programme, 1952. 451 Cf. Cappock 2005a, p. 124. 452 RM98F17:164: torn leaf, Fred McDarrah, The Artist’s World in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1961), p. 173. 453 RM98F108:16: page in book, overdrawn, John Terraine, The Great War: 1914–1918: A Pictorial History (London: Hutchinson of London, 1965), p. 138, British soldiers (2nd Lincolnshire Regiment) in a trench after a failed attack on Aubers Bridge.

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33  RM98F108:16: page in book, overdrawn, John Terraine, The Great War: 1914–1918: A Pictorial ­History (London: Hutchinson of London, 1965), p. 138, British soldiers (2nd Lincolnshire Regiment) in a trench after a failed attack on Aubers Bridge, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

in numerous Monet paintings such as Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, harmonie verte, 1899. If this was a source of inspiration, Bacon may not have aimed to respond to a specific individual figure, but may, in his typical existentialist attitude and in a cruel twist to Monet have regarded the scenery as a Dantesque pool of suffering and mortality. Another intervention was executed on a small photographic print showing Lacy standing in the small harbour of Ostia, Italy (figure 34).454 It is unusually literal. With strokes of green-blue and green-yellow paint Bacon continued the horizon line created by the sea in the right of the picture across the whole width of the print. He then obscured the huts and ships with wavy brushstrokes, sparing only Lacy’s figure and the jetty, possibly in an attempt to simulate the sea and extend its presence in the image. Both the spatial situation and the pattern he created around Lacy’s figure are loosely reminiscent of the interiors with patterned grounds which were particularly present in his work from the 1960s, examples of which include Portrait of George Dyer Talking, 1967, and Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror, 1968, even though they were not appropriated literally. On rare occasions, new pictorial elements were added to the existing imagery. Bacon drew a stool on a leaf with a twisted figure from Bridgman’s Complete Guide to Drawing and a sofa on a page with an illustration showing Igor Stravinsky.455 Both additions are, in terms of perspective and 454 RM98F1A:146: photograph, Francis Bacon, Peter Lacy at Ostia, Italy, 1954. 455 Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no. 176–177, comment no. 185, no page numbers.

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34  RM98F1A:146: photograph, Francis Bacon, Peter Lacy at Ostia, Italy, 1954, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

proportions, consistent with the printed figure and were meant to form with them a new homogenous image, completing the scene according to his own logic and imagination. The first intervention was adopted in Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1984 (figure 97) and the second in Seated Figure on Couch, 1962. Further Interventions Some interventions did not modify the source picture itself, but affected its surroundings. Facing the myriad of images in the studio made preselection unavoidable. Like a picture editor for a magazine, Bacon intuitively picked and chose images for further consideration. One way of singling out images was to tear them out of a publication. Numerous pages from books, magazines and newspapers shared this fate: a leaf from Michelangelo: The ­Sculptor,456 which features illustrations of Michelangelo’s model for a river god, and his statues Evening and Day from behind, or a page from The Concise Encyclopedia of ­Archaeology,457 presenting a photograph of a mummy from the Bronze Age to name but a few (figure 35). A torn leaf is easier to handle and to consult while working and, as pointed out before, can more fruitfully be fed into the image bank. The process often did not stop here, but continued and was further differentiated. For example, a frame from the Muybridge sequence ‘Some 456 RM98F11:52: torn leaf, The Concise Encyclopedia of Archaeology, ed. by Leonard Cottrell (London: Hutchinson of London, 1960), p. 142, plate 38, ‘Clothing: a woman of about 1000 B.C. in an embroidered jersey and hairnet, from an oak coffin, Denmark. (National Museum, Copenhagen)’. 457 RM98F1A:33: torn leaf, Martin Weinberger, Michelangelo: The Sculptor (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul and New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), fig. 102.1, figs. 102.2 and 102.3.

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35  RM98F11:52: torn leaf, The Concise ­Encyclopedia of Archaeology, ed. by Leonard Cottrell (­London: Hutchinson of London, 1960), p. 142, plate 38, ‘Clothing: a woman of about 1000 B.C. in an ­embroidered jersey and hairnet, from an oak coffin, Denmark. (National Museum, ­Copenhagen)’, ­collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

Phases in the Walk of an Athlete Rapid Speed’,458 now lost, was cut out of a torn page, and an illustration of Lucian Freud’s Portrait of Francis Bacon from 1952 was isolated by tearing a loose leaf from Francis Bacon – The Masters459 in half. Special emphasis was achieved when the loose page was mounted, a technique used at least since 1966 when a press photograph of Adolf Hitler and Ion Antonescu could be seen affixed to a support in a TV documentary.460 Bacon glued a newspaper cutting from The ­Sunday Times dated 22 February 1970 showing a photographic illustration of a reproduction of Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass, 1965–1966 (original executed between 1915–1923) by Richard Hamilton on cardboard (figure 36).461 He also cut out and mounted an image of a woman in an early photographer’s studio from Foundations of Modern Art,462 and a picture of a big game hunter sitting on a dead rhinoceros from the children’s book Adventures in Wildest Africa: On a Big Game Hunting Expedition.463 Usually, images are mounted individually, but in some cases several pictures are gathered on one support. A colour photograph of Bacon was fixed on board with paperclips 458 RM98F11:57: torn leaf, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901), p. 193. 459 RM98F149:18: fragment of leaf, John Rothenstein, Francis Bacon – The Masters, LXXI ([n.p.]: ­Knowledge Publications, 1967), p. 5, Portrait of Francis Bacon, by Lucian Freud 1952. 460 The leaf is now lost but can be seen in Bacon’s studio in Sunday Night Francis Bacon 1966; Picture Post, 8 February 1941, pp. 20–21, ‘The Man on the Spot: Antonescu before Hitler and his Gang’. 461 RM98F105:116: torn leaf, mounted on support, Richard Hamilton, ‘Duchamp Magical Myth For Our Time’, Sunday Times, 22 February 1970, p. 51. 462 RM98F1A:19: Amédée Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art (London: John Rodker, 1931), p. 55. 463 RM98BC33: torn leaf, J. E. Burns, Adventures in Wildest Africa: On a Big Game Hunting Expedition (London: Walker & Sons, 1949), p. 14.

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36  RM98F105:116: torn leaf, mounted on support, Richard Hamilton, ‘Duchamp Magical Myth For Our Time’, Sunday Times, 22 February 1970, p. 51, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

together with one of the surrealist artist E.L.T. Mesens and another one of Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett.464 The fact that the images were not glued onto the support but only attached with paperclips indicates that this step was meant to be reversible, and coloured fingerprints on the fragment featuring Mesens suggest that it had previously been detached and used on its own. Combinations where the mounting is more definite are rare, a newspaper article on Bacon featuring a colour reproduction of Painting 1946, an image from Muybridge’s sequence on wrestlers and a monochrome reproduction of Géricault’s Couple

464 RM98F1:14A: several cuttings, photographic illustration of the profile of E.L.T. Mesens (from BB19.01: Louis Scutenaire, Mon Ami Mesens (Brussels: Scutenaire, 1972), pp. 99–100), B&W photographic ­illustration of Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton, colour photograph of Francis Bacon, attached to a card support with three large and two small metal paper clips.

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Amoureux, c.1815, which were all glued onto a thick cardboard support.465 The explicit sexual connotations of the latter, for which Bacon specifically remembered it, underlined the homoerotic implications the artist saw in the Muybridge wrestlers.466 Similar to handwritten notes or rough sketches such assemblages were a reminder of interesting image combinations, which in microcosmic format echoed and consolidated the juxtaposition of images on the studio floor. Devouring, Digesting, Ruminating Like the material in the studio as a whole, the single item was in constant flux and caught up in a process of permanent transformation. An image, much like the appearance of a person, which Bacon thought of as changeable and fluid,467 was not a stable entity but ephemeral, and allowed unremitting development and change. Since for Bacon scratches and stains symbolised the passage of time,468 an item could decay, suffer from material fatigue, and ultimately ‘die’, or, as Russell phrased it, be ‘composted beyond the point of no recovery’.469 This was a process similar to ageing, not a single occurrence, and multiple metamorphoses took place over a period of time.470 For instance, the leaf with an image of a jazz singer, which was part of the collage with a reproduction of a Rembrandt self-portrait mentioned in the above,471 was circumscribed with dark blue paint before the two were combined. Likewise, the right edges of the leaf with an illustration of ‘Sir Austen Chamberlain as seen in a Distorting Mirror’ from Foundations of Modern Art,472 which formed the basis for the head in the centre panel of Triptych 1974–1977, 1974–1977 exhibits fingerprints in grey-brown only on the print, and not on the support it was mounted on (figure 37 and plate VI). They thus predate this process, unlike the further alteration of the image by orange paint marks at the top of the item which cover both the page and the support. On a torn leaf from Birds of the Night from 1945,473 showing an illustration with a family of long-eared owls, we can determine the chronology in which paint marks hit the item. The dark green splotches in

465 RM98F8:95: Klaus Berger, Géricault et son Oeuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), fragment of p. 41, Théodore Géricault, Couple Amoureux (detail), c.1815, fragment from Eadweard Muybridge, The ­Human Figure in Motion (London: Chapman & Hall, 1921), p. 215, newspaper cutting with photograph of Bacon and Painting 1946, 1946, glued on cardboard. 466 Cf. HKA: TGA 2008/16/16/4/2/9 ‘Bacon Interviews IIIc’, transcripts of interviews with David Sylvester, October 1973, pp. 24 and 25. 467 Cf. Archimbaud 2010, pp. 146–147, see also Sylvester 2009, p. 130. 468 Beard 1975, p.15. 469 Russell John 2001, p. 65. 470 Cf. Wieland Schmied, Francis Bacon: Commitment and Conflict (Munich: Prestel, 2006), p. 56; Finke 2009b, pp. 128–129. 471 RM98F129:50. 472 RM98F1A:22: torn leaf, mounted on support, Amédée Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art (London: John Rodker, 1931), p. 59, ‘Sir Austen Chamberlain as seen in a Distorting Mirror’. 473 RM98F105:131: torn leaf, Eric J. Hosking, Cyril Newberry and Stuart G. Smith, Birds of the Night (­London: Collins, 1945), pp. 63–64, ‘Plate 43. – The male long-eared owl brings a young rat to the nest. The hen is brooding newly hatched chicks (flashlight)’.

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37  RM98F1A:22:torn leaf, mounted on support, Amédée Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art (­London: John Rodker, 1931), p. 59, ‘Sir Austen Chamberlain as seen in a Distorting Mirror’, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

the lower left corner of the image, which correspond to the fingerprints on the lower right corner, on the page are underneath an orange and a pale purple blot. For other working documents, several states are recorded. A loose page from The World of Van Gogh Le Monde de Van Gogh Die Welt von Van Gogh with a photograph of a woman holding an umbrella474 was reproduced in 1985 in Wieland Schmied’s Vier Studien zu einem Porträt (plate XIV).475 At this point, the page shows paint marks, fingerprints, folds, and traces of folding but the item which was unearthed in 1998 from Reece Mews is more extensively crumpled and parts of the page are missing from the upper left and lower right corner. Not only did the original item disintegrate further, but in a process of layering of changes, the photographic records of the items themselves were subjected to the studio dynamics. The original altered item and its illustration could hereby enter very different paths. The image of two fighting hippopotami which Hunter photographed in Cromwell Place476 today shows no additional transformations different from its state in 1950 (figure 38). In the Hunter photograph of his material that Bacon kept in the studio, however, in the area occupied by this page, the photograph shows paint marks, traces of folding, and surface abrasion (figure 39).

474 RM98F130:156: torn leaf, Jos de Gruyter, The World of Van Gogh Le Monde de Van Gogh Die Welt von Van Gogh, photographs by Emmy Andriesse (The Hague: Daamen, 1953), p. 141. 475 Cf. Schmied 1985, p. 144. 476 RM98F1A:62: torn leaf, Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (­London: Heinemann, 1925), plate 17, see Hunter 1952, p. 12.

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38  RM98F1A:62: torn leaf, Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (­London: Heinemann, 1925), plate 17, ‘Annoyed Individual Snapping at Its Neighbour’, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

Preserving an item seems counter-intuitive considering how much their decomposition was appreciated, but in some instances Bacon did slow down a working document’s decay. One way of doing this was by mounting it.477 A loose leaf from An Atlas of Regional ­Dermatology had torn before it was attached to cardboard,478 but was now protected from new folds or tears. This, however, was not necessarily the end of it, and sometimes the process continued. Thus a strip of Sellotape covers a horizontal tear on a Deakin photograph of Dyer, but two stripes at the top and bottom of the item indicate that it had been mounted earlier and was then removed from its support.479 Other images were sent through the ‘pulverizer’480 of the studio dynamics several times, even after they had been altered and appropriated for a painting. A large part of the 477 Cf. Finke 2009b, p. 134. 478 RM98BC11: torn leaf, G. H. Percival and T.C. Dodds, An Atlas of Regional Dermatology (Edinburgh: E. and S. Livingstone, 1955), p. 120. 479 RM98F105:146: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in a Street in Soho, c.1963. 480 Russell John 2001, p. 71.

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39  RM98F1A:201: photograph, Sam Hunter, Bacon’s Cromwell Place studio, 1950, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, published in Sam Hunter, ‘Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of Horror’, Magazine of Art, 45.1 (January 1952), 11–15, p. 12.

c­ ollection of the image bank were reproductions of Bacon’s own paintings. Some of them, mostly photographs for Marlborough Gallery, were pinned up in the kitchen, others were attached to the wall in the atelier, but many others were fed into the maelstrom and were treated no differently than any other material. Starting with Study for Crouching Nude, 1952 up to Portrait of George Dyer Crouching, 1966, Bacon painted a number of versions of a crouching nude sometimes accompanied by a second figure. The group was informed by a newspaper clipping of a man being attacked by a lion,481 which Bacon reinterpreted as a sexually charged scene between humans, reverberating especially strongly in Figures in a Landscape, 1956–1957 (figure 40 and 41). On a photographic print of Figures in a ­Landscape Bacon covered the background with dark blue paint and traced the original railings in white (figure 42).482 Thus, the motif was transformed a second time, and even further removed from the original news picture. It may have been this altered reproduction of the painting, and not the original photograph, which from that point onwards influenced the future development of the group. Here the simulacrum attains its full power, as layer

481 Illustration from ‘Mauled by a Lion in Africa’, in Picture Post, 9 August 1947, p. 13: ‘The Cameraman Loses Consciousness’. 482 RM98F22:47: photograph, overpainted, Francis Bacon, Figures in a Landscape, 1956–1957.

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 40  Illustration from ‘Mauled by a Lion in Africa’, in Picture Post, 9 August 1947, p. 13: ‘The Cameraman Loses Consciousness’.  41  Francis Bacon, Figures in a Landscape, 1956–1957, oil on canvas, 152.5 × 118 cm, ­collection: ­Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, ­Birmingham.

42  RM98F22:47: photograph, overpainted, Francis Bacon, Figures in a Landscape, 1956–1957, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

upon layer of artificiality is added through reproductive media to a situation which Bacon had never witnessed in the first place.483 And yet, this was not a dogmatic process. Bacon first drew a rectangular frame on a photograph of the Venice Biennale in the 1890s on a torn leaf from the French magazine 483 Cf. Baudrillard 2007, pp. 71–72.

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43  RM98F103:3: torn leaf, overpainted, Umbro Apollonio, ‘La ­Bienalle’, L’OEIL, October 1956, p. 42, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

44  Francis Bacon, Portrait of Lucian Freud (on Orange Couch), 1965, oil on canvas, 156.2 × 139 cm, private collection.

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L’OEIL, but then covered most of the image in dark green paint (figure 43).484 He spared the figure of a man on a sofa and parts of the foreground, creating a roughly triangular shape, which is horizontally interrupted by a fold. This item formed the basis for two known paintings, Woman on a Red Couch, 1961 and Portrait of Lucian Freud (on Orange Couch), 1965 (figure 44).485 The artist did not refer to a reproduction of the first painting for the second, but must have consulted the manipulated item, for the lathed wooden feet in ­Portrait of ­Lucian Freud (on Orange Couch) are closely adopted from the original photograph, but do not feature in Woman on a Red Couch. The reproduction of a film still from Ridley Scott’s movie Alien, 1979, in a Paris Match magazine from the same year486 forms a curious case in this context. The article features a close-up detail of the infant alien which Swiss artist H.R. Giger designed after Bacon’s figures in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a ­Crucifixion, 1944.487 Thus, his own creatures, themselves based on photographic source material, digested through another artist’s imagination, may have been once more reformulated and ultimately appropriated by Bacon. Further Away from the Photograph Deliberate and accidental alterations occur from the mid-1940s until shortly before the artist’s death, and thus form a consistent, extensive, intended and targeted preparatory practice on the basis of the photographic material Bacon collected in his studios.488 Images did not ‘drop in like slides’489 when Bacon stood in front of the canvas with brush in hand, eager and ready to paint, but he, just like any other artist, had to grasp and develop them. Not every manipulated and altered item led to a subject in a painting but handling them frequently, watching them disintegrate, and modifying them was Bacon’s way of understanding, appreciating, advancing, elaborating, and playing with pictorial elements and ideas, truly making the image his own before the canvas was approached, for appropriation is never ‘passive, objective or disinterested, but active, subjective and motivated.’490 The similarities in the folding of two different book pages depicting the same Ancient Egyptian head are indicative of Bacon even working on one source image repeatedly to find a satisfying result.491 Thus, as Finke rightly remarked, ‘the working documents served as a kind

484 RM98F103:3: torn leaf, overpainted, Umbro Apollonio, ‘La Bienalle’, L’OEIL, October 1956, p. 42. 485 Cf. Finke 2009b, p. 138. 486 RM98NF196MAG: Paris Match, 31 August 1979, pp. 48–53. 487 Cf. Xan Brooks, ‘Ridley Scott: The first action heroine’, Guardian, 13 October 2009 [accessed 31 July 2021]. 488 Cf. torn leaf, overpainted, Heinrich Hoffmann, ‘The Führer Who Commands’, Picture Post, 13 July 1940, leaf photographed by Sam Hunter in the Cromwell Place studio, 1950, illustrated in: Gale and Stephens 2008a, p. 16, ill. no. 2; RM98F1:64: torn leaf, Joelle Bouvier and Regis Obadia, ‘L’Esquisse’, (Paris: ­Collection Angle d’Ailes, 1991), plate 60, Delahaye, Nathalie Million in ‘La Chambre’, 1988. 489 Sylvester 2009, p. 134. 490 Robert S. Nelson, ‘Appropriation’, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 160–173, p. 162. 491 Cf. Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no.36–37.

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of testing ground on which Bacon thought about the human body and how it is bound up in representation’.492 The intense preoccupation with an image and its advancement, which addressed pivotal tropes of his art such as figuration vs. abstraction, allowed Bacon to eventually execute his paintings in a less controlled, gestural and accidental manner in a material-based process on the canvas with confidence. The studio material constituted not just a generic field of experimentation but was a technical tool, and the concrete and direct source for the painted iconography. By definition, a sketch is ‘usually intended for further elaboration, often one of many rough drafts for a major work, recording details of scale, perspective, light and shade, and composition’.493 Like more traditional preparatory work, the altered and manipulated photographic material, too, is a further development of a starting point and an interim stage towards an iconography only finalised on the canvas, which was executed in and determined by oil paint. With the help of the altered working document, we can trace the artist’s thought and decision-making process, and the journey of the image through various transformations before it reached its final stage in a painting. Thus, Bacon did not develop his ideas on the canvas, as stated by Hammer,494 but the fact that the changes and transformations of the studio items fed frequently, consistently, and directly into the painted iconography confirms their status as unconventional but efficient equivalents for preliminary studies.495 Accidental processes are pivotal in the long-term change of the studio items. By accepting, embracing, fostering, and provoking them, Bacon successfully bypassed artistic agency and avoided illustrating personal impulses. This is the feature that distinguishes his photographic working material from his actual sketches, whose minor role in the preparatory stages of the paintings will be discussed in the next chapter. However, in general, ‘much evidence of forethought from the outset that is carried through the successive stages of painting’496 can be found. While some alterations happened due to a process of provoked chance, for other changes Bacon must have invested time and effort, which refutes his claims of the fortuitous emergence of his imagery. The painting process was overall much less spontaneous than Bacon cared to communicate.497 Material was held close to the canvas when working on a painting, and the book Fundamentals of Soil Science can be seen at the ready on top of a pile of material close to the easel in a photograph of the studio dated 1971, the year an illustration from this publication informed Two Men Working in a Field, 1971.498 Smudgy fingerprints in oil paint on many items prove that they were picked up and consulted while the process was underway, which was necessary for the precise adoption 492 Finke 2009a, p. 123. 493 Davies D. 1990, p. 508. 494 Cf. Hammer 2012c, p. 148. 495 Cf. Harrison 2009a, p. 71. 496 Shepard 2009, p. 160. 497 Cf. Harrison 2009b, p. 146. 498 Photograph, Francis Goodman, Francis Bacon in Reece Mews, 1971, published in: Francis Bacon, exh. cat. Paris: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 1971; Düsseldorf: Städtische Kunsthalle, 1972 (Paris: [Centre national d’art contemporain], 1971), p. 22.

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of alterations to the material, as was done with the tear and overpainting of the page from A Pictorial History of Boxing499 in Crucifixion, 1965. Pre-existing images were not at some stage consumed and later reproduced from memory,500 as Schmied believed, but likely held up in direct comparison to the painted version on the canvas during the early stages of the working process. The changes to the photographic material triggered a number of important processes on several levels, removing the image further from the photograph and bringing it closer to the painting even before the canvas was approached.501 The photographic material formed the hyper-figurative starting point of Bacon’s imagery but by sabotaging and eroding its figuration with anti-illustrational alterations, the weight of the image was shifted towards abstraction; a process that would be continued in the paint application and brushwork. Its materiality was shifted towards painting, too, when the newspaper cuttings and gelatin silver prints were spattered, besmirched, and overpainted with oil paint, and became inextricably linked with those new additions.502 A tube of orange paint which became permanently stuck to the fragment of a Deakin photograph of Bacon503 is exemplary for the process. Photography was in the past criticised for its purely mechanical character in which the artist’s active influence is ostensibly lacking; painting, by contrast, is regarded as incorporating the artist’s hand and creative decisions.504 The material’s distinct characteristics also change. By working with and handling his studio contents so extensively, by actively manipulating the items and allowing other alterations, Bacon infused the image with his own hand prior to the painting process. The torn magazine leaves, tattered photographs and besmirched book pages are thereby imbued with a new sense of aura after Walter Benjamin,505 an aura the undisturbed photograph or mechanical reproduction does not have. For Benjamin, an artwork’s aura consists of its here and now, its existence at the place where it is at, its history at this place, its physical alteration over time and its changing ownership, which constitute its authenticity and uniqueness.506 This aura cannot be reproduced and is

499 RM98F130:170: torn leaf, overpainted, Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of Boxing (London: Spring Books, 1959), no page numbers. 500 Cf. Schmied 1985, p. 43; this idea will be discussed in more detail and further qualified in chapter 3.2.2. 501 Cf. Harrison 2009b, p. 150. 502 Cf. Günther 2018, p. 102. 503 RM98F130:172: John Deakin, Francis Bacon in front of Venetian Blinds, 1967. 504 Cf. James Elkins, What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy (New York/London: Routledge, 1999), p. 45; and Sarah Richardson, Passion for Paint: A National ­Gallery Touring Exhibition in Partnership with Bristol’s Museums, Galleries & Archives Service and Tyne  & Wear Museums, exh. cat. Bristol: Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, 2006; Newcastle upon Tyne: Laing Art Gallery, 2006; London: The National Gallery, London, 2006 (London: National Gallery, 2006), p. 2; and Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, ‘On the Margin of the Impossible’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, exh. cat. London: Tate Britain, 2008/2009; Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009 (London: Tate Pub., 2008), pp. 14–27, p. 25. 505 Cf. Benjamin 2008, pp. 10–13. 506 Cf. ibid., p. 5.

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lacking in all mechanical reproductions of an artwork, and mechanical reproductions.507 An important part of this new aura for Bacon’s studio items is a conferred uniqueness that runs counter to their original reproducible quality, a sense of life, mortality, and of the passage of time, which is manifested in their physical transience. They thus draw nearer to the final oil paintings, and especially their materiality to which the power to manifest physical, mortal bodies is ascribed.508 In the following chapters more case studies will be introduced to illuminate certain aspects by embedding them in a wider discussion of the appropriation process. With their help, the construction of figures from photographic material, the adoption of colour and spatial settings, the relationship between figure and ground and the base images, the transposition of an image from photography to oil painting, and the treatment of narrative and identity during the appropriation process will be explored in depth.

2.4.  Drawing a Line – Drawings versus Photographs Bacon’s iconography originated from photographic material; with its help, he grasped and internalised the figure, objects, and spatial settings, and made meaningful changes to them, which sometimes directly preceded their representation on the canvas. Those crucial steps in the genesis of a painting had traditionally been resolved by drawing and sketching, but since its invention, photography was often employed in their place. Eugène Delacroix regretted not having discovered photography earlier: if he had, he said, he would have had to draw less.509 After Bacon’s death, over 80 sketches by the artist emerged. Their importance, however, must not be overestimated and, compared to the photographic material Bacon collected and worked with and its importance for the finished canvas, sketches seem to be of negligible significance for the genesis and further creative development of Bacon’s iconography, as will be shown in the following chapter. Posthumous Discoveries In 1998, Tate acquired a set of over forty sketches.510 Four Bacon had given to his friend Stephen Spender, while the others came from his friends Peter Pollock and Paul Danquah.511 They most likely all originated from the studio at 9 Overstrand Mansions in Battersea,512 which was owned by Pollock and Danquah, and which Bacon occupied between 1955 and 1961.513 Most of them are oil sketches on paper torn from two different notebooks,514

507 Cf. ibid, pp. 11–13. 508 Cf. Elkins 1999, p. 137; see also Gale and Stephens 2008b, p. 17. 509 Cf. Delacroix paraphrased in Billeter 1979, p. 6. 510 Cf. Gale 1999, p. 13. 511 Cf. ibid, p. 13, the Tate sketches have numbers beginning with ‘T073’. 512 Cf. Gale 1999, p. 15. 513 Harrison 2016b, p. 85 and p. 87. 514 Cf. Gale 1999, p. 13.

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featuring solitary human and animal figures reclining on beds and sofas, displayed on platforms, or trapped in movement in sparse environments, often defined by rectangular linear structures. Due to their consistency in material, style, and iconography, the majority of the Tate sketches are regarded as a unified group dating between c.1957–1961.515 Another 41 drawings emerged from 7 Reece Mews in 1998. They cover a wider range of material, supports, and time periods, dating from c.1936 to the mid-1980s. One sketch is of an early biomorphic figure in the style of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,516 and one sketch of a group of figures517 resembles the shadowy impressions of bodies in motion of Henri Michaux, of whom Bacon owned a drawing in the 1960s.518 They, too, mostly render a solitary figure in sometimes elaborate spatial settings. Recently, I discovered a pencil sketch on the endpapers of a 1952 edition of Selected Poems by T.S. Eliot in the estate of David Sylvester519 and a few more are known to be held in private collections.520 What all sketches have in common is that they are quite basic, with figures usually rendered in vague, imprecise outlines, which are sometimes so raw that their subject matter is hard to decipher.521 Authors agree on their genuinely crude, amateurish quality, and as such their status as drawings is contested and labelling them as sketches seems more appropriate.522 Bacon’s cousin Diana Watson suggested that he ‘may have had a few drawing lessons at the age of seventeen at St. Martin’s School of Art’,523 but he never received any consistent formal training. While Bacon drew flapper girls in private in the 1920s524 and created some ‘”Cubist-­ inspired” drawings while staying in France in 1927–1928’,525 no serious efforts at drawing are known. When he befriended Roy de Maistre in 1930, the older colleague was astonished by how little the young man knew about the technical side of painting and that he

515 Cf. ibid, pp. 15 and 16; Harrison dates them to an even shorter time span, 1959–1962 in Harrison 2008b, p. 12; or 1958–1961, see Harrison 2016a, p. 1408. 516 RM98F1:37: Francis Bacon, drawing of a biomorphic figure in black ink on lined paper, c.1930s. 517 RM98F1A:149: Monroe Wheeler, Soutine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1950), drawing inside of the front cover of the book. 518 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 61. 519 HKA: TGA 200816/4/2/13 ‘Bacon: materials used by the artist’: Pencil sketch and notes by Francis Bacon in ‘Selected Poems by T.S. Eliot’, Penguin 1952, pp. 125 and 26, illustrated in Harrison 2016a, p. 1410. 520 Harrison 2016a, p. 1408. 521 Cf. Cappock 2005a, p. 177. 522 Cf. Gale 1999, p. 19; see also Sylvester 2000, p. 207, Cappock 2005a, p. 160, ‘Martin Harrison in Conversation with Richard Calvocoressi’, in Francis Bacon: Late Paintings, ed. by Michael Cary, exh. cat. New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2015 (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2015), pp. 131–142, p. 132; and Harrison 2016a, p. 1408. 523 Diana Watson to Ronald Alley, 4 April 1962, Tate Archive, London, quoted from Harrison 2005a, p. 69. 524 ‘Ianthe Knott on Francis Bacon – Unfolding a Family History’, Video interview of Ianthe Knott with ­Barbara Dawson and Perry Ogden, 2000 [accessed 5 July 2021]. 525 Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), p. 321, quoted from Harrison 2005a, p. 69.

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had ‘scarcely drawn at all’.526 Maybe it was de Maistre’s mentoring which inspired the ‘­charcoal “sketches”’527 Mollie Craven remembered him doing – and discarding once a week – at Glebe Place in the 1930s.528 Sylvester bluntly claimed that ‘he [Bacon] was forever asserting that he couldn’t draw, and this was not a pose’.529 Martin Harrison suggested that the presence of drawing guides and art manuals in the studio was indicative of Bacon later attempting ‘in private, the study of conventional drawing techniques’.530 The coarse, loose, and quick nature of Bacon’s surviving sketches contradicts this claim and the fact that a pictorial element from such a guide, namely the illustration of a leg from Bridgman’s ­Complete Guide to Drawing from Life,531 informed the figure in Study from the Human Body, 1991 suggests that instead Bacon perceived drawing manuals and art guides as part of his image bank of actual and potential source material equal to reproductions of drawings by ­Michelangelo and photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson. And what should his motivation have been? Accused by fellow artist Michael Ayrton of not being able to draw, Bacon snapped ‘Is drawing what you do? I wouldn’t want to do that.’532 On another occasion he elaborated that since ‘the actual texture, colour, the whole way the paint moves, are so accidental, any sketches that I did before could only give a kind of skeleton, possibly, of the way the thing might happen’533 and that by going straight to the canvas, he could avoid ‘making an illustration of the drawing. So it’s so much better to immediately attack the canvas with the paint.’534 In fact, for an artist whose painting process depended on the materiality of oil paint while the genesis of his iconography was inspired and predetermined by photographic sources, there was no need to and no use for developing drawing skills. Unknown Bacon’s works on paper fall drastically short in comparison to the drawings by Michelangelo Buonarotti and Pablo Picasso he so admired, which lead Harrison to believe that Bacon, fully aware of this discrepancy, may therefore have denied making anything comparable.535 Bacon did describe how he ‘sketched out’536 the general layout of a painting directly on the canvas, though, and so may have been more open to talk about the concept of sketching

526 De Maistre paraphrased in Rothenstein 1974, p. 161. 527 Mollie Craven in Farson 1993, p. 36. 528 Cf. Mollie Craven in Farson 1993, p. 36; Bacon occupied Glebe Place between 1936 and 1943, see Harrison 2016b, pp. 81–82. None of these sketches seem to have survived. 529 Sylvester 2000, p. 207. 530 Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no.195, no page numbers. 531 RM98F94:9: Bridgman’s Complete Guide To Drawing From Life, ed. by Howard Simon (New York: Weathervane Books, 1979), p. 290. 532 Bacon quoted in Harrison 2008b, p. 12. 533 Sylvester 2009, p. 21. 534 Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985. 535 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 1408. 536 Sylvester 2009, pp. 194–195.

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than drawing, Harrison suggested.537 It seems unlikely that the reason for Bacon’s secrecy was a matter of terminology. Throughout his career, he denied producing any drawings538 and his sketches never entered the public realm. As a consequence, the prevailing public opinion was that he did not make any but that he approached the canvas directly without any preparatory work.539 His efforts were, however, known amongst a small circle of friends and intimates. Spender displayed – with Bacon’s knowledge – the sketches he owned on his mantelpiece,540 and in 1975 the curator Henry Geldzahler remarked that ‘few have been seen in public’.541 Danquah, Pollock, Wirth Miller, Sylvester, and John Edwards knew about them too, but Bacon could count on their friendly loyalty and all the sketches known today emerged only posthumously. In 1999, Sylvester revealed that he had ‘continuously refrain[ed] from mentioning a series of small pencil-sketches for paintings which I had seen in the endpapers of his copy of a paperback edition of poems by T.S. Eliot’;542 it turned out that not only did he not mention the sketches, he actually owned them.543 Similar to Bacon hiding the details of his working from photographic material, pretending not to sketch mainly served the purpose of not diminishing the impact of his vehement insistence on the importance of luck and chance for his work, as well as protecting the notion of spontaneity and immediacy attached to and indeed manifested in some parts of his work.544 Furthermore, as Sylvester pointed out, ‘if he had confessed of making sketches, to clarify their crude nature and little importance for his painting he would have had to get involved in boring defence explanations’ and would subsequently ‘to illustrate his arguments, have to exhibit them’.545 Value Spurred by the fact that their existence had been denied by Bacon, and that no sketches had been seen until then, the posthumous discovery of the Battersea sketches was celebrated as a sensation and a revelation, which should trigger ‘a complete revision of our understanding of his working method’.546 This is a status they do not deserve, but which was artificially

537 Harrison 2016a, p. 1408. 538 See, for example, Sylvester 2009, p. 21; Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985. 539 Cf. Melville 1949, p. 422; Durham 1985, p. 231. 540 See Lady Spender (wife of Stephen Spender), letter to Nicholas Serota, 8 February 1997, Tate Records, in Gale 1999, pp. 13–14. 541 Henry Geldzahler, ‘Introduction’, in Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings 1968–1974, exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975), pp. 5–13, p. 10. 542 Sylvester 1999, p. 9. 543 HKA: TGA 200816/4/2/13 ‘Bacon: materials used by the artist’: Pencil sketch and notes by Francis ­Bacon in ‘Selected Poems by T.S. Eliot’, Penguin 1952, pp. 125 and 26. 544 Cf. Sylvester 2000, p. 207. 545 Ibid. 546 Gale 1999, p. 14.

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­ uttressed by giving them descriptive titles547 – this was later repeated with the sketches from b Reece Mews548 – and declaring the works Bacon had given to Spender to have been a present, when in reality he may have simply left them behind when he moved to Reece Mews.549 Their significance for Bacon’s work and their function within the working process have been the subject of fierce debate ever since. Matthew Gale described the Battersea sketches as a pivotal stepping stone in the development of Bacon’s iconography. For him, they ‘show the development of images from diverse sources: absorbed, revitalised and reconstructed through the drawing process’,550 they formed ‘points of departure for his paintings’551 and were at least an ‘elaboration and reworking of earlier compositions for new canvases’.552 Sylvester qualified their role explaining that Bacon would probably not have consulted them after the outline of a figure was sketched out on the canvas, and doubted that ‘he [Bacon] would ever have worked from them in the way he worked from photographs’, rating them as ‘quick and summary’, and amounting to no more than ‘fragmentary hints and guesses’.553 Harrison saw all sketches as ‘presumably, preparatory to painting’,554 which, however, may not be true for all of them and could not be proven because they were not dated.555 The artist himself did not rate them highly. Danquah reported that Bacon ‘did not consider them in any way comparable to his completed paintings’,556 an observation which was confirmed by Bacon’s best friend Wirth Miller, who added that they were ‘private explorations or preliminary notations, more comparable to a writer’s notebook’,557 and ­Sylvester knew that Bacon had preferred to have them destroyed because he regarded them as ‘worthless except to himself as working tools’.558 On Bacon sketching on tracing paper, Edwards commented that ‘he [Bacon] saw no value in these sketches […] and thoughtlessly discarded them later.’559 Sketch versus Photograph The small number of all surviving sketches and their condition are first indicators of their inconsequential role in the working process. While both the creation of rough sketches and

547 Cf. Martin Harrison, ‘Movement and Gravity: Bacon and Rodin in Dialogue’, in Movement and Gravity: Bacon and Rodin in Dialogue, exh. cat. London: Ordovas, 2013 (London: Ordovas, 2013), pp. 3–39, footnote 5 on p. 11, p. 38, Harrison referred to Gale 1999, p. 13. 548 See Cappock 2005a, see p. 165, captions to ill. nos. 297 and 298. 549 Cf. Harrison 2013, pp. 3–39, footnote 5 on p. 11, p. 38, Harrison referred to Gale 1999, p. 13. 550 Gale 1999, p. 33. 551 Ibid, p. 14. 552 Ibid, p. 22. 553 Sylvester 2000, pp. 206–207. 554 Harrison 2016a, p. 1408. 555 Cf. ibid., p. 1408. 556 Paul Danquah in conversation with Richard Morpeth, 21 July 1997, Tate Gallery cataloguing files, quoted in Gale 1999, p. 15. 557 Matthew Gale in conversation with Denis Wirth Miller, 28 July 1999, quoted in Gale 1999, p. 13. 558 Sylvester 2000, p. 207. 559 Edwards 2001, p. 13.

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the collection and use of photographs were consistent throughout Bacon’s career, there are significant disparities in the quantity of material. The occasional spring cleanings of the studio may have affected further sketches too, but over 4000 surviving items bearing mechanically reproduced images stand in stark contrast to under 100 sketches. Only a handful of those not done on tracing paper relate to a painting560 – which does not mean they preceded them – but 369 paintings by Bacon included in the 2016 catalogue raisonné and an additional 5 lost and destroyed ones were related to one, but often to more, pre-existing images. Most sketches are clean and undisturbed, appear not to have been handled very often by the artist, and evidently not during the painting process. A leaf with a crawling figure bears faint traces of the artist’s attention such as single fingerprints and small paint blots (plate XLII).561 In their low quantity and lack of intensity they pale against the multiple layers of smudgy fingerprints in all sorts of colours on numerous items including a torn leaf from Adventures in Wildest Africa562 (plate XLIV), and the frail state of a picture of a man and a pet monkey mounted on a leaf taken from History of Egyptian Sculpture and Painting in the Old Kingdom563 the edges of which presumably disintegrated under Bacon’s repeated grip. Often, the colour of the fingerprints matches the colour in a related painting, which indicates a direct link, and shows that Bacon consulted them while painting the work in question.564 The negligible amount of paint and pigment traces also means that they were not even kept close to the canvas when Bacon was painting, unlike other items such as the blurry colour photographic close-up of a young woman, probably from an advertisement,565 which is almost unrecognisable under a profusion of paint blots and smears. Several sketches are connected to known paintings. The figure in an undated pencil sketch of a female nude, for example, bears a close resemblance to Seated Woman from 1961.566 Since none of the sketches are dated, however, it is difficult to determine where on the timeline of the genesis of an image to place them.567 It is unlikely that they were the first step in the process because there is no evidence that Bacon ever drew or painted in situ or from a live model.568 None of his early sitters recalled him making drawings or sketches of 560 T07352-54, and T07386; HKA: TGA 200816/4/2/13 ‘Bacon: materials used by the artist’: Pencil sketch and notes by Francis Bacon in ‘Selected Poems by T.S. Eliot’, Penguin 1952, pp. 125 and 26; one sketch in a private collection, see Harrison 2016a, p. 1413. 561 T07378: Francis Bacon, sketch, oil and ink on paper, c.1956–1957. 562 RM98F16:209E: torn leaf, J. E. Burns, Adventures in Wildest Africa: On a Big Game Hunting Expedition (London: Walker & Sons, 1949), p. 18. 563 RM98F1A:29: colour photographic image of a man and a monkey, source unknown. 564 The dark blue and grey fingerprints on RM98F248:10: TIME, the Weekly Newspaper, Atlantic Edition, 62.3 (July 20, 1953), p. 25, match the shades used in Three Studies of the Human Head, 1953. A photo­ graph from the magazine provides the base image of the centre panel. 565 RM98F16:14A: blurry colour photographic close up of a young woman, probably from an advertisement, source and date unknown, mounted on support. 566 T07386, cf. Gale 1999, p. 31. 567 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 1408, see also Cappock 2005a, p. 169. 568 Cf. Harrison 2008b, p. 12.

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them, or Bacon consulting any while working on their picture. They did, however, remember him looking at photographs569 and in fact in several instances a photographic source precedes the sketch. For example, a blue biro drawing of a seated figure on the inside cover of the book The Film closely follows a John Deakin photograph of Lucian Freud (figure 45 and 99).570 Another example is the small pencil sketch found in the endpapers of Selected Poems by T.S. Eliot from 1952.571 A kneeling figure, and what may be a lying figure, relate to the photographic reproduction of a lion attacking a cameraman published in Picture Post in 1947572 which fed into a number of paintings including Study for a Crouching Nude, 1952 (figure 40). Thus, Bacon’s sketches do not document the inception, the first emergence of an image, nor was it their purpose, ‘motivated by an act of creation’573 like the were for Henri Matisse, to first visualise a pictorial idea. In Bacon’s case the image had already been created by the material he collected and from that, he simply needed to find and pick one he liked. Many painters, from Delacroix574 to members of the Pre-Raphaelites575 and Picasso,576 are known to have executed sketches based on photographs, possibly in preparation for a painting. Did Bacon then, in an ‘exploratory process’577 of ideas triggered by the photograph, with his sketches create ‘intermediary stages between photographs and eventual paintings’,578 as proposed by Gale? If that was the case, considering Bacon’s characteristic approach to figuration, his sketches might be expected to push the depicted figure towards the distortions and idiosyncratic rendering of the figures on the canvas. In reality, they do not alter the figure significantly. Sketches such as one of a figure reclining on a sofa, and another one of a female nude in motion579 simplify the body, very loosely determine the positioning of limbs, and may anticipate distortions such as bulging and tapering, or slight 569 Cf. Sylvester 2000, p. 66. 570 RM98F1A:150: inside cover, drawing, Georg Schmidt, Werner Schmalenbach and Peter Bächlin, The Film: Its Economic, Social, and Artistic Problems (London: Falcon Press, 1948) and RM98F1A:87: photo­graph, John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964; for T07351: ‘Figure in a Landscape’ c.1952, Matthew Gale noted the similarity to Marius Maxwell’s Stalking Big Game with. Camera in Equatorial Africa, and Bacon’s Figure in a Landscape, 1952, but admitted that ‘it is not certain whether the sketch was made before or after the painting’; he also noticed the proximity to the newly fledged owls from Hosking’s and Newberry’s Birds of the Night and T07380: ‘Composition’, all Gale 1999, p. 23–24. 571 HKA: TGA 200816/4/2/13 ‘Bacon: materials used by the artist’: Pencil sketch and notes by Francis ­Bacon in T.S. Eliot, T.S. Eliot: Selected Poems (London: Penguin 1952), pp. 125 and 126. 572 Illustration from ‘Mauled by a Lion in Africa’, in Picture Post, 9 August 1947, p. 13: ‘The Cameraman Loses Consciousness’. 573 Raoul Jean Moulin, Henri Matisse: Drawings and Paper Cut-Outs (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), p. 12. 574 Cf. Coke 1981, p. 8, ill. nos. 11 and 12, p. 9. 575 Cf. Joyce H. Townsend, Jacqueline Ridge and Stephen Hackney, ‘Background, Training and ­Influences’, in Pre-Raphaelite Painting Techniques: 1848–56, ed. by Joyce H. Townsend, Jacqueline Ridge and ­Stephen Hackney (London: Tate, 2004), pp. 21–28, p. 27. 576 Cf. Billeter 1979, pp. 28–29, comments on ill. nos. 46–49. 577 Gale 1999, p. 21. 578 Ibid. 579 T07369, T07352.

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45  RM98F1A:150: inside cover, drawing, Georg Schmidt, Werner Schmalenbach and ­Peter Bächlin, The Film: Its Economic, Social, and Artistic Problems (London: Falcon Press, 1948), collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

46  RM98F15:70B: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964, ­collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

alterations to their proportions. In this respect they are in keeping with the oil underdrawings Bacon executed directly on the canvas, such as in ‘Seated Figure’, c.1978, so that an additional step seems redundant. The sketches based on identified photographic sources do not decisively twist or elevate the pictorial springboard further in a meaningful way either. The sketch from a Freud photograph by Deakin mentioned above reduces the figure to vague outlines. Bacon omitted the right foot and changed the three-quarter into a full profile. Compare this to the radical transformations of the original gelatin silver prints by Deakin. These included a torn and folded print580 in which the centre of Rawsthorne’s face is missing so that her lower jaw is positioned right under her nose, and another one of George Dyer581 in which, through folds and tears, half of the subject’s face and torso is missing and his leg left seems to be the continuation of his left arm (figure 46). There is also another print of Dyer582 where tears ever so slightly shifted the position of one half of his mouth, the left nostril, a piece of his face right under his nose is missing and the left eye is partly omitted (plate XXXII). Gale noted some

580 RM98F17:63: photograph, John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964. 581 RM98F15:70B: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964. 582 RM98F17:89A: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in a Street in Soho, c.1963.

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alterations in a succession of sketches based on Eadweard Muybridge wrestlers.583 Bacon turned the pair of wrestlers into a single crawling figure, in the second sketch introduced an ‘unexpectedly reversed foot’,584 and a succession from a ‘weighed-down position’585 to a ‘more stable’586 one. Such editing steps appear tame seen next to how tears deconstruct Dyer’s face in the aforementioned print of a Deakin photograph, which Bacon had ripped into small pieces, and which subsequently fed into Three Studies for Portraits (including Self-Portrait), 1969 (figure 19 and 20).587 Further, some of the important types of image changes that Bacon desired, and got from the idiosyncratic handling of the material in the studio could not be produced with a sketch. On the studio floor, images were altered not by deliberate acts but by the dynamics of the space and the working process itself. Actions such as being walked over, tearing, folding, and being spattered and besmirched with paint resulted in accidental alterations. They produced for him unpredictable shapes and forms that emerged without his direct creative input. Sketching, by contrast, especially in Bacon’s case, is not a slow, gradual, sometimes decades-long and externally-controlled process and it can hardly offer any surprises, and no creative progress beyond the artist’s at least partial control. Physical and accidental interventions to the studio items resulted in highly unconventional interventions to the figure: in random fragmentation, abrasion and paint blots. The alterations and ways of rendering the figure in the sketches appear minimal, plain, and literal contrasted with those executed with the help of photographic material. They do not add new and unexpected elements to the depicted figure in the manner the treatment of the photographic material does. The studio contents were trapped in a permanent process of transformation and decay, during which they changed, dissolved into fragments, and eventually disintegrated. The sketch, however, must be a single, or repeated intervention. Bacon seemed to have scrapped many of his sketches before they could transform or kept them and did not feed them into the ‘pulverizer’588 of the studio environment, but only by keeping image material for a sufficient amount of time could it creatively metamorphose in the manner required to serve for ­Bacon as a pictorial starting point. The surviving sketches thus also lack the symbolic sense of mortality the other studio items have and do not, in contrast to the photographic material, constitute a record of Bacon’s biography nor are they signifiers of the passage of time. The sketches also lack the tension between the original, undisturbed, hyper-real photograph and its altered state. The image is not renewed, nor creatively twisted and elevated; the sketches deliver only one level of representation. None of them have been deliberately torn, folded, or further manipulated, drawn over or overpainted, or protected and emphasized by mounting them on supports. Crucially, in contrast to any edits and alterations of the figure 583 Cf. Gale 1999, p. 26. 584 Gale 1999, p.26, on T07376: Francis Bacon, sketch, oil paint on paper, c.1959–1961. 585 Ibid. 586 Ibid. 587 Cf. Finke 2009a, p. 131. 588 Russell John 2001, p. 71.

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or a photographic source in a sketch, those on the photographic material, such as the ones to Peter Lacy’s forehead in a photograph by John Deakin, were transposed directly into a painting, which is in this case Study of Portrait of P.L. from Photographs, 1963, and in which the part of the head which was physically removed from the photograph is missing. There is no evidence of, and there was indeed no need for, an intermediary step. No sketches which reflect alterations on studio items were found. Afterthoughts Given the nature of the sketches, it is unlikely that Bacon used this technique to advance his figures, and in direct preparation for a painting, but they likely fulfilled different, more general purposes. Harrison suggested, for example, that the Tate sketches may have been ‘part of Bacon’s rehearsals for the newly dynamic limb positions’589 he aimed to achieve in the early 1960s. As will be explained in more detail later, figure and spatial setting usually stem from different photographic springboards but Bacon never physically combined the two in a collage. Some sketches indicate that they were used to try different settings for the same figure, maybe to get a better impression of different forms of interplay. Bacon repeated a particular body in movement twice in sketches from his Battersea studio – once in a curved, arena-like ground and once raised on a platform and framed by a rectangle in the background (figure 47 and 48).590 Some of the oil sketches may have been used to try out c­ olours and colour combinations. Two oil sketches place the same reclining figure in a sparse setting consisting of abstract, horizontal bars of colour in different shades of purple and pink. They relate to paintings such as ‘Reclining Figure’, c.1959, and manifest the abstract artist ­Patrick Heron’s impact on Bacon during his stay at St. Ives, while also channelling the work of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.591 The combination of the complementary colours red and green in several sketches592 is also a distinct choice that tallies with contemporaneous paintings such as Two Figures in a Room, 1959 (plate XLII and XLIII). In other oil sketches, for instance in the case of the crawling figure mentioned earlier,593 Bacon may have tried to find out if, and to what benefit, it was possible to anticipate or rehearse the gestural, accidental brushwork he applied on his canvases. It is conceivable, however, that he may have felt that the tiny, static twists and swirls executed wet-on-wet, with traces of scumbling, proved unsatisfying so that the technique was quickly abandoned.

589 Harrison 2013, p. 11. 590 T07362 and T07361: two sketches by Francis Bacon, both oil paint on paper, c.1959–1961. 591 Cf. Harrison 2005a, pp. 140–141. 592 For example, T07378: sketch by Francis Bacon, oil paint and ink on paper, c.1959–1961, T07359: sketch by Francis Bacon, oil paint on paper, c.1959–1961; and T07360: sketch by Francis Bacon, graphite and oil paint on paper, c.1959–1961. 593 T07378: sketch by Francis Bacon, oil paint and ink on paper, c.1959–1961; and T07360: sketch by Francis Bacon, graphite and oil paint on paper, c.1959–1961.

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47  T07362: sketch by Francis Bacon, oil paint on paper, c.1959–1961, collection: Tate Britain, London.

48  T07361: sketch by Francis Bacon, oil paint on paper, c.1959–1961, collection: Tate Britain, London.

Many of the surviving sketches were probably executed after already existing paintings.594 Indications for this chronological position can be found in a well-circumscribed group of a dozen drawings from Reece Mews.595 Besides all having been done on tracing paper, the drawings also share a common reference by relating to a handful of paintings from the 1980s and early 1990s only, which include the right panel of Diptych 1982–84: Study from the Human Body 1982–84, Study of the Human Body – from a Drawing by Ingres 1982, 1982, Triptych, 1987, and Triptych, 1991. A comment by Edwards, most likely on this set, confirms that they were done after the respective work had been completed. ‘He [Bacon] would sometimes draw on tracing paper,’ Edwards remembered, ‘slowly mirroring images underneath’.596 If that was the case, Bacon, drawn to self-referencing and repetition, may have aimed to loosely explore new possibilities for already existing elements, and muse on the further development or repetition of subjects rather than creating a concrete preliminary design for a painting. For instance, a series of four sketches involving a headless female body and a shadow597 strongly resemble the composition of the right panel of ­Diptych 1982–84: Study from the Human Body 1982–84; Study of the Human Body – from

594 Cf. Gale 1999, p. 21; and also Cappock 2005a, p. 169. 595 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 1408. 596 Edwards 2001, p. 13. 597 RM98F107:25A-C: drawings on heavy grade tracing paper, late 1970s–1980s.

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a ­Drawing by ­Ingres 1982. Bacon for example added legs to the figures in all four sketches and a shadow similar to the one in Still Life – Broken Statue and Shadow, 1984. The figure after Deakin’s Freud photograph is placed on a seating device different from the photograph but resembling the one in his own Seated Figure on Couch, 1962. And yet, Bacon did not depend on these sketches. As pointed out in the previous chapter, he often continued to develop his motifs with the help of reproductions of his own paintings or re-used the same photo­graphic item several times. The sketches may simply have fulfilled a similar role to the handwritten notes which Bacon used as mnemonic devices to record his ideas. For Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981 Bacon had noted in three hand-drawn boxes what he envisioned for the respective panel spelling out ‘Sybil at Cumae’, ‘Image procession of image in MS tryptich [sic] on dark red dais’ and ‘Figure unlocking door [Bacon here included some drawn rectangular elements] Think of door on both side panels.’598 Experiments Bacon’s sketches seem to consist mainly of two temporally bounded experiments.599 Drawing and sketching never developed into a serious and extensive preparatory practice. Maybe every once in a while the painter, who liked to think of himself as in the pantheon of artists including Rembrandt van Rijn and Michelangelo, felt it incumbent upon him to make a concession to his longed-for place in art history and tried to follow his heroes in attempting to make sketches – only to quickly realise that he was neither capable of producing satisfying results nor was this technique in any way useful for him. As their analysis in comparison with Bacon’s photographic source material has shown, none of Bacon’s sketches seem to advance the figure in a meaningful way and no effects are achieved which are not better, more poignantly, more often, and more consistently produced with the help of a photographic source, and none of the sketches seem to reverberate significantly in a finished painting. This is why their importance in the working process must not be overvalued – such tendencies lead to a failure to see the true protagonist in the origin and development of Bacon’s iconography: the photograph.600

598 Handwritten note and sketch by Francis Bacon, see Cappock 2005a, p. 197, ill. no. 340. 599 Cf. Harrison 2013, p. 11. 600 Cf. Harrison 2008b, p. 13.

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Part two of this analysis aimed to explore and evaluate the dynamics of Bacon’s studio environment as a framework for his art and working methods, with a special focus on the collection and handling of photographic material during the preparatory stages of the painting process. Part three will take a closer look at the appropriation process itself and study the image-image transfer from source to subject. Its focus will lie on the comparative analysis between the formal elements which constitute Bacon’s paintings and their photographic points of reference. I will use selected examples of links between base images and subjects on the canvas, to inductively bring to light and interpret inherent dynamics, patterns, and recurrent methodologies. We will learn that key characteristics of Bacon’s canvases are rooted in the appropriation process itself and are at times directly determined by this process, which suggests that Bacon understood and used it as a stylistic device per se. The analysis will be divided into three sub-categories, according to the main elements of Bacon’s compositions: spatial setting, figure and colour.

3.1.  Spatial Setting and Photography First, this subchapter will examine how spatial settings as formal elements in Bacon’s painting relate to pre-existing imagery. It will explore how, in the transformation process from source to subject, Bacon alluded to but also systematically undermined a naturalistic representation of space by a variety of technical means. In the history of painting, Bacon was not the only one to base his compositions on photographs. Within this process, the photograph has been used by artists in various ways. The entire structure of Gustave Courbet’s La Femme au Perroquet, 1866, derived from a photograph,1 and Lilian Browse pointed out 1

Cf. Scharf 1979, p. 133.

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as to Sickert’s use of photographs that ‘they […] certainly saved him from having to plan his compositions, and although he drew over them and squared them up, the spade work had already been done.’2 As the following analysis will show, in contrast, Bacon’s adoptions were far more complex and compartmentalised, and instead of merely saving labour and generating forerunners for his iconography, Bacon used the process to prepare distinct effects on the finished canvas. 3.1.1.  Spatial Settings – Abstract, Elusive, Unreliable Bones without Flesh – Abstracting and Minimising Space Bacon’s backgrounds are notoriously minimal. The three creatures in Three Studies for ­Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 are already effectively emphasized by a homo­ genous orange background on which depth and space are merely hinted at by some abstract black lines. In principle, this is the formula to which Bacon returns throughout his career: linear rectangular or curved structures on a monochrome ground evoke, but refuse to confirm, a notion of space. Notable exceptions occur almost exclusively in the 1950s, for example when Bacon, inspired by journeys to South Africa, painted figures and animals in grassland settings.3 During the 1960s, the space-frames of the 1950s were transformed into highly stylised interiors until in the 1970s often only allusions to a spatial setting are left, such as the railing in Triptych – Studies from the Human Body, 1970, which barely anchors the figures in space. The minimisation process continued throughout the 1980s and resulted in figures seemingly hovering on monochromatic colour planes, as for example in ‘Study for Portrait of John Edwards’, c.1984. ‘Backgrounds were just what abstraction was good for,’4 Bacon said. Bacon’s increasingly refined concept of a more detailed and complete figure versus a minimal background determined by geometrical structures shows striking parallels to ­László Moholy-Nagy’s mixed media photomontages. The figure-spatial setting situation in the ­Bacon paintings Three Studies of Lucian Freud, 1969, Figure in Movement, 1972, and Study from the Human Body, 1986, are reminiscent of works such as Moholy-Nagy’s The Structure of the World, c.1925, and Jealousy, 1924–1927. Frank Van Deren Coke’s description of Moholy-Nagy’s photomontage compositions adequately summarised the effect of Bacon’s works, too:

2 3 4

Lilian Browse quoted in Coke 1981, p. 99, in reference to p. 98, ill. nos. 222–225. For example, Figure in a Landscape, 1952, and Figure in a Landscape (Miss Diana Watson), 1957. Bacon paraphrased in Sylvester 2000, p. 220.

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‘[He] developed an effective amalgam which united two kinds of representation. The readily under­stood transcriptional elements made with the camera infused his works with a seeming matter-of-fact quality, which was then denied by the dreamlike association evoked in the mind of the viewer by the inclusion of strange perspective arrangements and incongruities. [...] By coupling photographs that had no logical association with strong geometric forms he stimulated the imagination beyond the evocative power of either straight photographs or hand-drawn geometric forms used independently.’5

Is it possible that Bacon drew inspiration from the Bauhaus teacher? In the following I will explore how the minimalist representation of space on the finished canvas is the result of a reductive appropriation of found spatial settings. For Bacon did not borrow the entire setting for a painting. His appropriation process in regards to backgrounds was selective and focussed, and neglected most of the pictorial information the source offered. The minimisation of the base image becomes palpable in many cases, Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V, 1957, being a prime example (plate XIII). This painting is part of a series of six works inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s self-portrait The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888. ‘I’d always loved that picture – the one that was burnt in Germany during the war’, Bacon enthused, ‘[…] that haunted figure on the road seemed just right at that time – like a phantom of the road, you could say.’6 Bacon probably knew the painting as a reproduction in Wilhelm Uhde’s Vincent Van Gogh in Full Colour, 1951, but the group was immediately triggered by a biographical Hollywood movie on the Dutch painter called Lust for Life,7 which contains a re-enactment of The Painter on the Road to Tarascon. Bacon was under pressure to produce new works for an exhibition at Hanover Gallery scheduled to open on 21 March but had not painted much until he saw the film, which premiered in London’s West End cinemas in mid-March 1957.8 Exhilarated by the movie, Bacon worked frantically and delivered some works of the series at the gallery in time for the opening and some, amongst them Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V, shortly after.9 Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V stands out from the group for its linearity, its calmer brushwork and the serenity of the scene. The lonely rambler, his sole companion his frayed shadow, stopped and turned towards the viewer as if to rest and contemplate his journey. The spatial setting of Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V, however, neither relates to a scene in Lust for Life nor to The Painter on the Road to Tarascon itself. So where does it come from? The answer lay hitherto unnoticed among the detritus in Bacon’s studio: a torn leaf with a black and white photograph of a peasant woman with a large umbrella on a country road from Emmy Andriesse’s The World of Van Gogh Le Monde de Van Gogh

5 6 7 8 9

Coke 1981, p. 241, p. 240–241, ill. nos. 481 and 482: Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Structure of the World, c.1925, and Jealousy, 1924–1927 (Coke dated them 1927 and 1930). Bacon quoted from Russell John 2001, p. 51. Uhde 1951 and Lust for Life, dir. by Vincente Minnelli (MGM, 1956), cf. Mellor 2008, p. 53. Cf. Mellor 2008, p. 53. Cf. ibid.

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Die Welt von Van Gogh, 1953.10 This picture distinctively anticipates the setting of the painting (plate XIV). Printed five years before Bacon approached his Van Gogh variations, the publication was available to him and probably already in his possession when Lust for Life triggered a sudden outburst of productivity. Bacon allowed the page to be reproduced in Schmied’s Francis Bacon: Vier Studien zu einem Porträt11 in 1985 and it featured in the Southbank Show12 in the same year, but no one noticed its significance at the time.13 Thus, the scene in the painting is neither a fictional setting which emerged out of the artist’s imagination nor is it a product of the close study of nature. Above all, the work was not conjured up with the help of elusive chance procedures but is the result of a close examination of a found photograph whose formal properties Bacon transferred onto the canvas. The main differences between Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V and Andriesse’s picture concern the figure; these will be addressed in the ensuing chapter. The most prominent deviation in the adoption of the spatial setting lies in the amount of detail Bacon chose to transfer onto the canvas. The photograph captures every component of the landscape surrounding the subject with great accuracy. The surface of the road is textured by dark patches and there are two distinct strips of vegetation parallel to the road. On the horizon is a third strip of vegetation that consists of trees and bushes enclosing a building. Examining the elements captured by the camera makes it easier to understand the space delineated in the picture. From the plants’ diminishing size, the eye can conclude increasing distance to the viewer and by comparing the size of the houses and trees with the size of the figure we are able to understand their positioning in space. For Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V Bacon neglected most of the pictorial information offered by Andriesse’s photograph and significantly simplified the original setting. The depiction of the road includes no hints towards its surface texture and the strips of vegetation in the source picture are turned into near monochromatic colour planes in red, orange and black. They do not distinguishably reference any of the plants or buildings from the photograph but in fact, in their homogeneity, fail to create any figurative connotation, just as they fail to create a sense of depth in the painting. Stacked on top of each other on the picture plane, they are reminiscent of Symbolist colour schemes as, for example, in Edvard Munch’s Four Girls on the Bridge, 1905,14 or even abstract Colour Field painting à la Mark Rothko. If it weren’t for the patch of green the artist added in the lower left corner, vaguely suggestive 10 RM98F130:156: torn leaf, Jos de Gruyter, The World of Van Gogh Le Monde de Van Gogh Die Welt von Van Gogh, photographs by Emmy Andriesse (The Hague: Daamen, 1953), p. 141. The publication revisits places where the Dutch artist is known to have painted, such as Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, Arles and Auvers, and in some photographs echoes the composition of Van Gogh’s paintings. 11 See Schmied 1985, p. 144. 12 See Francis Bacon 1985. 13 Brendan Prendeville falsely related the figure in the photograph to that in the painting but missed the more significant link to the overall composition, also, he did not identify the page, Brendan Prendeville, ‘Varying the Self: Bacon’s Versions of van Gogh’, Oxford Art Journal, 27.1 (2004), 23–42, p. 38. 14 Cf. also Bruce Bernard, ‘Francis Bacon: Study for Portrait of Van Gogh’, in Arts Council Brochure (­London: South Bank Centre, 1994), no page numbers.

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of an organic structure due to its colour and the irregular black brushstrokes, and the wavy lines framing the top black strip, the reading of the setting as a road in a landscape would depend entirely on the title and the art historical context of the painting. The work may also reference, albeit to a lesser degree, a photograph of Bacon himself on a deserted country road (plate XV).15 It was taken during a journey with Peter Lacy, a former stockbroker, fighter and test pilot, with whom he shared a passionate, yet troubled relationship since 1952.16 Bacon faces in the opposite direction to the figure in the painting and the countryside in the background is structured slightly differently from the one in Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V. Bacon may have identified with Van Gogh and alluded to himself as the ‘haunted figure on the road’ and ‘a phantom of the road’,17 using Van Gogh’s painting in his work as a visual metaphor to avoid, yet to refer to, his own experience as captured in the holiday snapshot, which was perhaps a less happy moment with Lacy. Stretching the bond between figure and figuration by paring down a found setting to a minimum was a technique Bacon often employed. The result was sometimes extreme, and became increasingly so in the later decades of his work. Study for Portrait of Gilbert de Botton from 1986 is a commissioned work which shows the financial entrepreneur and patron of the arts in a sparse space binding his tie in front of a mirror (figure 49).18 The setting derived from a black and white photograph of the matador Diego Puerta getting dressed for the arena, as reproduced in Robert Daley’s The Swords of Spain from 1967, three copies of which were found in the studio (figure 50).19 The overall posture and shape of both the protagonist and his mirror-image echo in the painting. The bullfighter, however, was replaced by a man in suit pants representing de Botton. What is gaping at us from inside the mirror appears, however, like a composite of de Botton’s likeness after some portrait photographs he had sent to Bacon,20 mingled with facial features of the artist himself. The photograph from The Swords of Spain depicts the corner of a room from an elevated position. It features an armchair in the foreground, on which Puerta placed another garment and a towel, and the corner of a large chest on the wall is visible in the right of the

15 RM98F12:17:21: photograph, unknown photographer (maybe Peter Lacy), Francis Bacon in the South of France, c.mid-1950s. This is one of 21 black and white photographs and photographic negatives found in a small envelope of a photo shop in Cannes (RM98F12:17:2), where they were probably developed. The journey seemed to have covered many areas of the Mediterranean, one picture (RM98F12:17:23) shows the Temple of Vesta in Tivoli, Italy, while others might have been taken in Morocco (RM98F12:17:15). Interestingly, many other examples from the series show roads and piers in equally hyper-dynamic perspectives, which might – given that they were taken by Bacon – be a reflection of his aesthetic preferences: RM98F:12:17:6, RM98F:12:17:7, RM98F:12:17:13, RM98F:12:17:22. 16 Cf. Harrison 2016b, p. 84. 17 Bacon quoted from Russell John 2001, p. 51. 18 Then a trustee of the museum, de Botton persuaded Bacon to donate Second Version of Triptych 1944, 1988 to the Tate Gallery, cf. Sinclair 1993, p. 308. 19 RM98F93:11, RM98F93:19 and RM98F93:20: Robert Daley, The Swords of Spain (London: Allen Lane Penguin, 1967), p. 131, cf. Günther 2011, pp. 24–25. 20 19 photographs of de Botton were found in Reece Mews. RM98F1:35: the colour portrait photograph of de Botton’s face shows pink paint marks and is horizontally folded in half, c.1980s.

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49  Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait of Gilbert de Botton, 1986, oil on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, private collection.

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50  Robert Daley, The Swords of Spain (London: Allen Lane Penguin, 1967), p. 131.

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picture. The part of the bed which can be seen as a reflection in the mirror underlines the tension and privacy of the situation. The photograph aesthetically gains part of its power from the interplay of the floral patterns on the armchair in the foreground, the carpet, and the embroidery on Puerta’s trousers. And yet, Bacon ignored all of this and reduced the setting to an elusive non-space. He edited out the chair, the carpet and the chest; indeed, he stripped the base image of any superfluous detail and abstracted it to three straight, graphic lines separating three homogenous colour planes in black and beige, which in their angles and proportions match those of the found setting. Omitting all detail belonging to a visual element, thus creating a pictorial shorthand for natural facts, is a powerful stylistic tool to create abstraction. With the help of this radical oppression of detail, Bacon unties the setting of his paintings from both the source picture and the illusion of three-dimensionality. At (Sur) Face Value – Adopting Outlines Yet Bacon’s versions of photographed spaces are not entirely abstract, but often abstracted from pre-existing images; he did not entirely cut the bond to a naturalistic rendering of space. As the previous two examples showed, the close adoption of pictorial detail was not on Bacon’s agenda: in fact, he omitted more from the source picture than the borrowed. But what is left after the extreme minimisation? What is the point of reference for what we see on the finished canvas? The base image for Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V captures the road in a dynamic shot emphasising its progression into the distance: the picture was taken from the left edge of the road, at an angle to the road and from a low viewpoint. It leads diagonally through the picture. In Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V black and green lines separate the colour fields that dominate the background from one another. The lines follow the margins of the road, the roadside, the field and the row of trees in the distance as represented in the photograph. In their number and positioning on the picture plane, the lines to a large degree match the outlines of the elements in the base image. A similar approach was adopted in Study for Portrait of Gilbert de Botton. While no additional detail is borrowed from the photograph published in The Swords of Spain, it is the margins of the hotel room which echo so distinctively on the canvas as three straight lines and colour planes. Bacon probably took the margins of the carpet on the floor as orientation for his simplified version of the setting, and made this into the presumed ground on the canvas. Thus, the core of the bond between source and canvas lies in Bacon’s adoption of the outlines of spatial elements. With the demarcation lines, Bacon transposed the main characteristics of the spatial setting, using the found composition as a template for his own version of the background. Since the margins of photographed buildings, rooms, roads, or fields were subject to the perspective of the camera, which faithfully captured the landscape or interior in front of the lens, those lines tie the painting not only to the source image but also to a naturalistic depiction of space: what remains after all the reduction is what balances the tightrope walker towards figuration.

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51  Francis Bacon, ‘Three Figures’, c.1982, oil and felt pen on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin.

Perspective and depth were only created as adopted from the margins of physical objects, such as rooms, houses, and streets in the pre-existing image, which thus remains a shallow affair concerning the surface of the photograph only. In the painting, for lack of additional technical artifice to assist the outlines and help simulate a fictional space, the lines are but a mere allusion to space and only hint at representational painting. Bacon ultimately creates no depth in the background: there is no alternation of colour and tonality to indicate increasing distance, and the lines are of even thickness. Embedded in a minimal, abstracted environment, they serve more to subdivide and structure the picture plane around the figure. They function merely as a symbol for space, a slippery armature onto which the viewers can project their desire for figuration and not a serious attempt at creating the illusion of a three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional medium. That Bacon’s lack of interest in a more accurate rendering of space motivated how he appropriated and adopted photographs is borne out by the methods he employed, and did not employ. He did not resort to making grids, a technique used by many of his colleagues to accurately transfer a small photographed setting onto the larger canvas.21 Unfinished paintings such as ‘Three Figures’, 1982, reveal that he positioned the linear structures that organise the space in freehand (figure 51). As a result, the adoption is lax and loose, and done in an imprecise manner. Extended beyond the margins of the canvas, the perspective lines in Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V, for example, do not meet in a single vanishing 21 Cf. Scharf 1979, pp. 167–168, ill. nos. 103–104, Theodore Robinson, Two in a Boat, 1891, and squared up photographic source.

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point and continue aimlessly into infinity. Furthermore, no traces can be found of any deeper consideration of how to simulate three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface. Bacon did not take the photograph as source of inspiration to then reconstruct the same setting on the canvas aided by conventional technical devices. Unfinished paintings, such as ‘Three Figures’, 1982, show no hints of an underlying construction to engender depth and perspective. Two parallel vertical lines in the background together with two diagonals on the presumed ground reference central perspective. But its preparation is exhausted in painting the outlines of the anticipated space, principally an abstract space-frame, onto the canvas, and the lines are not extrapolated to create a cohesive construction. ‘Brunelleschian perspective played no part in his schema’,22 Harrison rightly remarked, let alone planning and sketching out a mathematical, underlying construction of depth and perspective. Errors, Mistakes and Inconsistencies The minimisation of found settings is a significant deviation from the original image and a major step towards abstraction. Yet Bacon went further to dissociate himself both from the source picture and figuration in general, by integrating inconsistencies in his paintings both in comparison to the original setting and to the illusionistic rendering of space. In the case of Study for Portrait of Gilbert de Botton and its photographic counterpart, the inconsistency came about because an element from the found setting was assigned an ever so slightly different position in the adopted setting on the canvas. As pointed out earlier, Bacon borrowed the demarcations of the hotel room. For the ground in the painting, however, he only incorporated the area covered by the carpet. The confines of the room thus are shifted inwards, leaving the mirror, depicted here as a three-dimensional box, outside the presumed ground, reaching into an inscrutable black void. Bacon thus on the one hand mocks the representational value of the adopted outlines of the space, and reduces them to a mere charade of space. On the other hand he created an unsettling scenario, a rupture in reality we cannot comprehend by extrapolating what we know about space. In other cases, the logical errors are manifested in the selective appropriation and incohesive combination of elements, as is the case in Blood on the Floor – Painting, 1986 (plate XVII). If it were not for the conspicuous splashes of bright red blood, it would be an unassuming picture. All the painting offers is a couple of floor boards, a light switch and a light bulb dangling from the ceiling. In the absence of a figure, the puddle of blood is at the centre of the composition, highlighted by a contrasting beige ground and pointed at by the light bulb above. No additional information is provided; there is no body, no murder ­weapon, no narrative leading to a crime. Bacon may have found inspiration for this disturbing image in the numerous books on crime, mafia, forensic pathology, and war atrocities he collected,23 which often feature graphic imagery. The left panel of Triptych

22 Cf. Harrison 2009b, p. 158. 23 For example RM98F101:14: G. Austin Gresham, A Colour Atlas of Forensic Pathology, World ­Medical Atlases, XII, (London: Wolfe Medical, 1975); RM98F93:16: Hank Messick and Burt Goldblatt, The

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from the same year is based on a photograph of Leon Trotsky’s study after his assassination in ­Francis ­Wyndham and David King’s Trotsky: A Documentary24 from 1972 and this photograph might have fed into Blood on the Floor – Painting as well. Or is it the floor of a butcher’s shop, a slaughter­house? Considering its grim subject, however, the prominent floor is based on the most unlikely source. It was lifted from a black and white photographic reproduction in Michael Peto and Alexander Bland’s The Dancer’s World25 from 1963, which shows a cleaning bucket on the stage of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden (plate XVI). We can only speculate what attracted Bacon to this particular image but the photographic reproduction on the page opposite might provide a clue. ‘Twenty charladies’26 are pictured on their knees scrubbing the floor so that the scene resembles Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers from 1875, which has been associated with Bacon’s Two Men Working in a Field, 1971,27 and the connection may have stopped Bacon in his tracks when browsing through The Dancer’s World. The source image depicts only the floor of the stage, the extent of which is emphasised by the elevated position of the camera. The grid of narrowing vertical and horizontal boards forcefully leads the view into the distance, not unlike the composition of Paul Klee’s Hauptweg und Nebenwege, 1929. Bacon adopted the trapezoid of the foreshortened trapdoor on which the bucket is placed. Its inner structure is based on the six floorboards further away from the viewer: the second from the right is slightly shorter than the other floorboards, a characteristic which can be traced in the painting. Remnants of a naturalistic representation of space can be found in Blood on the Floor – Painting in the shape of the trapdoor and the diagonal outlines of the floorboards, the appropriation of which left hints at the linear perspective with one vanishing point featured in the photograph. And yet, the demarcation lines of the boards become blurry towards the end of the structure, so that the attempt at perspective towards the bottom of the painting loses power. The spatial logic is further sabotaged by the fragmentary manner in which the pictorial element was appropriated. Similar to how he dealt with figures in his work, Bacon cut out the distinctive part of the stage and positioned it at the centre of a plain orange void, where it appears to levitate. There are no other elements to help create perspective and depth, neither walls nor a ceiling. This lack of spatial references causes confusion about the status of the borrowed piece of floor. The fragment from The Dancer’s World becomes

24 25 26 27

Mobs and the Mafia. The Illustrated History of Organized Crime (London: Spring Books, 1972), and RM98F12:26: Ministère de l´Algérie, Cabinet de Ministre, The True Aspects of the Algerian Rebellion ([n.p.]: 1957). RM98F114:129: Francis Wyndham and David King, Trotsky: A Documentary (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 170. RM98F93:1: Michael Peto and Alexander Bland, The Dancer’s World (London: Collins, 1963), no page numbers. Caption to picture from Peto and Bland 1963, no page numbers. Cf. Martin Harrison, ‘Francis Bacon: Sources and Meaning’, lecture on 6 May 2005, New York: Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 2005, available on francis-bacon.com [accessed 31 July 2021].

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a nondescript, bizarrely artificial snippet of reality. If it weren’t for the title, it would be unclear whether the painting really depicted floorboards or an upright construction of wooden planks, as spatially reliable pictorial touchpoints are mostly lacking. The few references provided by Bacon work against any spatial connotations the planks might convey. The casing of the light switch does not match the perspective suggested by the floorboards. Following their logic, the walls should be leading away from the viewer at a ninety-degree angle but the switch faces the viewer; the casing visible on the left even suggests the switch might be positioned at a slight angle in the opposite direction. The positioning of the light bulb and cord is equally contradictory and ambiguous when read in relation to the floor. The ceiling it is attached to is not visible, so that it might be positioned right on the picture plane close to the viewer, but at the same time looks like it is directly above the splash of blood, which is presumably further away. Bacon may deliberately have lifted and combined pictorial elements in such an ambiguous, sometimes paradoxical manner to avoid the detested notion of illustration and to integrate into his works ‘changes in reality, which become lies that are truer than the literal truth’.28 Materiality Another, most powerful way to undermine the figuration provided by the source picture is the adoption of alterations of the image as physical object. Sphinx – Portrait of Muriel ­Belcher and Oedipus from 1979 illustrate that the metamorphosis of the spatial setting was often predetermined by the physical state of the photographic source (plate XVIII). The two works were originally intended to be parts of a triptych but a centre panel was never executed and the two outer panels were split when Sphinx was sold in 1980.29 Bacon and Belcher had been friends since 1948.30 Belcher was in hospital while Bacon worked on the painting and when she died in October 1979, Bacon may have turned the piece into a memorial to her.31 Mourning for a close friend perhaps reinvigorated the grief over another tragic loss. Oedipus is constructed from an unidentified Michelangelo-esque body onto which Bacon grafted the profile of his former partner George Dyer, who had died in Paris eight years earlier. Bacon borrowed it from a cut-out of a photograph which had already informed Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror in 1976, Painting, 1978, and would appear again in Study from the Human Body After Muybridge, 1988.32 Belcher’s figure, too, is a composite of diverse

28 29 30 31 32

Sylvester 2009, p. 172. Cf. Harrison 2008b, pp. 10–11. Cf. ibid., p. 11. Cf. ibid. RM98F107:28: cut-out from photograph, documentary film stock, ‘Francis Bacon’, prod. and dir. by David Hinton, ed. by and with Melvyn Bragg interview, for The South Bank Show, London Weekend Television, 1985. Two layers of paint in red and black which follow the circumference of the cut-out suggest that it was traced to transpose Dyer’s profile onto the canvas. There are also four small holes (probably from a drawing pin) at the top edge.

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source images including photographs of her taken by John Timbers and John Deakin and a picture of ballet dancer Marcia Haydée, published in the Observer in 1978.33 The two paintings follow the same pictorial formula. A single figure is placed in a linear cubical structure which itself hovers on a monochrome orange background. A rectangular pink colour plane, integrated into a smaller structure protruding into the first one, accentuates each figure. The outer cubic structure is almost identical in both paintings. It appears to be open towards the viewer and gives the impression of looking into an undefined spatial setting with a pentagonal ground and a square back wall. There appears to be a left, but no right wall and the ceiling is cut off by the upper margins of the canvas. A sense of depth is created by the diagonals on the left leading to the square in the centre, which is considerably smaller than the presumed entrance point creating a vague association with vanishing lines in linear perspective. Yet due to the different shape and dimensions of the supposed ground and ceiling and the disparities between the right and the left side, the cube fails to add up to a cohesive representation of space. Thus, while the linear structure is the only indication of depth and space in the painting apart from the composition of the figures, it is unreliable and volatile and can at the most be read as symbolising a spatial setting. Even this most abstract of elements finds its origins in a photograph. The structure loosely references a powerful black and white photograph of the dramatically lit king’s chamber in Khufu’s pyramid, in which a single figure throws a large shadow on the back wall. The torn leaf from Bacon’s copy of Kurt Mendelssohn’s The Riddle of the Pyramids34 published in 1974 was posthumously unearthed from Reece Mews (plate XIX). The artist’s interest in this photograph may have gone beyond its aesthetics, and perhaps he found its subject, a burial chamber, an apt pictorial springboard for two memorial paintings. For the cubic structure on the canvas Bacon adopted the square back wall of the space in the photograph, the ceiling being cut by the margins of the image, the diagonal perspective line marking where the ceiling and the right wall meet and the two diagonal lines created by the encounter between the ceiling, the wall, and the floor on the left side. By altering the length of the construction lines and the angles they now interrelate, and the canvas depicts a twisted and contorted version of the photographed room. Bacon did not solely rely on the found image to compose the cube. Besides altering the spatial structure in the photograph during the execution on the canvas, Bacon also absorbed the physical state of the torn leaf. The cube on the canvas features additional lines which do not appear in the original photograph but originate from damage to the torn book page. It is impossible to tell if these occurred deliberately or by accident, but dog-ears

33 John Timbers, Muriel Belcher in the Colony Room, c.1975, John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, c.1965 (item owned by The Estate of Francis Bacon, illustrated in Harrison 2008b, p. 10), RM98F15:12: Observer, 4 June 1978, cf. Harrison 2008b, pp. 10–11. 34 RM98F110:38: torn leaf, Kurt Mendelssohn, The Riddle of the Pyramids (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974), p. 134, ill. no.37.

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on the upper and lower left corner broke the printed surface and left straight white marks on the picture. These physical alterations to the book page affected Bacon’s perception of the image, and he embraced the damage as a valid contribution to its iconography. The physical alterations in the object thus became the upper and lower diagonal contours of the cube on the front left on the canvas. Bacon, however, shifted the upper line generated by the dog-ear upwards to connect it with the perspective lines of the wall in the photograph. He in other words referenced not only found pre-existing imagery but mingled it with the physical alterations to the leaf as a three-dimensional object, and transformed the result into his painted iconography. Crucially, such predetermined alterations are partly responsible for the anti-naturalistic appearance of the cube on the canvas and must thus have been embraced by Bacon as agents of non-illustration. As pointed out above, it is unclear if the page from The Riddle of the Pyramids was altered by accident or manipulated deliberately and the effect it had on the pre-existing iconography was relatively mild. In other cases, the working documents bear witness to stronger targeted manipulations by the artist. ‘Street Scene (with Car in Distance)’, 1984, features a wide grey street with a red vehicle, which is hovering freely in front of a homogenous red background (plate XX). The scenery is informed by a colour photographic reproduction from The Illustrated London News,35 September 1980 (plate XXI). In its original state, the image showed a red van on a sloping London street in a dilapidated residential area. Initially, the page was torn from the magazine and mounted in its entirety onto a cardboard support using transparent tape. At some point, the artist cut off the upper part of the leaf together with the support, following the edge of the pavement in the photograph as well as removing the upper part of the car. Both parts of the leaf remained in the studio. The glue of the tape left traces on the lower part of the image and is still attached to the upper part, which is, in contrast to the lower part, no longer affixed to the cardboard.36 The lower part, which forms the starting point for ‘Street Scene (with Car in Distance)’, is now secured in place with a paper clip. The sparse composition of ‘Street Scene (with Car in Distance)’ is solely predefined by the irregularly shaped item which is created from the lower part of the magazine page and the remaining cardboard support. The street, the pavement and the red car echo distinctively on the canvas. Yet the original image is heavily recast, with the manipulated physical shape of the image itself at the core of the alterations. The composition is, once again, stripped of all detail. The corrugated iron fence and the houses to the left of the car in the original picture are missing, and the background was omitted completely. These elements were physically removed from the original composition and do not feature on the remaining part of the image. Without the rest of the picture as reference, the topography

35 RM98F130:166: fragment of leaf, mounted on cardboard, The Illustrated London News, 268.6986.2 (September 1980), p. 37. Transparent tape attached to the fragment. Fragments come from RM98F237:2: copy of magazine (see RM98F130:166), pages 37 and 38 are torn out. 36 The other part of RM98F130:166 is RM98F16:295O.

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of the ­setting becomes unclear and this facilitated Bacon turning the descending into an ascending street. The wall next to the car protruding from the road in the upper right of the painting does not exist in the original newspaper photo but derives solely from the cut shape of the studio item. The genesis of ‘Street Scene (with Car in Distance)’ exemplifies the significance of the studio material as a physical object. There are specific formal discrepancies between the undisturbed original image from The Illustrated London News and the painting, which are the result of concrete interventions into the materiality of the item itself. The decision to omit the gutter from the photograph as a pictorial element, on the other hand, may have been an abstract, intellectual decision, driven by the artist’s imagination and vision, and the texture and various hues of grey, white, and red of the street may have been guided by the execution on the canvas itself, by the behaviour of the paint and the gesture of the brushstroke. But the fact that the original car, houses, and background were omitted was rooted in a different process: it was rehearsed and anticipated with the help of the studio item. Whereas in some cases, for instance in the item which informed Figure Getting out of a Car,37 the part of the image which was of no interest was overpainted, here the measures are more radical. The artist did not interfere with the image on a two-dimensional, pictorial level as overpainting or overdrawing does, but manipulated the shape of the item as a three-dimensional object to alter the composition – he simply physically removed the parts of the image he wanted to omit: the value of the item lies in its transformed state as an object.38 However, this three-dimensional alteration is in the painting translated back into two-dimensional iconography, offering no hint towards the preparation process. Melting, Mingling and Merging ‘There is nothing simple about the art of Bacon and the use that he makes of photographs is characteristically complex: his images often derive from a variety of photographs of different subjects and these may be fused or coloured by his memory of some still other thing seen or remembered,’39 John Rothenstein suspected in 1964. Two aspects of his statement are being proven vital by the present research on the studio material. First, Bacon’s adoption of pre-existing imagery is far from simple, and second, often more than one source informed a painted subject. This also applies to spatial settings. Rothenstein perhaps intuitively employed the term ‘fused’ to describe the combination process of separate sources and in that, too, lies a truth he could not have anticipated. For the phenomenon I will discuss in the following is not the selection of fragments from disparate sources which are, in a collage-like practice, rearranged next to each other on the picture plane, but the more complex process of layering, merging, melting, the fusion of almost identical pre-existing settings in 37 Cf. torn leaf, overpainted, Heinrich Hoffmann, ‘The Führer Who Commands’, Picture Post, 13 July 1940, leaf photographed by Sam Hunter in the Cromwell Place studio, 1950, illustrated in Gale and Stephens 2008a, p. 16, ill. no. 2. 38 Cf. Finke 2009a, p. 131. 39 Rothenstein 1964, pp. 17–18.

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their entirety using a mechanism which may be likened to filmic superimposition. Using this technique, which Bacon was well-familiar with from films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike, 1925,40 a third image can be created by superimposing one image over another, either by registering them separately on one length of film or by rewinding the film after the first exposure and adding a second image, or else by double-printing in a laboratory.41 In Bacon’s case, the diverse pictorial elements involved in the process share vital formal features such as outlines and proportions, which echo, to a larger or lesser degree, on the finished canvas. While the blatant formal correspondences between single photographic sources and painted spatial settings, such as Andriesse’s photograph of a French woman and Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V, might lead one to assume that this is the only, the one correct source for the painting’s background, in reality this is barely ever the case. A considerable degree of pictorial correlation between one source and a painted subject is no guarantee for exclusivity, as I demonstrated with the help of the private holiday snapshot of the artist, which might have fed into Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V too. Ultimately, we will never know how many other sources Bacon consulted, and what other ideas and experiences contributed to a certain work. When we do find different sources, even among his studio material, we can barely ever say for certain that he looked at one image or another when conceiving a painting. Even when several connections to pre-existing imagery can be established, it might not always be possible to disentangle precisely what element of which image fed into which element on the canvas and to what degree. It is highly likely that the artist himself would not have been able to answer such questions.42 The spatial setting of Statue and Figures in a Street, 1983, bears a close resemblance to several photographic points of departure (plate XXIV). Statue and Figures in a Street is an utterly elusive work, posing more questions than it answers. An undistinguished curved street, which within the margins of the outer of two linear cubical structures is framed by a wall, leads from the lower left corner into the painting. It hovers freely on a plain orange background and beyond the outer rectangular structure, it dissolves into the distance. In the centre, Bacon placed a small headless nude trapped in movement on a plinth, its back turned towards the viewer. It is accompanied by some ghostly pedestrians, which, like the statue, stand out for their pictorial vagueness. One source for the anonymous setting is a black and white photograph on a leaf torn from The Book of London,43 which features photographs of the city by Iain Macmillan (plate XXV). Book and painting are tied together by a handwritten note by the artist in the

40 Cf. Archimbaud 2010, p. 16. 41 Cf. Georges Régnier, Movie Techniques for the Advanced Amateur (New York: American Photographic Book Pub., 1959), p. 140. 42 Cf. Michael Peppiatt, ‘Francis Bacon: The Studio as Symbol’, The Connoisseur, 214.871 (September 1984), 84–93, p. 86. 43 RM98F17:138: torn leaf, Iain Macmillan and Roger Baker, The Book of London (London: Joseph, 1968), p. 251.

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publication saying ‘The Streets of London 1983’,44 which likely relates to Statue and Figures in a Street. The note is consistent with the artist’s habit of using everything ready to hand as a notebook, reminding himself to use certain imagery for the genesis of a new work. The photograph in question shows a young man walking on the pavement alongside high brick walls, behind which unnamed warehouses tower. Bacon adopted the positioning and proportions of the pavement, the wall and their characteristic curve in the picture for the layout of his own work but remodelled it into a street on the canvas. The image was shot from a low viewpoint close to the wall, which emphasizes its size and the advance of the pavement into the distance; both effects echo in the painting. Macmillan’s street scene is not the only image which may have made an impact on the spatial organization of Statue and Figures in a Street. The frame ‘Man Walking down Pavement’ from La Marche de L’Homme, 1888, by Étienne-Jules Marey forms a very different, yet at the same time strikingly similar possible source (plate XXII). Bacon might have seen it reproduced in a publication dedicated to the French photographic pioneer, but it had also been frequently published in books on film and movie making.45 It features, for instance, in Nicole Vedrès’ Images du Cinéma Francais46 from 1945, which is one of the earliest books on film Bacon owned. The image offers a distinctive spatial arrangement of elements very similar to the dockland photograph. This image, too, was photographed from a low viewpoint and features a male figure walking on an almost identically curved footpath. The positioning, proportions, and perspective of the pavement correspond to a large degree with the one in the painting. There is much to suggest that the layering of formally highly similar sources was a purposeful and deliberate technical strategy Bacon employed to benefit from what each source had to offer. Bacon commented to David Sylvester that ‘Muybridge and ­Michelangelo are mixed up in my mind together’,47 and seeing his figures in the context of his working material suggests that we need to take this statement literally and that he actually mixed up two sources on the canvas. For the lower body of the striding male nude in Study from the Human Body (Man Turning on Light), 1973 in its posture and shape resembles both a preparatory drawing for the Pauline Chapel fresco by Michelangelo and the manipulated photograph of a ‘Man Shadow Boxing’48 by Muybridge introduced earlier (plate X and XII).

44 RM98F21:55: Iain Macmillan and Roger Baker, The Book of London (London: Joseph, 1968). 45 E.g. Roger Manvell and Paul Rotha, Movie Parade – A Pictorial Survey of World Cinema, (London, New York: Studio Publications, 1950), p. 149, ill. no. 632. 46 Nicole Vedrès, Images du Cinéma Francais, avant-propos de Paul Eluard (Paris: Les Éditions du Chêne, 1945), p. 90, ill. no. 153, a torn leaf from this publication was found in the studio [RM98F1A:47: pp. 105–106]. 47 Sylvester 2009, p. 114. 48 RM98F15:41: torn leaf, Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of Michelangelo (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), p. 285 fig. 406: ‘Nude Seen from the Rear’, 1534 and 1545 (?), black chalk, Haarlem, Teylers­ museum, and RM98F11:91: torn leaf, folded, attached to support, inserted in plastic bag, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901), plate 63, ‘Pugilist. Striking a Blow’, see Günther 2011, pp. 16–17.

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The subject may thus equally be based on both, and the melting of two different images with disparate connotations into a single painted subject may have been facilitated by their formal similarities. The second part of his comment illustrates that this was not a random combination. Bacon aimed to get one thing from one source, and something else from the other, which he then hoped to coalesce in his painting. Bacon explained that ‘so I perhaps could learn about positions from Muybridge and learn about the ampleness, the grandeur of form from Michelangelo’.49 Thus, he aimed to borrow the signature characteristics of both sources: scientific accuracy in capturing the body in movement from Muybridge and the impact of the highly aestheticised, idealised masculinity of Michelangelo. Study from the Human Body (Man Turning on Light) was likely not the only case in which Bacon employed this approach. Even though it is difficult to disentangle precisely the impact of the two sources mentioned above related to Statue and Figures in a Street, some formal elements on the canvas can more distinctly be assigned to one source than the other. From the Macmillan photograph Bacon adopted the shape of the pavement without major alterations, but converted it into the street on the canvas. He also adopted the fact that it is accompanied by a high wall. From the Marey picture, he might have borrowed the idea of a black backdrop for a light figure to heighten its impact within the composition. Black rectangular backdrops appear in Bacon’s paintings since the mid-1960s, for example in the left panel of Crucifixion, 1965 and the centre panel of Triptych – Studies of the Human Body, 1979, so that the black void in Statue and Figures in a Street may be a self-referential feature. Yet in this instance Bacon likely adopted it from the Marey photograph. Impenetrable darkness as a backdrop for his subjects was crucial for Marey to achieve the best possible visibility of the movement of the photographed figure. That is why in 1883 he developed an open shed of 3 × 15 × 4 metres which was painted black with the walls and floors additionally covered in black velvet.50 This shed can be seen to the left of the figure in ‘Man Walking down Pavement’ and was adopted by Bacon as a black colour plane in Statue and Figures in a Street to highlight the statue which is, similar to Marey’s protagonists, trapped in movement. A third source of inspiration reverberates strongly in Statue and Figures in a Street. While the idea of integrating a black plane into a wall, and as backdrop for the main figure derived from La Marche de L’Homme and The Book of London, to integrate it into a street scene with ghostly pedestrians throwing shadows is strongly reminiscent of Paul Strand’s famous photograph Wall Street, 1915.51 The photograph is dominated by the windows of the recently built J.P. Morgan & Co. Building on Wall Street, New York. The iconic picture only shows these as gigantic monochrome black blanks. In comparison, the pedestrians appear small, insignificant and anonymous, just as they do in Bacon’s painting. Turning

49 Sylvester 2009, p. 114. 50 Cf. Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 75. 51 Martin Harrison in conversation with the author, 2012.

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their backs to us, they cast long shadows in the low morning sun, similar to the faceless figures in ­Statue and Figures in a Street. And yet, Bacon appropriated none of the elements in Wall Street directly so the photograph falls into the category of more generic inspiration. However, none of the other formal references mentioned above come as close to Statue and Figures in a Street in their style, mood, and overall scenery – so Strand’s photograph might have been the critical source of inspiration for the idea of the painting which was then executed with the help of unrelated formal sources. Thus, the analyses of some of the pictorial springboards of Statue and Figures in a Street shows that the overall layout of a painting might be assembled from various, unrelated sources which are melted and fused by the artist to form a new, unexpected result. In sum, Bacon created reduced, paradoxical, and volatile settings which neither in their appearance on the canvas, nor in their construction from photographic material provide strong and effective points of identification for the figure. As Ernst van Alphen pointed out, the cages and boxes do not offer a frame for the figure and erode the constitution of the figure beyond its form, because they stay trapped in a space which is fundamentally ambiguous and does not allow for self-experience.52 This effect is, as we now know, based on a distinct appropriation practice. 3.1.2.  The Stage Set – Figure and Ground

The first part of the chapter discussed how Bacon adopted spatial settings from pre-existing images. This part will explore how spatial settings are related to the figure during the appropriation process and the construction of a painting. A main character trait of Bacon’s work is that it usually presents the figure as a pictorially and stylistically isolated element. I will show that this effect is deeply rooted in Bacon’s preparatory practice and his idiosyncratic absorption of source material. ‘The moment there are several figures – at any rate several figures on the same canvas – the story begins to be elaborated,’53 Bacon said and in the majority of his works the focal point is a single human, animal, or fantasy creature, which is placed on its own at the centre of the composition. Gilles Deleuze classed this lack of opponents among the techniques that allowed Bacon to successfully avoid ‘the figurative, illustrative, and narrative’54 and helped reduce the figure to a mere ‘Icon’,55 an ‘Image’.56 Van Alphen suggested integrating into

52 Cf. Ernst van Alphen, ‘”Reconcentrations”: Bacon Reinventing his Models’, in Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, ed. by Wilfried Seipel, Barbara Steffen and Christoph Vitali, exh. cat. Vienna: Kunst­histo­ri­sches Museum, 2003/2004; Riehen/Basel: Fondation Beyerle, 2004 (Milan: Skira, 2004), ­pp. ­57–69, p. 65. 53 Sylvester 2009, p. 22. 54 Deleuze 2008, p. 2. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., according to Deleuze, other devices are putting the figure onto a rail and placing it inside cube or oval, see Deleuze 2008 p. 1.

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this group of techniques the volatility of the spatial settings.57 The figure is not only removed from figuration by its pictorial solitude, it is also emphatically uncoupled from its surroundings in style and material so that it appears as an entity utterly detached from the ground. The minimalist, abstracted design of the background versus the more developed and detailed appearance of the figure was pointed out in the previous chapter. The brushwork and distribution of colour within the figure and ground differ widely too. While in some periods, for example from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s, and in some groups of works, including most of the Van Gogh variations of 1957, figure and background were unified by similar brushwork and a close intertwining of formal elements in a painterly manner, at least since the early 1960s the paint application becomes palpably more disjointed. In the later decades the background is usually smooth and monochrome while the figure is executed in painterly, accidental brushwork. Multiple colours are barely mixed, and the material towers up in haptic, thick impasto. This discrepancy, ‘a violent juxtaposition of two opposite conventions’,58 is one of the most notable and noticed characteristics of Bacon’s works.59 Technical analysis revealed that this effect was potentiated by a targeted choice of material. While the figure was usually painted in oil, in the background synthetic household emulsions generated a flat, matt, and ‘featureless’60 surface.61 In 1974 Bacon dismissed his past detours into the painterly and explained that he now created the ‘very clear backgrounds against which the image can articulate itself’62 to avoid the ‘homely atmosphere’63 he ascribed to painting that depended on the painterly. Bacon never elaborated what he meant by trying to avoid a ‘homely atmosphere’ but in relation to his formal treatment of the figure, it is consistent with the figure not fitting comfortably into its environment; in fact, the figure appears to be constantly rejected by its environment. This dissociation of figure and background is often compounded by their being literally separated by a margin of raw canvas. This can already be seen around the right edge of the umbrella in Painting 1946 but occurs increasingly frequently as of 1960, for instance in Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1969.64 Without any points of reference on the canvas either in form, style, or material the figure indeed becomes an utterly isolated entity, whose relationship to figuration is deeply disturbed. A close examination of Bacon’s working documents and associated paintings revealed that the isolation of the figure as a pictorial element and its sharp disconnection from the background were at least partially predetermined by Bacon’s working processes. A figure 57 Cf. van Alphen 2003, p. 65. 58 David Sylvester in Sylvester 2009, pp. 118–119. 59 Cf., for example, also Andrew Forge, ‘About Bacon’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by Dawn Ades and ­Andrew Forge, exh. cat. London: Tate Gallery, 1985; Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1985/1986; Berlin: Nationalgalerie, 1986 (London: Thames and Hudson in association with Tate Gallery 1985; New York: Abrams, 1985), pp. 24–31, pp. 24–25. 60 Shepard 2009, p. 169 61 See also Durham 1985, p. 231. 62 Sylvester 2009, p. 119. 63 Ibid. 64 Cf. Shepard 2009, p. 169.

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was usually lifted out of a pre-existing image on its own, neglecting any other formal elements and background and figure were consistently borrowed from separate sources. The figure was thus a solitary, confined entity detached from its original context by default even before it entered the canvas. In relation to Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, David Boxer remarked that the figures were ‘delineated into some sort of stage setting.’65 The idea of understanding the background as a sort of stage set versus the figure as an actor playing on it is an apt visual metaphor to characterise how Bacon handled both elements during the preparatory stages of his paintings. Actor and stage set are two clearly separated and separable entities with the first outweighing the significance of the second. While the stage set may, broadly speaking, be described as a static auxiliary device, the main protagonist, the actor, moves around on this stage following the guidance of the director. The nature of the drama taking place, or rather the lack of it, will be discussed in chapter 3.3.1. Making an Entrance. The Separation of Figure and Background The idea of taking figure and background from different sources is not unprecedented in the history of art. Paul Cézanne’s The Bather, 1885, is based on a black and white photograph of a Standing Model, c.1860–1880, captured posing in a studio in front of a plain backdrop,66 but the barren landscape in the painting comes from elsewhere. Some of ­German ­illustrator Heinrich Zille’s photographs ‘served as records of store fronts and buildings, which he copied as backgrounds for his semi-caricature genre sketches of simple everyday scenes. [...] He could go through a file of his photographs at leisure and pick out suitable details of a locale he wished to draw without having to revisit it.’67 In Olga in an Armchair, 1917, painted after a photograph of the model in the artist’s studio, ‘Picasso blocked out the background of the image and isolated the woman/ chair entity revealed by the examination of the pose,’68 Anne Baldassari observed, and pointed out that ‘Picasso frequently used this type of visual cutting in his treatment of photographic images.’69 Bacon applied this technique consistently, developing a wide variety of approaches. Turning Figure, 1963 forms a prime, albeit extreme example for this approach (figure 52). With a few lines and colour planes in white, black, and the beige of the raw canvas, Bacon created a minimalist depiction of an anonymous street corner in an urban setting. Bacon positioned a nude of undefined gender and identity on the pavement, which seems to be trapped in heavy contortions. It is only accompanied by its own shadow and an amorphous white mass creeping around the corner of the building. The work’s spatial setting derived 65 66 67 68

Boxer 1975, p. 14. Cf. Carolyn Lancher, Paul Cézanne (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), pp. 11–15. Coke 1981, p. 97. Anne Baldassari, ‘“Heads, Faces and Bodies”: Picasso’s Uses of Portrait Photographs’, in Picasso and Portraiture, Representation and Transformation, ed. by William Rubin (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), pp. 202–223, p. 218. 69 Baldassari 1996, p. 218.

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52  Francis Bacon, Turning Figure, 1963, oil on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, private collection, Germany.

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53  RM98F130:91: torn leaf, Peter Calvocoressi and Guy Wint, Total War: Causes and Courses of the Second World War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, either 1974 or 1979), collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, probably originally seen by Bacon in Picture Post magazine on June 8, 1940, p. 25.

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from a news photograph of a man looking at his dead daughter lying on the pavement, who was killed during a German bomb attack on Rotterdam in 1940.70 It was published in Picture Post magazine on June 8 1940, shortly after the attacks, and since the significance of the magazine for Bacon is well-known,71 he likely found it there (figure 53). Bacon strongly abstracted the found composition and adopted only the outlines of the building, the street and the pavement. He left the placement of the formal elements on the picture plane largely intact, but shifted the whole frame of the news image upwards so that he gained more space in the foreground. It is possible that a second photographic image with a very similar composition fed into the layout of Turning Figure too. René Jeanne and Charles Ford’s ­Histoire du Cinéma72 published in 1947 features a black and white still from the short film La Goualeuse, 1914 by Alexandre Devarennes, in which actors Jane Marnac and Henry Bosc are shown huddled on the pavement. Bacon owned a copy of Histoire du Cinéma73 but only one tattered leaf survived the ruthless dynamics of Reece Mews. The image of the street corner is shot from almost the same angle as the photo from Picture Post, producing a comparable image structure. Since the white mass on the corner echoes the positioning of the girl’s body, and because the figures in the photograph and those on the canvas are of similar size, the Picture Post image may be considered closer to the painting than the La Goualeuse still. The protagonists of the original photograph, the grieving father and his dead child, were discarded in favour of a formally unrelated subject. While the overall setting captured in the news picture corresponds to that in Bacon’s painting, he must have taken the prominent Turning Figure from somewhere else. Due to its seemingly crossed and bent legs as well as its twisted upper body, the nude in the painting might have been inspired by a sketch of a captive from Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Studies for the Sistine Ceiling and the Tomb of Pope Julius II, c.1508–1512,74 but a more direct source remains to be found. While Bacon integrated a figure of a similar size to the one in the photograph, the new subject, by contrast, faces the viewer and looks to the right. It has also been moved to the centre of the canvas to emphasise its status as the focal point of the composition. In this case, Bacon took the principle of including a new figure into a pre-existing spatial setting to an extreme: the nude was physically cut out from a different painting and

70 Picture Post, 8 June 1940, p. 25, see Günther 2011, p. 39. 71 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 89; Daniels 2009a, p. 76; Peppiatt 2008a, p. 155. 72 René Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire du Cinéma, 7th edn, Histoire encyclopédique du Cinéma I, Le Cinéma Français (Paris: Robert Laffont MCMXLVII, 1947), fig. no. 31: ‘Jane Marnac et Henry Bosc dans La Goualeuse d’Alexandre Devarennes’. 73 RM98F105:25: torn leaf, René Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire du Cinéma, 7th edn, Histoire encyclopédique du Cinéma I, Le Cinéma Français (Paris: Robert Laffont MCMXLVII, 1947), fig nos.: 98–101. 74 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Studies for the Sistine Ceiling and the Tomb of Pope Julius II, c.1508–1512, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Sylvester published the leaf with the drawings in question alongside his interviews with Bacon, but juxtaposed it with an illustration of Painting, 1950, see ­Sylvester 2009, pp. 114–115, ill. nos. 86 and 87.

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mounted onto the present canvas.75 Cutting out figures to glue them onto a different support is admittedly a rare exception in Bacon’s oeuvre,76 and not a technique the artist himself liked to apply,77 but Turning Figure epitomises his attitude towards the treatment of figure and ground as coming from different pictorial source material. It visualises and makes palpable a vital and regularly applied method in the working process. Of course, this process comes with consequences for the background. When the setting is detached from its original protagonists, is abstracted and reduced to its outlines as described in the previous chapter, it, too, becomes an isolated, narrative-less entity, which is denigrated by Bacon to a mere backdrop, a stage-set which steps back to emphasise the figure. And yet, the artist was most likely not indifferent to the picture, which he had chosen for a reason, even if the reason is now unknowable. It is conceivable that remnants and residues of the base image survived all alienation processes. ‘Once a new pictorial composite was creatively synthesized on the picture plane, its real-life reference almost disappeared, but not entirely. Emotive antecedents continued to resonate in the paint as the unlaid ghosts of visual fact, no matter how distanced the final pictorial formulation might be,’78 Sam Hunter rightly observed. The fact that Bacon lifted background and figure from separate sources has been noted in the past but, just like other hints towards his appropriation practice, these comments went largely unheard. In 1975, Hugh Davies linked the bushland setting in Study of Figure in a Landscape, 1952 to a plate from Marius Maxwell’s Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa, but remarked that while its composition is related to the painting, the prominent buffalo ‘has nothing to do with Bacon’s work’.79 Today we know that the kneeling nude in the painting indeed derived from a separate source, a private photograph of Peter Lacy (figure 22).80 And yet, without the studio material available for research, no one could have guessed the extent and consistency with which Bacon employed this technique. It goes back to at least 1933, when he integrated an X-ray of Michael Sadler’s skull into an unrelated composition in The Crucifixion81 and since then, Bacon applied this method regularly. Maybe this treatment of pictorial springboards fostered the further separation of figure and background by the means described above. Only a few examples are known in

75 Cf. Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 150. 76 Another example is Reclining Woman, 1961, painting seen on display at Tate Britain, BP Spotlight: Tracey Emin and Francis Bacon, 31 March 2015 – Summer 2016. 77 Bacon to Davies in 1978, Davies H. M. 2009, p. 110. 78 Sam Hunter, ‘Metaphor and Meaning in Francis Bacon’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by Lawrence Gowing and Sam Hunter, pubd. in relation to the exhibition of the same name, Washington: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1989; Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1990; New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), pp. 27–38, p. 28. 79 Davies H. M. 1978, pp. 140–143, quote on p. 142. 80 RM98F130:167: photograph, mounted on torn leaf, Francis Bacon, Peter Lacy, c. early 1950s, William S. Smith, History of Egyptian Sculpture and Painting, published on behalf of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (London: The Oxford University Press, Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1949). 81 See Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 30.

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54  Francis Bacon, In Memory of George Dyer, 1971, left panel, oil and dry transfer lettering on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, collection: Fondation Beyeler, Beyeler Collection, Riehen/Basel (full triptych see p. 444).

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55  Graeme Kent, A Pictorial History of Wrestling (London: Spring Books, 1968), p. 126.

which an entire pre-existing composition was transferred onto the canvas along with all its components, amongst them Lacy’s House in Barbados, 1952, which Bacon faithfully adopted from a black and white photograph of the property.82 The Actor While for Turning Figure, the nude was physically cut out of a different setting, Bacon usually only metaphorically cut out the figure from his source material – he adopted the figure and ignored the rest of the found image – to then remove it from its original pictorial context and plant it into a new, unrelated environment. In Memory of George Dyer, 1971 exemplifies the radical omission of any visual and content related context of the figure in the pre-existing image (figure 54). George Dyer entered Bacon’s life in 196383 and became the artist’s lover, but also his muse and subject of many canvases. The story of his untimely death, which led Bacon to create a number of commemorative paintings, the so called ‘Black Triptychs’,84 is well-known. Dyer had joined Bacon on a trip to Paris for the opening of his show at the Grand Palais in 1971. On the morning of 24 October – two days before the event – his body was discovered slumped on a toilet in the bathroom of Hotel des

82 RM98F248:4: photograph, Peter Lacy’s house in Barbados, photographer and date unknown. Figure in a Landscape (Miss Diana Watson), 1957, also follows closely the whole composition of a photograph of Bacon’s cousin taken by the artist himself. 83 Cf. Harrison 2016b, p. 88. 84 The term was coined by Hugh Davies in Hugh M. Davies, ‘Bacon’s “Black” Triptychs’, Art in America, 63.2 (March–April 1975), pp. 62–68.

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S­ aint-Pères, where Bacon and his entourage were staying for the trip.85 Dyer had threatened to commit suicide before86 and that night he poisoned himself with an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol.87 After his death, Dyer was still omnipresent in Reece Mews in the form of numerous photographs. For the curve in its body, the figure in the left panel of In Memory of George Dyer is loosely reminiscent of a picture by John Deakin,88 which shows Dyer standing in the studio, tilting his head and resting his hand on a canvas, creating a similar bend in the upper body. However, despite the fact that there was plenty of material available to paint Dyer directly from a photograph, the crawling figure in In Memory of George Dyer was borrowed from an unrelated source. Bacon lifted it from a photographic reproduction of two men fighting in A Pictorial History of Wrestling from 1968 (figure 55).89 The black and white image shows two wrestlers struggling on the floor in a tight embrace, with the first one holding the second in a headlock. ‘This two-headed, four-handed man is really two men caught in a puzzling position during a Cumberland match. [...]’90 the caption explains this obscure picture. For his representation of Dyer, Bacon closely adopted – with only a few minor adjustments – the distinct posture of the wrestler R. Gardner, whose body is facing us, lying on his side with both legs bent. Trapped in motion by the camera, he balances his weight on his left knee, the left arm with which he entraps his opponent’s neck, and his head. This unusual pose equally conveys movement, struggle, and emotional tension. Bacon did not borrow anything else from the photographic reproduction and his interest concentrated on this figure alone. Any other visual information in the book illustration, the texture of the grass on the ground, the shadow and the legs of an approaching person behind the wrestlers, was edited out. Most importantly the second figure, the other fighter named Andrew Bell, was omitted and does not appear on the canvas. Although admittedly barely visible in the original photograph, his participation is vital to create the curious posture. But Bell’s presence might have played a subliminal role for Bacon, even if he did not appropriate the figure directly. Bacon explained that he ‘often used the [two Muybridge] wrestlers in painting single figures, because I find that the two figures together have a thickness that gives overtones which the photographs of single figures don’t have.’91 While no such instance is known in relation to the Muybridge wrestlers, Bacon perhaps put his

85 Cf. Farson 1993, p. 182 and RM98F149:46: Valerie Beston, booking request, Hotel des Saint-Pères, 24 September 1971. 86 RM98F24:2: cover of Arts Council catalogue, 1968, handwritten note by George Dyer (orthography as in original, where however only capital letters are used): ’Anye money must go to my farther. Its not so bad. We must all go PS. I don’t like it.’. 87 Cf. Farson 1993, pp. 177–178. 88 The Estate of Francis Bacon, Bacon studio item: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964. 89 Graeme Kent, A Pictorial History of Wrestling (London: Spring Books, 1969), p. 126. Bacon ripped this page out of the studio copy [RM98NF55] and the leaf is now missing, see Günther 2011, p. 35. 90 Kent 1968, p. 126. 91 Sylvester 2009, p. 116.

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claim into action on this occasion. For the left panel of In Memory of George Dyer Bacon uncoupled the figure from all of its formal context and lifted the isolated shape out of the source picture to plant it into an alien spatial setting. The figure’s new, sparse background in no way resembles its original environment. It consists of two curved colour strips, which defy any figurative reading. They are purely formal elements which barely anchor the figure in space, and which are themselves placed on a plain, monochrome and otherwise empty pink background. Since the panel depicts only a single figure, nothing suggests the context of a wrestling match, refers to the identity of the fighters, or the place and date of the event documented in A Pictorial History of Wrestling. The figure is thus successfully ‘emptied’ and cleared of its original connotations. The same method was applied in many cases, for instance in the photographic illustration of a man on a movie set,92 which forms the basis of Seated Figure, 1979. He also used it for Man Standing, c.1945 where the subject derived from a Heinrich Hoffmann photograph of Adolf Hitler, which can be seen in Hunter’s photo­ graphs of the material in Cromwell Place.93 For Harrison, ‘Bacon’s tactic of removing the nominal subject from its natural surroundings, [is] intensifying its “realism” by transposing it to an “artificial” context […]’94 and we can now see how this detachment is anticipated and confirmed in the appropriation process. The pictorial springboards for the examples mentioned above were found in Bacon’s studios and we know that the actual source images, albeit paint-splattered and distressed, were left intact by the artist. The editing process of cutting the figure off from its context was carried out in the artist’s mind and depended on his imagination and foresight. Only in rare cases did Bacon resort to practising and anticipating this step by carrying out physical interventions on the studio item. A cut-out, that of an anonymous walking man seen from behind from a mid-19th-century black and white photograph reproduced in Aaron Scharf’s Art and Photography, 196895 played an important part in the genesis of Statue and Figures in a Street (plate XXIV). Here it formed the basis for the ghostly figure in the lower left corner of the canvas (plate XXIII). Traces of orange and brown paint on the edge of the stencil suggest that Bacon possibly moved it around on the canvas to establish a good position for the figure, and eventually held the item onto the canvas to trace its shape. The outline of the painted figure was subsequently an almost exact reproduction of the figure from Art and Photography, including its triangular shadow on the ground. Bacon only made small changes: he omitted the hat of the man in the photograph and, by raising his left shoulder, changed the figure’s direction of view. Bacon did not create a fixed collage prior to painting, but the page from The Book of London (plate XXV) that served as the basis for the spatial setting and the figure from Art and Photography were found as separate items. A cut-out 92 RM98F110:79: Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), p. 94. 93 Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf Hitler at a window at Hradčany Castle, Prague, on 15 March 1939, see Hunter 1952, p. 12. 94 Harrison 2016a, p. 1248, in relation to Study from the Human Body – Figure in Movement, 1982. 95 RM98F125:36: fragment of leaf, Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (London: Allen Lane, 1968), ‘121. Anon.: Details from instantaneous photograph. 1860s (?)’.

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of his own figure from a black and white photograph by Peter Stark, c.1975–1977,96 was found crumpled and covered with blots of paint in the studio, but it cannot reliably be assigned to a surviving painting. The fact that the figure was sometimes physically detached from its original narrative and context is not only significant for a better understanding of Bacon’s methods and his idiosyncratic approach to figuration, it is also vital for the interpretation of his finished paintings on the basis of their source material. For, as the previous examples show, Bacon already discarded a pre-existing figure’s meaning in the preparatory stages of a painting so that it can only have played a role for the artist himself, if that. Thus, interpretations of his paintings on the basis of their photographic sources have to be advanced with utmost caution. The Actor on Stage Bacon took advantage of the large degree of creative freedom that taking the figure and background from different sources granted. Liberated from its original pictorial and narrative context, the voided figure becomes a mere form which can easily be integrated in other­ wise conflicting backgrounds in ways prohibited by its original setting. When integrating a pre-existing figure into an alien composition, Bacon applied a range of techniques which showed varying degrees of faithfulness to the figure’s original context. One of the mildest but regularly applied forms of editing the relationship between figure and ground is shifting a figure of a similar shape, size and proportions within the composition. It is known that Walter Sickert offset his figures in compositions appropriated from photographs, such as Self-Portrait with Blind Fiddler, 1928 or 1929, to create ‘visual tension’.97 Bacon moved the figure around within the found setting like a director who asks his protagonists to change their position on stage. This was done, for instance, in the case of Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V. Bacon in the painting replaced the peasant woman from The World of Van Gogh by a new protagonist. The black and white photograph featured an old woman dressed in a long dark gown and a headscarf, holding a dark umbrella in her right hand. She is facing left but turning her head towards the viewer. Although consistent in shape and posture, in the painting the figure was replaced by a different protagonist and moved to the edge of the road. The figure changed its gender and lost the umbrella but is now equipped with all the attributes of Van Gogh in his self-portrait: a walking stick, a large straw hat, a knapsack, a sketchbook and a small bag. This outfit tallies with pictures of contemporary painters like Paul Cézanne, a photograph of whom setting out to paint near Aix-en-Provence directly informed other works of Bacon’s Van Gogh series;98 another,

96 RM98F8:131A: cut-out of black and white photograph of Francis Bacon in his studio, c.1975–1977. 97 Cf. Coke 1981, p. 99. 98 Cf. Lorenza Trucchi, ‘The Delirium of the Body’, in Francis Bacon: Figurabile, ed. by Achille Bonito Oliva, exh. cat. Venice: Museo Correr, 1993 (Milan: Electa, 1993), pp. 113–126, p. 117, Trucchi related an­ other image of Cézanne to Bacon’s Van Gogh Going to Work, 1957; see also Russell John 2001, p. 52.

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similar photograph may reverberate in this painting as well.99 The impact of the new figure is emphasised by enlarging it ever so slightly and shifting it closer to the viewer into the lower left of the canvas. A similar approach was employed in the case of Study for Portrait of Gilbert de Botton and Turning Figure. In the case of Study for Portrait of Gilbert de Botton the figure was shifted from the centre of the composition to the right edge of the painting, where it is cut by the margins of the canvas. As a result, the reflection is the new formal centre of the painting and the main focus of the canvas. The pictorial dominance of the reflection over the ‘­original’ is enhanced by the fact that while the reflection is whole, well-lit, and accentuated by the surrounding white colour plane, the figure outside the mirror is incomplete and fades into the dark. Representing a subject indirectly via a reflection is an established trope in the history of painting, an early example being Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding, 1434. Bacon’s interest in the photograph and his emphasis on the effect in his execution of the motif may have been sparked by his familiarity with and admiration of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 1656100 or indeed the same artist’s Rokeby Venus, 1647–1651. Both incorporate a likeness depicted via a mirror. He said to Hugh Davies that ‘if you don’t understand the Rokeby Venus you won’t understand my paintings.’101 In other cases, the new combination differs much more from the original images. The sometimes-drastic incongruities are rooted in the mismatching scales of found elements. Some of Bacon’s dog paintings from the early 1950s, such as Dog, 1952 are constructed from variations on a Muybridge motion-series of a mastiff walking102 combined with a photograph of a Nazi Rally in Nuremberg for the background (figure 56 to 58).103 The photograph of the Zeppelinfeld was the pictorial starting point for the spatial setting in nine paintings between 1951 and 1956. Bacon did not bother to adjust either size to create a naturalistic combination, an illustration of a dog walking on the rally ground. Instead, knowing both sources, Bacon’s combination seems bizarre, with a gigantic animal treading over an ant-sized Zeppelinfeld. This example illustrates how little the artist aimed to keep the integrity of his source pictures intact and how dismissive he was towards their original meaning and context, but also how ruthlessly he subordinated them to his own creative idea. However, since the sources of Bacon’s paintings were not meant to be known, it

  99 Black and white photograph, Paul Cézanne on his way to paint near Auvers, 1874, illustrated in Ulrike Becks-Malorny, Paul Cézanne, 1839–1906: Pioneer of Modernism, rev. edn (Cologne: Taschen, 2016), p. 2. 100 Cf. HKA: TGA 2008/16/16/4/2/9 ‘Bacon Interviews IIIc’, ‘October 1973 IIIC’, p. 45 and Sylvester 2000, p. 239. 101 Hugh Davies in conversation with Martin Harrison, 14 October 2006, see Harrison 2008a, pp. 42–43, footnote 4, p. 270. 102 Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 704: ‘Dog; walking; mastiff. Dread’. 103 RM98F105:64: David Churchill Somervell, 100 Years in Pictures: A Panorama of History in the Making (London: Odhams Press, 1951), p. 26, ‘1936 Nazi Rally at Nuremberg’.

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 56  Francis Bacon, Dog, 1952, oil and sand on canvas, 198 × 137 cm, collection: Tate Britain.  57  RM98F105:64: David Churchill Somervell, 100 Years in Pictures: A Panorama of History in the Making (London: Odhams Press, 1951), p. 26, ‘1936 Nazi Rally at Nuremberg’, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

58  Detail from Eadweard Muybridge, ­ uybridge’s Complete Human and Animal M ­Locomotion: All 781 Plates from the 1887 ‘Animal Locomotion’, 3 vols (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), III, p. 380, plate 704: ‘“Dread” walking’ (not the direct source).

must be emphasized that such inconsistencies were only relevant in the pre-stages of the painting, in the working process, and for the artist alone, and are not meant to affect the interpretation of the finished composition. Other examples underline Bacon’s disinterest in creating a cohesive unity between figure and background. The physical separation between the sources of both elements anticipates the pictorial separation on the finished canvas. For example, the figures in Sphinx – Portrait of Muriel Belcher and Oedipus, both 1979, are not matched up with the elusive

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spatial setting lifted from a photograph of the inside of an Egyptian pyramid,104 which was discussed earlier. Instead the figures, themselves based on newspaper cuttings and photographs,105 hover disconnectedly over the presumed ground, as in Sphinx, and violate the space’s limitations much like in Oedipus. In such cases, the new figure has completely lost the connection to both the source of the spatial setting and its transformed version on the canvas. Naturalistic accuracy as an impetus in constructing paintings from photographs must be dismissed – mimesis or even pastiche were not Bacon’s intention. The importance of the figure over the background, and the lack of interest in a coherent combination of the two to achieve naturalistic representation, is confirmed by the chronology of the working process. The artist himself remarked that he usually started by painting the figure and only integrated the background when the first had reached a more advanced state, from which point on both developed ‘in tandem’.106 This claim is generally supported by the unfinished paintings which emerged after his death. Those that were abandoned in the early stages either show a more or less advanced figure on an otherwise untouched canvas, as in ‘Figure’, c.1959 and ‘Figure’, c.1962, or a half-finished figure which is supported only by some very basic, graphic lines which structure the background as in ‘Figure Opening Door’, c.1968.107 Thus, Bacon probably consulted and picked the image which formed the basis of the figure first and might have still been searching for a suitable source for a background during the painting process. Props for the Actor What applies to the figure and its relationship to the background also applies to other formal elements. They, too, are lifted individually from their original context and planted in a new, unrelated setting alongside an equally alien figure. The dunes in Sand Dune, 1983 come from a French postcard with this motif,108 the blossom in Painting 1946, 1946 was borrowed from a book on roses,109 the seating device in Portrait of Lucian Freud (on Orange Couch), 1965 was informed by a photograph of a sofa in a French art magazine,110 and the umbrella in Triptych 1974–1977, 1974–1977 originates from a photogravure in an

104 RM98F110:38: torn leaf, Kurt Mendelssohn, The Riddle of the Pyramids (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974), p. 134, ill. no.37. 105 Cf. Harrison 2008b, p. 10 and p. 11. 106 Shepard 2009, p. 164, see also Sylvester 2009, p. 195. 107 Joanna Russell did, however, underline that in paintings of the 1950s a thin wash of paint may have come first, on which then the figure was placed, see Joanna Russell, ‘”The Mystery of the Paint”: Francis Bacon’s Materials’, in Francis Bacon – New Studies: Centenary Essays, ed. by Martin Harrison (­Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), pp. 233–245, p. 242. 108 RM98F109:10: French postcard of sand dunes, mounted on inside cover of book B.S. Johnson and Julia Trevelyan Oman, Street Children (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964). Caption in French ‘Coucher de Soleil dans les Dunes’. 109 McFarland 1937, p. 6. 110 RM98F103:3: torn leaf, overpainted, Umbro Apollonio, ‘La Bienalle’, L’OEIL, October 1956, p. 42.

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amateur ethnology book.111 In all these cases, the formal elements were extracted from their original context and integrated into a new setting. Most of the time, this process happens unbeknownst to the viewer. Without access to Bacon’s source material, who would have predicted that the rose and the suit of the figure in Painting 1946 stem from different sources? And yet, in the last two decades of Bacon’s oeuvre sometimes it is not the single, selected element which is lifted from a pre-existing source, but the image is integrated as an intact picture. In a self-referential nod towards his working methods, in Triptych, 1991 Bacon incorporated in the composition a painted version of a paint-splattered black and white photograph of himself by Jacques Saraben from 1973,112 as if pinned on the wall above a torso-less set of legs.

3.2.  Figure and Photography 3.2.1.  ‘Collage is not my medium’ – The Construction of the Figure

Bacon populated his canvases with contorted fantasy creatures, reclining male and female nudes, bodies resting and in movement, serene men in suit and tie, gasping popes, torsos of unspecified anatomy and undefined gender, dogs, bulls, and howling monkeys. From 1949 onwards, the human figure took centre stage. Mostly depicted in full-length and about three-quarter life size, Bacon often placed a solitary figure at the centre of the composition. From early works including Man Standing, c.1945,113 to late ones such as Triptych, 1991,114 he consistently drew on pre-existing imagery to build up the figures (see List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings), using a variety of techniques. Some of them are cohesive with the ones detected in the construction of the spatial settings and their relationship to the figure, for instance the fact that figures are often composed of a variety of sources which are conjoined either as pictorial fragments next to each other on the picture plane, or blended, merged, and layered in one shape. A signature characteristic of Bacon’s figures, and the topic of numerous studies, is that they are distorted and deformed. A close analysis of the working methods testifies that deforming effects are often rooted in a deliberately imprecise appropriation process involving the combination of several sources and the adoption of alterations to the base image, which helped Bacon to remove his paintings from conventional figuration and the individual photographic source.

111 RM98F1:23: torn leaf, over-drawn and mounted on support, Peoples of all Nations: Their Life Today and Story of their Past, ed. by J.A. Hammerton, 7 vols (London: The Fleetway House, 1922–1924), I, p. 147. 112 The Estate of Francis Bacon, studio item: Jacques Saraben, Francis Bacon, 1973. 113 Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf Hitler at a window at Hradčany Castle, Prague, 15 March 1939. 114 RM98F1:34: torn leaf, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 68, ‘Men Wrestling’.

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Metamorphoses The original figure was sometimes subjected to a process of drastic reformulation, which was often practiced and anticipated by physically manipulating the studio item. For example, the torso of the figure in Study from the Human Body (Man Turning on Light), 1973 is not a cohesive entity but seems trapped in multiple stages of movement (plate XI).115 At least two possible positions of the torso grow out of the lower back; the more upright one, however, is cut off by the red void in the background. As pointed out before, the folds in a torn page with a series showing a ‘Man Shadow Boxing’ from The Human Figure in Motion116 predetermine the anomalies in the representation of the male nude (plate XII). The source page depicting a boxer striking a blow is folded so that it merges two frames from a series into one image. The back of the nude in the source item is concealed by the fold of the page, and this predetermines the painted back being interrupted by the colour plane. The result on the page is a headless figure with a ‘split’ back, and this image was likewise directly appropriated for Study from the Human Body (Man Turning on Light). Bacon here merges two different points in time captured in photography into a single picture, thwarting the idea of a motion ‘series’ in Eadweard Muybridge, yet emphasising the frames’ distinction by adopting two separate steps of the boxer’s movement. Bacon’s interpretation of ‘Man Shadow Boxing’ thus emphasises the halting of rather than the flow of the movement. This apparent reversal of the source’s serial character lends weight to Andrew Forge’s assumption that ‘what Bacon has learned from Muybridge – from his sequences as distinct from the individual frames that have contributed so crucially to his imagery – is the opposite of what one might expect: less a matter of time captured than of time ruptured.’117 The unusual shapes of other figures are predetermined by the alteration of the source material too. The female nude in the left panel of Crucifixion, 1965 is based on a sequence from Muybridge’s motion study ‘Woman Walking Downstairs, Picking up Pitcher, and­ ­Turning’118 that Bacon tore from a book (figure 59 and 60). Several horizontal and diagonal and one prominent vertical fold shift the positioning of anatomical details relative to one another, subsequently changing the shape of the figure and, in a concertina effect, dissolving the figure’s structure. Bacon appreciated the changes so much that he fixed them with a sewing needle and enclosed the twisted figure in black paint, which on the one hand consolidated the existing alterations but on the other further compromised the shape. The deformed appearance of the female nude in the studio item is echoed exactly in the painting. A similar transformation of the source item, using a mixture of targeted and 115 After Study from the Human Body (Man Turning on Light), a similar figure, with a similar rendering of the back appears in a number of paintings, including Study from the Human Body, 1981, 1983 and 1987, ‘Figure Opening Door’, c.1987 and Man at a Washbasin, 1989–1990. 116 RM98F11:91: torn leaf, folded, attached to support, inserted in plastic bag, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901), plate 63, ’Pugilist. Striking a Blow’. 117 Forge 1985, p. 31. 118 RM98F105:147: torn leaf, overpainted, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 124: ‘Woman Walking Downstairs, Picking up Pitcher, and Turning’, see Harrison 2005a, pp. 186–187, ill. nos. 206–207.

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59  Francis Bacon, Crucifixion, 1965, oil on canvas. Triptych, each panel: 197.2 × 147 cm, collection: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.

coincidental alteration, also inspired the execution of the stooping figure in the foreground of the right panel. It is informed by a picture of the boxer Max Schmeling from A Pictorial History of Boxing, 1959 (figure 61).119 The leaf from this book shows traces of many folds, some of which eventually turned into tears. The boxer’s arm in the illustration is interrupted by a tear, and at about the same point the arm in the painting dissolves into a fleshy mess. On the page the head was encircled in black paint so that the back and the arm of the figure were highlighted, but the head was also separated from the body. This treatment is echoed in the painting: the head of the fighting man looks as though it were mounted onto the shoulders, and the black shadows above and below the head are consistent with Bacon’s manipulation of the page. Interestingly, the two sources are manipulated in the same manner. This underscores their close connection to Crucifixion, but is also an indication that during the preparatory stages of the triptych the two were closely tied. Due to the spatial restrictions of Reece Mews, it was only ever possible to work on one panel at a time,120 so Bacon may have resorted to practicing the composition across the panels with the help of photographic material. He may have manipulated and tried several source images before he committed to the ones described above, and finally achieved a well-balanced composition with the outer figures leading one’s gaze into the work. In other cases, great deviations from the pre-existing image are unrehearsed and are the result of a creative thought process alone. A brown pelican diving into the sea from The Birds LIFE Nature Library121 from 1963 is a prime example of an imaginative pictorial 119 RM98F130:170: torn leaf, overpainted, Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of Boxing (London: Spring Books, 1959), no page numbers; cf. Günther 2011, pp. 36–37. 120 Cf. Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985. 121 RM98BC36: torn page, mounted on cardboard, The Birds LIFE Nature Library, ed. by Roger Tory ­Peterson et al. (New York: Time Life Books, 1963), p. 55.

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60  RM98F105:147: torn leaf, overpainted, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 124: ‘Woman Walking Downstairs, Picking up Pitcher, and Turning’, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

61  RM98F130:170: torn leaf, overpainted, Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of Boxing (London: Spring Books, 1959), no page numbers, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

reformulation (figure 63). Bacon tore the leaf from the book and mounted it on cardboard; blotches and prints from rubber gloves in the pink used in the painting can be found on the item, but the figure itself was left unaltered. The pelican forms the basis of a number of subjects, such as the fantasy creature in the left panel of Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981 (figure 62).122 Placed in a domestic setting with an open door and a chair, but also including an unsettling stream of red mass, the hunting bird was fundamentally altered. In the photographic reproduction, it is shown in profile diving head down into the sea. The bird’s right wing is folded at a ninety-degree angle while the left wing behind the body is more open. The long neck is bent into an S-shape, the pelican’s beak is pointed towards the water surface and its feet are bent. Bacon’s figure, by contrast, seems to be hovering upright. It lacks a head or a face: between its wings is just a fleshy, undefined bulge. The upward facing feet were turned into downward facing paws. The chest of the bird is converted into a conical piece of unspecific anatomy equipped with an anus, while the head and beak of the pelican were transformed into a tail. Out of an undefined orifice 122 The bird relates, for example, also to Study for the Eumenides, 1982, Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, 1983 and Painting March 1985, 1985.

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62  Francis Bacon, Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981, left panel, oil on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, collection: Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (full triptych see p. 444).

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63  RM98BC36: torn page, mounted on cardboard, The Birds LIFE Nature Library, ed. by Roger Tory Peterson et al. (New York: Time Life Books, 1963), p. 55, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

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next to right wing disgorges a splash of red material. Maybe the lack of detail in the grainy photographic illustration fostered the creature not having feathers – in any case its wings and body are solid, fleshy pieces of anatomy. No dogmatic parameters can be identified as to the degree of transformation applied, however. As pointed out before, in other cases the figure is borrowed more carefully. The cat which features in Portrait of George Dyer and Lucian Freud, 1967, for example, was copied meticulously from a leaf torn from A Picture of the Twenties.123 In general, with a more naturalistic style in the 1980s, Bacon’s appropriations became more faithful and are easier to detect and to trace back. The profile of the boxer Yvon Durelle124 was reproduced so faithfully in Study for the Human Body, 1991 that one may well wonder whether Bacon might have anticipated a future identification by a boxing aficionado. This example will be discussed in more detail shortly. Although Bacon was satisfied when ‘no critic will guess where that came from’,125 he seemed to have enjoyed a game of revelation and disguise, balanced out by voicing and visualising his love for photography and its aesthetics while trying to avoid one-dimensional interpretations on the basis of his source imagery. Their recognisability was a tightrope walk, albeit with a clear tendency towards not putting too much emphasis on his base images. Fragments, Layers, and Assemblages In the last chapter, it was established that figure and spatial setting often stem from different sources. Figures which were adopted in their entirety, such as the animals in Owls, 1956, or the subject in Figure in a Landscape (Miss Diana Watson), 1957, are exceptions, but often the figure itself is built up from several base images too. Just like taking the figure and setting from different source images, constructing the figure from a variety of pictorial references is a consistent strategy. For instance, while the abdomen and legs of the Female Nude Standing in a Doorway, 1972 relate to the manipulated Muybridge motion study126 which had already informed the nude in the left panel of Crucifixion, 1965, the shoulders, arms and head derived from a photograph of Henrietta Moraes by John Deakin.127 Similar cases can be found throughout Bacon’s oeuvre and they often affect the relationship between the head or the face, and the body, with Study for the Nurse in the Film Battleship Potemkin from 1957 being a prominent example. While the face is lifted from a scene in the movie, the body comes from elsewhere, referencing frames from Muybridge’s plate 123 RM98F130:154: Richard Bennett, A Picture of the Twenties (London: Vista Books, 1961), p. 35, see O’Donnell 2009, pp. 90–91. 124 Cf. Harrison and Daniels 2008, no page numbers: torn leaf, mounted on support, Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of Boxing (London: Spring Books, 1959), p. 176. The boxing fight took place in Montreal in 1958; RM98F1:4: torn leaf, mounted on support Gilbert Odd, Boxing: The Great Champions (London: Hamlyn Books, 1974), p. 82. 125 Russell John 2001, p. 180. 126 RM98F105:147: torn leaf, overpainted, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 124: ‘Woman Walking Downstairs, Picking up Pitcher, and Turning’. 127 RM98F1A:107: photograph, John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961.

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‘Woman ­Sitting Down in Chair and Drinking Tea’.128 The implications of taking the body and head from different sources will be discussed in more detail in relation to Bacon’s portraits in 3.3.2. The process can be acutely compartmentalised; reminiscent of the isolation of details in Bacon’s working material, even single limbs were traced back to specific source images. In Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1967 the raised arm of the figure derives from a photo­graphic reproduction in Albert von Schrenck-Notzing’s Phenomena of ­Materialisation,129 which depicts the indistinct fragment of an arm pointing at ghostly emanations on medium Eva Bisson’s head, while the head of the figure is a derivation from Deakin’s portrait photographs of Rawsthorne in a street in Soho (figure 64 to 66).130 References for the remaining body have yet to be identified. Another example is Study for the Human Body, 1991, which shows a male nude in a sparse spatial setting (figure 67). Similar to works such as Three Figures and Portrait, 1975 and Lying Figure in a Mirror, 1971, Study for the Human Body does not communicate a cohesive body image but depicts an assemblage of anatomical features. The back seems too short for the size of the head, but the leg is too big and shown from the front instead of as from the side, as would be required by the positioning of the torso. The second foot close to the face of the nude is a left foot just like the one on the outstretched leg and smaller than the first, which suggests that it belongs to a second figure. The fragmentary character of Study for the Human Body probably finds its roots in its construction from pre-existing imagery. The profile of the figure is based on at least two photographic reproductions of the boxer Yvon Durelle, who is just about to be defeated by Archie Moore in a dramatic fight in Montreal in 1958, which Bacon both mounted on a support (figure 68).131 The pictures, which record Durelle’s defeat with a split-second difference, were published in 1959 and in 1974132 and could both have inspired Study for the Human Body in 1991. Bacon only adopted the profile of the athlete and ignored the remainder of Durelle’s body. The prominent leg in the painting was lifted from a different source. It strongly resembles an illustration in Bridgman’s Complete Guide to Drawing from Life133 in which Bacon referred to boxing noting ‘Mike Tyson’ on the endpaper, which underlines a possible connection of the two

128 Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, Muybridge 1887, plate 162, ‘Woman Sitting Down in Chair and Drinking Tea’, see Davies H. M. 1978, pp. 116–117. 129 RM98F138:1: Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920), fig. 38: ‘Second Flashlight Photograph by the Author, 11 August, 1911’, see Günther 2011, pp. 14–15. 130 E.g. RM98F22:128: two photographic fragments, John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a Street in Soho, c.1964. 131 Cf. Günther 2011, pp. 32–33. 132 The Estate of Francis Bacon, studio item: mounted on support, Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of Boxing (London: Spring Books, 1959), p. 176 and RM98F1:4: torn leaf, mounted on support, Gilbert Odd, Boxing: The Great Champions (London: Hamlyn Books, 1974), p. 82. 133 RM98F94:9: Bridgman’s Complete Guide To Drawing From Life, ed. by Howard Simon (New York: Weathervane Books, 1979), p. 290.

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64  Francis Bacon, Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1967, oil on canvas, 124.2 × 157.1 cm, collection: Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

sources (figure 69). The page in question shows an outstretched leg from the front and is besmirched with pale pink and orange paint in the colours of Study for the Human Body. The anatomical inconsistencies in the painting perhaps originate in the fact that Bacon deliberately did not match up the size of the different sources when transferring them on to the canvas. Naturalistic figuration is thus undermined by the incohesive dimensions of the base images and their carefree borrowing. The majority of sources owned and used by Bacon is much smaller than the painted subject, and come in a whole range of sizes, so that most of them had to be enlarged considerably. A well-known exception is Deakin’s portrait photographs whose dimensions determined the scale of Bacon’s small portrait paintings.134 Many artists squared up photographs to facilitate their accurate transfer onto the canvas with the help of a grid.135 Walter Sickert and Graham Sutherland used that technique, but 134 Cf. Harrison quoted in O’Donnell 2009, p. 103. 135 Cf. Scharf 1979, p. 168, ill. nos.103 and 104, Theodore Robinson, Two in a Boat, 1891, and photographic source; Coke 1981, pp. 74–75, ill. nos. 169–170, Chuck Close, Richard, 1969, and photographic source from the same year, p. 101, ill. nos. 232–233, Irving Couse, Hopi Flute Dance, 1903 and photographic source.

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65  RM98F138:1: Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (London: ­Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920), fig. 38: ‘Second Flashlight Photograph by the Author, 11 August, 1911’, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

66  RM98F11:2: photograph, folded, John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a Street in Soho, c.1964, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

Bacon regarded it as a weakness in both cases136 and never employed it himself. Instead, pictorial elements are positioned, combined, and synchronised in their scale on the canvas freehand. The enlargement and combination happened with varying diligence, as we have already seen in the combination of figures and spatial settings, which is consistent with a referencing process that is often loose and highly transmutative, and in which accuracy or thoroughness was neither desired nor pursued. For most works, disparate base images are blended so smoothly that without consulting the working material from Reece Mews, no one would have guessed that a figure or a composition were lifted from different photographic references, let alone be able to determine their number and their margins on the canvas. For example, it could not have been anticipated that the profile, but only the profile of the figure in the left panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 136 Cf. Davies H. M. 2009, p. 114; Sylvester 2000, p. 235.

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67  Francis Bacon, Study for the Human Body, 1991, oil, pastel and aerosol paint on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, private collection.

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68  RM98F1:4: torn leaf, mounted on support Gilbert Odd, Boxing: The Great Champions (London: Hamlyn Books, 1974), p. 82, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

69 RM98F94:9: Bridgman’s Complete Guide To Drawing From Life, ed. by ­Howard Simon (New York: Weathervane Books, 1979), p. 290.

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70  Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1988, oil and aerosol paint on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, private collection, Australia.

71  RM98F233:1: fragment of photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

72  RM98F8:14: photograph, Francis Bacon, John Edwards, c.1980s, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

1944 was lifted from a plate in Schrenck-Notzing’s Phenomena of Materialisation137 and that the remaining figure and the desk reference a different source, namely frames from Muybridge’s series of a ‘Getting On and Off a Table’.138 Other sources are not combined with equal care, as the analysis of the elements which formed Study for the Human Body

137 Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920), fig. 66 ‘Enlargement of portion of fig. 64, Eva Carrière’. 138 Muybridge 1901, p. 157, ‘Getting On and Off a Table’.

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shows. Interestingly, reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze’s idea of pure meat and flesh as the common material denominator of humans and animals, in some cases, such as Portrait of John Edwards, 1988, an undefined, pictorially vague ‘zone of indiscernibility’139 of plain flesh sits between the head, which stems from a photo of John Edwards,140 and the legs, which were borrowed from a photo of George Dyer,141 as if to emphasise the disconnectedness of the formal references but underline their common denominator (figure 70 to 72). The lower back region of the Study for the Human Body is a similarly indistinct area. As discussed in chapter 2.3., the fragmentary appropriation of sources was facilitated, if not inspired and spurred by the fragmentary character of Bacon’s pictorial references. The leg from Bridgman’s Complete Guide to Drawing from Life is a case in point. Another example is a fragment of a photograph of a semi-nude Dyer on a chair in Reece Mews taken in about 1965;142 a variety of more or less complete versions from the same negative and similar postures from the same shoot survived in the studio (figure 71).143 In this fragment, only the crossed legs survived from the original photograph, but it does not feature the rest of the body or Dyer’s head any longer. Its surface has cracked numerous times and the item is spattered with paint. Bacon first referenced the frame shortly after the pictures were taken, with Portrait of George Dyer Staring at Blind-Cord, 1966 being one of the earliest examples. While here the relationship between the crossed legs, the upper body and the representation of Dyer is left intact, this was soon to change. It is not possible to date the fragmentation of the gelatin silver print, but the isolation of what for Bacon appeared to be the key part of the image, Dyer’s crossed legs, may have triggered and facilitated this element’s combination with other images in future works. In Study for a Portrait of John Edwards and Portrait of John Edwards, both 1988, for example, the signature seated pose is fused with portrait photographs of John Edwards.144 ‘You could go on for the whole of your life painting the same subject,’145 Bacon said, and in line with this, he was drawn to creating loose groups, series of paintings, repetition and self-referencing and some of the pictorial building blocks were used repeatedly. Some were used just a handful of times, such as the torn leaf captioned ‘Sir Austen ­Chamberlain as seen in a Distorting Mirror’146 from Amédée Ozenfant’s Foundations of Modern Art, (­figure 37) which played a role in the genesis of both the outer panels of Triptych, 1976 and the centre panel of Triptych 1974–1977, 1974–1977 (figure 37 and plate VI), others were employed e­ xcessively. Dyer’s crossed legs mentioned above developed into one of 139 Deleuze 2008, pp. 15–16. 140 RM98F17:50: photograph, Francis Bacon, John Edwards, c.1980s. 141 RM98F233:1: fragment of photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964. 142 RM98F233:1: fragment of photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964. 143 RM98F1A:161: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964 [see also RM98F1A:164]. 144 RM98F8:14 and RM98F17:50: Francis Bacon, John Edwards, c.1980s. 145 Sylvester 2000, p. 236. 146 RM98F1A:22: torn leaf, mounted on support, Amédée Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art (London: John Rodker, 1931), p. 59, ‘Sir Austen Chamberlain as seen in a Distorting Mirror’.

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Bacon’s signature subjects and the exact posture derived from this particular negative alone features in eleven paintings altogether. Muybridge’s wrestlers,147 though not all taken from the same frame of the series, appear in nine works.148 The excessive referencing of the same subject suggests that for the artist they turned into universal ciphers, maybe standing for sex, mortality and guilt. However, Bacon probably depended less and less on the original photograph the more often he painted the subject, and may also have resorted to reproductions of his paintings based on a particular photograph. Superimposition Much like in Bacon’s spatial settings, for some figures several pictorial springboards come into question that all show similarities to the painted body in posture, proportions, and positioning in the composition. This clustering of possible sources may be coincidental and caused by the ‘continual barrage of images’149 characteristic of the modern age of mass media. Among the myriad of diverse images in photography and printing, and indeed the whole history of figurative art, there are only so many angles from which a human body can be captured and only so many compositions an image-maker can come up with. The appearance of the body itself, mutilated, sick, and compromised as it may be, is limited by its biological characteristics. Images of the human figure have to resemble each other. Which reference is seen as the formal starting point for a painted figure depends on art historical reasoning, and is ultimately always in danger of being the result of projections and associations of the recipient.150 By his own account, Bacon was influenced by everything he saw, reacting like ‘a sponge that absorbs everything’151 and as Peppiatt remarked, may not always have been able to ‘disentangle which disparate elements have mingled in his mind to suggest this or that enigmatic image’.152 Yet, as pointed out before, formal correspondences with a variety of sources may not have been random occurrences after all but evidence of purposeful attempts to combine and mingle their inherent characteristics. If we accept the possibility of such purposeful mingling of sources, other meaningful combinations present themselves. Figure Getting out of a Car, c.1944 is only known today from a photograph by Peter Rose Pulham (figure 73).153 Bacon radically reworked the painting in 1946 and in its current state, now called Landscape with Car, the formerly prominent

147 Cf. e.g. RM98F1:34: torn leaf, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 68, ‘Men Wrestling’. 148 Two Figures, 1953, Two Figures in the Grass, 1954, Two Figures on a Couch, 1967, Triptych – Studies from the Human Body, 1970, Three Studies of Figures on Beds, 1972, Triptych August 1972, 1972, Two Figures with a Monkey, 1973, Triptych – Studies of the Human Body, 1979, The Wrestlers after Muybridge, 1980. 149 Burroughs and Odier 2008, p. 34. 150 Cf. Isekenmeier 2013, pp. 12–16. 151 Archimbaud 2010, p. 32. 152 Peppiatt 1984 p. 86. 153 Cf. Alley and Rothenstein 1964, Appendix A4.

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figure is disguised by foliage. The work has been described as ‘disturbing’,154 but while the faceless mouth, the movement towards the viewer, and the figure’s imposing build evoke a feeling of unease, the surreal scene radiates absurdity and threat in equal proportion. A cumbersome creature is clumsily leaning forward to speak into three microphones. Compared to the body the vehicle is too small, as are the clothes, which scarcely cover the massive figure. It seems as if a nightmare unsuccessfully tried to disguise itself as an acceptable appearance but ended up as a ridiculous caricature of fear. This effect may be rooted in a distinct combination of references – without them neccessarrily having any literal formal consequences in the finished canvas or an impact on its intepretation. Martin Hammer suggested that Figure Getting out of a Car derived from a photograph of Adolf Hitler, which shows the dictator arriving in a crowd in Nuremberg, representing ‘a widespread strand in Nazi propaganda imagery, whereby the party leaders are presented as moving in their official cars, like gods in their chariots, amid enthusiastic crowds or vast armies’.155 The car itself was lifted from a different image of the dictator156 (figure 76) and Hitler’s outstretched arms loosely link this photograph to the figure, but the image, if consulted, may have provided an emotive element of menace and evil more than a pictorial or narrative starting point. Two other figures are formally closer to the grisaille creature. One is a frame from Muybridge’s study of a woman ‘Sitting Down on the Ground’ (figure 75).157 The motion study shows a nude model with a gown wrapped around her hips, who, in the process of sitting down, faces the viewer, supports her weight with her right arm while balancing her movement with her half-stretched left arm. The nude’s pose, chest and limbs coincide to a great extent with that of Bacon’s enigmatic figure. Moreover, both figures appear trapped in an act of movement, which in the painting is indicated by the creature’s knee on the car door and, not least, by the title. The other is the colour plate ‘Die Gärtnerin. Galanter franzö­sischer Farbstich von Moret nach Aug. de Saint-Aubin’,158 which is one of the few known appropriations from a printed illustration, published in the book ­Illustrierte ­Sittengeschichte (figure 74). Just like the Muybridge figure, ‘The Gardener’ strongly resembles the painted figure in posture and prominent cleavage. Both backgrounds are determined by horizontal lines, like the railing of the balcony and the car door. If all three sources did feed into Figure Getting out of a Car, ridiculing Hitler by putting him in drag, so to speak, would make this work a bold, singeing satire of contemporaneous politics in the manner of a Dada collage, while referencing a figure reading a book might have been a hidden 154 Sylvester 2000, p. 18. 155 Hammer 2012, p. 103, Adolf Hitler, illustration from ‘Deutschland Erwachet’ (Hamburg: Cigaretten Bilderdienst Hamburg Bahrenfeld, 1933). 156 Torn leaf, overpainted, Heinrich Hoffmann, ‘The Führer Who Commands’, Picture Post, 13 July 1940, leaf photographed by Sam Hunter in the Cromwell Place studio, 1950, illustrated in: Gale and Stephens 2008a, p. 16, ill. no. 2. 157 Muybridge 1887, plate 248 ‘Sitting Down on the Ground’, row one, frame 3. 158 RM98F136:17: Eduard Fuchs, Illustrierte Sittengeschichte, II, ‘Die Galante Zeit’ (Munich: Albert Langen, 1909), colour plate ‘Die Gärtnerin. Galanter französischer Farbstich von Moret nach Aug. De Saint-­ Aubin’, between pp. 200–201, see Günther 2011, p. 7.

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73  Francis Bacon, Getting out of a Car, c.1944 (first now overpainted version of Landscape with Car, c.1945–1946, oil on canvas, 144 × 128.6 cm, private collection).

74 RM98F136:17 Eduard Fuchs, Illustrierte Sittengeschichte, II, ‘Die Galante Zeit’ (Munich: Albert Langen, 1909), colour plate ‘Die Gärtnerin. Galanter französischer Farbstich von Moret nach Aug. De SaintAubin’, between pp. 200–201, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

self-referential nod to his source material – unbeknownst to the viewer, on a private level and for Bacon alone. Another example is the genesis of Still Life – Broken Statue and Shadow, 1984 (­figure 77). By noting ‘make shadow a separate unit’,159 Bacon named a key formal characteristic of all shadows in his work. At times fleshy puddles, two-dimensional voids, or alternative shapes, they are unrelated to their presumed source and independent of any light configuration. The shadow in Still Life – Broken Statue and Shadow is no exception. The statue, a headless female torso, rests on a plinth. Yet the shadow appears to reference a standing figure, complete with legs, a head, and arms along its side. The discrepancy between the figure and the shadow is due to each being informed by different pictorial sources. The distorted torso echoes Hans Bellmer’s biomorphic sculptures, Deakin’s photos of Moraes, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ female nudes,160 but the shadow is from elsewhere. One

159 RM98F1:59: torn leaf, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901), p. 184, ‘Males (Nude) Plate 345. Wrestling, lock.’ Handwritten note in blue pen ‘Make shadow into separate unit’. 160 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 156.

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75  Detail from Eadweard Muybridge, Muybridge’s Complete Human and ­Animal Locomotion: All 781 Plates from the 1887 ‘Animal Locomotion’, 3 vols (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), II, p. 856, plate 248 ‘Sitting Down on the Ground’ (not the direct source).

76  Francis Bacon working material, torn leaf, overpainted, Heinrich Hoffmann, ‘The Führer Who Commands’, Picture Post, 13 July 1940, leaf photographed by Sam Hunter in the Cromwell Place studio, 1950.

likely pictorial starting point, the shadow of a man in a high-angle shot of a father and a daughter, can be found on a dog-eared page torn from L’Oedipe un complexe univers,161 which features essays by Gilles Deleuze, Sigmund Freud, Pierre-Félix Guattari, and others (figure 78). In its shape it matches the one in the painting. The caption to the photograph warns that an Oedipus complex badly resolved in childhood can burden your adult life. For Bacon, who claimed to have both loathed and have been sexually attracted to his father,162 this must have made a compelling read. The other side of the leaf shows Ingres’ Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1808, a version of which Bacon had painted in 1983,163 and which may also have attracted him to this page. Fingerprints on the leaf, made wearing Marigold gloves, in a light orange-pink hue further link the item to the shadow. On several occasions, Bacon related the motif to a strong feeling of mortality. ‘After all, if you really love life, things excite you, you are walking with the shadow of its opposite,

161 RM98F17:149: torn leaf, Didier Anzieu et al., L’Oedipe un complexe universel: Les grandes découvertes de la psychanalyse (Paris: Tchou, 1977). 162 Cf. Sylvester 2009, pp. 71–72. 163 Francis Bacon, Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, 1983.

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77  Francis Bacon, Still Life – Broken Statue and Shadow, 1984, oil, pastel and aerosol paint on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, private collection.

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78  RM98F17:149: torn leaf, Didier Anzieu et al., L’Oedipe un complexe universel: Les grandes découvertes de la psychanalyse (Paris: Tchou, 1977), no page number, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

79  RM98F22:116: torn leaf, I.F. Kladov, I.F. ­Kotomtsev et al., The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials (London: ­Hutchinson, 1944), no page number, collection: Dublin City ­Gallery The Hugh Lane.

you are walking with the shadow of death all the time,’164 he said, but in his typically evasive manner, denied any such connotation for his painted shadows.165 And yet, an actual image of death may have fed into Still Life – Broken Statue and Shadow and added poignancy, and some ‘brutality of fact’166 to the subject. For its shape also strongly resembles that of the decomposed body of a child murdered during the Second World War reproduced in The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials, 1944 (figure 79).167 The page was folded multiple times, which damaged the

164 ‘I’ll go on until I drop’ 1991; see also Sylvester 2009, p. 78. 165 Cf. ‘I’ll go on until I drop’ 1991. 166 Sylvester 2009, p. 182. 167 RM98F22:116: torn leaf, I.F. Kladov, I.F. Kotomtsev et al., The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the ­Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials (London: Hutchinson, 1944), no page number.

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printed surface. Formal differences between the potential base images are marginal but the combination of both narratives makes for a psychologically explosive mixture. ‘Collage is not my medium’168 The combination of diverse, pre-existing pictorial elements is not new in the history of art. Pablo Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe, 1905, for instance, incorporates a photographic reproduction of Madonna and Child with St. John The Baptist and a Chorus of Angels by Sandro ­Botticelli from 1490 as well as studio portraits of boys he collected.169 Aaron Scharf observed that in the history of painting from photographs ‘the most widespread practice is to work with fragments.’170 According to him, the fragments were integrated ‘to provide an area of texture, or to counter-pose photographic tonality with some other graphic technique’.171 Scharf established that sometimes ‘an image with specific connotations, retain[ed] its normal iconographic meaning’.172 At other times, he detected that, closer to Bacon’s use of photographic fragments, they were integrated ‘as a purely formal emotive element with no reference to the initial representation […] a kind of hieroglyph, its identity changed with its severance from the original context’,173 and that ‘it is found as an apparently random image, often in incongruous, surrealist-like juxtapositions’.174 Other art forms focus on the meaningful combination of images. First attempts at photomontage were executed around 1858 by Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, and Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and John Heartfield used it as mounted montage from 1917 onwards.175 Advanced by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso at the beginning of the 20th century, collage had its heyday in the Dada and Surrealist movements during the interbellum. For the ready-made quality of its components, which covered a wide range of materials including newspaper cuttings, photographs, and other printed products, the medium is considered the epitome of Modernism.176 Dada artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch juxtaposed diverse images in witty, farcical, and sometimes disturbing ways to voice often vitriolic criticism on the social and political conditions of the Weimar Republic, while also undermining the alleged truthfulness of photography.177 Höch’s C ­ ut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 168 Davies H. M. 2009, p. 110. 169 Cf. Anne Baldassari, ‘Picasso, 1901–1906: Painting in the Mirror of the Photograph’, in The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso, ed. by Dorothy Kosinski, exh. cat. San Francisco: Museum of ­Modern Art, 1999; Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2000; Bilbao: Fundación del Museo Guggenheim, 2000 (­Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1999), pp. 286–307, p. 305. 170 Scharf 1979, p. 313. 171 Ibid. 172 Ibid., pp. 314. 173 Ibid. 174 Ibid. 175 Cf. Billeter 1979, p. 411. 176 Cf. Dorothea Dietrich, The Collages of Kurt Schwitters: Tradition and Innovation (Cambridge/New York/ Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 3. 177 Cf. Coke 1981, p. 255.

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1919, composed of ‘mechanical illustrations, architecture, words cut out from newspapers, animals and photographs of over 50 individuals’,178 is exemplary. She used the m ­ edium to expose and mock the pompous militarism, male oppression, and failing of the culture in Weimar Germany.179 The combination of specific pre-existing elements created a new meaning for the collage as a whole, and an agent to convey the artist’s message – provided, of course, that the audience knew and recognised its building blocks. Bacon’s practice has several points of contact with modernist collage, which he may have encountered first-hand during his stay in Berlin in 1927.180 It is apparent in the accumulation of printed matter of all sorts, especially images from newspapers and magazines, but also in Bacon’s free juxtaposition of the most diverse images or fragments of pictures, at times in highly charged combinations. While it may seem the construction of Bacon’s paintings is partially indebted to collage techniques, Bacon deviates widely from the medium in execution and intent, and pointed out that ‘collage is not my medium’.181 No fixed combinations of images he used to construct a painting are known to have survived, but several sources for one work were found separate from each other in the studio. Bacon repeatedly used the same item, wanted his working material to decay and deteriorate over time, and hoped that a particular image would form a potent combination with yet another, and another image. Most importantly, the public was not supposed to know that a painting was constructed from pre-existing material, nor to which photographs he referred (see chapter 1.1.). It was neither intended nor possible for the viewer to gain a surplus from their combination and their juxtapositions can only have been relevant for the artist alone and at the beginning of the working process. Bacon’s relationship to collage remained under the surface, he limited its role to the work’s preliminary stages, and his painting was not intended to be the sum of its base images. He absorbed underlying effects, however, such as the elimination of ‘singularity, rationality, coherence’182 and the logical depiction of rational space, and collage’s ability to dissolve traditional subject matter.183 The conjectures about combinations of items and their possible interpretation made throughout this chapter unwrap a crucial function of the studio: its contents were meant to provide psychological blasting agents, which, in the right combination, engendered precursors not only of the iconography but also of the kind of sensation the artist aimed to create on the canvas. The act of seeing, evaluating, choosing, and combining source material itself thus already bears considerable creative potential. For that reason, Anne Baldassari valued Picasso’s practice as being ‘far beyond imitative transcription; he decoded, displaced and

178 Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany 1890–1937: Utopia and Despair (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 122. 179 Ibid. 180 Cf. Harrison 2016b, p. 76. 181 Davies H. M. 2009, p. 110. 182 Sally O’Reilly, ‘Collage: Diversions, Contradictions and Anomalies’, in Collage: Assembling Contemporary Art, ed. by Blanche Craig (London: Black Dog, 2008), pp. 8–19, p. 8. 183 Cf. ibid., pp. 11–12.

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combined each of the signifying units of an image with other sources, as though he wanted to exhaust all their visual and documentary possibilities. He seems to have adopted a kind of “floating” gaze, open to formal suggestions that a “realist” eye would have dismissed.’184 Bacon must have possessed a similar ‘floating gaze’, which, however, developed its full power due to his own unique creative vision, which John Russell described as ‘the irreducible Baconian element, the something put into painting by Bacon and nobody else.’185 3.2.2. Figure, Outline, Materiality – Closest to and Furthest Away from the Photograph

As has been pointed out throughout this study, it was Bacon’s goal to ‘take the image very much further away from the photograph’.186 Tracing the appropriation of the figure from book page to canvas is a particularly good way to explore how this idea was implemented. It incorporates two poles of the journey: the point closest to the source image is the figure’s contour, while its interior is furthest away. The outline was usually adopted relatively faithfully, but the inner structure was often drastically altered, either on a pictorial level, but more significantly so by fully committing to the medium of oil paint. The choice and handling of the material not only led the image away from the photograph, but from figuration too, further shifting the image towards abstraction. In yet another balancing act, Bacon, however, was keen not to cut the connection to figurative representation altogether because ‘painting isn’t only the material, it’s the result of a sort of conflict between the material and the subject.’187 Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1963, was informed by photographs of the sitter commissioned from John Deakin (plate XXVI and XXVII). Reminiscent of the sharp distinction of subjects and objects in the gelatin silver print, in the painting, the shape of the figure is determined by outlines in dark paint.188 This contour is adopted with only minimal changes, none of which substantially interfere with the integrity of the pictorial starting point. The inside of the figure, however, differs widely. An alien black form embraces the sitter’s chest like an exuberant collar and swirls down her abdomen to reach its darkest point at the pubic bone, from where it fades into both legs. Sometimes, such pictorial alterations took a more literal form. Study for a Portrait, 1967 was informed by a nude photograph of Moraes by Deakin too.189 In line with Bacon’s fascination for X-ray photography, in Study for a Portrait he painted the bones and the flesh of the lower legs.

184 Baldassari 1997, p. 40. 185 Russell John 2001, p. 73. 186 Sylvester 2000, p. 235. 187 Archimbaud 2010, p. 145. 188 Henrietta Moraes, Henrietta (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994), pp. 71–72; RM9817:124: fragment of photograph, John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961. 189 RM981A:107: fragment of contact sheet (detail), John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961.

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The most striking changes compared to the photograph are prompted by how the figure was built up in oil paint. The body, like the floor and mattress, was underpainted in a deep red. The strokes of dry, broken, flesh-coloured and white paint Bacon painted on this layer at best create vague intimations of a muscle structure and a loose description of anatomy. The legs fade into nothingness and the left hand and right arm are barely indicated. The face consists entirely of ‘non-rational marks’,190 thick impasto with little anatomical reference. The execution of Moraes’s body is gestural, painterly, and taps the full potential of the medium, and has been described as a ‘triumph of direct expression and intense brushwork’.191 Bacon’s idiosyncratic handling of the paint is in no way rooted in the photograph. It contrasts sharply with the photograph’s flat surface and the rendering of Moraes’s body in grades of black, white, and grey. This disparity is even more extreme in other paintings. In Portrait of George Dyer Staring at Blind-Cord, 1966, which draws on a photograph of the sitter by Deakin taken in the Reece Mews studio,192 the interior of George Dyer’s body is entirely painted in large aggressive brushstrokes. As a consequence, the inner structure alone is often barely capable of convincingly suggesting a human body. The body of the bird in the left panel of Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants, 1968 is evidently informed by a flamingo taking flight from a lake photographed for the book They Live in Africa: Nature’s Paradise (figure 80 and 81).193 Bacon perverts the picture by tying the painted bird to the ground with a black puddle and obstructing its momentum with a cage-like structure, so it becomes a symbol of confinement instead of liberation and departure.194 The body of the animal is only coarsely defined within the limitations of its shape with gestural brushstrokes on the raw canvas. It depends heavily on the outline, here determined by the margins of the red ground, which has to carry the main load in conveying figuration. ‘The vague outline of something’195 Bacon explained that he started the painting process by defining the ‘vague outline of something’196 on the empty canvas. Unfinished paintings recovered from the studio, for example ‘Self-Portrait’, c.1991–1992, confirm the artist’s claim and show simple outlines in a variety of colours (figure 82), as mentioned earlier. Bacon’s statement is also corroborated by several paintings where basic underdrawings show through, such as Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1984. It seems to have been the general approach.197 We can conclude from Bacon’s own statements and the analysis of unfinished works, that this

190 Sylvester 2009, p. 58. 191 Harrison 2016a, p. 734. 192 RM98F1A:161: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964. 193 Jen and Des Bartlett, They Live in Africa: Nature’s Paradise (London: Collins, 1967), p. 236. This page is missing from the studio copy of the book [RM98F213:39]. 194 Cf. Günther 2011, p. 11. 195 Sylvester 2009, pp. 194–195. 196 Ibid. 197 Cf. Shepard 2009, p. 160.

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80  Francis Bacon, Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants, 1968, left panel, oil and pastel on canvas, 198 × 147 cm, collection: Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran (full triptych see p. 445).

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81  Jen and Des Bartlett, They Live in Africa: Nature’s Paradise (London: Collins, 1967) p. 236 (detail).

‘something’ which denotes the beginning of the painting process was the figure; to be more precise, it’s contour.198 Since the figures were lifted from pre-existing imagery, this itemisation of the painting process provides intriguing insights into how he handled his sources. Bacon’s first step was to position and delineate a figure he had found in his image bank and transpose it from source to canvas. In other words, the painting was initiated by appropriation. Furthermore, reminiscent of Édouard Dujardin’s remark that taking the outline was enough to represent a face,199 the appropriation of a figure was initially restricted to its contour. The outline was the main focus of Bacon’s attention and the most desirable element to adopt. Isabel ­Rawsthorne reported that Bacon was ‘obsessed with the photographic delineation of form – wishes, as far as I can see, to seize such a quality in painting’200 and the painter himself enthused how different from any ‘conventional concept of a man running’ the aerial shot of a figure in movement was, which had produced an ‘off-balance L-shaped form’.201 It seems 198 Sylvester 2009, pp. 194–195; Davies H. M. 2009, p. 110, see e.g. ’Figure’, c.1959, and ’Seated Figure’, c.1978. 199 Cf. Édouard Dujardin quoted from Scharf 1979, p. 250. 200 HKA: TGA 9612/1/3/27: Isabel Rawsthorne, letter to Peter Rose Pulham, 3 July [1949], quoted from Hammer 2012a, p. 362. 201 Rothenstein 1964, p. 17.

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82  Francis Bacon, ‘Self-Portrait’, 1991–1992, oil on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, collection: ­Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin.

that for Bacon, one of the most interesting aspects of photography were the novel and un­usual shapes and forms it produced, which manifested itself directly in his appropriation process. The same approach was applied to spatial settings, of which, too, only the bare bones were adopted. An arguably rare epitome of the focus on the outline are cut-outs of figures, for instance the aforementioned walking man from Art and Photography,202 which Bacon had borrowed for Statue and Figures in a Street (plate XXIII and XXIV). The text underlines the picture’s novelty saying that ‘no artist would have dared to draw a ­walking figure in attitudes like some of these’,203 which must have spurred Bacon’s imagination and ambition. Usually, however, the figure is lifted without physically detaching it from its ­environment. This practice has many precedents and is consistent with, for example, that of Ford Madox Brown. Technical examinations of Work, 1852–1865 showed that the under­lying drawings of two male heads consist only of outlines he had adopted from photographs.204 Because these were available to be consulted during the further painting process,

202 RM98F125:36: fragment of leaf, Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (London: Allen Lane, 1968), ‘121. Anon: Details from instantaneous photograph. 1860s (?)’, see also RM98F8:131A: photograph, cutout, Peter Stark, Francis Bacon in his studio, c.1975–1977; RM98F130:82: cut-out from photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in a Street in Soho, c.1963. 203 Oliver Wendell Holmes quoted from Scharf 1968, p. 182. 204 Cf. Townsend, Ridge and Hackney 2004, pp. 165 and 168.

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no additional ­detail in the underdrawing was necessary.205 A similar approach is known to have been used by German painter Franz von Stuck.206 The last chapters addressed that sometimes a base image was radically reformulated. While the appropriation was done as economically as possible by condensing it in the adoption of the outline, it nevertheless forged a strong bond with the source picture. Even when extreme metamorphoses took place, a sense of the outline was maintained. The hovering creature in the left panel of Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981, is a good example. Its extensive remodelling was described in 3.2.1. That Bacon derived the painting from this particular photograph can nevertheless be conjectured because its silhouette resembles that of the bird published in The Birds.207 Bacon also remained faithful to the outline when it had changed due to the physical alteration of the source item, as the relationship between the profile of Isabel Rawsthorne in Studies of George Dyer and Isabel Rawsthorne, 1970 and that in the base image, a fragmented portrait photograph of Rawsthorne by Deakin,208 illustrates. The nose has been ripped off from the gelatin silver print, or it was lost due to material fatigue, but Bacon adopted the outline of Rawsthorne’s profile including this omission. Bacon’s focus on the shape allows speculation about less obvious pictorial starting points. A black and white photograph published in Paris Match on 2 June 1978209 shows a soldier of the French Foreign Legion kicking in a door in Kolwezi, Zaire, today the Democratic Republic of the Congo (figure 83). In addition to Bacon’s interest in current affairs, the picture may have attracted his attention for an allegoric relation to Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, 1899, which Bacon owned and had read.210 The aggressive intrusion of a Western soldier into a building in the Congo region – Heart of Darkness takes place on and near the Congo River – may be likened to the aggressive imperialistic penetration of Africa, which is a major theme of the novel. The shape of the soldier bears a close resemblance to that of the protagonist in Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, 1983 whose posture the news picture may have inspired (figure 84).

205 Cf. Ibid. 206 Cf. Josef Adolf Schmoll called Eisenwerth, ‘Die Ausstellung des Münchner Stadtmuseums 1970: „Malerei nach Fotografie“ – ein persönlicher Rückblick’, in Eine neue Kunst? Eine andere Natur! ­Fotografie und Malerei im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. by Ulrich Pohlmann and Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern, exh. cat. Munich: Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, 2004, in collaboration with Foto­museum im ­Münchner Stadtmuseum (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2004), pp. 333–339, p. 333, cited from Romina Friedemann, ‘Wunsch & Wirklichkeit: Der Einfluss der Fotografie auf das Porträt’, in Wunsch & ­Wirklichkeit: Porträts aus der Sammlung Clemens Sels Museum Neuss, ed. by Romina Friedemann, exh. cat. Neuss: Clemens Sels Museum Neuss, 2017/2018 (Dresden: Sandstein, 2017), pp. 9–30, p. 15. 207 RM98BC36: torn page, mounted on cardboard, The Birds LIFE Nature Library, ed. by Roger Tory P ­ eterson et al. (New York: Time Life Books, 1963), p. 55. 208 RM98F16:262: photograph, John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964. 209 RM98F23:6: torn leaf, Paris Match, 2 June 1978, p. 99, article ‘Horreur a Kolwezi’ on the rescue of European hostages taken by rebel and militant groups in the city of Kolwezi. 210 BB18.12: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976); cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 1096.

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83  RM98F23:6: torn leaf, Paris Match, 2 June 1978, p. 99, article ‘Horreur a Kolwezi’ collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

200

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84  Francis Bacon, Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, 1983, oil on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, ­collection: Museu Coleçao Berardo, Lisbon.

201

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While the painted outline is the element closest to the source image, Bacon does not slavishly copy it. The initial underdrawings are confident and affirmative but also quick and crude, barely describing more than a faint silhouette. In this respect they are symptomatic for a loose adoption process in which accuracy did not play a role. As pointed out earlier, the figure was not transferred onto the canvas by mechanical means or by squaring it up but instead copied freehand, a process which portends the introduction of some initial deviations. Slight changes to the positioning, the mild elongation, compression, and bulging of limbs are inherent parts of Bacon’s repertoire. The outline can also be entirely interrupted in the finished work, as can be seen in Three Studies of Lucian Freud, 1969, which is informed by a photograph of the sitter on a bed.211 The interruption of the silhouette is a stylistic device Bacon used especially frequently in his portraits and self-portraits, for example in the right panel of Two Studies for Self-Portrait, 1977. Where the right cheek would be, Bacon painted a black void that merges with the black background, and the shape of the face is only barely maintained by adding a thin, beige brushstroke to indicate the lower end of the jaw. ‘I happen to be a painter and that’s all’212 ‘FB: Reality is what exists. Are you real? To me you’re real. There you are, there you are Melvyn Bragg. [...] There you are, flesh and blood before me. How are you going to re-make that? How are you going to make that in another art? MB: Why do you want to? That’s the interesting question. [...] FB: Because, [...] I want to be able to re-make, in another medium, the reality of an image that excites me. [...] MB: Why do you want to do that, Francis? FB: Because I like doing it because I happen to be a painter and that’s all.’213 Francis Bacon in conversation with Melvyn Bragg

Francis Bacon ‘happened to be a painter’.214 This statement might seem banal but it is crucial for the correct localisation of his engagement with photography and the adequate evaluation of its significance in the working process. By his own account, Bacon aimed to ‘re-make’ the reality of a subject understood as consisting of ‘flesh and bone’ into ‘another medium’ as a painter, whose weapon of choice was predominantly oil paint. The critical step away from his photographic points of reference, in fact, the ultimate break with the photograph lies here, in his choice and handling of material. Bacon’s preoccupation with photography was intense and closely intertwined with the genesis of his iconography, but to ‘reduce Bacon’s paintings to a collation of anodyne image-quotations would be perverse’.215 Moreover, such a one-dimensional analysis would miss key points of Bacon’s artistic interests and creative practice. Paint marks and thumbprints on many studio items

211 E.g. RM98F1A:87: John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964. 212 Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985. 213 Ibid. 214 Ibid. 215 Harrison 2009b, p. 143.

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indicate their consultation after the painting process had been initiated216 and some aspects, such as physical alterations, were adopted carefully from the working document. Yet anatomical details were often disregarded and deliberately subverted. The shape of a figure forms the core of the appropriation process and much suggests that after the source image had fulfilled its primary task of providing a silhouette, it became of secondary importance. For, after the outline was defined, it was filled with thick impasto consisting of coarsely mixed multiple colours, applied in gestural, expressive, and accidental brushwork, which creates the typically vivid effect of Bacon’s bodies and faces.217 The pictorial starting point was transposed into another medium, and not merely transformed on a pictorial but on a physical level too. Photography and painting differ fundamentally. But while it may sound self-evident that Bacon’s sources and subjects belong to different media of antithetical materiality, this discrepancy as a crucial distinguishing factor between the two has not received much attention in Bacon scholarship. The topic is often neglected or merely discussed en passant in writing on painters working from photographs too.218 Frank Van Deren Coke’s comment on how Walter Sickert ‘superimposed his own charming impressionistic style of applying paint on unconventional compositions made with a camera’219 is a rare exception. The artist himself, however, was well aware of the diametrically opposed characteristics, stating that ‘the texture of a painting seems to be more immediate than the texture of a photograph, because the texture of a photograph seems to go through an illustrational process onto the nervous system, whereas the texture of a painting seems to come immediately onto the nervous system’.220 The majority of Bacon’s base images are either original photographic prints or mechanically reproduced photographs. In its essence, photography is ‘a technique of inscribing, in an emulsion of silver salts, a stable image generated by a ray of light’.221 It requires the presence of the subject to trigger a physio-chemical process in which the camera captures light waves thrown back from a subject, resulting in a uniquely close bond to the depicted subject and an indexical relationship to reality.222 And yet, as a physical item a photograph is somewhat flat, smooth and dry, and falls short in conveying corporeality. It lacks the expressiveness and physical depth of paint and instead relies on ‘visual codes embedded in the surface [...] the arrangement of light and shadow, composition and facial expressions to

216 Cf. ibid., p. 146. 217 It seems that Bacon used this approach from the very beginning of his career, for example in ‘Painted Screen’, c.1930, see Cwiertnia 2016, p. 67. 218 Only brief comments can be found, for example in Easton 2011, p. 2. 219 Coke 1981, p. 97, see also p. 243. 220 Sylvester 2009, pp. 57–58. 221 Cf. Hubert Damisch, ‘Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image’, in The Photography Reader, ed. by Liz Wells (London/New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 87–89, p. 87. 222 Cf. Mark W. Scala, ‘Introduction’, in Paint Made Flesh, ed. by Mark W. Scala, exh. cat. (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), pp. 1–9, p. 4; see also Sontag 1978a p. 5; Sontag 1978b, p. 154.

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convey interiority’.223 Consequently, the two media are perceived differently: while the first seems ‘closer to truth’,224 ‘painting’s tactile and flesh like qualities enable it to be seen as a palpable presence.’225 The relationship between image and creator is equally different. In the thick impasto of an oil painting, it is possible to trace the artist’s actions, which forges with the viewer ‘a direct connection to the creative impulse that generated the picture’226 while the materiality and texture of a photograph merely give away information on the camera settings, the film and paper which were used, and the developing process. While a photographic image does, of course, provide additional information on the photographer, for example, how the camera was held, and how the body of the photographer had to adjust to that, if he or she was running, standing still or using a tripod, this is not ingrained in the physical substance of the photograph as it is in oil paint. Bacon’s actions are traceable in the energetic white dashes he threw on the canvas but also quite literally when he manipulated the paint with his fingers ‘exploiting its malleable plasticity’,227 which seemed to ‘delight’228 him. The mechanically reproduced photograph is a pale shadow of its original. Bereft of its direct indexicality, its physical reality is reduced to gradations of colour dots arranged in a grid, doomed to vegetate as screens.229 Imants Tillers painted a grim picture of their existence: ‘While the dot-screen of mechanical reproduction renders all images equivalent, interchangeable, scale-less and surface-less, the consumption and regurgitation or “recreation” of these images reinvests them with an aura, surface, substance and scale entirely different from their corresponding “originals”. In this sense mechanical reproduction is purgatory or limbo for image patterns. Like disembodied souls floating textureless in books, they are waiting to be reborn, to be recreated, to feel the actuality of their reality. The mechanical reproduction of images is a form of death (crucifixion).’230

Bacon had started his career as an interior designer but shifted his focus towards painting during the 1930s. While occasionally toying with the idea of creating sculptures,231 he ­never worked in any other medium but stuck to painting, using a small range of materials in comparison to other artists.232 The photographs Bacon took and painted from remained in the realm of his preparatory work. Occasionally, photographs and newspapers appear in

223 Scala 2009, p. 4. 224 Ibid. 225 Ibid. 226 Richardson 2006, p. 2, for similar thoughts see Elkins 1999, p. 45; and Gale and Stephens 2008b, p. 25. 227 Durham 1985, p. 233. 228 Ibid., p. 231. 229 Cf. Terry Smith, ‘Enervation, Viscerality: The Fate of the Image in Modernity’, in Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photographic Era, ed. by Terry Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 1–38, p. 23. 230 Imants Tillers, ‘In Perpetual Mourning’, ZG/Art & Text, 11 (July 1984), 22–23, p. 23. 231 Cf. Davies H. M. 2009, p. 101. 232 Cf. Durham 1985, p. 231.

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Bacon’s paintings as subjects in a witty, self-referential manner,233 but in contrast to contemporaries such as Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton, and David Hockney, he never mounted them on a canvas or overpainted them as artworks in their own right. Such ‘mixed media jackdaws’234 he held in contempt because in his mind they did not transform the photograph enough.235 Thus, while his paintings were close to the photographic source in their early stages, a clear cut was made when the actual painting process began. The disassociation from the photograph was important for Bacon, for although he appreciated the ‘fluidity of [its] surface’,236 he felt the medium was limited in its ability ‘to get under the surface of things.’237 And under the surface of things, he wanted to get. The traits of oil paint are traditionally intimately linked with the reality of the body. On account of its texture and viscosity, it is often likened to bodily fluids, excretions, skin, and flesh. ‘It is hopeless to pretend that oil paint does not continuously recall the worst miscarriages of digestion,’238 James Elkins explained and Mark Scala pointed out that ‘the stickiness of oil paint makes it a mirror of the body’s gelatinous essence’.239 The medium is thus capable of emulating the substance of the figure it renders, effectively embodying it. Oil paint has been declared an ‘equivalent for flesh’240 and a ‘trope for life’.241 In that sense, the painter is a true creator when material and icon interlock, because ‘the worked paint is the texture of what it depicts, just as (color and light being inseparable) it is the luster on fur, the liquid glimmer in an eye, the blush on a cheek, or the shadow on a furrowed brow’.242 Since paint is not bound to a descriptive role it engages other modes of perception than the intellectual, and the experience of seeing an oil painting is often described as sensory, visceral, and emotional.243 Its distinct texture ‘enables us to “feel” the picture with our eyes, adding to the vividness of the pictorial experience’244 and to ‘”touch” with our eyes’245 while simultaneously ‘touch[ing it] with our minds, through memory, experience, emotional identification’,246 in a process of ‘emphatic looking’247 that involves ‘projecting ourselves onto the painted figure as it simultaneously projects itself onto us’.248 It offers 233 Cf. Triptych, 1991, and The Estate of Francis Bacon, studio item: photograph, Jacques Saraben, Francis Bacon, 1973. 234 Russell John 2001, p. 71. 235 Ibid. 236 Sylvester 2000, p. 215. 237 Ibid. 238 Elkins 1999, p. 136 239 Scala 2009, p. 2. 240 Gale and Stephens 2008b, p17. 241 Elkins 1999, p. 137. 242 Michael Taylor, Rembrandt’s Nose: Of Flesh & Spirit in the Master’s Portraits (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2007), p. 51. 243 Cf. Richardson 2006, p. 2. 244 Ibid. 245 Scala 2009, p. 3. 246 Ibid. 247 Ibid. 248 Ibid.

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universal points of contact known to all living beings, namely the aspects which ‘haunt all flesh – sensuality, pain, aging, and death, the great unifiers that cross all boundaries of age, class, and nationality’.249 This understanding of the medium was pivotal for Bacon’s art. It made it the ideal choice for an artist who aimed to convey an extreme, intense experience of life, in a way that photography is not capable of. ‘All artists are lovers’, he explained, ‘they’re lovers of life, they want to see how they can set the trap so that life will come over more vividly and more violently’.250 Bacon would like his paintings ‘to look as if a human being had passed between them…like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events as the snail leaves its slime’251 and to convey ‘what is called the living sensation more nearly on the nervous system and more violently’.252 As this was his remit, material was not a subordinated means to an end but played a crucial role. In keeping with the qualities ascribed to oil paint, Bacon aimed for the ‘complete interlocking of image and paint, so that the image is the paint and vice versa’.253 Since, by his own account, ‘painting has nothing to do with colouring surfaces’,254 his figures are built up in oil paint. He followed the example of his hero Vincent Van Gogh, the unique way Van Gogh used ‘that very thick paint, that very thick material’255 which substantially contributed to his ‘re-creat[ing of] reality’256 which Bacon so admired. Paintings like Seated Figure, 1962 where the body is created with black and skin-coloured paint which is in some places so thick that its peaks were squeezed flat by the glazing, and Portrait of George Dyer Talking, 1966 in which the subject’s face is covered by an area of thick white paint whose depth is underlined by a narrow green stroke cutting a deep trench into the material, are paradigms of a material-focussed approach. The haptic, corporeal materiality of Bacon’s work, in which oil paint piled up in ‘voluptuous impasto’,257 is one of its most prominent and most noted features, and many authors describe their visceral, non-intellectual reactions: the paint ‘seems to have an organic life, seems to have accumulated slowly, seems like dried-out slime’,258 and the work ‘causes pain’,259 ‘we feel them before we analyse them’.260 Confirming Bacon’s self-set goal, ­Michael

249 Ibid. 250 Farson 1993, p. 105. 251 From an unpublished interview in Time, 1952, quoted from The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors, ed. by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, exh. cat. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1955; Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1955; Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum, 1956; San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1956 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), p. 60. 252 Bacon in Farson 1993, p. 107. 253 Bacon 1953, p. 12. 254 Russell John 2001, p. 35. 255 Archimbaud 2010, p. 42. 256 Ibid. 257 Durham 1985, p. 232. 258 Sylvester 2000, p. 35. 259 Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), p. 9. 260 Harrison 2009b, p. 166.

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Andrews saw that ‘the object is changed into paint, not described in or with paint’261 and Russel confirmed that ‘the image and the paint coalesced in a way that was both “right” for the painting in question, and “like” for the person portrayed’,262 respectively, and the latter even felt obliged to warn the audience, for ‘the experience on offer is so intense that only the visitor who has a professional duty to examine the paint as paint will consider doing so’.263 Bacon’s art seems to open up a channel of communication from body to body, which included the painter himself, who said to have ‘physically felt’264 what he painted. In that interplay of image, paint and body, viewer and creator, the photograph lost its relevance. Its role in Bacon’s art must therefore not be overestimated. ‘Splashing the stuff down’ 265 The idiosyncratic manner in which the material was employed was a deliberate and decisive step away from the base image too. In keeping with Bacon’s dismissal of the texture of photography,266 he created forceful surfaces in his paintings with considerable skill. Pastel, dust, sand, cotton wool, sprayed automobile paint, artist’s acrylic paints, household emulsions,267 candle wax268 were all employed for unusual textures and light effects;269 in the centre panel of Triptych August 1972, 1972 for instance sand was added to wet paint to intensify the effect of the impasto and support the rendering of the back of the figure.270 A further variation in texture is achieved by leaving areas of bare canvas, or by scrubbing it to roughen the surface.271 In Reclining Woman, 1961 canvas fibres are left jutting out of the paint.272 In some paintings ‘the interlocking of image and paint’273 took a rather literal form and the texture supports the pictorial content. In Three Studies for Figures at a Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 and Head II, 1949, the strap of the dress in the left panel of the first, like the collar of the shirt in the second, grows out of the surface in a three-dimensional, relief-like manner. For Figure in a Landscape, 1945 dust from the studio floor was added to a thin wash of grey paint to re-create the ‘slightly furry’274 quality of Eric Hall’s suit, just as sand in Sand Dune, 1983 enhanced the pictorial impact.275 In some backgrounds, especially

261 Michael Andrews, unpublished notes on Francis Bacon written for Bruce Bernard, 1988, Tate Archive, quoted from Calvocoressi 2005, p. 11. 262 Russell John 1964, no page number. 263 Russell John 2001, p. 103. 264 Sylvester 2000, p. 232. 265 Bacon 1953, quoted from Durham 1985, p. 231. 266 Cf. Sylvester 2009, pp. 57–58. 267 Cf. Durham 1985, pp. 231–232. 268 Cf. Sylvester 2000, p. 32. 269 Cf. Shepard 2009, p. 169. 270 Cf. Durham 1985, pp. 231–232. 271 Cf. Shepard 2009, p. 169. 272 Cf. Durham 1985, p. 233. 273 Bacon 1953, p. 12. 274 Sylvester 2009, p. 192. 275 Ibid., p. 191.

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in George Dyer Riding a Bicycle, 1966, a rough surface is created by picking the brush off the surface leaving numerous small peaks, mimicking the texture of sand or soil. It is not that oil paint per se did not allow for the emulation of photography, as contemporaneous photorealistic tendencies show. In the work of Chuck Close, ‘the artist’s hand is subordinated to a laborious system for translating visual data, which echoes the mechanisms of the photographic source’.276 For Bacon, to the contrary, ‘every stroke of paint laid down ought to be a self-sufficient expression of the artistic ideas.’277 Consequently, the positioning, length and course of a brushstroke are often unrelated both to the formal parameters determined by a photographic starting point and the naturalistic rendering of a subject. Portrait of George Dyer Staring at Blind-Cord, 1966 is based on a photograph of a semi-nude Dyer in the Reece Mews studio taken by Deakin in approximately 1965.278 The painting, however, only loosely mimics the pose, introducing a whole array of deviations. A bright red area on Dyer’s shin and a black swirl creeping up his chest have no counterpart in the photograph. Where the right leg rested on the left, Bacon placed a cluster of black, white, red and green paint. These are paradigmatic instances of the kind of marks ­Bacon called ‘non-rational’,279 a quality he admired in Rembrandt van Rijn’s paint application, where marks coagulate to communicate the ‘mystery of fact’.280 They do not relate to Dyer’s anatomical features but are abstract, unexpected additions which prevent the painting being read as purely figurative. In the balancing act between figuration and abstraction, they tip the work towards abstraction. ‘Bacon had been working for weeks on the Jet of Water [1979], which had gone through many different phases before being given its definitive form. The work was now almost finished. In fact there was really nothing else to be added, but Bacon was not satisfied with it. “There’s something missing but I don’t know what.” Suddenly he put on a glove and hurled a pellet of white paint at the picture with all his might, crushing it against the canvas. I was staggered by the force of his gesture and the risk he was taking.’281 Eddy Batache

Extreme versions of Bacon’s non-rational marks are the white dashes he threw or dripped on works such as George Dyer Riding a Bicycle, 1961, Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1967, and Study for Portrait, 1971, which may have been inspired by the blots of paint on the working material (figure 85). Such white dashes appear as non-representational material elements applied on top of the nearly finished work; a chronology which is supported by a comparison of a transparency of an earlier stage of Studies of the Human Body in

276 Art and Photography, ed. by David Campany (London: Phaidon, 2003), p. 150. 277 Bacon quoted in Neville Wallis, ‘Nightmare’, Observer, 20 November 1949, p. 6. 278 RM98F112:14: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964. 279 Sylvester 2009, p. 58. 280 Ibid. 281 Eddy Batache, ‘Francis Bacon and the Last Convulsions of Humanism’, Art and Australia, 23.2 (1985), 222–225, p. 222.

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85  Francis Bacon, Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1967, oil on canvas, 35.5 × 30.5 cm, private collection, Canada.

Motion, 1970282 without the white dash, and the finished canvas. In line with the capacity of the medium to resemble bodily substances, they have been interpreted as allusions to semen283 and bone,284 and in Studies of the Human Body in Motion their position suggests that they reference saliva or vomit. For Bacon, the splashes were intended to heighten the impact of the painting. ‘I can only hope’, he said, ‘that the throwing of the paint onto the already-made image or half-made image will either re-form the image or that I will be able to manipulate this paint further into – anyway, for me – a greater intensity’.285 They were supposed to ‘break the willed articulation of the image’,286 so that it could grow ‘spontaneously and within its own structure, not my structure’,287 in another attempt to remove himself from authorial agency. The previous chapters established that chance, contrary to the artist’s statements, only played a limited part in the genesis of the iconography. It is, however, a potent agent in the paint application. In general, Bacon conceded a high degree of autonomy to the material. 282 RM98F22:34: colour transparency showing an early stage of Study from the Human Body in Motion, 1970. 283 Cf. Harrison 2009b, p. 162. 284 Cf. Deleuze 2008, p. 17. 285 Sylvester 2009, p. 90. 286 Ibid., p. 160. 287 Ibid.

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He hoped to benefit from the unexpected, non-rational additions to the figure, neither predetermined by the pre-existing image, the artist’s intellect, nor the boundaries of ­ figuration.288 He consciously embraced oil paint’s unpredictability, for ‘when you’re using oil paint, it can result in an effect that you cannot control. You can apply a blob of paint, turn the brush in one way or another, and that will produce a different effect each time which will change the whole meaning of the image. […] One knows, one sees something that one’s going to do, but painting is so fluid that one can’t note anything down.’289 Bacon often does not, or only coarsely, first blend different colours on a palette but loads the brush with several tones. When these are applied in gestural strokes, which colour will appear where is unpredictable. Chance results are facilitated by imprecise tools, such as large oneinch brushes,290 sponges, rags,291 knives, and spoons.292 Scumbling is a chancy technique too: relatively dry, thick paint is applied so that the film rips and tears open during the stroke and previous layers show through but the artist cannot know where and how the oil film will tear. Scumbling was used for the bodies in Study of a Baboon, 1953 and Sleeping ­Figure, 1959 for example, and creates a porous and volatile idea of skin and corporeality. The ­commitment to accidental outcomes is underlined by Bacon’s working on the unprimed canvas from which the brushstroke, once applied, cannot easily be removed. Throwing paint on nearly finished canvases, thus devolving responsibility for the appearance of his iconography to his material and to chance, was a risky decision which jeopardised otherwise satisfying results. The will to take a chance, however, was deeply entrenched in Bacon’s personality. The artist was a passionate gambler, and gambling, especially at the roulette table, was an integral part of his life.293 One of his earliest memories was of being sent to the Post Office to place bets.294 The artist himself related his painting practice to his love for gambling. ‘I feel I want to win,’ he claimed, ‘but then I feel exactly the same thing in painting. I feel I want to win even if I always lose.’295 The same thrill, the intense experience of the moment and the hope to gain something extraordinary – luck permitting – he associated with the ‘Rien ne va plus’ of the croupier, determined his paint application too. And yet, the painting process was not completely haphazard but luck and chance were wilfully employed, provoked, and controlled. While sometimes struggling in earlier years, over time Bacon had learned to master his materials and techniques which he later handled with confidence.296 By his own account, routine, practice, and experience led him to ‘manipulate paint’297 in a way which reduced the chance of failure and his remarks 288 Cf. Archimbaud 2010, pp. 88–89. 289 Ibid., p. 82, see also Sylvester 2009, p. 97. 290 Cf. Melville 1949, pp. 419–423. 291 Cf. Russell Joanna 2009, p. 235. 292 Cf. Cappock 2005, p. 206. 293 See Farson 1993, pp. 40–41; Sinclair 1993, p. 93; Sylvester 2000, p. 257. 294 Cf. Sinclair 1993, p. 41. 295 Sylvester 2009, p. 51. 296 Cf. Durham 1985, pp. 231–232. 297 Sylvester 2009, p. 89–90.

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on throwing paint indicate an amount of thinking and ‘aiming’298 to achieve the best possible result. Accident and deliberation went hand in hand, overlapped, and were mutually dependent so that sometimes a chance result such as the stream of blood red colour gushing out of the creature in Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus was further worked on in a purposeful manner.299 The fact that paint was scraped off and erased suggests that changes of mind were put into effect.300 Durham suspects that, similar to how the artist handled questions concerning the genesis of his iconography, his constant referral to luck and chance was partly a gesture against the dissection of his painting process and a statement against the ‘traditional, academic reverence for the craft of the painter’.301 The ultimate departure from the photograph thus happened within the margins of the outlines of the figure, through the choice and handling of material, oil paint, whose material characteristics are fundamentally different from those of a photograph.302 The following chapter will show how in other areas, namely narrative and identity, Bacon bends to an extreme or entirely breaks the connection to the source image.

3.3.  Narrative, Identity and the Use of Photographs The reinterpretation of a base image is an established method in the history of appropriation in art. For instance, in 12th and 13th century Italian and French art, motifs from Ancient Roman art were borrowed but their pagan stories were changed into Christian ones: ‘the motif of a Hercules [was used] for an image of Christ, or the motif of an Atlas for the images of the Evangelists.’303 Numerous examples can be found in the history of art, ranging from ­Rembrandt van Rijn turning Andrea Mantegna’s Cristo in scurto, c.1480, into the study object in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Joan Deyman, 1656,304 to Édouard Manet using an engraving of The Judgment of Paris, c.1515 by Marcantonio Raimondi after a drawing by Raphael, as a formal reference for the arrangement of the main figures in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1862–1863.305 This did not change when the base image was a photograph. The identity of the model was ignored when it was turned into an Odalisque by Eugène Delacroix in 1857,306 and the ‘Lazarus’ in Lazarus Breaks His Fast by Walter Sickert in 1927.307 298 Ibid., p. 92. 299 Cf. Durham 1985, p. 233; the same applies to white dash in Three Figures in a Room, 1964, see ­Harrison 2009b, p. 160; see Sylvester 2009, p. 160. 300 Cf. Harrison 2009b, p. 160. 301 Durham 1985, p. 231. 302 Cf. Günther 2018, p. 102. 303 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York/ London: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 19–21. 304 Cf. Donat de Chapeaurouge, Wandel und Konstanz in der Bedeutung entlehnter Motive (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1974), p. 21. 305 Cf. Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism (New York: Walker, 2006), p.40. 306 Cf. Scharf 1979, p. 125. 307 Cf. Coke 1981, p. 99, ill. nos. 228–229.

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Bacon reframed and reinterpreted his sources, too, and how this is done in regards to identity and narrative will be investigated in the following two chapters. Several authors have pointed out in the past that Bacon changed the meaning of his pictorial references and, for example, that he ‘sought to bypass the narrative connotations inherent in reportorial photographs. Indeed his recontextualizations completely altered their original meaning.’308 Just like many other aspects of Bacon’s appropriation practice which were known and addressed in the past, this one, too, did not gain a foothold in Bacon studies. The genesis of Portrait of George Dyer Staring into a Mirror, 1967 gives an impression of the process of reinterpretation (plate XXVIII). The piece draws on the subject’s relationship to a mirror in a black and white photograph from My System, 15 Minutes’ Work A Day For Health’s Sake309 and both the narrative of the source picture and the identity of the source figure are reinterpreted (plate XXIX). In the picture, the author demonstrates a sidebend seated on a stool, in which he turns so far to the left that he can see himself in the mirror behind him. Bacon neglected both the identity of Müller and the action of the exercise. Instead he replaced the semi-nude athlete with a suited Dyer, an identity mostly manifested in the title and in a fleeting resemblance in the figure’s facial features. The side-bend is reduced to a moderate twist, an ultimately elusive gesture which allows the sitter to gaze into the mirror, and his mirror image to stare back at him. Considering that Bacon placed Dyer on what could be interpreted as a bar stool in front of the counter in a pub, the mirror may be an allegory for the abyss of Dyer’s alcoholism which increasingly viciously started to stare back at him. This disregard for defining elements of a source during the appropriation process prevents any narrow interpretations on their basis. As discussed in chapter 3.2.1., not only was Nazi-related imagery not the only source of inspiration for Figure Getting out of a Car, c.1944, in the light of Bacon’s highly transformative appropriation practice it is unlikely that Nazi Propaganda is indeed the ‘real subject’310 of the painting. The previous chapter pointed out how the indexicality of a photograph makes it a seemingly irrefutable record of reality. In 1840, Edgar Allan Poe had already enthused about the ‘absolute truth’311 of the daguerreotype in contrast to ‘ordinary art’312 and by the middle of the 20th century photography had cemented its authority in terms of veracity, and was accepted as ultimate proof in science, law, the news and in daily life.313 Due to this characteristic, in painting it was sometimes used to add authenticity, a prime example being Édouard 308 Harrison 2005a, p. 76; see also Coke 1981, p. 168, Anon., ‘Francis Bacon: “Photography has ­Completely Altered Figurative Painting”’, Creative Camera, 54 (December 1968), 442–443, p. 442. 309 J. P. Müller, My System: 15 Minutes’ Work A Day For Health’s Sake (London: Link House/­Athletic Publications, 1939), Exercise 13, ill. no.82. Bacon owned an undated edition of this book: see ­ RM98F108:69. 310 Martin Hammer, ‘Residues and Fragments: The Dublin Archive as a Research Resource’, keynote ­address presented at symposium ‘Bacon’s Books: Francis Bacon’s Library and its Role in his Art’ (Dublin: Trinity College Dublin, 20 October 2012). 311 Poe quoted in Coke 1981, p. 7. 312 Ibid. 313 Cf. Campany 2003a, p. 17.

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Manet’s paintings of the execution of archduke Maximilian I between 1867 and 1869, which draws on photographs of the event that the painter did not witness.314 Aaron Scharf remarked that ‘in accordance with the tradition of reportage in modern painting […] literal accuracy, exacerbated by the camera, had become imperative’.315 Bacon did exactly the opposite and often reduced the photograph to a donor of shapes and forms. Bacon’s practice thus fundamentally undermined key characteristics of photography, leading his painting not only formally but also conceptually ‘very much further away from the photograph.’316 3.3.1.  ‘I don’t want to tell a story, I have no story to tell’ ‘David Sylvester: I think that really what it’s about is that people want to find a story in art. They’re rather starved of stories in the art of our own time, and that when they find an art like yours it’s really a marvelous temptation to weave stories. Francis Bacon: Ah yes, I’m sure it is. David Sylvester: I think that that’s what really goes on.’317

In a post-war era deprived of narrative by abstract art, it was tempting to interpret Bacon’s figures as protagonists of some enigmatic story. Today, knowing so many photographic references of his paintings, connecting their story with his imagery is equally hard to resist. For a better understanding of Bacon’s art, however, both approaches are fruitful only to a very limited degree. In the following, some of the mechanisms that Bacon employed to shed the narrative of the source image will be traced, to then explain that the emptied image was left void because telling a story was not on Bacon’s agenda. In essence, the term narrative describes an ‘account of connected events’318 and is synonymous with the word ‘story’.319 Narrative art is, broadly speaking, the visual representation of such a story. Narrative painting traditionally acts within boundaries determined by the nature of the medium. A painting is innately unsuitable to convey narrative because it usually only shows a single scene, thus lacking an identifiable beginning, middle, and end, which are essential for storytelling.320 It therefore needs to somehow reach beyond that 314 Édouard Manet, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 1868–1869, The Execution of Emperor ­Maximilian, 1867–1868, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 1867, The Execution of Emperor ­Maximilian, 1867, see Scharf 1979, pp. 67–75. 315 Scharf 1979, pp. 66–68. 316 Sylvester 2000, p. 235. 317 HKA: TGA 2008/16/16/4/2/9 ‘Bacon Interviews IIIa’, Interview III, December 1971: 70 pages, FB 69 and FB 70. 318 Oxford Dictionary of English, ed. by Angus Stevenson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 1179. 319 Ibid. 320 Cf. Stephen Sartin, ‘Preface’, in A Dictionary of British Narrative Painters (Leigh-on-Sea: F. Lewis, 1978), p. 5; Norbert Lynton, ‘Introduction’, in Narrative Painting: Looking Into Paintings: A Series of Three Arts Council Exhibitions Looking Into Landscape, Portrait and Narrative Painting, exh. cat. (London: Arts Council, 1987), pp. 3–22, p. 3; Anabel Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Anabel Thomas, An Illustrated Dictionary of Narrative Painting (London: John Murray in association with National Gallery Publications, 1994), pp. ix–xvi, p. x.

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­ epicted scene, for which it depends heavily on the participation of the spectator. It ‘has d to be composed in such a way that the viewer constructs the story, ranging from before to after the “moment” of the painting, from details before him.’321 The details can consist of a pictorial element emblematic for the whole,322 but the work may also render a signature scene from323 or a trigger image324 of the story. Facial expressions and bodily gestures convey emotions and relationships between figures, while their movement supports narrative too.325 In the arrangement and combination of stylistic means, narrative painting requires ‘wholeness, clarity and directness’,326 telling a pre-existing, defined, and finite story.327 Critics agree that the audience has to be familiar with the story, in the past often derived from mythology, the bible, history, and literature, to be able to make sense of the painting.328 While narrative painting boomed in the Victorian era, from the late 19th century329 the emphasis shifted from documenting a story towards expressing the artist’s feelings towards an event.330 Terry Atkinson argued that this shift ‘gave way to the representation of an alleged inner life, and to an emergent genre which finds a kind of final settling place in abstraction.’331 Narrative painting fell out of fashion and experienced a renaissance only in the 1960s.332 It was now much more associative and left plenty of room for the viewer’s imagination. A story line was no longer a must, and several events in time could be represented on one canvas.333 Definitions became looser, and at times somewhat difficult to grasp. For Timothy Hyman narrative painting had to have something ‘naive’334 about it, ‘present an imaginative vision of life, rather than taking up a strategic position about art’335 and ‘bear more subject-matter, might accommodate more of human life’.336 The term was even applied to abstract art, as long as it conveyed ‘successive transformations’.337 321 Sartin 1978, p. 5. 322 Cf. The Dictionary of Art, ed. by Jane Turner (New York: Grove, 1996), p. 523. 323 Cf. Lynton 1987, p. 5. 324 Cf. Thomas 1994, p. xi. 325 Cf. ibid., p. xi–xii. 326 Glenn Sujo Volsky, ‘Narrative Painting 2: At Arnolfini, Review of “Narrative Painting”’, Art Monthly, 30 (October 1979), 19–21, p. 20. 327 Cf. Rees-Roberts 1980, p. 33; and see also van Alphen 1998, p. 28. 328 Cf. e.g. Thomas 1994, pp. ix–x; Lynton 1987, p. 3 and p. 5. 329 Cf. The Tate Guide to Modern Art Terms, ed. by Simon Wilson and Jessica Lack (London: Tate, 2008), p. 139. 330 Cf. Turner 1996, p. 523. 331 Terry Atkinson, ‘History Painting: Painting and Recapitulation’, in History Painting Reassessed: The ­Representation of History in Contemporary Art, ed. by David Green and Peter Seddon (Manchester/ New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 149–162, p. 157. 332 Cf. Wilson and Lack 2008, p. 139; Glossary of Art, Architecture and Design since 1945, ed. by John A. Walker, 3rd edn (London: Library Association Publishing, 1992), entry 434, no page numbers. 333 Cf. Walker 1992, entry 434. 334 Timothy Hyman, ‘Introduction’, in Narrative Paintings: Figurative Art of Two Generations, exh. cat. Bristol: Arnolfini Gallery, 1979, and travelling until 29 Mar. 1980 (Bristol: Arnolfini Gallery, 1979), no page numbers. 335 Ibid. 336 Ibid. 337 Walker 1992, entry 434.

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By 1980, Marcus Rees-Roberts criticised the fact that in contemporary art the term was used in an inflationary and unreflected manner, and often unjustifiably so, and argued for a more precise understanding.338 For him, the story did not ‘exist in the air, simply waiting to be captured with a single swipe’339 and was not ‘the mere possibility of fictional speculation, dependent on the whim or mood of the spectator’340 but had to be inherent in the painting in question.341 The narrative ingrained in a painting was not to be confused with one it merely told ‘by implication’.342 He pointed out that if the emergence of such stories was to prove that there is narrative in a work, anything could be described as narrative art, which reduced the piece to a ‘catalyst’343 for the viewer’s ‘daydream’.344 Moreover, he warned that speculation on possible narratives also took away from our perception of the work as a painting, thus ignoring its ‘physical, material specificity [and] relegate its importance’,345 a thought which, as we will see, closely approximated Bacon’s opinion. The medium of photography, by contrast, is thought to maintain a close bond to narrative because, ‘index first, and an icon second’,346 a photograph captures a specific moment from real life. This means that it is inevitable that something happened before and after the scene. Although the story is not conveyed in full, ‘because it is a record of an actual moment, we can justifiably speculate about those moments which necessarily precede and succeeded it, but which aren’t shown’.347 Bacon ascribed a ‘smell of death’348 to pictures of animals taken before they entered the slaughterhouse, which demonstrates his acute awareness of this trait of photography. He may have made these comments in 1962 in relation to a Paris Match magazine with a report on the abattoirs in La Villette, Paris, from November 1961,349 which was found in his studio. The Key Turning in the Door Bacon’s image bank included many photojournalistic, news, and documentary sources, paradigms of how the photograph’s indexical relationship to narrative was taken advantage of. Photographic images are used here to illustrate and support a certain story, with which they are inextricably linked. A poignant example is the black and white photograph of a rhinoceros collapsing after being hit by a hunter’s second bullet published in Stalking Big Game

338 Cf. Marcus Rees-Roberts, ‘A Note on Narrative Painting’, Art Monthly, 38 (July/August 1980), 33–34, pp. 33–34. 339 Ibid., p. 33. 340 Ibid. 341 Cf. ibid. 342 Ibid. 343 Ibid., p. 34. 344 Ibid. 345 Ibid. 346 Rees-Roberts quotes Charles Sanders Peirce, Rees-Roberts 1980, p. 33. 347 Rees-Roberts 1980, p. 33; cf. also Barthes 1982, p. 96. 348 Sylvester 2009, p. 23, cf. also Beard 1975, p. 15. 349 RM98F22:27: Paris Match, 25 November 1961, p. 43.

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86  Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a ­ amera in Equatorial Africa (London: Heinemann, C 1925), Chapter VIII, plate 6: ‘The second ball made it spin around and collapse on its forelegs’.

87  Francis Bacon, Rhinoceros, 1952, oil on canvas, 198 × 137 cm (destroyed by the artist).

with a Camera, which Bacon used as base image for Rhinoceros, 1952 (figure 86 and 87). We can imagine the story of the picture well – the hunt, the shots and, as a consequence, the death of the animal. Photojournalistic and documentary photographs are usually accompanied by captions and articles, which provide more detailed information on the wider narrative context.

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­ ccording to David Campany, a photograph ‘actually means little on its own and relies A on a broader textual and discursive apparatus to bring out its latent possibilities.’350 A photographic reproduction, which must have caught Bacon’s attention because he cut it out and mounted it on cardboard, shows a young soldier who, bizarrely, is sitting outdoors on a dentist’s chair on a deserted and litter-strewn street (figure 88).351 From the caption we learn that he is on guard in a ‘phantom town’ (‘la ville fantôme’),352 which had been forsaken by its inhabitants, where he is supposed to prevent looting. The article in Paris Match informs us of the location and date of the picture. The photo reportage entitled ‘Israel 1967’ aimed to give an impression of Israel in the aftermath of winning the Six-Day War, and the picture was taken in the former Syrian, then Israeli town of Quneitra. Without identifying the source of the page and the accompanying caption and article, it was not possible to make sense of the scene. Other photographs and photographic reproductions in the studio did not come with a refined narrative per se. Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies, for example, despite the fact that they form series, convey no story in the sense of a succession of events but break up and dissect a single action into separate sequences.353 Deakin’s portrait photographs, too, were not shot with an elaborate narrative in mind but were meant to record features, postures and gestures. And yet, due to their indexicality, the wider narrative of the sitters’ lives and their relationships to Bacon reverberates in them. Reminiscent of Barthes’ noeme, it is impossible to view photographs of George Dyer, for example, without the well-known ‘story’ of his tragic death coming to mind. At the beginning of the working process, Bacon was thus facing not only a myriad of images but countless stories too. But how were those narratives treated during the appropriation process? Were they transformed into oil paint together with the formal elements they were connected to? Some such relationships were indeed left intact. A photograph of the close encounter between a matador and a bull in the arena by José Suárez was published in John Marks’ The Life and Death of the Fighting Bull in 1967354 (plate XXXI). Bacon remained relatively faithful to the figure constellation in a formal sense in Study for Bullfight No. 1, 1969 (and later in Second Version of Study for Bullfight No. 1, 1969). A male figure and a bull in close interaction, the rag of the matador, and the setting in an arena, make the event in the painting identifiable as a bullfight (plate XXX). And yet, in many other cases the story of the base image was decidedly undermined and suppressed. As pointed out in chapter 2, the first step away from the narrative of a pictorial starting point was made during the pre-stages of a painting. The process started with the choice of 350 Campany 2003a, p. 20. 351 RM98F1A:204: fragment of leaf, mounted on support, Paris Match, 12 August 1967, p. 49. 352 Full caption to the photograph is ‘Dans la ville fantôme, le soldat installé dans un fauteuil de dentiste monte la garde pour prévenir le pillage.’ 353 Cf. Davies H. M. 1978, p. 151. 354 John Marks, The Life and Death of the Fighting Bull, photographs by José Suárez (London: Cassell, 1967), p. 92, fig. 45, page is missing in studio copy of book [RM98F136:4].

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88  RM98F1A:204: fragment of leaf, mounted on support, Paris Match, 12 August 1967, p. 49, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

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material. As Susan Sontag pointed out, ‘taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events’355 – a claim which becomes especially tangible when seeing the studio floor with its myriad photographic images of all sorts, which turn into a large multi-coloured carpet of pictures when viewed from a distance. Often images were detached from their written, but also from their visual context in a book or magazine by ripping or cutting them out. The numerous loose leaves on the studio floor bear testimony to the great extent in which this method was applied. The effect of simply tearing out a leaf from a book must not be underestimated and is indicative of photography often depending on further commentary for the full understanding of its story. Before its source was identified as the publication Peoples of All Nations, described in the subtitle as an effort to record Their Lives and Stories of their Past, the image of two young children, one of them carrying a large umbrella,356 discussed earlier in relation to Painting 1946, 1946, was elusive (plate II). It was not entirely clear of what gender the children were, or where and when the picture was taken, and what the scene was supposed to illustrate. The fact that we now know the origin of the page allows us to appreciate its background. The two children in the picture are members of the Cham-people who lived in Annam, a country east of Cambodia and Siam in present day Vietnam. The image was published in relation to the article ‘Annam I. Its Quaint Folk, Civilized and Savage’,357 written from a distinctly colonial Western perspective. The original caption ‘Young Cham dandies wear almost the same clothes as their sisters, with armlets and necklets for decoration. The umbrella is sheer vanity’358 indicates the significance of the boys’ accessory. Neither their background as living in South East Asia, the issue of gender-related clothing raised by the caption, nor indeed the more abstract connotation, the effort to document ‘peoples of all nations’, reverberate in Painting 1946. The image provided a pictorial springboard for the depiction of the spatial setting and the motif of the umbrella, everything else was left out. It can therefore not have been important for Bacon to convey this narrative context. The same applies to the right panel of Triptych 1974–1977, 1974–1977, for which the photograph supplied the shape of the umbrella shielding a figure representing George Dyer. The technique of removing context to strip an image of narrative proves effective even today when viewing the studio material. The black and white photographic reproduction from a torn magazine page with a man resting his chin on his hand,359 a gesture repeated in an image hanging on the wall behind him, remains inexplicable. Is the man a movie star? Are we dealing with an 355 Sontag 1978a, p. 11. 356 RM98F1:23: torn leaf, over-drawn and mounted on support, Peoples of all Nations: Their Life Today and Story of their Past, ed. by J.A. Hammerton, 7 vols (London: The Fleetway House, 1922–1924), I, p. 147. 357 Gabrielle Vassal, ‘Annam I: Its Quaint Folk, Civilized and Savage’, in Peoples of all Nations: Their Life ­Today and Story of their Past, ed. by J.A. Hammerton, 7 vols (London: The Fleetway House, 1922– 1924), I, pp. 121–170. 358 Vassal 1922–1924, p. 147. 359 RM98F17:22: unidentified torn leaf from magazine, recto: photographic portrait of man, verso excerpt from Elizabeth Taylor, Nibbles and Me (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946).

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advertisement? The effect is amplified when an image is reduced to a fragment only. What story could we possibly ascribe to a set of tiles or the upper part of a man’s profile on their own?360 In addition, the dynamics in the studio then further sabotage the narrative of a torn leaf. Pages from a Paris Match magazine361 and a Picture Post album362 underwent the same treatment: both show numerous marks of accidental folding and blots of the same red and pink paint which visually equalise the leaves. However, one features pictures from a public execution in Pakistan in 1978 and the other pre-war elections in Great Britain. This process of detaching the figure from its original story continued on the canvas by reinterpreting its actions. Actions are here defined as happening on a more granular level than narrative, as ‘the fact or process of doing something […] [and] a gesture or movement’,363 and are at most the building blocks of a potential story. On the one hand, important signifiers are not adopted. Muybridge’s ‘Athlete Heaving a 75-pound Rock’364 is bereft of his boulder when he reappears in Study for Nude in 1951. As a consequence, the original action is unrecognisable in the painting. On the other hand, some of the actions were given a different meaning by equipping the figure with new accessories. The arm from an image in Phenomena of Materialisation,365 which was there pointing at an emanation on the medium’s head, was adopted in Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne without the medium or the spectre, but Bacon added a key to the hand, which is inserted in the keyhole of the door in the background. The action is thus changed from pointing to locking or unlocking. Bacon did the same with a reproduction of an Ignudo from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling366 who in the fresco is sitting on a pedestal, but is removed from this context and placed in Painting, 1978 where he is holding a key with his toes – the leg and foot were added by Bacon. Sometimes, the action is given a new meaning. Bacon lifted two stooping figures from Raphael’s The Miraculous Draught of Fishes,367 which, minus their boat and the fish, are turned into Two Men Working in a Field and a photograph of John Edwards,368 in

360 RM98F105:139J: fragment of photograph, John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964, RM98F234:4: fragment of page, John Richard, Paul Elby and Roland Liot, Close-Ups from the Golden Age of the Silent Cinema from the fabulous Jorifin Collection (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1978), p. 315. 361 RM98F130:151: Paris Match, 30 June 1978, title of article is ‘Puni Selon le Coran’. 362 RM98F130:68: Picture Post 1938–50, ed. by Tom Hopkinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 29. 363 Stevenson 2010, p. 16. 364 Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive ­phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 317, ‘Athlete Heaving a 75-pound Rock’, row two, frame two. 365 RM98F138:1: Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920), fig. 38: ‘Second Flashlight Photograph by the Author, 11 August, 1911’, see Günther 2011, pp. 14–15. 366 RM98F108:42: torn leaf, Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of Michelangelo (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), p. 107, Study for the Nude at the Right above the Persian Sibyl, 1511. 367 The Victoria and Albert Museum in London owns a cartoon for a tapestry, Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, 1515–1516. 368 RM98F125:12: Edward Quinn, Francis Bacon and John Edwards, standing in front of Carcass of Meat and Bird of Prey, 1980, in the Reece Mews studio, 1979.

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which he is smiling with his mouth closed, was turned into a Study of a Man Talking, with an opened mouth. In other instances, the action is kept but the – admittedly fleeting – narrative is changed. For instance, the two figures in the right panel of Crucifixion, 1965 taken from Jacques-­ Henri Lartigue’s Le Grand Prix A.C.F. published in 1913,369 are still watching and looking on, but they are no longer observing a car race but the strange, possibly violent scenery in the centre panel of the triptych. The removal of accessories and other elements contributing to the story of the source figure goes as far as completely isolating it during the appropriation process. The figure was often entirely removed from its original background. In some cases, this alone suffices to eliminate all narrative. Two Seated Figures, 1979 shows two suited men sitting on chairs with their faces half concealed by their hats, half deliberately left undefined (figure 1). Both the ground and walls in the background are nondescript, apart from the familiar light bulb and tassels. Both men seem to look at the prominent wrist watch of the figure on the left. Valerie Beston connected the imagery with the theme of ‘mafia’370 in her diary, but no further clues to its content exist. As explained in chapter 1, the figures were lifted from a double-spread featuring the director Allan Dwan on a movie set (figure 3 and 4).371 In the original photograph, the tripod and lower parts of a movie camera, some props in the background and not least the presence of a well-known Hollywood director, convey the narrative of movie making. None of this was adopted by Bacon who detached the figures from their original story. Without the discovery of this image in one of the studio books, the background of the base image in film-making could not have been guessed. Bacon subjected the photograph of a young boy, Germinal Matta, to the same treatment. It was taken from a Paris Match magazine article on the murder of his father, Raphaël Matta, known for his attempts to protect elephants in the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire. The picture informed the top figure in Three Studies from the Human Body, 1967,372 but in the painting Bacon omitted all visual context and gave no hints as to its origin (figure 89 and 90). He adopted only the curious posture of the nude boy dangling from a branch – which the artist replaced by a straight pole – but apparently mounted another face on the torso, equipped him with a more muscular body and aged him. The narrative of the boy’s father being killed by poachers in Africa is ignored. Again, the effect is amplified when only fragments are borrowed, such as the outstretched arms and claw-like hands of the dancer Marcia Haydée performing the Tatiana role in the ballet Onegin by John Cranko,373 which Bacon used for his Sphinx – Portrait of Muriel Belcher, 1979. 369 Cf. Boxer 1975, pp. 180–181. 370 Valerie Beston’s diary quoted in Harrison 2016a, p. 1182. 371 Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), p. 94, the copy which was found in Bacon’s studio [RM98F110:67]. 372 Jacques Guillaume, photograph of French boy in the Ivory Coast ‘joue au singe’, Paris Match, 28 March, 1959, p. 27, see Harrison 2013b, p. 36. 373 RM98F15:12: Marcia Haydée, fragment from the Observer, 4 June 1978.

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89  Jacques Guillaume, photograph of French boy in the Ivory Coast ‘joue au singe’, Paris Match, 28 March, 1959, p. 27.

90  Three Studies from the Human Body, 1967, oil on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm), private collection, London.

Figures from one background were planted into a new setting which may itself have been taken from pre-existing material. The figure, however, did not assimilate the narrative of the new setting either because this, too, was effectively stripped of its story. Bacon’s weapons of choice here were abstraction and reduction, as explained earlier in relation to Turning Figure, 1963 the spatial setting originated from a photograph published in Picture Post374 which shows the aftermath of a German bomb attack on Rotterdam (figures 52 and 53). We have this information from the caption of the picture and from the article in which it featured, but it is also told by pictorial elements such as the rubble on the ground, the dead body of the girl, and the grief-stricken man gazing at it. The image was reduced to its bare essentials and abstracted to a set of lines and colour planes. Both the father and his daughter are gone, so is the debris on the street. Nothing reminds us of the traumatic story and as a consequence the setting has lost its power to endow the new figure, possibly a derivation of a Michelangelo sketch, with its story. A similar, albeit more radical technique is applied in ‘Street Scene (with Car in Distance)’, 1984 (plate XX). The fragment of a photographic reproduction, which had served as the base for the painting, was once embedded

374 Picture Post, 8 June 1940, p. 25.

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in an article in The Illustrated London News375 on the shortage of affordable housing in London (plate XXI). The article, just like the magazine from 1980, was entitled ‘London in Crisis’. The subsection in which the photograph featured was called ‘The Housing Need’, and discussed homelessness, the lack of affordable housing and council housing, and the poor standard and condition of available accommodation. In the context of the article the purpose of the picture was to illustrate the dire living conditions due to the poor state of many houses in the city. Not only was the page with the image ripped out of the magazine and thus removed from the article, crucially, Bacon removed from the working document all houses shown in the photograph, and adopted this omission for his painting. The houses, however, were the main point of interest in the photograph in the context of the article. Neither the action in a photographic source of inspiration, nor the wider narratives associated with them were necessarily transposed onto the canvas, which can only mean that Bacon was not interested in doing so. As a consequence, a base image is highly unreliable in providing any further information on the story of the painting and is therefore useless as a manual for its interpretation. This does not mean, however, that Bacon was indifferent to their narratives. ‘Photography has covered so much: in a painting that’s even worth looking at, the image must be twisted if it is to make a renewed assault upon the nervous system. And that is the peculiar difficulty of figurative painting now. I attempt to recreate a particular experience with a greater poignancy in the desire to live through it again with a different kind of intensity’,376 Bacon explained. The photograph may thus have formed a proxy which helped him achieve this goal and ‘twist’ the image as in referring to, maybe perverting and elevating what the artist may have seen in the flesh, but not depicting his memory and experience of the event. As pointed out before, much of the material in the studio appears to have held biographical significance. And yet, considering Bacon’s aversion for anything plain and literal, the surrogate image may not always have been chosen on a par for par basis. It is possible that the source narrative was very different from the experience Bacon sought to express, but nevertheless helped him to grasp it in his painting. Shock What happened with the emptied figures on the canvas? Did Bacon free them up to fill them with his own narrative? Such examples are rare. Muybridge captured the motions of two wrestlers in his typical scientific setting (figure 92).377 Bacon, however, in Two Figures, 1953 placed the athletes on a bed (figure 91). Two nude males in a tight embrace on a bed trigger associations of sexual, rather than athletic interaction. But Bacon did not limit the changes he made to the figures’ acts: by mounting his face and that of his lover Peter Lacy on the Muybridge bodies, he created a link to their love relationship – a remarkably literal bi375 RM98F130:166: fragment of leaf, mounted on cardboard, The Illustrated London News, 268.6986.2 (September 1980), p. 37. 376 Bacon to Peppiatt in Peppiatt 2008b, p. 16. 377 Cf. e.g. RM98F1A:80: torn leaf, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901), ‘Some Phases of a Wrestling Match See Series 20’.

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91  Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1953, oil on ­canvas, 152.5 × 116.5 cm, private collection.

92  RM98F1A:27: torn leaf, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 69: ‘Men Wrestling’, top left (not the direct source).

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ographical link beyond the scene shown on the canvas. Usually, however, the narrative-less figure was left as empty as it was. The artist himself leaves no doubt about his distaste for narrative, explaining that ‘I don’t want to tell a story, I have no story to tell.’378 He did not see ‘any value at all in history paintings’,379 literature was a stimulation only and not an influence,380 and by no means did he want to illustrate texts.381 Bacon also expressed no desire to comment on the biggest narrative of all either. ‘I’m not a preacher. I’ve nothing to say about the “human condition”’,382 he declared. Instead, much like Rees-Roberts, Bacon warned that too strong a focus on a potential narrative may overshadow or cause one to miss other essential aspects of a painting as a painting, or put one in danger of misunderstanding the work.383 For him, the possibilities inherent in its materiality and the feelings and sensations it could evoke were of much greater importance.384 On several occasions he deplored the lack of emotion in favour of an emphasis on narrative, for ‘… hardly anyone really feels about painting: they read things into it – even the most intelligent people – they think they understand it, but very, very few people are aesthetically touched by painting’.385 Bacon strongly associated storytelling with boredom386 and for his own art he had very different goals. In relation to the choice and handling of material, Bacon aimed to convey an intense, extreme and visceral experience of life. ‘I’ll tell you how I think of my own work: It unlocks the valves of sensation at different levels’,387 he said. In relation to Triptych – Studies from the Human Body, 1970 he explained that he wanted to express the ‘strength of the sensation’,388 in an image which ‘coagulated the sensation of two people in some form of sexual act’.389 He explained that he tried to achieve this by creating an equally intense, ‘stark’390 image, which was to give him a ‘shock’.391 By his own account, narrative had no room in this concept: ‘It’s not […] a shock you could get from a story, it’s just a visual shock.’392 A shock is sudden and unexpected but a story needs to be grasped and processed. Both telling and understanding a narrative requires a certain amount of time and would 378 Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985. 379 Archimbaud 2010, p. 40. 380 Cf. ibid., p. 102–103. 381 Cf. ibid., p. 104. 382 Francis Bacon cited from Andrea Rose, ‘Introduction’, in Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, exh. cat. Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2005; Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2005/2006 (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland in association with the British Council, 2005), pp. 7–8, p. 8. 383 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 22, and p. 65. 384 Cf. ibid., p. 23. 385 ‘I’ll go on until I drop’ 1991; see also Sylvester 2000, p. 249. 386 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 22 and p. 65. 387 Beard 1975, p. 18. 388 Sylvester 2009, p. 102. 389 Ibid, p.106. 390 Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon, 1985. 391 Ibid. 392 Ibid.

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therefore diminish the momentum and impact of the desired sensation. Bacon explained how a certain speed and directness are of the essence. Quoting Paul Valéry, he explained that he wanted to ‘give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance’,393 but also that he wished to bypass the intellect and for his paintings not to be perceived via a ‘long diatribe through the brain’394 but to come across ‘directly onto the nervous system‘.395 He fervently promoted the emotional perception of a painting over its conscious decoding, for ‘the most important thing is to look at the painting, to read the poetry or listen to the music. Not in order to understand or to know it, but to feel something.’396 Perhaps similar to how Bacon thought photography had liberated painting from representation, he also concurred with a sentiment expressed by Norbert Lynton that ‘today we have films (moving pictures) for that [storytelling], and of course TV, newspapers, magazines, books galore …’,397 and so saw no need to construct a story. Fool’s Gold Despite Bacon’s vehement dismissal of narrative, his paintings do incorporate subtle hints and faint leads towards a story, so that his position needs to be further qualified. In scholarship, opinion on whether narrative is present in his paintings is divided. Timothy Hyman labelled Bacon’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962 and Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, 1967 as being ‘amongst the most convincing narrative paintings of our time.’398 For Wieland Schmied, Bacon is ‘not a story-teller but a destroyer of stories’.399 With him, Gilles Deleuze, who saw Bacon’s figures as pure flesh,400 found that two figures on one canvas were shown ‘without the slightest story being narrated’401 and a triptych, too, ‘does not imply a progression, and it does not tell a story’,402 is positioned on the one end of the spectrum while Hyman, and Martin Hammer, who claimed that Bacon’s paintings were ‘a latter-day version of what is commonly termed “history painting”’,403 are at the other. There is some truth in both extremes because in Bacon’s works there is a certain ambivalence towards storytelling, albeit with a pronounced emphasis on its subversion. Bacon builds up a complex and impactful situation, in which storytelling is provoked and undermined, offered and withdrawn, and a reading is teased and rejected at the same time, without, however, ever forming a comprehensive story.

393 Sylvester 2009, p. 65; see also Bacon to Peppiatt in: Peppiatt 2008, p. 16. 394 Sylvester 2009, p. 18. 395 Ibid. 396 Archimbaud 2010, p. 77, cf. p. 75. 397 Lynton 1987, p. 3. 398 Hyman 1979, no page numbers. 399 Schmied 2006, p. 61. 400 Cf. Deleuze 2008, p. xii. 401 Deleuze 2008, pp. 46–47. 402 Ibid., p. 49. 403 Hammer 2012b, p. 9.

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A reason to not forgo narrative as radically as Bacon claimed, may have been his desire to keep a certain amount of control over the viewers’s perceptions and to guide their experience of the painting, so that they did not succumb to what he called ‘undisciplined emotion’404 in a comment on abstract art. ‘That’s why abstract painting is so popular, also, because they don’t feel they have to have any story and therefore they can just give themselves up to what they think [...] there’s nothing too complicated, it’s just so simple, abstract art. Anyone can feel or not feel about it. It’s so simple that you can’t look at it. It just makes you yawn for two minutes’,405 he said on another occasion. Bacon resolved the conflict inherent in his simultaneous rejection and incorporation of narrative, by going on another tightrope walk, in which, similar to the one between figuration and abstraction, hints in both directions create an intricate balancing act. Despite the denial of narrative, there is a substantial amount of bait on the canvases which lures the viewer into looking for one; enough to create an expectation, ‘a sense of narrative [which] explains the critical impulse to ‘narrativize’ them; [...].’406 Canvases with two or more figures which suggest a narrative relationship between them are not as rare as one might think. Two Figures in a Room, 1959, Three Studies from the Human Body, 1967, and Painting, 1980 are just some of many examples.407 The succession of three images in a triptych may indicate a sequence of events and groups of several works with the same subject, such as Study for Portrait I-VIII, 1953, do the same.408 According to Ernst van Alphen, the paint application itself supports a narrative reading by evoking or implying movement, which is critical for storytelling.409 The postures of the figures suggest movement, as in A Performing Dog, 1954, Figure Turning, 1962, and Portrait of Man Walking Down Steps, 1972. Figures perform actions, they are talking, writing, screaming, working in a field and turning on the light. Some of the actions come with an implied start and end, and a before and after, for instance in Study from the Human Body (Man Turning on Light). Others come with a moment of suspense, for example Walking Figure, 1960, which plays with an element of hiding and revealing. In some paintings we can identify gestures, as is the case in Study for Portrait VIII, 1953, The End of the Line from the same year, and Study for Self-Portrait, 1981 (81-06). The subject is looking at us directly in Study for Portrait I, 1953, averting the gaze in Self-Portrait, 1972, it closes its eyes in Three Studies for a Portrait, 1976. The figure in Study for Portrait V, 1953 is grinning at us. Furthermore, Bacon’s canvases contain ostensible ciphers, which appear to stand in a relationship to the figure and promise to imbue it with a meaning that transcends the depicted scene. They range from carcasses, animals including birds, cats 404 Sylvester 2009, p. 60. 405 HKA: TGA 2008/16/16/4/2/9 ‘Bacon Interviews IIIa’, Interview III, December 1971: 70 pages FB69 and FB70; cf. also Peppiatt 2008b, p. 17. 406 Van Alphen 1998, p. 12. 407 Cf. van Alphen 1998, p. 23. 408 Cf. ibid., pp. 23–24. 409 Cf. ibid., p. 24.

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and dogs, to cameras, mirrors, pieces of newspaper, and arrows, to doors, behind which something might have happened or will happen. Although Bacon himself contended to have been entirely unconcerned with the political connotations of the swastika in the right panel of Crucifixion, 1965 and only to have integrated it to ‘break the continuity of the arm’410 and make it work formally, it must inevitably evoke WWII and the Nazi regime. As a symbol it is too strong for its meaning to be easily altered or omitted.411 Some expressive titles, including The Crucifixion, Study for the Nurse in the Film Battleship Potemkin, A Piece of Waste Land, Oedipus, and Study for the Eumenides establish a connection with well-known narratives beyond what is shown on the canvas. The Black Triptychs reference the story of Dyer’s death and the artist admitted that ­Triptych May–June, 1973 was ‘the nearest he had ever done to something which had a story’.412 Well-acquainted with the tragic event, we immediately interpret a male nude vomiting into a washbasin and sitting slumped on a toilet as George Dyer in the final night of his life. At times, other narrative references transpired, such as Bacon in hindsight identifying the creatures in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion as Eumenides.413 That on some rare occasions such stories, or hints towards them, entered the public realm, nevertheless does not mean that more are lurking in the dark for other paintings, waiting to be discovered so we can eventually explain a work. Bacon’s canvases are not riddles set by the artist, which can be decoded if only all clues are put together in the right order or if only enough background information is gathered. On the contrary, many hints explicitly and deliberately lead nowhere and foil the sense of expectation they originally created. On closer inspection, the elements which suggest a narrative hold little authority and ultimately build up to nothing more than a chimera. By his own account, Bacon put several measures in place which helped him to avoid storytelling. He would show no more than one figure per canvas414 – a rule he often broke, but the majority of his works do feature one figure only. The participation of the figures in an ongoing sequence of events Bacon often undermined by isolating figures spatially: in a rectangular structure, a circular element, or on a pedestal.415 The effect is particularly strong when it concerns several figures on one canvas. In Painting, 1980 for example, space is delineated by several rectangular and circular structures; neither of the three, or perhaps

410 Sylvester 2009, p. 65. 411 Cf. Roland Barthes comments on the appropriation of the American flag ‘complete or fully charged, the sign cannot be shifted’, Barthes paraphrased in: Nelson 2003, p. 164. 412 Bacon paraphrased in Sinclair 1993, p. 221. 413 Cf. Francis Bacon, letter to Tate Gallery, 9 January 1959, Tate Gallery cataloguing files, cited from Matthew Gale, ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944’, Tate, catalogue entry, November 1998 [accessed 31 July 2021]. In Greek mythology, the Eumenides, or Erinyes and Furies, are goddesses of vengeance. In Aeschylus’ Oresteia, they haunt Orestes for killing his mother Clytemnestra. 414 Cf. Sylvester 2009, pp. 22–23, p. 63. 415 Cf. van Alphen 1998, p. 29.

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four, different entities seem to exist in the same space, however. Their separation from the background by material means and through brushwork has been mentioned in the above, and was discussed in more detail in chapter 3.1.2. Furthermore, in cases when there are two or more figures on one canvas, no communication is suggested by either their gaze, movement, or gestures. As Forge pointed out, ‘if one pair of eyes met another, if one pose slid into its next stage, if one gesture had a consequence, if Oedipus had only lifted his head to address the Sphinx, then something could have been felt to have happened that we could watch from the outside. But the homely boundaries of a story are refused.’416 Indeed, the movement of the two nudes in Three Figures and Portrait, 1975 leads, if anything, away from each other, just as the looks of the three nudes in Three Studies from the Human Body, 1967 do not meet. Some figures, for example the ones in the outer panels of Triptych – Studies from the Human Body, 1970, do not have a head or eyes at all. Significantly, in The End of the Line, the recipient of the kiss on the hand is obscured by the wall of the shed. While it is true that the paint application may imply movement, it also, as pointed out in the previous chapter, sabotages the figure’s very existence as figurative, thus having an inherent connection to the real world where things may happen, and moreover, it often hinders the identification of facial expression and the direction of view by blurring features or replacing anatomical references with non-rational marks. Forge mentioned another element which distinctly undermines the development of a story on Bacon’s canvases. The actions in his work do not come with any identifiable purpose or outcome. What happens after the man has turned on the light, and why did he do it? Where is Dyer riding his bicycle to? Where is he coming from? Is he meeting someone there? No succession of events, with a beginning, middle, and end can be identified, the depicted scene never reaches beyond itself. Turning Figure, for example, seems to have internalised in its body the action of turning, but will never actually turn. The bull and the matador in Study for Bullfight No. 1 are supposed to fight, and to go on fighting forever. A climax is not intended. For this curious lack of intent and progression, the scenes on Bacon’s canvases hardly qualify even as an ‘event’. The figures appear to be trapped in ‘actions’ of a very rudimentary kind eternally. Often, we are faced with basic, static scenes, such as a figure sitting, sleeping and lying, which do not attempt to imply a series of events. A prime example is a group of reclining figures from the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Reclining Figure, 1959 and Reclining Woman, 1961, where the figure lies head down and one leg up on a sofa. The setting of the figure is usually so minimal and sparse that it reveals no clues as to the figure’s destiny. The pictorial ciphers very rarely direct thinking towards concrete stories either. Interpretation of some ciphers can, of course, be approached in a traditional manner. One could read the dog in conjunction with a lover in Two Studies of George Dyer with Dog, 1968 as an allegory of fidelity. Most others remain puzzling. They cannot be placed in any classical canon of symbols, but Bacon built up a highly personal repertoire of signs, the meaning of which 416 Forge 1985, p. 31.

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is private and often inaccessible to the viewer, including for example light bulbs, ashtrays, and blinds. Some of them are distinctly volatile. Arrows often draw our attention to random body parts without any conceivable reason. While artists such as George Hainsworth used writing to evoke a story in works such as Performance Cancelled, 1986 in which he spelled out the on canvas ‘Guernica Chernobyl etc.etc.’, Bacon’s crumpled newspapers come minus the news story. While they are compelling references to his studio and working process, the dry-transfer lettering is not combined into words or sentences but arranged randomly. The painted newspaper fragments reference storytelling and are an unmistakable indication of narrative, but do not manifest one. In that sense they, on a diminutive scale, do what Bacon’s paintings do on a large scale. Most of the time, figures are not accompanied by any pictorial accessories at all. Seated Figure, 1960 was even bereft of a chair. There are several types of triptychs in Bacon’s oeuvre. Some appear to depict a scenario in the same spatial setting, presumably at the same time, such as Crucifixion, 1965. If there was any story to be told, it is impeded by the stylistic device Bacon mentioned himself:417 while the gaze of both the nude on the left and that of the two men in the background of the right is directed at the figure in the centre panel, their looks are interrupted by the gaps between the panels. Others, such as Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962, may show the same space at different points in time. If that was the case, no narrative forms here either, because nothing links the ‘scenes’ – there are no recurring subjects or objects, nor is there identifiable progress. If the same person appears in all three panels of a triptych in the same space, as in Study for a Self-Portrait – Triptych, 1985–1986, we are at best reminded of a Muybridge motion series, of how Muybridge captures several parts of a single movement or event. Most titles are elusive and nondescript, and characterise the picture as undefined, maybe even unfinished (‘study’ and ‘sketch’), refer to the format alone, like ‘triptych’ or ‘diptych’, or provide simplistic descriptions of the subject matter such as ‘head’, ‘human body’ or ‘nude’. Some of the more expressive titles, such as Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, which presumably contributed significantly to Hyman’s perception of the work as narrative, were given by the gallery418 and not by the artist himself. He preferred titles which were as ‘anonymous’419 as possible. In the new catalogue raisonné this work was therefore retitled Triptych, stressing Bacon’s dissatisfaction with the interpretative title.420 Even if a narrative is ostensibly ingrained in the work’s title, it may prove difficult or impossible to decipher. For example, it is far from easy to identify which of the biblical characters the men in the left panel of Three Studies for a Crucifixion are supposed to represent. And did Bacon refer to the bible at all? He professed that, as an atheist, the crucifixion to him was just an ‘act of man’s behaviour’,421 thus expanding the potential story of his crucifixions to all cases where it was used as capital punishment. 417 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 23. 418 Cf. ibid., p. 197. 419 Ibid. 420 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 858. 421 Sylvester 2009, p. 23.

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It may be valid to see narrative in Bacon’s art based on loose definitions like Hyman’s, but if any stricter rules are applied, it fails to qualify. The main reason is that his art remains elusive. While some elements may suggest the existence of a story, they are so slippery and volatile that they are not capable of building up a clearly defined narrative. Apart from very few exceptions, there are no pre-existing, well-known stories that we just need to recall to understand a work. The loose threads do not tie together, the signs are mute beyond a personal meaning for both the artist and the spectator. They prove tenaciously resistant to interpretation, mean different things to different people, with the artist not clarifying but often further mystifying their nature.422 The works entice the viewer to speculate about a story but the spectator is thrown back entirely on their own imagination and experience: ‘Bacon’s pictures are not meant to tell stories or re-create events – they open the sluicegates of self-knowledge to individual viewers.’423 But as Rees-Roberts emphasised, ‘mere speculation about a situation, real or fictional, is not a narrative’.424 All things considered, the term narrative does not seem suitable to describe Bacon’s canvases. This explicitly does not mean that they are void of meaning or impact – many elements can be connected to the painter’s biography, and to his visual and literary interests – only that they do not come together in a cohesive story. Bacon, with his focus on provoking visceral sensations, provides a loose framework in terms of storytelling: his art focuses all efforts on the figure and the body, and in this way Bacon determines the boundaries, but not the direction or consequences of our own perception. The content of Bacon’s art is not to be explained or ‘read’, or to be grasped with straightforward concepts of understanding. ‘Painting is a world of its own, it’s self-sufficient. […] Basically, I believe that you cannot talk about painting, it just isn’t possible,’425 said Bacon, while Simon O’Sullivan underlined that ‘art is not, […], ultimately concerned with knowledge – or, at least, with what passes for knowledge within our everyday knowledge-economy (simply, information). It is not useful in that sense.’426 A painting’s photographic source of reference must in any case be ruled out as a supplier of stories. The sometimes complex narratives of a pictorial starting point are in Bacon’s works exchanged for an intense experience of the moment of looking at them. They provoke a strong emotional reaction, one so intense that for van Alphen it ‘precludes reflection upon one’s emotional state’427 leading to a temporary ‘loss of self’.428 He proposed an ‘affective reading’;429 variations of which may indeed be better suited to approach a Bacon work, and be more sympathetic to the artist’s intentions.

422 Cf. Harrison 2008a, pp. 44–45. 423 Anon. 1968, p. 442. 424 Rees-Roberts 1980, p. 33. 425 Archimbaud 2010, p. 171. 426 Simon O’Sullivan, ‘From Stuttering and Stammering to the Diagram: Deleuze, Bacon and Contemporary Art Practice’, Deleuze Studies, 3.2 (December 2009), 247–258, p. 250. 427 van Alphen 1998, pp. 9–10. 428 Ibid. 429 Ibid.

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3.3.2.  Portrait and Identity – No Less than Life Itself

In the last chapter I analysed the relationship between narratives in source pictures and narratives in related canvases. As it happens, these are not only incongruous, but narrative plays a minor role in Bacon’s art altogether. Similar observations can be made in relation to the meaning of a subject. Neglecting and deliberately changing an image’s meaning during its appropriation is a consistent approach of Bacon’s. The transformative power of Bacon’s appropriations could be enormous, and might even ignore the boundaries of species. For example, while the long-eared owl hatchlings from the book Birds of the Night430 are supposed to represent birds in Owls, 1956, the flying barn owl from Birds in Action431 is metamorphosed into a fantasy creature with a human mouth and a vulva in Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1950. In Lying Figure, 1977 a photographic reproduction of a bull432 is overlaid and intertwined with a human body. This painting, especially with Bacon adopting the prominent genitalia of the animal, epitomises the sexual connotations that the bullfight had for him.433 The appropriation of a photograph of a lion attacking a journalist434 in Figures in a Landscape, 1956–1957 and related paintings is extraordinary in this context, because it turns the aggressive female animal into what appears to be a male human (figure 40 and 41). ‘It may be true that most of Bacon’s pictures are based on photographs, but the image is usually so thoroughly Baconised that the very meaning of the subject-matter has shifted so that the source is largely irrelevant and only of academic – and photographic – interest,’435 an anonymous author rightly assumed in 1968, while Frank Van Deren Coke knew in 1964 that ‘the objective photographic source [two wrestlers from Muybridge’s motion studies] remained identifiable, but the meaning of the painting is totally divorced from the source of inspiration.’436 Since questions of subject matter – namely the sitter, and how their identity and visual appearance are to be rendered – are at the heart of the genre, portraiture suggests itself for a case study. It forms an exception in Bacon’s oeuvre in that he was, at least from the 1960s onwards, more open about the use of photographs. In 1963, he entitled a portrait painting Study of Portrait of P.L. from Photographs, and in a BBC documentary in 1966437 he talked 430 RM98F137:6: Eric J. Hosking, Cyril Newberry and Stuart G. Smith, Birds of the Night (London: Collins, 1945), fig. 10. 431 RM98F114:79: Eric Hosking and Cyril Newberry, Birds in Action, London: Collins, 1949, p. 78, ‘Barn Owl with Vole’. 432 RM98F104:126ver: torn leaf, Barnaby Conrad, Encyclopedia of Bullfighting (London: Michael Joseph, 1961), p. 14: ‘“Chicuelo II” apretándose with a handsome specimen of Mexican bull. Notice the width of the horns and the matador’s proximity to the animal. Olivares.’. 433 Russell John 2001, p. 143. 434 Illustration from ‘Mauled by a Lion in Africa’, in Picture Post, 9 August 1947, p. 13: ‘The Cameraman Loses Consciousness’. 435 Anon. 1968, p. 442. 436 Coke 1981, p. 168. 437 Cf. Fragments of a Portrait, ‘Sunday Night Francis Bacon’, dir. by Michael Gill and with David Sylvester interview, BBC Television, 1966.

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at length about preferring to paint portraits from photographs instead of working with a sitter.438 Several photographs by John Deakin from his studio feature in the film, too, and some are published in the first printed version of the interview in 1975.439 While it is a wellknown fact that Bacon based his portraits on pre-existing lens-based imagery,440 the process has never been systematically analysed. In literature on the matter photographs are often merely juxtaposed with his portraits for their supposed objectivity in depicting their subjects, the photographs neatly contrasting with the paintings, and they are seen as ‘a starting point and not as a working drawing.’441 In the following, I will show that photographic material, while consistently and reliably the formal basis for Bacon’s portraits, is no reliable vessel for identity, nor is it a dependable aid for the interpretation of a canvas. Instead, it was a tool which helped Bacon express individual feelings and attitudes towards a sitter; it also facilitated Bacon’s challenging and blurring of conventional ideas of representation, portraiture, and identity. Portrait Painting and Photography The traditional task of portrait painting is to produce a well-made and truthful likeness of the sitter’s exterior, preferably combined with a realistic impression of their personality.442 We expect from portraiture, and ascribe to it, a high degree of authenticity, and would like to think it capable of showing the true nature and character of a person.443 In the past, a core aim was ‘to affirm a distinct identity for the people they [portraits] represented’,444 an idea which became more significant and whose implementation artists refined with the increasing importance of individuality during the Renaissance period.445 It was thought that the sitter’s identity was fixed, unambiguous, and permanent, and that it was the artist’s task to show an individual’s discrete characteristics.446 Since until the late 19th century portraits 438 Cf. Sylvester 2009, pp. 38–43, Interview 2 is based on Fragments of a Portrait. 439 Cf. Sylvester 1975, p. 39, figs. 36–37. 440 For example, photographs are published next to Bacon’s portraits throughout Francis Bacon: Die Portraits, exh. cat. Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2005; Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2005/2006 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz 2005). 441 Elizabeth Cayzer, Changing Perceptions: Milestones in Twentieth-Century British Portraiture (Brighton: Alpha Press, 1999), p. 67. 442 Cf. Malcolm Warner, ‘Portraits about Portraiture’, in The Mirror & the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso, ed. by Paloma Alarcó and Malcolm Warner, exh. cat. Madrid: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid, 2007; Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 2007 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 11–23, p. 11; see also Gottfried Boehm, Bildnis und Individuum: Über den Ursprung der Portraitmalerei in der Italienischen Renaissance (Munich: Prestel, 1985), p. 39; and Ines Janet Engelmann, ‘Mache dir ein Bild(nis)!’, in Das Andere Ich: Porträts 1900–1950, ed. by Wolfgang Büche and Ines Janet Engelmann, exh. cat. Halle: Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, Landeskunstmuseum Sachsen-Anhalt, 2003 (Halle: Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, 2003), pp. ­55–59, pp. 55–56. 443 Cf. Norbert Schneider, The Art of the Portrait: Masterpieces of European Portrait-Painting, 1420–1670 (Cologne: Taschen, 1994), p. 12; cf. also Warner 2007, p. 11. 444 Warner 2007, p. 17. 445 Cf. Ibid. 446 Cf. Ibid., p. 18.

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were usually commissioned works, this has, of course, never been entirely true, and many portraits were a ‘feel-good likeness’447 reflecting more how the sitters saw themselves, or how they wanted to be seen by others, than faithfully capturing their looks and character.448 For its menial role, portraiture was regarded as holding little artistic value.449 Within this understanding of portraiture, photography naturally found its place. Jean-­ Auguste-Dominique Ingres probably used daguerreotypes as early as 1841,450 and ­numerous artists were to follow his example. Traditional portrait painting can be a long and arduous process, often requiring dozens of sittings.451 To facilitate their work, painters had in the past drawn on optical aids, for example by using glass panes to create silhouettes. For the same reason, photography was gratefully embraced too.452 With the help of a photograph the subject could be scrutinised as often as one wished for any length of time without the sitter being present – or even alive.453 By the 1890s, Walter Sickert concluded that it was ‘sheer sadism’454 to conduct more than one sitting when photographs were avail­ able. Photographs were ideally suited as a working tool because of their mimetic fidelity in the transcription of reality. Eugène de Mirecourt reported that ‘Nadar’s photographs are so marvellously exact, that M. Ingres, with their help, has produced his most admirable portraits without the necessity of having the original before him.’455 The indexicality of a photograph, the immediate, physical relationship between subject and photographic print, added authenticity in regards to identity, for it embodied a ‘further encounter [...] better still, an encounter ­extended’.456 The proliferation of the new technology soon led to a decrease in portrait painting.457 It was not long until photography was faster, more convenient, and cheaper than painting while also producing a more faithful likeness.458 The dominance of photography over the genre and the increasingly strong tendencies towards abstraction caused a further decline in portrait painting during the course of the 20th century.459 ‘Who would ever have commissioned Mondrian or Rothko to paint a portrait?’,460 Robert 447 Ibid., p. 11. 448 Cf. also ibid. 449 Cf. Boehm 1985, p. 39; and also Warner 2007, p. 11. 450 Cf. Scharf 1979, pp. 49–52. 451 Cf. ibid, p. 49. 452 Cf. Schneider 1994, p. 12. 453 Cf. e.g. Eugène de Mirecourt quoted in Scharf 1979, p. 49, see also p. 56. 454 Walter Sickert, quoted in Scharf 1979, p. 56. 455 Eugène de Mirecourt quoted in Scharf 1979, p. 49. 456 Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, 1922–1931 as quoted in Howard Brassaï, Proust in the Power of Photography (New York: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 84–85, quoted from Easton 2011, p. 2. 457 Cf. Scharf 1979, p. 42. 458 Cf. Schneider 1994, p. 10; see also Scharf 1979, p. 41 and p. 43. 459 Cf. Schneider 1994, p. 10. 460 Robert Rosenblum, as quoted from Francisco Calvo Serraller, ‘The Spirit behind the Mask’, in The Mirror & the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso, ed. by Paloma Alarcó and Malcolm Warner, exh. cat. Madrid: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja, 2007; Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 2007 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 3–9, p. 8.

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­ osenblum mischievously asked. And yet, the trivialisation of portraiture through its omniR presence, especially as mechanical images, also started to spark new interest.461 From around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century the modern avant-gardes started to radically break with old traditions and ways of thinking. The presumed truthfulness of portraiture made it an ideal and highly popular starting point for challenging conventional manners of representation.462 Novel approaches revealed ‘the subjectivity and artifice of their art, playing with the likeness of their models and the very idea of likeness,’463 refrained from flattery and depicting social status, and valued the artist’s own style and expression higher than any paying customer’s opinion.464 The portrait’s status as a work of art was now the main focus.465 As explained earlier, many perceived photography as a liberation and a legitimisation for exploring new paths.466 This resulted in radical pieces such as Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Daniel-Henry K ­ ahnweiler from 1910. While we would struggle to recognise the art dealer in the street, the work is a prime example of Picasso’s newly developed Analytical Cubism. Despite the fact that a faithful rendering of the sitter was no longer desired, photography was still referenced. Its role, however, had changed drastically and took highly idiosyncratic shapes. Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler is in fact based on a photograph of the art dealer that Picasso had taken of him in his studio.467 Anne Baldassari rated this image, together with other pictures Picasso had taken of his friends in 1910 and 1911, as starting points for The Poet and Man with a Pipe, both made in 1911;468 both works are paragons of Analytical Cubism. She identified their new function as ‘devoted, in theory, to picking out a model’s characteristics, the [photographic] portrait here becomes a collective stock of signs that painting redistributes and reorganizes with no further concern for realism.’469 The novel role that Bacon had found for his portraiture will be the focus of the following discussion. Identity was no longer seen as set in stone either and ‘other people’s souls’470 were of lesser interest, so that for modern painters ‘to delve into the sitter’s inner being is either impossible or not especially desirable.’471 Subsequently, the representation of identity was approached on more liberal terms. Due to the increasing employment of photographs, the relationship between subject and representation had already begun to water down, a

461 Cf. Serraller 2007, p. 8. 462 Cf. Warner 2007, p. 11 and p. 13. 463 Ibid., p. 12. 464 Cf. ibid., pp. 11–13. 465 Cf. ibid., p. 13. 466 Cf. Kircher quoted from Schwarz 1987, p. 111, see Picasso and Braque quoted in Coke 1981, p. 299. 467 Cf. Pablo Picasso, photograph of Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, Paris, boulevard de Clichy studio, 1910, Baldassari 1996, p. 209. 468 Cf. Baldassari 1996, p. 209. 469 Ibid., p. 209. 470 Warner 2007, p. 18. 471 Ibid.

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­ ynamics embraced and advanced by the avant-garde.472 For example, sitters were rendered d recurrently, but with a different identity each time, so that ‘the idea of sitter and model fused’.473 Picasso ‘would conflate different people (and people and animals) in the same portrait, or decide whom a portrait represented only after working on it for some time [so, as a consequence] Paloma could become the Infanta María Magarita from Las Meninas, or vice versa.’474 By the 19th century genre categories were beginning to break down, and after 1900 definitions of portraiture became increasingly loose.475 In a postmodern age of plastic surgery and genetic engineering ‘science does not consider our exterior physical image truly revealing. [...] So it is logical that 20th-century art has wished to go beyond physical appearances to enter into a comparatively more significant and revealing interiority.’476 This historic loosening and the emphasis on interiority are to be kept in mind when evaluating Bacon’s portraiture. ‘To distort the thing far beyond the appearance’477 Bacon echoed Kirchner when he said that in the past, painters had aimed to ‘record’478 their environment, but that today, the camera was much better suited for this task.479 He concluded that therefore photography had utterly changed figurative painting.480 Like the German Expressionist, Bacon perceived photography’s dominance over the faithful documentation of the world as a liberation, but also as an obligation. Painting now needed to come up with something more ‘fundamental’,481 something ‘extreme’482 in order to ‘unlock [...] the valves of sensation at different levels’,483 he proclaimed. This urge for radical new ways of representation colours his attitude towards portraiture too. Bacon knew that perception was subjective and that a face was seen differently by different people,484 which by implication contradicted the truth claim of traditional academic portraiture. By his own account, he had no interest in producing a naturalistic record of anyone’s features485 but instead wanted to ‘distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a reading of the appearance’.486 Deformation, he was convinced, ‘brings

472 Cf. Scharf 1979, p. 49, p. 56. 473 Warner 2007, pp. 18–19. 474 Ibid., p. 19. 475 Cf. Ibid., p. 11. 476 Serraller 2007, p. 8. 477 Sylvester 2009, p. 40. 478 Ibid., pp. 65. 479 Cf. ibid., pp. 65–66. 480 Cf. ibid. 481 Ibid., p. 28. 482 Ibid., for similar thoughts see pp. 65–66. 483 Beard 1975, p. 18. 484 Cf. Archimbaud 2010, p. 170. 485 Cf. Sylvester 2009, pp. 40–41, p. 146; see also Francis Bacon 1985. 486 Sylvester 2009, p. 40.

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me nearer to the human being than if I were to sit down and illustrate one, [...]. I get nearer by going farther away.’487 He was concerned with the questions how one might create ‘likeness outside illustration’488 and how ‘to re-make it [the portrait] so that it turns back into appearance of the person but isn’t an illustration of them.’489 He wondered how this appearance, in his mind a fluid and changeable condition,490 and ‘the pulsation of the realism of a person’,491 how this person had ‘affected’492 him, could be rendered in paint. In line with his general wish to balance figuration and abstraction in a ‘tightrope-walk’,493 Bacon nevertheless saw no point ‘painting a portrait unless it looks like the person’.494 By explaining that he aimed ‘to make an image of their heads [...] more than just a literal portrait’495 he underlined that on the canvas he sought to arrest the immediate experience of physical existence in flesh and blood, not a two-dimensional record of someone’s surface, which is the face.496 Maybe Bacon had been inspired by Gertrude Stein’s comment on Picasso’s portraits, an artist he admired for his ‘brutality of fact’,497 that ‘the reality of life is in the head, the face and the body and that is for him so important, so persistent, so complete that it is not all necessary to think of any other thing and the soul is another thing’.498 Bacon set himself a difficult task. He aimed to grasp no less than the very individual, inherent liveness of a person, in all its oscillating and malleable facets, removed from anything spiritual or religious. He approached portraiture in an emotional, visceral and immediate manner, in which pictorial resemblance and naturalistic representation played a minor role. It seems logical that, to visualise highly individual aspects of the sitter’s existence and Bacon’s relationship to them, he deemed it necessary to know the people he painted very well – especially when the portrait was to be executed in their absence.499 Within this concept, Bacon saw no more than a secondary role for photography. He believed that the real living essence of a person could neither be captured by photography, nor by academic painters. In his view people preferred these ‘because for some reason they prefer a sort of colour photograph of themselves instead of thinking of having themselves really trapped.’500 Photography could, so he said, then only serve as a form of ‘dictionary’,501 487 Beard 1975, p. 19. 488 HKA: TGA ? IVa-b September 1974, p. 31; Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985. 489 Ibid. 490 Archimbaud 2010, p. 147. 491 HKA: TGA200816/4/2/9 Folder 6, Interview IX 1984–1986, pp. 35 and 36. 492 Sylvester 2009, p. 130. 493 Ibid., p. 12. 494 Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985. 495 Ibid. 496 Cf. Ibid. 497 Sylvester 2009, p. 182. 498 Gertrude Stein, Picasso (London: B. T. Batsford, 1938), pp. 13–14. 499 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 38; Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985; ‘I’ll go on until I drop’ 1991. 500 HKA: TGA200816/4/2/9 Folder 6, Interview IX 1984–1986, pp. 35 and 36. 501 Sylvester 2009, p. 73.

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a ‘reference’502 which helped him to correct his memory of the looks of a person.503 Indeed, in Bacon’s working process photographs were neither guarantors for anatomical correctness nor were they employed to authenticate identity in a painting. The artist, as we will see in the following, found new and surprising ways to use photographs in his portraits. An Instable Core Portraiture played a negligible role in Bacon’s early work, and only became more prominent after 1949 when the body became his principal subject.504 After that, portraits developed into a core interest. Despite Bacon’s claim to have done ‘very few portraits’,505 out of 584 known paintings, 185 are portraits and 53 are self-portraits.506 Bacon’s definition of portraiture as a genre and how it represented a subject and its identity was loose, fluid, and non-exclusive. In Bacon’s mind, even a crucifixion painting could come close to a self-­ portrait.507 Often, the identity of the sitter is imprecisely rendered, seems instable and ambiguous, and unexpected alien elements seem to lurk beneath the surface, or explicitly feature on the canvas.508 Frank Auerbach recalled that he had witnessed how what had started as a portrait of Lisa Sainsbury ended up as a likeness of Peter Lacy,509 which indicates that the identity of the subject was not set at the beginning but negotiated during the working process. This idea is supported by the fact that the unfinished ‘Self-Portrait’, 1991–1992, looks as much like George Dyer as it looks like Bacon. The same applies to many finished canvases. Martin Harrison in the centre panel of Three Figures in a Room, 1964 saw Dyer’s portrait ‘morphing’510 with Bacon’s, and observed similar dynamics in Three Studies of George Dyer, 1969.511 Self-Portrait, 1976 curiously bears a resemblance to Peter Beard and the face in Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1951 is not a good likeness of Freud, but the prominent chin resembles that of David Sylvester. Bacon equipped his friends with what looks like boar’s fangs in a group of paintings including Study of Henrietta Moraes, 1969, the nose of the sitters in Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1964 appears to belong to a baboon, and the fragment of a shadow in the right panel of Studies of George Dyer and Isabel Rawsthorne, 1970 depicting Isabel Rawsthorne, is that of George Dyer.

502 ‘I’ll go on until I drop’ 1991. 503 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 73; see also ‘I’ll go on until I drop’ 1991. 504 ’Portrait’, c.1930, is speculated to depict Bacon’s older brother Harley, who had died the year before from lock jaw, and X-ray analysis revealed what may be the likeness of Eric Hall under the right panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, see Harrison 2016a, p. 116 and p. 146. 505 ‘I’ll go on until I drop’ 1991. 506 Counted are here only those works which have the terms ’portrait’ or ’self-portrait’, or the name of a person in the title. 507 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 46. 508 Sadly, not all sitters of ’portraits’ have been identified to date, see Harrison 2016a, p. 890. 509 Cf. Auerbach cited from Harrison 2016a, p. 520. 510 Ibid., p. 760. 511 Cf. ibid., p. 916.

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The boundaries between portrait and figure study were unstable and blurry as well. Titles do not, as shown above, reliably describe the identity of the sitter, and they are equally deceptive in determining the genre. Anonymous titles were attached to what is almost certainly supposed to be the depiction of a specific person. Head of a Man, 1960 for example was meant to be a self-portrait,512 Man in a Chair, 1952 ‘somewhat resembles David Sylvester’,513 Head in Grey, 1955 is a good likeness of Peter Lacy, while Oedipus, 1979 looks remarkably like Dyer, and the Male Nude before Mirror, 1990 like Bacon’s friend Anthony Zych. Furthermore, likenesses crop up in unexpected places. That of Dyer features at the bottom of Seated Figure, 1978 and the painted version of a photograph of Bacon takes a prominent place in Triptych, 1991. As we will see, the characteristic ambiguity and ‘manyness’ of Bacon’s finished portraits is inspired, fostered, and sometimes directly anticipated by an idiosyncratic preparatory and appropriation practice from photographic material. A Secondary Experience Despite Bacon’s firm belief that photographs were of limited use for his approach to portraiture, it depended heavily on lens-based imagery from the outset.514 In 1951, Bacon painted his first portrait of an identified sitter, Portrait of Lucian Freud, which was to set the tone for the future use of photography in relation to the genre (figure 93). For early portraits, such as Portrait of Lucian Freud, Bacon still invited models to sit for him, but the sobering accounts of those events suggest that they happened merely pro forma. When Freud arrived at Bacon’s temporary studio at the Royal College of Art, he found the work ‘almost completely finished and an extremely good likeness’.515 Other sitters recall similar stories. Sylvester remembered that ‘while sitting in 1953 [probably for what was to become ‘Portrait of a Man Walking’] I observed that my appearance was sharing his attention with that of photographs of wild animals, in particular a rhinoceros.’516 Bacon’s cousin Diana Watson also ‘sat (not stood) for him about two or three times’517 but Figure in a Landscape (Miss Diana Watson), 1957 is based on a photograph of her which Bacon took at a picnic at Byland Abbey, Yorkshire, in about 1938.518 Bacon changed Portrait of Lucian Freud considerably one more time, but again in the absence of the sitter.519 Ultimately, it is based on a snapshot of Franz Kafka, which Bacon had found in Max Brod’s biography of the writer

512 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 612. 513 Cf. ibid., p. 292. 514 As early as 1933, The Crucifixion features a skull after an X-ray photograph of Sir Michael Sadler, see Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 30. 515 Sylvester 2000, p. 66; Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 51–52; Bacon occupied Rodrigo Moynihan’s atelier there until 1953, see Harrison 2016b, p. 84. 516 Sylvester 2000, p. 66. 517 Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 114–115. 518 Cf. ibid. 519 Cf. ibid., pp. 51–52.

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93  Francis Bacon, Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1951, oil and sand on canvas, 198 × 137 cm, collection: Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester University, Manchester.

94  Frontispiece to Max Brod, Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie (Erinnerungen und ­Dokumente) (Prague: Heinrich Mercy Sohn: 1937), Kafka’s sister Ottla is edited out for the frontispiece.

(figure 94).520 Thus, during the genesis of Portrait of Lucian Freud, Bacon not only valued a photograph higher than the presence of the sitter, he also chose as pictorial springboard a photograph which did not depict the subject. Both techniques were to dominate his work for the rest of his career. Bacon soon abandoned any attempts to paint from nature. For the rare commissions, photographs were sent to the studio as working material.521 As pointed out in chapter 2.1.,

520 Cf. ibid., pp. 51–52, black and white photograph, Franz Kafka with his sister Ottla in front of the Oppelt-­Haus in Prague, c.1914, frontispiece to Max Brod, Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie (Erinnerungen und ­Dokumente) (Prague: Heinrich Mercy Sohn: 1937), Ottla is edited out for the frontispiece. For the location and date of the picture see ‘Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach: AsKI KULTUR lebendig, ‘Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach: Franz Kafkas ‘Briefe an Ottla‘ gehen an Marbach und Oxford’, ­Arbeitskreis selbstständiger Kultur-Institute e.V., 2011, [accessed 5 July 2021]. 521 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 1138, p. 1200 and p. 1246.

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the artist even painted his closest intimates from photographs, and John Edwards, the subject of many paintings, confirmed that he never sat for Bacon at all.522 ‘Even in the case of friends who will come and pose, I’ve had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from photographs than from them,’523 Bacon said. The vast majority of those photographs were provided by his friend John Deakin. Deakin’s style, which has been described as ‘forensic’,524 is characterised by close cropping, a low angle – he often used a top viewfinder Rolleiflex camera – and strong tonal contrasts. Bacon cherished Deakin’s portraits as ‘the best since Nadar and Julia Margaret Cameron’.525 Since around 1957, Deakin took several series of portraits and nude studies for Bacon.526 Over three hundred photographs, or fragments thereof, and negatives by Deakin survived the gruelling dynamics of Reece Mews, and today form one of the largest groups of material by a single author. Comparative studies of the negatives in the John Deakin Archive suggest that it may originally have been many more.527 The strong bond between Deakin’s photographs and Bacon’s portraiture also manifests itself in the fact that Bacon for many of his small portrait triptychs used almost exactly the size of Deakin’s gelatin silver prints, which measured 35.5 × 30.5 cm, dimensions Bacon exclusively used for this group of works, and which facilitated borrowing subjects from them.528 In these triptychs, following Deakin’s pictures, Bacon often painted his sitters ‘looking side face, front face, and then side face from the other side’529 to echo the effect of ‘police records’.530 Deakin’s photographs were more to Bacon than image donors and sources of inspiration, however. Their importance as a catalyst for his development into a prolific portrait painter can hardly be overstated, which may be illustrated by a simple numbers game: in the 1950s, the latter part of which Deakin started to provide source images in, 49 painted portraits are known, but in the 1960s, it is 79 – the majority of which are based on Deakin’s photographs.531 But what did Bacon gain from so radically eliminating the presence of the sitter? For one thing, it was their influence on him and his work that was avoided. Bacon regarded 522 Cf. Harrison in conversation with John Edwards, quoted from Dawson 2009, p. 66. 523 Sylvester 2009, p. 38. 524 Bruce Bernard quoted in Robin Muir, Under the Influence: John Deakin, Photography and the Lure of Soho, pubd. in relation to the exhibition of the same name, London: Photographers’ Gallery, 2014 (London: Art/Books in association with the John Deakin Archive and the Photographers’ Gallery, 2014), p. 69. 525 Francis Bacon, ‘Written statement’, in John Deakin: The Salvage of a Photographer, exh. cat. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984/1985 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984), p. 8. 526 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 544. 527 Cf. Günther 2018, p. 97. 528 Cf. Harrison quoted in Jessica O’Donnell, ‘”The Street … the Only Valid Field of Experience”: Francis Bacon and the Photography of John Deakin’, in Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, ed. by Logan Sisley, exh. cat. Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2009/2010 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), pp. 88–121, p. 103. 529 Sylvester 2009, p. 86. 530 Ibid. 531 Counted are here only those works which have the terms ‘portrait’ or ‘self-portrait’, or the name of a person in the title, cf. Günther 2018, p. 104.

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the sitters’ presence as inhibiting, because some people, ‘at least simple people’,532 may perceive the distortion of their appearance as offensive, so that he preferred to practice ‘the injury’533 he found essential to ‘record the fact of them more clearly’534 in private. He might have come to that conclusion in light of painting Cecil Beaton’s portrait in 1960. While the fashion and society photographer was initially excited to be painted by Bacon, he found the result appalling.535 Bacon sensed Beaton’s disgust and destroyed the painting immediately after Beaton had left the studio.536 Bacon also explained that he was not able ‘to drift that freely as I am able to through the photographic image’537 with his sitters in the studio, by which he might have meant that, in line with his wish not to put a spotlight on his use of photographs, he wanted to prevent people from studying the extent and details of his work from pre-existing imagery. Bacon may also have expected better results for trapping a sitter’s ephemeral and oscillating appearance. While sitting for a portrait, the model is necessarily aware of being watched and poses for the painter, so that a painted portrait has by default something unnatural about it.538 A photograph, in contrast, as the photographer Ken Hutton said of his work, ‘resolves itself largely into being quick enough off the mark. You have got to catch that fleeting expression before the face settles back into its vacant stare’,539 employing a process and speed which, in relation to Henri Cartier-Bresson, has been likened to a ‘kind of gunshot’.540 John Rothenstein suggested that this quality of photography may have fostered in Bacon the ‘predilection for portraying people as though they were alone, unaware of any other presence’.541 In any case, it was a conscious creative and conceptual decision to opt for a secondary experience, in which the sitter is only represented through photography. In portraiture, Bacon took his wish to avoid direct illustration from nature and his aspiration to artificiality, both of which he considered essential for a good artwork, to an extreme. Thus, most of all, he gained an immense degree of creative freedom of action. Cut off from real life experience, on his own in his studio, Bacon was no longer distracted by the real presence and looks of the sitter but he could freely build up and construct both likeness and identity from pre-existing imagery, guided only by his own perception, private memories, and deepest sensations.

532 Sylvester 2009, pp. 38–41. 533 Ibid. 534 Ibid. 535 Cf. Buckle 1991, pp. 321–326. 536 Cf. ibid., p. 326. 537 Sylvester 2009, p. 38. 538 Cf. Warner 2007, p. 15. 539 Ken Hutton quoted from William Feaver, ‘That’s it’, in Francis Bacon 1909–1992, Small Portrait Studies, exh. cat. London: Marlborough Fine Art, 1993 (London: Marlborough Fine Art, 1993), no page numbers. 540 André Pieyre de Mandiargues, ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson – The Great Revealer’, in The Great Photo­ graphers: Henri Cartier-Bresson Portraits, by André Pieyre de Mandiargues and Ferdinando Scianna (London: Collins, 1984), pp. 4–5, p. 5. 541 Rothenstein 1974, p.167

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Building / Unbuilding Identities To achieve his goals for portrait painting, Bacon developed his very own methods. For him, all ‘logical’542 processes had to be rejected. One had to foster accidental procedures and move towards abstraction – away from anything photographic. He explained ‘When I make a self-portrait or anything like that, as I’ve looked at myself hundreds and thousands of times in mirrors and in photographs, I sort of know the contours of my face but I just don’t want just to make it like a photograph. I haven’t the slightest desire to do that and therefore when – it’s like continuous gambling – [...] when you start each day, you are wondering what chance will bring up for you, in the way of a mark which is the mark of resemblance but a non-­ illustrational mark of resemblance.’543

The great significance of materiality in Bacon’s work and his idiosyncratic handling of paint have been discussed in detail in chapter 3.2.2. The techniques and methodologies identified there play an important role in his portraiture too. Both abstraction and chance are combined in the characteristic irrational marks which strongly determine the faces in Bacon’s portraits. As pointed out before, an expressive white dash interrupts our reading of Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1967, and Study for Head of Lucian Freud from the same year seems to consist exclusively of abstract streaks of white and green paint. Both paintings can be traced back to photographs of the sitters by Deakin,544 which, as ‘forensic’545 beacons of pictorial realism, are a particularly distant starting point. The positioning and course of the brushstrokes undermine identity in these works because they are not guided by the sitter’s individual anatomical features – here faithfully represented by photography – but by the malleability of the paint and the energy of Bacon’s gesture. Immediate, yet literally fluid, they form a material equivalent to his idea of appearance as changeable and transitory. ‘Ideally’, Bacon said, ‘one would just like to pick up a lump of paint and throw it at the canvas and there was the marvellous likeness, and the whole thing was there.’546 Just how little interest Bacon had in producing a naturalistic portrait is palpable here, in his abandoning of conventional ideas of figurative representation and likeness in favour of the production of an artwork which followed his own creative ideals. Adopting a photograph’s truthfulness was not Bacon’s intention. Instead, in what appears to be a counter-intuitive move, neglecting what was perceived as the major assets of photography for portrait painting in the past – indexicality and mimesis – Bacon employed pre-existing lens-based imagery to subvert the manifestation of identity and a naturalistic rendering of the sitter. An effect similar to the painted ‘non-rational’547 marks is achieved by reproducing the physical manipulations and alterations to a source item. The adoption 542 Sylvester 2009, p. 107. 543 HKA: TGA ? IVa–b September 1974, p. 31. 544 RM98F11:2: photograph, folded, John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a Street in Soho, c.1964; RM98F104:131: fragment of photograph, John Deakin, Lucian Freud in a Street, c.1964. 545 Bruce Bernard quoted in Muir 2014, p. 69. 546 ‘I’ll go on until I drop’ 1991. 547 Sylvester 2009, p. 58.

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of folds, creases, and blank spaces was a consistent approach Bacon applied in all genres, including his portraits. Barely a year old, some pictures Deakin had taken of Bacon’s then new partner Dyer standing in a street in Soho had probably already undergone a radical transformation in 1964. Alterations of the gelatin silver prints seemed to have informed early paintings of Dyer from that year.548 One image is ripped in such a way that Dyer’s left cheek is covered by a darker area of the print when folded in, namely the subject’s suit (plate XXXII).549 This seems to have anticipated the dark shadow which covers the left part of the sitter’s face in the centre panel of Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (on pink ground), 1964 (plate XXXIII).550 Furthermore, the irregular rendering of the painted chin strongly resembles the folds and creases of the photograph in that area. A similar approach was taken in Seated Figure, 1961 where the fragmentary depiction of the subject’s head echoes the fragmentary character of a photograph of Peter Lacy by Deakin from c.1957.551 Another print from the series has been reduced to a fragment. It now only shows part of Dyer’s profile with his mouth and eye,552 the remainder of the head is missing (plate ­XXXIV). This treatment resonates distinctly in the centre panel of Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (on light ground), 1964 (plate XXXV).553 Here, the left part of Dyer’s profile is executed in darker tones than the right. Bacon integrated a tier in the execution of Dyer’s hair, just as he changed the tone and brushwork in exactly the same place where it is interrupted in the print. Thus, the photograph does not serve Bacon as a vehicle to attain the highest possible precision and detail in the depiction of his sitters. It is a technical starting point for experimentation with a view to creatively reformulating representation itself. Furthermore, just like ‘non-rational’554 marks in paint, those predefined by the alteration of the physical base image help to challenge the identity of a sitter because they, too, are not rooted in their anatomy. Identity and individuality are, however, most effectively undermined by the choice and combination of source images. Due to its indexical relationship to reality, a photograph is not only a pictorial but also a conceptual authority in depicting a person. Thus, within a traditional understanding of portraiture, a photograph of the sitter would be the most logical starting point. In general, Bacon seems to have cherished a photograph’s indexicality and it is very likely that a picture of Isabel Rawsthorne would end up as a painting of Isabel Rawsthorne.555 But this was not always the case. Here it becomes clearer what Bacon may have meant when he talked of employing illogical methods. Confirming Sylvester’s assumption that ‘there could be a constant interplay between the living sitter, some photographs

548 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 738; see also Günther 2018, p. 100. 549 RM98F17:89A: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in a Street in Soho, c.1963. 550 Cf. Günther 2018, p. 100. 551 RM98F22:44: John Deakin, Peter Lacy at Smithfield Meat Market, c.1957. 552 RM98F108:3: fragment of photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in a Street in Soho, c.1963. 553 Cf. Günther 2018, p. 100. 554 Sylvester 2009, p. 58. 555 Cf. Ibid., p. 104.

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he was actually looking at, and other existing images stored in his memory,’556 or in fact in his studio, sometimes, photographic material of disparate fictional or real individuals and inanimate objects were combined in one portrait. They predetermined its ambiguities, uncertainties, and peculiarities. On the occasion of its sale in 2012, Christie’s announced as a sensation that the body in Study for Self-Portrait, 1964 was painted after a photograph of Lucian Freud and rated the combination of the two physiognomies as an ‘almost devotional act’.557 The body in Study for Self-Portrait is an assemblage of at least two photographs from the series of Freud sitting on a bed taken by Deakin.558 The head may, due to the slightly twisted mouth, have been lifted from a polaroid of Bacon in front of a shop window from 1959.559 The vigour with which this duality was promoted might have been related to the fact that Freud had died the year before. Subsequently, the prices for his work had gone up, and the auction house suddenly had two top sellers in one work.560 In fact, the process of using seemingly unrelated images and combining disparate images in portraits and self-portraits was a technique Bacon consistently and frequently applied. For example, Study for Self-Portrait, 1963 mingles a photograph of Freud with Bacon’s likeness before Study for Self-Portrait, 1964 did this, and the same signature rolled up white shirt sleeves from Deakin’s Freud series feature in Study for Portrait (Isabel Rawsthorne), 1964 in which the face of the sitter is adopted from a Deakin photograph of Rawsthorne.561 The distorted profile in the right panel of Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, 1967 was borrowed from a photograph of a soldier heavily wounded in the First World War, which was published in Fourteen Eighteen (figure  95 and 96).562 The soldier had lost the entire front of his head, including his nose and upper jaw, and Bacon adopted the horrible disfigurement to a degree that none of his own anatomy can be recognised. He used a similar technique in Study of Henrietta Moraes, 1969, which is informed by a manipulated film still from Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour which premiered in 1959, which Bacon found in a book.563 The significance and implications of the choice and combination of material for the portrait, the artist, and the viewer are located between several poles. As with all research 556 Sylvester 2000, p. 68. 557 E-catalogue: Christie’s, Post-War and Contemporary Art: Evening Auction 2012 Christie’s, ‘Post-War and Contemporary Art: Evening Auction‘, Christie’s, 27 June 2012 [accessed 10 October 2013]. 558 For the propped up trousers it relates to RM98F1A:170, and for the folded hands to RM98F1A:87, both John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a Bed, c.1964. 559 RM98F12:17:1: polaroid of Francis Bacon outside Wallace Heaton Camera Shop, Bond Street, c.1959. 560 Cf. Jane Raffan, ‘What price self?’, National Portrait Gallery: Portrait Magazine, 22 January 2013 [accessed 31 July 2021]. 561 RM98F22:128 and RM98F17:158: upper and lower part of photograph, John Deakin, Isabel R ­ awsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964. 562 RM98F244:11: John Masters, Fourteen Eighteen (London: Michael Joseph Publishers, 1965), p. 85: ‘A facial injury (from Nie wieder Krieg)’. 563 RM98F1A:40: torn leaf, mounted on support, affixed with two paper-clips, Thomas Wiseman, Cinema (London: Cassell, 1964), p. 158, film still from Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, 1959.

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95  Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, 1967, right panel, oil on canvas, 35.5 × 30.5 cm, private collection (full triptych see p. 445).

96  RM98F244:11: John Masters, Fourteen Eighteen (London: Michael Joseph Publishers, 1965), p. 85: ‘A facial injury (from Nie wieder Krieg)’.

on ­Bacon’s source material, we need to bear in mind that the base images were not meant to be seen by the public and thus cannot have been meant to serve as keys to their meaning. The ‘discovery’ of a source unrelated to the sitter of a portrait does not finally reveal the truth about this work. The right panel of Three Studies for a Self-Portrait is not a portrait of the wounded soldier, Study of Henrietta Moraes is not a painting about the actress ­Emmanuelle Riva or her unnamed character in Hiroshima, Mon Amour and it is highly doubtful that Study for Self-Portrait, 1964 was supposed to be a portrait ‘of two artists not one’,564 as Mark Brown interpreted Christie’s claim. Instead, much suggests that the identity of the subject in some sources, and in some cases, played a negligible role. The analysis of Bacon’s appropriation process so far indicates that pre-existing images were mostly merely regarded as a pictorial building-block. The chosen picture was ‘emptied’ in a twofold manner: aside from the outline and shape of a figure, much of the source picture was eliminated, and the narrative of a pictorial springboard was often ignored as well. On using photographs of Dyer in his work, Bacon commented to Sylvester:

564 Mark Brown, ‘Francis Bacon’s body turns out to be Lucian Freud’s in self- portrait’, Guardian, 25 May 2012 [accessed 31 July 2021].

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‘DS: You haven’t done heads of George lately, have you? FB: No. I think [...] it’s always more difficult to do – or seems more difficult to me – to do heads of people who are dead. DS: But a lot of male figures continue to look like George. I don’t know if they are. FB: They are not specially; … I’m not very conscious of George, if anything, it’s because I have a great number of photographs of George which John Deakin took. DS: Of George’s body. (FB: Yes) But you’ve also got the ones of the head (FB: Yes) But of course, one can understand... FB: I don’t know that it makes much difference whether one paints things or people who are dead or alive. …’565

Thus, the artist rated the identity of the subject in the photographs of Dyer as secondary, but emphasised the convenience of their availability in his studio. The body and face of a specific person may sometimes simply have formed the basis for a renegotiation of the human figure, quite independent of their identity.566 And yet, some choices and combinations may not have been entirely random but were guided, to a greater or lesser degree, by creative but also by highly personal reasons in a manner similar to the personal, encoded logic behind his acquisition of source material. Of course, with Bacon no longer available for comment, any interpretations of the rationale behind specific selections and juxtapositions must be made with due caution, and must ultimately remain speculative. It is possible, however, that seemingly unrelated photographs may have helped the artist to express personal feelings and attitudes, personal stories and perspectives, visualise ambiguities or uncertainties, underline certain aspects and character traits, and negotiate how a sitter had ‘affected’567 him. Particularly in relation to photographs of Dyer, a complete separation of form and content seems unlikely. Bacon was deeply moved by his tragic death and was tormented by feelings of guilt. ‘After all, I’ve had a very unfortunate life,’ he said, ‘because all the people I’ve been really fond of have died. And you don’t stop thinking about them; time doesn’t heal.’568 The excessive, posthumous referencing of Dyer’s body and likeness may have been a way for Bacon to process his former partner’s death and exorcise his pain. Bacon used the crossed legs from the photographs of Dyer in Reece Mews from 1964569 another 16 times after his death, for instance for the seated figure in Study for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1988 (figure 70 and 71). The title of the painting suggests that the work is a portrait of Bacon’s close friend Edwards and consequently the head is borrowed from a series of photographs that Bacon had taken of him (figure 72).570 By combining Dyer with Edwards, he may unconsciously have drawn on the fact that in the human psyche the experience of past relationships colours and

565 HKA: TGA2008/6/4/2/9 Folder 2, Bacon Interviews Via+VIIa, VIa 1979, p. 2. 566 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 1104. 567 HKA: TGA200816/4/2/9 Folder 6, Interview IX 1984–1986, pp. 35 and 36; see also Sylvester 2009, p. 130. 568 Sylvester 2009, p. 76. 569 RM98F105:146: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964. 570 RM98F8:14: photograph, Francis Bacon, John Edwards, c.1980s.

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97  Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1984, oil and aerosol paint on canvas. Triptych, each panel: 198.3 × 148 cm, private collection.

­ etermines that of present ones.571 Combinations with Freud’s body tend to recur as well. d In Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1984 Bacon linked photographs of Edwards with those of Lucian Freud (figure 97 to 99).572 Bacon and Freud had been close friends since about 1944,573 but were also life-long rivals for the rank of best contemporary British painter. It may have been this longstanding artistic competition which led to their falling out bitterly in the mid-1980s.574 Deakin’s photographs of Freud were last referenced in Study for a Self-Portrait – Triptych, 1985–1986. While earlier references to images of Freud may have been a sign of their affinity, in the genesis of Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards did Bacon address another impending loss? In other cases, the addition of an unrelated source may have provided just the visual and (hidden) narrative components which Bacon needed to adequately render a situation, attitude, or feeling. Self-Portrait, 1956 is the first painting labelled as such by the artist but ‘he “isn’t himself exactly”’,575 William Feaver felt (figure 100). Despite its explicit title, it is not a good likeness and it is mainly due to the title that we identify Self-Portrait as such. Sylvester described it as ‘Quasimodo-like’576 – did he know more about its genesis? For while 571 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 1152. 572 E.g. right panel: RM98F1A:87: John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964, and RM98F8:46: Francis Bacon, John Edwards, late 1970s to early 1980s. 573 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 106. 574 Cf. ibid. 575 William Feaver, ‘”A Name, A Wretched Picture & Worse Bust”: From Picasso’s Stalin to Warhol’s Mao’, in The Mirror & the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso, ed. by Paloma Alarcó and Malcolm Warner, exh. cat. Madrid: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid, 2007; Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum 2007 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 37–43, p. 39. 576 Sylvester 2000, p. 81.

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98  RM98F8:46: photograph, Francis Bacon, John Edwards, late 1970s to 1980s, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

99  RM98F1A:87: photograph, John ­Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964, collection: ­Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley stated that Self-Portrait was painted ‘out of his head’,577 in reality it draws on the heavily distorted face of Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo in William Dieterle’s black and white movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame from 1939 (figure 101).578 The film, based on Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel of the same name, was highly acclaimed at the time and received two Oscar nominations.579 No film still from the movie was found in Reece Mews but Bacon, a keen cinema-goer, may have watched the original in a movie theatre and could have found pictorial sources in a variety of magazines, for example Life magazine from 1940, which featured the article ‘Movie of the Week: the Hunchback of Notre Dame’580 together with a close-up shot of Charles Laughton as Quasimodo. There are several striking formal parallels between the face of the film character and Bacon’s depiction of himself. Both Quasimodo’s and Bacon’s right eye are smaller and are placed lower than the left eye. The right side of the face bulges out as if swollen while the left side appears to be sagging down. Both faces are flanked by big, protruding ears and are adorned with large noses. Bacon mounted the face of the fictional character on a seated, suited figure and seemed to have included a hidden clue to the fact that the figure is a montage: the face is separated from its environment by a white dotted outline enclosing parts of the right side of the head.

577 Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 101. 578 Black and white movie, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, dir. by William Dieterle, prod. by Pan Berman, Charles Laughton as ‘Quasimodo’ (RKO Radio Pictures, 1939). 579 Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris 1482 (Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1831), see IMDb, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (dir. by William Dieterle, 1939)’, IMDb, [n.d.] [accessed 5 July 2021]. 580 ‘Movie of the Week: The Hunchback of Notre Dame’, Life, 1 January 1940, 37–39.

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100  Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait, 1956, oil on canvas, 198 × 137 cm, collection: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth.

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101  film still, black and white movie, The ­­Hunchback of Notre Dame, dir. by ­William ­Dieterle, prod. by Pan Berman, Charles Laughton as ‘Quasimodo’ (RKO Radio Pictures, 1939).

And yet, the referencing of this source does not make Self-Portrait a painting about The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Clues towards the reasoning behind the choice of working material may be found in Bacon’s biography, and in particular in his relationship with Peter Lacy. Even though Lacy was for Bacon ‘the love of his life’,581 he also perceived their relationship as ‘a total disaster’582 and described his obsession with him as ‘like having some dreadful disease.’583 The men shared a sadomasochistic relationship, and Lacy’s neurotic nature and alcoholism often caused it to run out of control. David Herbert remembered of their time in Tangier that ‘Francis was always being beaten up’,584 and on at least one occasion Lacy threw Bacon out of a window.585 Bacon commented once that ‘Peter seems to be going a bit mad. I shall never be able to work with all this …’.586 Other statements and letters by the artist from that time testify to a drained, unhappy artist.587 The passionate relationship had turned into a burden. On the one hand, the formal adoption of Q ­ uasimodo’s distorted features could be a reference to the real-life physical injuries he suffered from Lacy. Bacon ‘frequently suffered beatings and drunken accidents’588 and directly referred to an injury in Self-Portrait with Injured Eye in 1972.589 On the other hand, the choice of source may also invoke his state of mind. For in his own misery Bacon may have felt close to a fictional character who suffered from unrequited love and loneliness. Considering that Bacon himself was whipped by Lacy,590 the scene where Quasimodo was flogged in public must have resonated with Bacon too. Thus, it is possible that both the image and the story

581 John Edwards to Martin Harrison, 27 February 2002, quoted from Harrison 2005a, p. 132. 582 Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), p. 14, quoted from Harrison 2005a, p. 132. 583 Ibid. 584 Farson 1993, p. 161. 585 Cf. Sinclair 1993, p. 140. 586 Farson 1993, p. 158. 587 Cf. transcript of letter to Robert Sainsbury, 1st June 1956, sent from 9 Overstrand Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, SW11, published in Peppiatt 2006a, p. 157; see also Farson 1993, p. 94. 588 Harrison 2005a, p. 122. 589 Cf. ibid., p. 122. 590 Cf. Farson 1993, p. 163.

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of the hunchback served for Bacon as a visual metaphor, as a vessel for certain emotions, which helped Bacon express how he felt and saw himself in that moment. Not all choices and combinations were equally emotionally charged, and may have been guided by more general aesthetic and conceptual concerns. Lisa Sainsbury sat for Bacon once a week between 1955 to 1957, except when Bacon was in Tangier, but only three of the original eight studies survived.591 As Sylvester recalled, ‘decisive work was done when the sitter was not present’.592 He underlined that Sketch for a Portrait of Lisa, 1955 ‘resembles the sitter faintly; it strongly resembles Queen Nefertiti. […] Like Giacometti in some of his sculptures of standing women, Bacon made the head of someone he knew coalesce with that of an ancient Egyptian sculpture in all its formal rigour and monumental grandeur.’593 Bacon owned an abundance of publications on Ancient Egypt which featured numerous reproductions of ancient Egyptian sculpture, and a black and white photographic reproduction of Queen Nefertiti’s bust was published, for instance, in Hermann Ranke’s The Art of Ancient Egypt. Architecture, Sculpture, Paintings, Applied Art from 1936.594 Egyptian art was the ‘only great body of work he [Bacon] admired consistently and without qualification’595 for its ‘ferocity, its understanding of death, its inner grandness.’596 In the right panel of Two Studies for Self-Portrait, 1977 a tubular transparent structure emerges from Bacon’s mouth and is jointed to a second smaller tube. Similar pictorial ele­ ments appear in Three Studies for a Portrait of Peter Beard, 1975 and Study for Portrait, 1976. They look like technical devices, resembling the glass pipes and working equipment of a chemistry laboratory. Andrew Forge described them as ‘mysterious circles and ellipses that often hover in front of the heads or are embedded in them as if by plastic surgery.’597 For him, they brought to mind ‘a lens – an intensifier of sight – and a hole drilled.’598 Bacon 591 Cf. Sylvester 2000, pp. 68–69; ‘On Sketch for a Portrait of Lisa’, 1955, in Francis Bacon, exh. cat. London: Tate Gallery, 1962 (London: Tate Gallery, 1962), no page numbers. 592 Sylvester 2000, pp. 68–69. 593 David Sylvester, ‘Bacon and Giacometti: Likeness and Difference’, in Trapping Appearance: Portraits by Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti from the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, exh. cat. Norwich: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 1996 (Norwich: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 1996), pp. 5–10, p. 10. 594 For example, RM98F1A:213:61: Cyril Aldred, The Development of Ancient Egyptian Art (London: Alec Tiranti, 1952), RM98F105:91: Kurt Lange, König Echnaton und die Amarna-Zeit: Die Geschichte eines Gottkünders (Munich: Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliches Lichtbild, 1951), RM98F130:167: photograph, mounted on torn leaf, Francis Bacon, Peter Lacy, c. early 1950s, William S. Smith, History of Egyptian Sculpture and Painting, published on behalf of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (London: The Oxford University Press, Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1949); RM98F22:10: Hermann Ranke, The Art of Ancient Egypt. Architecture, Sculpture, Paintings, Applied Art (Vienna: Phaidon Press, 1936; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936), plate 130. The plate in question shows signs of blue and green fingerprints reminiscent of the palette of the Lisa Sainsbury paintings. 595 Melvyn Bragg, ‘Melvyn Bragg: My friend Francis Bacon, possessed by devils’, The Telegraph, 15 November 2013 [accessed 31 July 2021]. 596 Ibid. 597 Forge 1985, p. 29. 598 Ibid.

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gave hints to their origin and the reason for employing them, stating that ‘[...] there was a book that I bought years and years ago somewhere of images of filters – they were just filters of different kinds of liquids, but the way they were formed suggested all sorts of ways in which I could use the human body (after all, the human body is in a sense a filter, apart from its other attributes)’.599 The remaining collection of books in Reece Mews has not yet delivered a convincing direct source. The elliptical elements, which can, for example, be seen in Three Studies for a Portrait, 1976, may be transformed versions of the surgical instruments from the gruesome photographs of wounded WWI soldiers published in books such as Ernst Friedrich’s book War against War! 600 and may have fulfilled a similar function. The fact that we can now see that disparate images were incorporated, and how, proves that Bacon’s portraits were not conceptualised with a definite, definable and static identity in mind. For, regardless of the individual reasons, merging base images of different individuals or other unrelated material in a portrait is the antithesis not only of a traditional understanding of portraiture but also of the traditional use of photographs in relation to the genre. Painting a portrait after the image of an unrelated fictional or unrelated real person must take away from the accurate capturing of the intended sitter’s individual identity and makes the portrait a non-exclusive plurality, in which several personalities share the same pictorial space, mingle, merge, and compete with each other. Sometimes, a hint to the identity of a figure is first disguised by the use of photographs, but is then reaffirmed by very small and private pictorial ciphers. The face of the figure in the left panel of In Memory of George Dyer, 1971 is neither that of the wrestler from A Pictorial History of Wrestling, nor is it Dyer’s, but the canvas includes an unexpected, hitherto unnoticed reference to the identity of its subject, which could only be decrypted with the help of an unpublished part of a conversation he held with Sylvester: a small white ball floating in a fleshy puddle in front of the figure. Bacon explained that ‘the image in the centre [of In Memory of George Dyer] is very much a profile of George unlocking the door and this one [the left panel] – he was very keen on games in the gesture of catching some kind of ball or something like that’.601 If we accept the reading of such a ball as an attribute of Dyer, Two Studies from the Human Body, 1974–1975 may in an earlier state have been intended to be a commemoration of Dyer, too, when it featured a single figure reaching for another small ball on the ground.602 Thus, as this example illustrates, Bacon’s figures and sceneries are not entirely bereft of all meaning. Subtle, fine, highly personal symbols imbue his figures with a biographical meaning, which the artist was not always willing to disclose.

599 Sylvester 2009, p. 199. 600 Ernst Friedrich, War against War! (London: Journeyman Press, 1987), p. 232: ‘War agrees with me like a stay at a health resort’, p. 231: ‘Many operations have to be carried out in full consciousness (without any narcotic or anaesthetic)’. 601 HKA: TGA200816/4/2/9 Folder 6, Interview IX 1984–1986 pp. 155–156. 602 Two Studies from the Human Body, 1974–1975, underwent many considerable changes and the state discussed here is only known from a photograph by Peter Beard from 1974 which is illustrated in ­Harrison 2005b, p. 94; see also Harrison 2016a, p. 1068.

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Constructions Bacon’s ideas and execution of portraiture are consistent with the dismissal of traditional concepts of identity and mimesis of his avant-garde predecessors and modern contemporaries. He implemented these during the painting process itself, but Bacon also used his preparatory and appropriation practice from photography to deconstruct figuration and blur identity. On the other hand, the unexpected, highly personal choice and combination of source imagery also helped Bacon to express feelings and attitudes towards the sitter and better trap their appearance. Malcolm Warner explained how portraits in the past could convey the impression of being in the presence of the sitter from that time.603 According to him, this feeling was provoked despite the fact that ‘we may know that all art is artifice and not to be confused with reality in the raw, but before the work of a skilled portraitist we seem to suspend disbelief.’604 Bacon radically stripped away the illusion and laid bare the artificiality of the genre. What a portrait is, is first and foremost determined by the artist, and the objectivity of the likeness is always counteracted by the artist’s own imago.605 Since Bacon cancelled out the presence and potential input of the sitter in favour of a full reliance on photographs picked and combined according to his own feelings, experiences, and attitudes, in Bacon’s case the painter’s influence is extremely high. So Bacon is what we see, perhaps more so than the subject. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘the sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.’606

3.4. Colour and Photography – ‘Colour is a most mysterious thing’ ‘Colour is a most mysterious thing, the more you work, the more mysterious it is’607 Bacon professed to appreciate artists such as Diego Velázquez, Claude Monet, Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri Matisse for their use of colour,608 but true to his typical evasive manner and of a piece with his claim that his iconography was based on principles of chance, he contended that the actual hues in his work were ‘all from myself’.609 When asked what had motivated the change from the darker schemes of the 1950s 603 Cf. Warner 2007, p. 17. 604 Ibid., p. 17. 605 Cf. Wolfgang Büche, ‘Das Porträt – Schlüssel zum Wesen des Menschen?’, in Das Andere Ich: Porträts 1900–1950, ed. by Wolfgang Büche and Ines Janet Engelmann, exh. cat. Halle: Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, Landeskunstmuseum Sachsen-Anhalt, 2003 (Halle: Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, 2003), pp. 7–13, here pp. 7–8, pp. 12–13. 606 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. by Joseph Bristow, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), III, p. 7. 607 Davies H. M. 2009, p. 100. 608 Cf. ibid. 609 Cf. ibid, p. 98.

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to the brighter hues of the 1960s, he shrugged the question off by claiming it was just ‘boredom’.610 As with every aspect of his working process, here, too, Bacon held his cards close to his chest. Yet critics have argued that his colour schemes reflect a whole array of influences ranging from contemporary men’s fashion,611 his own make-up,612 travels to ­Africa,613 to art historical predecessors such as Roy de Maistre and Edgar Degas.614 A careful examination of the studio material shows that it is imperative to include in the canon of colour references the printed material Bacon worked from. The dynamics in the appropriation of pre-existing hues and tones, as is the case with the pictorial transformation of shapes and forms, support the painting’s removal from the naturalistic rendering of reality. As such, they are at least partly responsible for a distinct characteristic of Bacon’s palette, the artificiality of his colour schemes.615 Bacon’s colour schemes over the decades are increasingly dominated by the ever more nondescript colour fields in the background. They often come in intense, over-saturated, garish tones and colour combinations. In After Muybridge – Woman Emptying a Bowl of Water and Paralytic Child on All Fours, 1965 a bright red, orange, and pink clash in the background, and ‘Seated Figure’, c.1984 is entirely dominated by a homogenous pink background. While sometimes intense colours are offset with more neutral beiges or black, for example in Lying Figure, 1966 and Two Studies from the Human Body, 1974–1975, Bacon’s colour schemes are anything but natural. Bacon’s colours are also artificial in the sense that they often do not, in relation to the figure or object they are assigned to, sustain the impression that they reproduce any local colour from the natural world. For example, Lying Figure, 1959 is entirely made out of morbid light and darker greens, yellows, some reds and whites. While from around 1960 onwards Bacon predominantly uses variations of pale pinks to simulate the colour of skin for his figures and portraits, these colours are often interrupted by unrelated hues. Bacon for instance used a dark green to paint the area underneath the sitter’s eye as well as parts of the forehead in Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1967. This of course tallies with the artistic remit Bacon claimed for his work. He repeatedly emphasised that his painting was driven by the urge to avoid ‘illustration’,616 which he described as ‘second-hand’,617 but that instead ‘reality in art is something profoundly artificial’618 which needs to be ‘re-created’.619 Such unusual yet highly effective unnatural colour schemes have in the past been related to photography. ‘Oscillating as he [Bacon] does in his paintings between very calm and neutral colour and colour of the utmost violence, he finds in the heightened and falsified 610 Sylvester 2009, p. 12. 611 Cf. Alistair O’Neill, ‘Available in an Array of Colours’, Visual Culture in Britain, 10.3 (2009), 271–291. 612 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 93. 613 Cf. Sylvester 2000, p. 81 and p. 87. 614 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 28, p. 41. 615 Cf. Deleuze 2008, p. xiv. 616 Sylvester 2009, p. 172. 617 Ibid. 618 Ibid. 619 Ibid.

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colour of photography a stimulus more potent than that which other peoples’ paintings can normally offer,’620 John Russell suggested in 1971, which is, as we will see, confirmed by the study of Bacon’s source material and its relation to his art. The artificiality ascribed to his colours, however, goes much deeper and is much more profound than may be guessed from the unusual palette of his subjects or the paintings in their entirety. The rupture with naturalism goes beyond the borrowing of the bright distended colours in a found image, as emerges when we look closely at the relationship between an appropriated form and its colour. The Blue Veil Bacon’s extensive collection of printed matter offered ample inspiration for marvellous colours from the most diverse fields. The book Roses of the World in Color621 from 1937 featured beautiful hand-tinted photographic illustrations of blossoms, from a lush deep blood red to a crisp snow-white and, judging from the numerous ripped out, mounted, and manipulated pages, the varying shades of inflamed red skin in the otherwise often nondescript medical photographs in An Atlas of Regional Dermatology622 published in 1955 was a much-appreciated source. Bacon enthused about the magnificent hues of the hand-­ coloured illustrations of diseases of the mouth, in Ludwig Grünwald’s Atlas-Manuel des Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses Nasales.623 The colours found in his working documents were, as we will see, for Bacon not only a permanent and fruitful source of inspiration in a general sense, but single mechanical reproductions were concrete starting points for specific colours in his paintings. The idea that photography and printed matter might have played a role in Bacon’s colour choices is not new and generic links to photography, film, and print media in colour schemes of particular periods and groups of works have been drawn in the past. The dark hues of the early 1950s, for example, have repeatedly been linked to the shades of the monochrome newspaper photographs of the time624 while the change towards brighter hues around the end of the decade may – contrary to Bacon’s denial quoted above – have been related to a shift in the press landscape, which during that time became increasingly colourful.625 Such colour changes should, however, not only be accounted for by correspondences with and the careful absorption of the media landscape. They were also rooted in the careful study and consultation of the material in the studio. For instance, Three Studies of the Human Head, 1953 not only references the smudgy and grainy monochrome news images

620 Russell John 2001, p. 66; cf. also Harrison 2005a, p. 107. 621 RM98F105:93: J. Horace McFarland, Roses of the World in Color (London: Cassell, 1937), pp. 163–164, ‘The Polyantha Rose, Mlle. Cécile Brunner’. 622 RM98F8:9ver: G. H. Percival and T.C. Dodds, An Atlas of Regional Dermatology (Edinburgh: E. and S. Livingstone, 1955). 623 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 35; Grünwald 1903, see RM98F105:140J. 624 Cf. e.g. Sylvester 1952, p. 28. 625 Cf. Lawrence Alloway, ‘Francis Bacon’, Art International, 4.2-3 (1960), 62–63, p. 62.

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of the early 1950s generically, the right panel is in fact directly informed by a monochrome photograph of Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent published in Time magazine on 20 July 1953, a picture Bacon had in the studio.626 The page in question is dog-eared and spotted with coloured fingerprints. The first colour supplement of the Sunday Times627 from February 1962 was found in Reece Mews, too, and an image of Hitler from a colour feature on the Nazi regime in it fed into the centre panel of Crucifixion, 1965.628 The now destroyed Portrait of George Dyer and Lucian Freud, 1967629 shows Bacon’s lover and his painter-friend sharing a bench in front of a thick blue curtain (plate XXXVI). Both heads are painted from multiple viewpoints so that they give the impression of turning towards and away from each other, as in an animated conversation. They may have already enjoyed each other’s company for a while since the ashtray on the glass table in front of them is well-filled. Portrait of George Dyer and Lucian Freud is unusually situational and one of but a few canvases in Bacon’s oeuvre which convincingly portrays a relationship between two figures. Only the cat, which as a matter of course is positioned on a plinth in the lower left corner without any obvious function in the scenery, adds a familiar element of enigma and disorder to the work. References to pre-existing imagery are known for the representations of Freud and the 630 cat, but the following considerations will focus on the blue veil in the background. While integrating a curtain might be a self-referential nod to its frequent appearance in earlier works such as Study from the Human Body, 1949 and Study after Velázquez II, 1950, it is in this case constructed from photographic source material. For the correspondences in the arrangement of folds, its structure was likely adopted from a black and white press photograph of Adolf Hitler meeting Ion Antonescu in 1940, that Bacon still owned in 1966 but which is lost today (plate XVIII).631 Since this image is monochrome it cannot have inspired the colour of the curtain on the canvas. Instead, the distinct shade of dark blue in the painting, mingled and offset with black and grey tones, was adopted from a different image, which, apart from the fact that both feature heads of state, is unrelated to the first one in terms of the actual subject, narrative, and date. It derives from a full-page colour photographic reproduction of King Hussein of Jordan published in Paris Match magazine in 1966, which the artist detached from its source and glued onto a cardboard support

626 Cf. Günther 2011, p. 44 and 45, RM98F248:10: TIME, the weekly newspaper, Atlantic Edition, 62.3 (20 July 1953), p. 25. 627 RM98F114:140: fragment of leaf, mounted on cardboard, Sunday Times Colour Section, 18 February 1962, p. 18. 628 Colour photographic illustration of a Nazi rally in Nuremberg, 1938, cf. Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no.53, no page numbers. 629 Cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 856. 630 RM98F130:154: Richard Bennett, A Picture of the Twenties (London: Vista Books, 1961), p. 35; RM98F16:298: John Deakin, Lucian Freud, c.1964. 631 The leaf is now lost but can be seen in Bacon’s studio in Sunday Night Francis Bacon 1966. The page comes from Picture Post, 8 February 1941, pp. 20–21, ‘The Man on the Spot: Antonescu before Hitler and his Gang’.

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(plate XXXVII).632 The picture shows the king and his advisor at a press conference sitting on a podium behind a table filled with microphones. Both the news picture and the painting are linked by capturing a similar situation with two seated male protagonists; the one on the left with his arms spread and the other with folded hands, which may have induced Bacon to portray his friends in similar postures. Most importantly, the back wall of the room in the photograph is embellished with a curtain of the exact same colour blue as the one in Portrait of George Dyer and Lucian Freud. The left edge of the studio item is blotched with blue fingerprints in the same shade of blue of both the drapery in the photograph and that on the canvas, which suggests that Bacon held it near at hand while painting Portrait of George Dyer and Lucian Freud. Additionally, smudgy fingerprints on the cardboard in the distinct greenish-blue of the table in the foreground support the idea that this particular working document played a decisive role in its planning and execution. Bacon imitated the exact tone of the blue in a pre-existing image for the oil blend he used in Portrait of George Dyer and Lucian Freud. The hue on the canvas thus certainly did not arise accidentally, nor did it come, as the artist stated, from ‘himself’633, but instead was predefined by a photographic reproduction from his image bank. Marks in the same blue can be found on the torn leaf from A Picture of the Twenties depicting the cat.634 Multi-Coloured Breadcrumbs Even more so than with figures and spatial settings, it is difficult to establish a reliable link between a colour in a working document and a painted subject. This is complicated by the specifics of Bacon’s colour appropriations, in which the source of colour and form do not necessarily match. The correspondences between a pre-existing colour from a book and a subject on the canvas may be purely coincidental. And yet, manipulations of the studio items by the artist and traces of the working process on others confirm Bacon’s targeted interest in specific colours and also bear testimony to his intense engagement with and handling of the material. When a torn leaf, a battered book, and a crumpled photograph lay in the path of the painter while he was painting, they were sure to end up randomly blotted with paint. Yet like the fingerprints on the mounted leaf featuring King Hussein of Jordan, paint marks on other working documents suggest a targeted appropriation process, for their colour also matches the hues on the image they were found on. For instance, a torn page from an article on the 1976 movie Rocky from The Sunday Times Magazine, 1977635 shows paint marks in light blue and wine red, corresponding with the hues of the jumpers Rocky and his coach 632 RM98BC39: torn leaf, mounted on support, Paris Match, 16 December 1966, p. 55, illustration from article ‘Roi, ce n’est pas un job de tout repos’. 633 Davies H. M. 2009, p. 98. 634 RM98F130:154: Richard Bennett, A Picture of the Twenties (London: Vista Books, 1961), p. 35. 635 RM98F114:25: torn leaf, Sunday Times Magazine, 20 March 1977, colour photographic illustration of Sylvester Stallone as ‘Rocky’, film still from Rocky, dir. by John G. Avildsen, prod. by Irwin Winkler,

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wore in the printed colour reproductions of stills from the film (plate XXXIX). Likewise, blots in cobalt blue, a rusty orange, and a fleshy pink on a loose leaf with a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait, 1889 from Wilhelm Uhde’s monograph on the artist636 bear a striking resemblance to the colours of the Dutch artist’s coat, hair, and flesh tones in the painting (plate XL). The interest in these specific items cannot conclusively be related to a concrete painting, and they might have been consulted for now destroyed works, early versions of paintings, or were simply dismissed at some point. However, the coherences between the paint traces on the studio material and the colours in a magazine or book indicate a principle working method in which Bacon took the printed colour as a prototype for his oil paint or pastel blend. The idea that Bacon harked back to colour he found in photographic or other printed material is especially convincing when it concerns a mixed colour, which required careful reconstruction by the artist, such as the green blue of the curtain behind King Hussein of Jordan. In other cases, Bacon drew a square around a shade of dark blue on a colour chart by Carson Paints637 while another one by Dulux638 with orange hues shows traces of precise vertical folding which suggests that he wanted to mark the brightest shade, possibly as a reminder for later purchase and use (plate XLI). Thus, those colours, too, were not bought and used on a whim. In contrast to the appropriation of pictorial elements such as spatial settings and figures, the manipulation of the source material only played a minor role when Bacon borrowed a pre-existing colour. Material which contained hues that attracted the artist’s attention might have been singled out by mounting torn leaves on a support, and hues he found particularly interesting were encircled, as described above. The found colour itself, however, was not altered in a manner that created a novel tone or shade – the way folding, cutting, and ripping reformulated a shape. It was not, for example, overpainted, with a thin transparent wash of paint, to change its tone or depth. The availability of pre-existing colours, however, offered convenient ways to try and rehearse colour combinations. While Bacon described how he ‘tried out colours’639 on his famously paint-blotted walls he might well, though there is no direct evidence for this approach, have held different items with different colours next to each other to observe and evaluate how their colours worked together. He may similarly have combined the printed sources for a monochrome form with a potentially suitable colour on another item. Random paint blotches on items may also have triggered ideas for novel combinations, for example deep blue blots on a reproduction of the right panel of his own Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus,

Robert Chartoff, (Chartoff-Winkler Productions, 1976), page has accretions of orange, black and red paint and patterned imprint (rubber gloves) in black paint. Rest of magazine is RM98F110:16. 636 RM98F104:70: torn leaf, Wilhelm Uhde, Van Gogh, rev. and enl. edn (Oxford: Phaidon, 1981), with a reproduction of Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889. 637 RM98F21:79: colour chart, Carson Paints, circle drawn around one colour. 638 RM98F108:33A: Dulux colour chart ’orange’, folded. 639 Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985.

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1981.640 The fact that Bacon used whatever was available as an ad hoc palette, for instance the cover of the book Off – Highway Trucks off the Road, 1985641 on which he mixed a pale pink on top of the yellow printed background with an illustration of a red truck, also played a role. Sometimes, new colour combinations appeared – or may even have been rehearsed – in a more targeted way altogether. The lower part of a photographic reproduction of ­Bacon’s own Study for Crouching Nude, 1952642 was overpainted in a green-grey ­colour which not only alters the spatial arrangement of the painting but its colour scheme too. Technical examinations of Bacon’s paintings revealed that after he switched to working on the unprimed side of the canvas in the late 1940s, he committed to a certain colour at an early stage of the painting process. The rough sketches Bacon executed on the canvas to fix a general idea of the composition were executed in black paint but sometimes, as Joanna Shepard pointed out, the colour corresponded to that of the form he painted over those marks.643 Bacon thus ‘planned the colours he would subsequently apply’,644 which means that if those colours referred to a pre-existing tone from a torn book page or newspaper cutting, Bacon chose that item before the actual painting process started.645 Paint it Black As was the case within the adoption of formal elements, loose patterns and intuitive me­ thod­ologies can be identified in Bacon’s borrowings of colours from pre-existing material. In the more conventional appropriations, the colour was lifted along with the shape. The intense yellow and the outline of the rose in Painting 1946, 1946, for example, both come from the same tinted reproduction of the hybrid tea rose ‘Amelia Earhart’.646 As we have seen in the previous chapters, Bacon’s appropriation process is in its nature complex and multi-layered. Often, there is more than one pictorial reference for a painting or even a single subject, and a number of disparate shapes, forms, and spatial settings are combined in one work. This process of fragmentation, re-assembling, and mingling is continued in how colour is appropriated.

640 RM98F8:86: torn leaf, in: Francis Bacon, exh. cat. (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1985; Berlin: National­galerie, 1986), German edition, colour illustration of Francis Bacon’s Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981, ill. no. 110. 641 RM98F130:46: torn cover of C. J. Fraser, Off-Highway Trucks of the Road, Including Highway Locomotives and Outback Trucking in Australia (Sparkford: Haynes Publishing, 1985); cf. Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no.63, no page numbers. 642 RM98F1:18: torn leaf, lower part overpainted with grey paint, Ronald Alley and John Rothenstein, Francis Bacon. Catalogue Raisonné and Documentation (London: Thames & Hudson, 1964), pp.57–58, p.57: colour reproduction, Francis Bacon, Study for Crouching Nude, 1952. 643 Cf. Shepard 2009, p. 160. 644 Ibid. 645 Ibid. 646 Günther 2011, p. 9; the colour of the chicken in ‘Chicken’, 1982 matches the colour of the plucked bird depicted in the photographic reproduction from RM98F108:81: Terence and Caroline Conran, The Cook Book: The Complete Guide to Selecting, Preparing and Presenting Good Food (London: Mitchell Beazley, 1980), p. 84, ’Poultry’, where its shape derives from, cf. Harrison 2008b, p. 8.

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Just as figure and spatial setting usually came from different pre-existing material, colour and form are often borrowed independently from each other from different source items. This mechanism is especially palpable in relation to Bacon’s black and white sources of inspiration. The photographic material Bacon collected comes almost exclusively in black and white, amongst them some of his most fertile and consistently used pictorial starting points: John Deakin’s portrait photographs, Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic motion studies, Picture Post magazine, K.C. Clark’s Positioning in Radiography, and Albert von Schrenck-Notzing’s Phenomena of Materialisation. For example, 300 out of the around 4000 flat items unearthed from the studio are Deakin’s predominantly black and white photo­graphs and around 120 are either books from or about Muybridge, leaves torn from the books, or fragments of pages, which are all monochrome. While, of course, Bacon knew the subjects of Deakin’s photographs well in the flesh, and when working in the studio without the sitters present may have been able to re-create the tone of their complexion and hues of their clothes from memory, in most other cases this was not possible. For the artist himself did not and could not know the colour of, for example, the curtain in the room where Hitler and Antonescu met because he did not witness the event. Thus, from the monochrome photographic image, it was simply impossible for Bacon to know the exact local colour of the subject so that it was also impossible to faithfully render it. The connection to illustration was a priori cut off. From the late 1940s to the mid-1950s Bacon painted mostly, but not slavishly, in dark and subdued hues of grey, dark blue, and black, which chimed with his own monochrome source material and contemporary media in general. Whenever during that period, or outside of it, he wanted to introduce other colours many of his pictorial starting points forced Bacon to generate colour schemes for originally monochrome forms and shapes, reminiscent of David Sylvester relating the brighter elements in his works of the early 1950s to the process of ‘tinting a photograph.’647 Instead of attempting to simulate any presumed local colours of the appropriated black and white subject, much suggests that in those cases, Bacon often drew inspiration from colour schemes from separate unrelated images. The curtain in Portrait of George Dyer and Lucian Freud is a case in point. Its colour and form stem from different images and were creatively combined during the transformation process from printed to painted subject. Another example is Two Figures in a Room, 1959 (plate XLIII). The shapes and positioning of both the stooping and the lying nude are based, amongst other sources, on a black and white press photograph of a camera man being attacked by a lion in the savannah, which was published in Picture Post in 1947 (figure 40).648 Two Figures in a Room, 1959 is dominated by unexpected iridescent shades of red and green, also applied to the two eponymous figures. The colours are quite unrelated to the

647 Sylvester 1952, p. 28. 648 Illustration from ‘Mauled by a Lion in Africa’, in Picture Post, 9 August 1947, p. 13: ‘The Cameraman Loses Consciousness’, see Martin Hammer, ‘Francis Bacon: Back to Degas’, Rothenstein Lecture 2011, pubd. in Tate Papers, 17 (Spring 2012).

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presumed tones of the original scene, which makes this a prime example of an artificial colour scheme. Yet the unnatural palette did not originate from Bacon’s imagination but this precise colour scheme comes from a publication found in Reece Mews. Harrison suggested that the unusual hues are strongly reminiscent of the red and green 3-D printing which was popular during the 1950s649 and several torn out, manipulated, and paint-spattered leaves from J.E. Burns 3-D children’s book Adventures in Wildest Africa: On a Big Game Hunting Expedition published in 1949, which were posthumously unearthed from Reece Mews,650 confirm Bacon’s interest in and knowledge of this printing technique. A particularly daubed and worn loose page shows, amongst some other colours, blots in the exact rusty red of the reproduction which echoes in the foreground and parts of the figure in the painting, as well as the distinct shade of green of the printed page which informed the railing and some areas of the two figures on the canvas (plate XLIV).651 Blots of a deep purple matching the hue Bacon used to offset the red of the ground can be found on that item too. Thus, this particular leaf may have served as point of departure for the colour scheme of Two Figures in a Room. Interestingly, in this instance the sources which informed shape and colour are thematically related: both deal with Africa and Big Game Hunting. This might have led Bacon to combine them – such clear narrative relationships cannot always be established, however. Typically, neither context is addressed in the painting, which instead shows the intimate love play between two nude figures. In many cases, the dissociation of shape and colour was predetermined by the black and white source material, and to find a new colour for a subject in a painting was a necessity as much as a choice. While this might initially have posed a challenge, it probably soon developed into a well-defined approach that was embraced and nurtured. Just because a pictorial reference came from a colour illustration this did not automatically mean that its hues were adopted one-on-one. For example, Bacon mounted a ‘nondescript yet curiously suggestive’652 fragment from the French magazine Chroniques de l’Art Vivant from 1979 on a cardboard support (plate XLV).653 It shows a corridor with a door and some pipes and cable conduits on the wall and ceiling. The entire page is printed in variations of a distinct shade of pale lilac and white, and this particular hue features in several paintings, including two works from 1973, both entitled Self-Portrait (plate XLVI).654 And yet, while the pictorial elements such as the light-switch housing and cable conduit informed those same features 649 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 150. 650 For example RM98BC33: torn leaf, J. E. Burns, Adventures in Wildest Africa: On a Big Game Hunting ­Expedition (London: Walker & Sons, 1949), p. 14, and RM98F16:209E: torn leaf, J. E. Burns, A ­ dventures in Wildest Africa: On a Big Game Hunting Expedition (London: Walker & Sons, 1949), p. 18, see H ­ arrison and Daniels 2008, comment no.152–153, no page numbers. 651 RM98F16:209E: torn leaf, J. E. Burns, Adventures in Wildest Africa: On a Big Game Hunting Expedition (London: Walker & Sons, 1949), p. 18. The green component has faded considerably in the studio item but is visible in reference copies of the publication. 652 Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no.120, no page numbers. 653 RM98F1A:73: fragment of cover, mounted on support, Chroniques de l’Art Vivant, 39, Paris 1973. 654 Cf. Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no.120, no page numbers.

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in Triptych May–June, 1973655 the eerie pale purple of the photographic reproduction does not appear in the painting. In terms of how colour was referenced, the same source could even inform different paintings in a different manner. A cut-out of Dyer’s profile from a colour photographic print656 informed both Figure Writing Reflected in a Mirror, 1976 and Painting, 1978. While in the latter the colour of Dyer’s hair, which appears in the photograph as reddish-brown, was adopted faithfully, in the first Bacon not only equipped the figure with a slightly altered hairdo, he also changed its colour to black. Sometimes a subject from a colour source was turned into a monochrome painted motif, for instance when Bacon ignored the soft flesh tones of the erotic illustration of a gardener from Illustrierte Sittengeschichte in favour of the grisaille tones typical for the sculpturesque creatures of that period, as he metamorphosed the gardener into the creature in Figure Getting out of a Car, c.1944.657 Thus detaching form and a colour during the appropriation process was probably a method deliberately applied by Bacon. As a consequence, his art made an important step away from illustration because by choosing a colour from another, entirely unrelated source, Bacon added a layer of artificiality – non-naturalism – to a subject, which may already have been the result of a variety of sources mixed and mingled to form a new pictorial element, far removed from the original context of the single image. The most obvious point of contact between the artificial hues in Bacon’s art and the working material in the studio lies in the appropriation of colours which were themselves artificial. Early mainstream colour printing in books and magazines often did not reproduce the colour of the depicted subject faithfully.658 A torn leaf from Living Birds of the World659 with exotic parrots in over-saturated hues of orange and blue on a vibrant blue background in a colour photographic print found in Bacon’s studio is a case in point. In its heightened intensity it reminds us of paintings such as the aforementioned After Muybridge – Woman Emptying a Bowl of Water and Paralytic Child on All Fours. While the hues on this page and many other colours in Bacon’s image bank are falsified, some are entirely fabricated and thus truly artificial. Even those most unnatural tones were embraced and borrowed by ­Bacon. The red and green images in Burn’s Adventures in Wildest Africa, which so distinctively informed Two Figures in a Room, are in fact the result of an anaglyph printing technique, in which an image in red and one taken from a slightly different angle in green were printed on top of each other, so that the human eye would perceive a three-­dimensional ­impression

655 Cf. ibid. 656 RM98F107:28: printed colour documentary film stock, stencil, George Dyer, 1960s. Two layers of paint, one red, another black, follow the circumference of the cut-out. There are also four small holes (probably from a drawing pin) at the top edge. 657 RM98F136:17: Eduard Fuchs, Illustrierte Sittengeschichte, II, ‘Die Galante Zeit’ (Munich: Albert Langen, 1909), colour plate ‘Die Gärtnerin. Galanter französischer Farbstich von Moret nach Aug. De Saint-­ Aubin’, between pp. 200–201, cf. Günther 2011, pp. 6–7. 658 Cf. Russell John 2001, p. 66; cf. also Harrison 2005a, p. 107. 659 RM98F125:29: torn leaf, E. Thomas Gillard, Living Birds of the World (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958), ill. nos.85–87.

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of the printed image when seeing it through the red and green ‘wonder ­spectacles’660 which came with the publication. Such 3D images and movies were highly popular during the 1950s.661 The colours in Two Figures in a Room are thus twice removed from naturalistic representation. First, they do not come from the same source as the figures and second, they come from a source which itself did not attempt to reproduce the natural colours of the subject in print, but created an artificial colour scheme based on a scientific principle. The fragment from Chroniques de l’Art Vivant is another example. The entire page is printed in variations of a distinct shade of pale lilac and white, which made a lasting impression on Bacon – equally strong, if not stronger, as that of its figurative elements.662 The artist made a deliberate choice not to paint his subjects in more naturalistic colours or to search for colour inspiration closer to a presumed local colour, but instead decided to appropriate the fabricated colours offered by found printed matter. Spreading Out Colour and form often originated from separate source images but, more than that, colours from pre-existing images also infused formal elements and parts of the painting that had no relation to the source image’s original subject. On a regular basis, a specific colour from a specific source left the restrictions of its original subject to infiltrate formally unrelated elements of the composition, often determining the overall colour scheme of a work. For instance, the greenish blue of the curtain from the photograph of King Hussein of Jordan not only influenced the tone of the curtain in the painting, but it echoes in the bench, Dyer’s suit, and the table. It fed into Freud’s shoe and even the cat in the foreground. The same mechanism can be traced in ‘Street Scene (with Car in Distance)’, 1988 which was inspired by a colour press photograph featuring a red van,663 whose exact tone not only determines the colour of the vehicle in the painting but also dominates the homogenous empty red background. The purple of the torn and mounted fragment from the cover of Chroniques de l’Art Vivant mentioned above likewise inspired more, and different, formal elements than offered by the pre-existing image in the two self-portraits from 1973. In these self-portraits, the distinct colour of the magazine cover informed not only what would have been the obvious choices: cables, light switches, a door, and a corridor. It also reverberates in new elements. Self-Portrait, 1973, (73-10) shows Bacon sitting in the centre of a room with his arms wrapped around his left leg. The colour of the magazine appears in the cable and the doorframe and informed the undistinguished void behind the doorway framing the seated figure, as may be expected from the printed photograph. However, parts of the head are tinted in that hue, too, just like the shadow, or puddle of transparent liquid, underneath the 660 Cf. Gary Waldman, Introduction to Light: The Physics of Light, Vision, and Colour (Great Britain: Dover Publications, 2002), pp. 152–155. 661 Cf. ibid., p. 153. 662 Cf. Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no.120, no page numbers. 663 RM98F130:166: fragment of leaf, mounted on cardboard, The Illustrated London News, 268.6986.2 (September 1980), p. 37.

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table. The mounted fragment from the studio shows pale-lilac paint marks exactly matching the colour on the photographic illustration, which again shows that Bacon must have aimed to reproduce this particular shade in oil paint. The marks also show that he kept the mounted leaf close by while working on Self-Portrait. In some cases, there is no pictorial parallel between the subject related to the source colour and the painted form. The shade of lilac from Chroniques de l’Art Vivant also features in the second Self-Portrait of 1973, in which Bacon rests his arm on a washbasin. Bacon’s posture and the sink both derive from a black and white portrait photograph of the artist taken by Peter Stark in Reece Mews,664 which was combined with the colour lifted from the curious photo of a deserted corridor. Crucially here, too, the purple is used in a variety of elements. These include the cable of the light bulb, its shadow, the sink, and what appears to be Bacon’s own shadow on the sink; none of these forms originate in the source image from Chroniques de l’Art Vivant. A torn out leaf from Mick Jagger in His Own Words665 with a full page portrait of the charismatic lead singer was taken as inspiration for the likeness in the right panel of Three Studies for a Portrait (Mick Jagger), 1982 (plate XLVII and XLIX) but the black and white photographic reproduction cannot have provided the starting point for the radiant orange of the background.666 Pigment marks of the same vibrant hue as in the painting on the black and white reproduction emphasise the discrepancy but also indicate an involvement of the leaf in the creation of the commissioned portrait. This striking orange, Bacon’s ‘favourite colour’,667 is a recurring hue in his oeuvre and had already featured prominently in works such as Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 and Triptych – Studies from the Human Body, 1970. It is nevertheless equally conceivable that on this occasion other material on Jagger in the studio fed into his decision to paint the background orange. The remainders of the book Mick Jagger in His Own Words minus the torn leaves were found in Reece Mews too.668 The back cover of the book, of which Bacon tore more than half off, shows a colour photographic reproduction of Jagger on stage wearing a shirt in the same orange as the background of the triptych (plate XLVIII). The page underneath, which is now immediately visible because parts of the cover are missing, again shows traces of orange pigment matching Jagger’s shirt and the colour of the finished painting, which strongly links this item to the triptych. Thus the subject wearing a bright orange shirt in this photographic reproduction might well have stimulated the choice of colour for the canvas. Bacon detached the hues from any association with the subject of the original image but used them as an abstract starting point for his individual creative venture and a personal interpretation of his sources. They are now employed purely as compositional tools which elegantly unify his work on the canvas. 664 RM98F112:02: Peter Stark, Francis Bacon in Reece Mews, 1975–1977. 665 RM98F235:1: Barry Miles and Mick Jagger, Mick Jagger in His Own Words (London: Omnibus, 1982), p. 1. 666 Cf. Günther 2011, pp. 28 and 29. 667 Archimbaud 2010, p. 170. 668 RM98F94:3: Barry Miles and Mick Jagger, Mick Jagger in His Own Words (London: Omnibus, 1982).

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The Pope’s True Colours A close study of their inherent dynamics shows that in Bacon’s appropriations often colour and form were lifted from separate sources, which may have been a method deliberately employed to avoid illustration in his art. The fact that we now know that form and tone do not need to have been borrowed in tandem puts a new complexion on one of the most prominent issues in Bacon studies regarding the colour of a subject. Bacon’s dependency on photographic source material has long been held responsible for an alleged error in the colour scheme of one of his best-known groups of works. Between 1946 and 1971 Bacon painted more than thirty works based on Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650.669 In the work by the Spanish master, the pontiff sits in front of a rust red curtain, and wears a bright red cape and a hat of the same colour, which forms an appealing contrast to his white under vestment. Bacon, in contrast, initially used different hues for the pope’s gown and painted it in dark blue and lilac in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example in Head VI, 1949; lighter shades of pink and red were introduced in the mid-1950s, in works such as Study for a Pope, 1955 and Study for Portrait No.1, 1956. Bacon only matched the vibrant red of the original for the first time in Study for Pope I–VI, 1961 (plate L). A handwritten note by the artist in the book Quarante Mille Ans d’Art Moderne indicates that re-evaluating his hues was on the artist’s mind that year. It says ‘12th 1961 Velázquez – colour – primitive cave figure art – paint as thin as is possible to make image’670 and is likely for the date mentioned and the emphasis on colour related to the aforementioned series of six variations of Portrait of Pope Innocent X painted in 1961. Further­more, a crumpled, paint-splattered and heavily decayed colour plate of Portrait of Pope Innocent X from Enrique Lafuente Ferrari’s Velazquez published in 1960671 was found in the studio stuck on an ashtray, whose beautiful glossy finish enhances the shades of crimson and wine red in the reproduction (plate LI). Its fragile state bears testimony to frequent consultation and its exuberant and shiny colours might have been the model for the bright red on the canvas. Bacon claimed to the last that he had never seen the original,672 stating that the ‘fear of seeing the reality of the Velázquez after my tampering with it’673 would have kept him from going. Instead, he explained to have been ‘obsessed with the photographs […] of Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X’ and had bought ‘book after book with this illustration in it.’674 Based on the presumption that those publications were monochrome,

669 Cf. Harrison 2005a, p. 89 and p. 92. 670 RM98F137:2: J. A. Mauduit, Quarante Mille Ans d’Art Moderne (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1954), hand­ written note by Francis Bacon on front inside cover. 671 RM98F104:5: Enrique Lafuente, Velazquez (Ohio: World Publishing, Editions d’Art Albert Skira, 1960); RM98F209:40:2: fragment of plate, Enrique Lafuente, Velazquez (Ohio: World Publishing, Editions d’Art Albert Skira, 1960), p. 82, Bacon owned a second copy of the book [see RM98F104:5]. 672 Cf. Archimbaud 2010, p. 159; Sylvester 2000, p. 42. 673 Sylvester 2009, p. 38. 674 Ibid., p. 24.

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scholarship established the hypothesis that the painter chose the purple by mistake because he did not know the original work.675 In the light of Bacon’s unfettered approach to the appropriation of any form and colour from a pre-existing source, which included the deliberate detachment of form and colour, the idea that the artist made such a radical change erroneously is not convincing. Other arguments speak against it too. Eight books on Velázquez and 23 torn out pages which were found in Reece Mews testify to the painter’s obsession.676 While the earliest ones, The Paintings and Drawings of Velázquez – Complete Edition, 1943,677 Les Demi-Dieux: Velasquez, 1946,678 and Velázquez from 1948679 indeed contain solely black and white illustrations of Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Jose Ortega y Gasset’s Velásquez published in 1954,680 of which Bacon owned the French and the English edition, features colour reproductions of the portrait. Potentially, the ‘correct’ colours were available to Bacon in his studio at least since the mid-1950s. We know that Bacon stayed in Rome for several weeks in the same year.681 He gave Sylvester the Hotel D’Inghilterra as his postal address,682 which is only a ten-minute walk away from the Doria Pamphilj where the Velázquez Pope is. Considering that by his own account, Bacon usually compensated potentially monochrome or falsified reproductions of artworks with ‘a journey to the National Gallery [...] because I want to see the colour for one thing’,683 it is hard to believe that he would not do so in this particular case too. As Hugh Davies pointed out, he did not even have to travel to Rome because a version of Velázquez’s Pope was available for Bacon to visit in London at the Wellington Museum.684 On a pictorial level, Velázquez’s Pope was often mingled with alien images such as the screaming woman from Battleship Potemkin or photographs of monkeys and politicians from a book, and often the dignitary was transplanted into a new setting.685

675 Cf. Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 45–46; Harrison 2011a, pp. 88–95. 676 We need to consider, however, that some publications and reproductions might have been lost during clear-outs of the studio and that the date of publication of the books found in the space after Bacon’s death does not need to be synonymous with the date of acquisition by the artist. 677 RM98F239:13: Enrique Lafuente, The Paintings and Drawings of Velazquez – Complete Edition (­London: George Allen & Unwin LtD, 1943). 678 RM98F21:65A: Léon-Paul Fargue, Les Demi-Dieux: Velasquez, Au Divan (Paris: Éditions du Dimanche, 1946. 679 Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p.300. 680 RM98F137:10: José Ortega y Gasset, Velásquez (Paris: René Julliard, 1954); RM98F93:9: José Ortega y Gasset, Velásquez (London: Collins, 1954). Plate 90 from the French edition can be seen in a 1960 photograph of Bacon’s studio at Overstrand Mansions which indicates that it was acquired before that date. cf. Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no.167, no page numbers. 681 Cf. HKA: Uncatalogued ‘Green Folder BACON’ with correspondance from Francis Bacon to David ­Sylvester. Folded postcard from Francis Bacon to David Sylvester, post stamp: 15/12/1954; Sylvester 2000, p. 42. 682 Cf. HKA: Uncatalogued ‘Green Folder BACON’ with correspondence from Francis Bacon to David ­Sylvester. Folded postcard from Francis Bacon to David Sylvester, post stamp: 15/12/1954. 683 Sylvester 2009, pp. 37–38. 684 Cf. Davies H. M. 1978, p. 86. 685 Cf. Harrison 2005a, pp. 88–92.

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So why would he stick to a faithful representation of colour? Moreover, would none of his cultivated and knowledgeable partners, mentors and friends including Eric Hall, Roy de Maistre, Graham Sutherland, and the art historian David Sylvester have pointed out such a blatant flaw? If he had really made a ‘mistake’, would it not be a rather naive move to then in 1961 change the colour back again, now knowing ‘how it was really supposed to be’? It seems more likely that by changing its colours, Bacon aimed to put his own twist on the well-known masterpiece and make it entirely his own. After all, Bacon’s appropriations, including his adoption of colours, were orientated towards his own creative goals; accuracy in the representation of any pre-existing element was never part of his agenda. Thus when in 1962 Bacon claimed – knowing very well that this was the most prominent element which until very recently he had not adopted for his own canvases – that the reason for his obsession with Portrait of Pope Innocent X were the ‘magnificent colour of it’,686 he might have been coquetting with the audience’s linear way of thinking. In that respect, the comment is reminiscent of his claims to be fascinated with the mouth because he loved ‘the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth’687 and which he hoped to paint ‘like Monet painted a sunset’,688 and likened the mouth to a ‘[Joseph Mallord William Turner] Turner’,689 when in reality, as Melvyn Bragg rightly emphasised, most of his mouths are black.690 Form and Colour Both the dissociation of painting from the academic illusionistic rendering of colour and with it the dissociation of form and colour were initiated by the modern avant-gardes from around 1900 – long before Bacon first approached the canvas. Movements such as Expressionism and Symbolism gave colour a new, intrinsic and independent value in figurative painting, and abstract art cut off colour from figuration altogether. A tone could come from anywhere. Matisse, co-founder and leading exponent of the Fauves, for example, composed Open Window, Collioure, 1905 led by his own subjective perception.691 The result is a powerful colour scheme of saturated and intense hues, in which pinks and reds are directly offset by complementary greens. It has been speculated that this paradigmatic shift in terms of colour choices was not only a revolt against academic conventions but indeed also triggered by the urge to free painting from any competition with photography, which was still predominantly monochrome, for example by using exaggerated colour schemes.692 ­Matisse’s fellow Fauve André Derain confirmed that the exuberant colours typical of the Fauvist movement aimed

686 Sylvester 2009, p. 25. 687 Ibid., p. 50. 688 Ibid. 689 Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985. 690 Ibid. 691 Cf. Sandra Gianfreda, ‘”Orgie der reinen Farbtöne” – Die Fauves 1905’, in Im ­Farbenrausch: Munch, Matisse und die Expressionisten, exh. cat. Essen: Museum Folkwang, 2012/2013 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2012), pp. 138–139, pp. 138–139. 692 Cf. Scharf 1979, p. 177; see also Coke 1981, p. 95.

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to disengage painting from the influence of the black and white camera vision.693 Later in his life Matisse himself pointed out the shortcomings of photography in relation to this modern approach to painting, and explained that he painted ‘to translate my emotions, my feelings and the reactions of my sensibility into colour and design, something that neither the most perfect camera, even in colours, nor the cinema can do.’694 While many of his predecessors were either openly hostile or defensive towards photography, Bacon enthusiastically embraced the colour mechanically reproduced colour photography provided without reservations. He actually used and integrated colour found in pre-existing material into his painting following the example of the modern avant-gardes and applied it solely guided by his own pictorial concerns rather than academic standards or indeed the specifications of the photographic source. Detached from its origins as a local colour, even dissociated from its original form, the appropriated colour is reduced to a mere abstract inspiration, implemented at the artist’s will. Bacon’s appropriation of colours from printed source material applying the mechanisms described above was perhaps a conceptual tool to anchor artificiality – the anti-illustrational rendering of reality – into his art in the pre-stages of a painting.

693 Cf. Derain quoted in Coke 1981, p. 95. 694 Henri Matisse quoted from Scharf 1979, p. 253.

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‘Let a man of genius make use of the daguerreotype as it should be used, and he will raise himself to a height that we do not know.’1 Eugène Delacroix, 21 May 1853

Bacon was notoriously critical of contemporary artists’ efforts.2 In regards to the employment of lens-based imagery he dismissed Graham Sutherland’s Portrait of Winston ­Churchill, 1954 as looking like ‘a lesson in how not to use photographs’3 and for his taste the ‘mixed-media jackdaws [presumably his contemporaries from the ICA] […] [had] not sufficiently digested their sources’.4 Bacon never elaborated on what he regarded as a successful manner of using photography, or on his own use of it. His own methods, goals, and ideals can only be extrapolated by analysing how he actually used photography, as was done in the present study. This reveals a multifaceted picture of a complex, unique, highly inventive and transformative painting practice from photography beyond Delacroix’s wildest dreams. The photographic source must here be understood as an important and omnipresent formal starting point and a focal point of the artist’s creativity, which, however, was only referenced loosely on the canvas, manifesting an ultimately ambiguous attitude towards the medium.

1 2 3

4

Eugène Delacroix, 21 May 1853, journal entry, quoted in Coke 1981, p. 9. For example, he described Jackson Pollock’s all-over compositions as looking ‘like old lace’, Sylvester 2000, p. 246. HKA: Uncatalogued ‘Green Folder BACON’ with correspondence from Francis Bacon to David ­Sylvester, Folded postcard from Francis Bacon to David Sylvester, post stamp: 15/12/1954, Postcard sent to ‘­David Sylvester Esque., 4 Queensbury Place, London S.W. 7, Inghilterra’, cover showing an illustration of ­Toulouse Lautrec’s ‘Dance at the Moulin Rouge’, detail. Bacon quoted in Russell John 2001, p. 71.

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Now that we know so many sources for Bacon’s paintings, what do we gain? Have we now deciphered his work? Physically reformulated, reduced, layered, the identity of the original subject and narrative disregarded, the photograph’s inherent figuration thwarted and in its new appearance on the canvas determined by a medium with opposite characteristics, it is clear that a source photograph is an unsuitable key to interpret a completed work. This never was their purpose, and the artist deliberately kept his working material away from critics and the public alike. The base photograph does therefore not reveal the true meaning of a painting. With the painter no longer available for comment, ultimately, apart from formal analysis, we can only speculate on their significance for the artist and the finished canvas. Bacon’s paintings amount to much more than the sum of their pictorial starting points, which were subject to thorough ‘Baconization’,5 and it would be naive to think that they could be exhaustively explained by naming their iconographic sources. Instead, much like the study of more conventional preparatory work in the form of sketches and drawings, the analysis of formal one-on-one links between photographic material and Bacon’s paintings yielded first and foremost technical insights towards a more comprehensive and a more detailed understanding of Bacon’s hitherto little-known working process, the origins of his imagery, his decision-making process, and the transition of an image from an undisturbed pictorial springboard to the painted subject on the canvas. The great number of references to photographic material revealed by the comparative analysis of Bacon’s surviving studio material and his surviving paintings allows us to describe more precisely the nature of his relationship with the medium and the processes and intentions involved, and to delineate the value but also the limitations of this line of enquiry. Formal one-on-one links were established in all decades of his career, these are present in all formal elements, for all subjects and genres, and across all changes in style. They bear testimony to an extremely close relationship to the medium, which is not generic or only guided by general visual interests, but in which the photograph is the direct predecessor of the iconography on the canvas. The unfocused ‘Oh yes – Bacon uses photographs’6 which has dominated the discourse for so long can finally be replaced by a decisive ‘We know which photographs Bacon used, and how’. This new factual data will hopefully help to overcome both the artist’s editing hand and old patterns of interpretation to make room for fresh ideas and perspectives on Bacon’s use of photographs. For example, the tenacious idea of the accidental emergence of Bacon’s imagery, promoted by the artist himself and spread by critics to the present day, must once and for all be rejected. Far from being merely a random ‘pile of rubbish’,7 the studio, its contents, and its dynamics played a decisive and active role in the working process. The material in the studio was Bacon’s ‘window’8 through which he saw the world and, with publications

5 6 7 8

John Russell, Francis Bacon (London: Methuen, 1964), no page numbers. Russell John 2001, p. 70. Campbell-Johnston 2008. Rothenstein 1964, pp. 16–17.

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and photographs directly referencing the artist’s concrete real-life experience, in the seclusion of the studio its contents became his own custom-fit simulacrum. This created distance from reality and helped circumvent the detested idea of illustration, understood as merely recording someone’s own experience. By getting ‘nearer by going farther away’9 and, to paraphrase Vincent Van Gogh with Bacon, by creating ‘changes in reality, which become lies that are truer than the literal truth’10 and working exclusively from the photographic material he surrounded himself with, Bacon removed his work from anything plain and literal, homely or anecdotal, and shifted the emphasis instead towards the image and the figure as form. Bacon saw the photographic depiction of a reality not his own, but similar, as a welcome tool to avoid the illustration of his own experience and perception, which nevertheless still mediated access to, and created a point of intersection with, reality. The ‘inherent objective nature’11 of the camera vision, as outlined by Anne Baldassari, was ideally suited to achieve Bacon’s goal: ‘The camera’s mechanical, monocular eye enabled both the cutting out of reality, by the use of framing, and the cutting off from reality. Confronted with the ductility of the living being, the technical distancing of the camera offered a way to capture its bodily form alone.’12 Bacon’s painting and his working environment depended on, shaped, and mutually influenced one another. The vast collection and the constant acquisition and replacement of material resulted in a sheer inexhaustible well of visual inspiration, which could be filled with the latest preferences at the artist’s convenience. On a technical level, the cookery books, the publications on football, and the medical textbooks were Bacon’s anatomy studies which helped him examine, grasp, and develop a figure but which were not used to achieve maximum accuracy. Instead, the studio material was accidentally altered and deliberately manipulated by folds and tears, overdrawing, and paint blots which distorted, twisted, and reformulated the image. The photograph was a field of experimentation for the creative alteration of representation itself.13 Bacon, for whom ‘real imagination is technical imagination,’14 and who was convinced that an artist today had to invent their own techniques,15 amongst his idiosyncratic canon of procedures and stylistic tools included techniques which may initially have started as obstacles, challenges, and parts and results of the working practice and the studio space itself. These involve folds of the items, the monochromy of early photographs and photographic reproductions, but also the drawn cubic structures on his working documents. These alterations fed directly into the painted iconography, so they can be seen as unusual equivalents to more traditional artist’s preparatory work.16

  9 Beard 1975, p. 19. 10 Sylvester 2009, p. 172. 11 Baldassari 1996, p. 203. 12 Ibid. 13 Cf. Finke 2009a, p. 123. 14 Francis Bacon quoted in Ritchie 1955, p. 60. 15 Bacon to Bragg in: Francis Bacon 1985. 16 Cf. Harrison 2009a, p. 71.

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A close study of the base item and a careful comparison with a related painting allow us to trace the exact construction of a work, to determine which, how many, where and how pre-existing images fed into a painting, and to detect and interpret recurring patterns and methodologies within these processes. As a general rule, the painted image is closest to the pre-existing one, and identifiable as being related to it, by its shapes and outlines. Beyond that, the appropriation process is often a radical metamorphosis of the formal starting point negating its inherent integrity: spatial settings are reduced to perspective lines, and figure and background, but also shape and colour are usually borrowed from different sources – several sources for one painting and even for a single subject are not uncommon. Elements can in this process be combined in a collage-like manner on the picture plane, or merged and layered like in a filmic superimposition. The identity of a subject from a source image and the narrative it is embedded in are often not congruous with the painted version on the canvas. The appropriation process was not a gentle affair, Bacon ruthlessly subordinated his sources to his own creative vision, and in the true sense of the term made them his own.17 The ulti­mate break with the photograph lies in Bacon’s total commitment to his medium – to oil paint. Its inherent nature and the handling it allows catapult his art away from photography. The integration of accidental, ‘non-rational’18 marks to the pictures prevented them from looking what he called ‘photographic’19 and oil paint’s ability to mimic corporeality and establish a channel of visceral, physical communication between the figure, the viewer, and the painter makes the photograph lose its significance altogether. An evaluation of these processes indicates that Bacon not only appropriated images to obtain formal elements, but that he used the preparatory and appropriation process itself as a tool to anticipate and generate effects he integrated prominently on his finished canvases, such as the isolation of the figure, the sabotage of figuration, and the instability of spatial settings. Bacon’s art gets much of its power from the tension created by his commitment to polar opposites and the delicate balancing of mutually exclusive goals, and this is also reflected and rehearsed in his work with and from photographs. Bacon accumulated photographic material excessively, and extensively and consistently used it as a basis for his iconography. He was fascinated by the aesthetic opportunities offered by lens-based imagery and embraced them gratefully in his painting. And yet, he also strove to ‘remove it [his painting] very much further away from the photograph’20 and even regarded photography as an inferior art form.21 This resulted in a highly transmutative, selective, fragmentary, and corrosive preparatory and appropriation process. Bacon cherished and employed the photograph as 17 The Prestel Dictionary of Art and Artists in the 20th Century, ed. by Wieland Schmied, Frank Whitford and Frank Zöllner (Munich: Prestel, 2000), p. 20, entry Appropriation: ‘from Late Latin appropriare = to make one’s own’. 18 Sylvester 2009, p. 58. 19 Sylvester 2000, p. 235. 20 Ibid. 21 Cf. ibid.

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figurative indexical starting point which was important for anchoring his art in figuration and the human experience. Both the photograph and its inherent figuration were undermined step by step, first by accidental alterations to the physical photograph, a subversive appropriation process, and then with abstract marks in the paint application. Finally, the source was almost, but only almost, annihilated by its transposition into another material, oil paint. Bacon thus undermined the one with the other, and balanced the implications and impact of each out with the other. In Good Company – Photography, Abstraction and Materiality in Modern Art Bacon liked to emphasise his solitary position in the art world22 and critics have in the past presented him ‘as unique - an unaccountably singular artist who was unlocatable in terms of influence and tradition’.23 Yet like numerous other artists Bacon in his painting and working processes absorbed three major, closely interwoven trajectories of modern art, which preoccupy painting to the present day: the engagement with photography, figuration versus abstraction, and a focus on material. These points of contact can only be introduced here superficially and in isolation, and deserve further, more in-depth examination. I have pointed out throughout this study that Bacon’s engagement with photography is consistent with countless predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Key points and major developments of the shared history of painting and photography shall here be summarized again, to illustrate how deeply embedded Bacon’s practice is in the history of art, despite claims to the contrary. Optical aids, including the camera obscura, lenses, and mirrors, have been used by painters from Jan Van Eyck to Canaletto.24 The invention of photography in 1839 by Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre was warmly welcomed by artists because lens-based images were now fixed and available for unrestricted use and repeated consultation.25 Nude photographs, photographs of Old Masters, landscapes, and sculpture were sought-after study material in the 19th century, and were requested, discussed, exchanged, and collected.26 Photographs have been accumulated in

22 Cf. Sylvester 2009, p. 67. 23 David Alan Mellor, ‘Francis Bacon: Affinities, Contexts and the British Visual Tradition’, in Francis ­Bacon: Figurabile, ed. by Achille Bonito Oliva, exh. cat. Venice Museo Correr, 1993 (Milan: Electa, 1993), pp. 95–104, p. 95, Mellor quotes as example Andrew Forge, ‘The Paint of Screams’, Art News, New York, October 1963, pp. 38–41, 55–56, p. 39, cf. also Barbara Steffen, ‘Introduction’, in Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, ed. by Wilfried Seipel, Barbara Steffen and Christoph Vitali, exh. cat. Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 2003/2004; Riehen/Basel: Fondation Beyerle, 2004 (Milan: Skira, 2004), pp. 15–16, p. 15: ‘He [Bacon] did not think much of Abstract Expressionism; instead he went his own way, independent of the prevailing artistic currents of his day. In a way he remained an outsider his entire life.’ 24 Cf. Hockney 2006, p. 12 and p. 184; see also Steadman 2001, p. 1; Anon., ‘Photography Before the Dry Plate’, in ‘From Today Painting is Dead’. The Beginnings of Photography, exh. cat. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1972 (London: Arts Council, 1972), pp. 5–7, pp. 5–6. 25 Cf. Scharf 1979, p. 24; see also Anon. 1972, p. 6. 26 Cf. Billeter 1979, p. 14, comment on ill. nos.1–3; see also in a letter from 7 April 1865, Millet asked Feuardent to bring photographs of art works from his trip to Italy: ‘[…] … In short, bring whatever

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vast numbers ever since; Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot owned more than three hundred,27 Édouard Vuillard had a collection of about 2000,28 thousands of photographic images emerged from Pablo Picasso’s studio after his death in 1973,29 and in 2003 Gerhard ­Richter’s Atlas contained over 5000 items.30 Painters used photographs as guides or models for compositions, figures, portraits, and colours,31 but also responded to photography’s novel aesthetics, as is exemplified by the to their contemporaries shocking realism of works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.32 Contemporary painters, amongst others Jenny Saville and Peter Doig, compose their paintings after photographs. Original photographs were soon accompanied by printed compilations; Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies, for example, were meant as study material for artists33 and were consulted by painters including John Everett Millais and J.A.M. Whistler.34 ‘Artists are interested in pictures as sources of ideas for their work. Where the pictures come from and how they are made are of little concern to them’,35 Frank Van Deren Coke explained. Accordingly, painters expanded their interest to found images from newspapers and magazines, which they collected. Walter Sickert for instance excessively accumulated and made use of ‘Press Art’,36 for example when lifting a photograph from the Daily Express for The Miner in 1936.37 Photographic collage took centre stage in the Dada and Surrealist movements of the interbellum and in this typically modernist medium38 High Art entered into a lasting dialogue with mass culture.39 ‘During the 1920s, photography took on a new and active role as a resource and stimulus for artists of all persuasions’,40 Dawn Ades stated. She saw this confirmed in the show Film und Foto in 1929, where ‘surrealists like Man Ray, constructivists from Germany, Holland, Russia, former Dadaists like Hannah Höch and George

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37 38 39 40

you can get there – […]’, letter quoted in Scharf 1979, p. 93, p. 98–99; furthermore, photographs by ­Vuillard appear in Vallotton’s collection, see Easton 2011, p. 8. Cf. Scharf 1979, p. 91. Cf. Easton 2011, p. 8. Cf. Baldassari 1997, p. 7. Cf. Iwona Blazwick, ‘Introduction’, in Gerhard Richter: Atlas, The Reader, ed. by Iwona Blazwick and Janna Graham (London: Whitechapel, 2003), pp. 11–13, p. 11. Cf. Scharf 1979, pp. 124–125, p. 135, p. 188; see Baldassari 1997, p. 178 and 179, ill. nos. 204–206. Cf. Townsend, Ridge and Hackney 2004, p. 68 Cf. Scharf 1979, p. 219. Cf. Eadweard Muybridge included a list of subscribers in the endpapers of the publications, see ­Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Muscular Actions, 3rd edn (London: Chapman & Hall, 1907), Appendix, pp. 275–277. Coke 1981, preface, no page numbers. Daniels coined the expression ‘Press Art’ in relation to Sickert’s use of the printed press, see Harrison 2005a, p. 79 referring to Rebecca Daniels, ‘Press Art: The Late Oeuvre of Walter Richard Sickert’, Apollo: The International Magazine of Art and Antiques, 156 (2002), 30–35, see also Harrison 2005a, p. 79, ill. no. 72: ‘Sickert, with his wife Thérèse, in his Broadstairs studio, 1938, The Sketch, 2 March 1938 (photographer unknown).’. Cf. Daniels 2009a, p. 80, Daily Express, 16 October 1935. Cf. Dietrich 1993, p. 3 Cf. Campany 2003b, p. 150. Ades 1986, p. 1.

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Grosz, abstract artists and professional photographers showed side by side’.41 The medium’s potential was explored and its boundaries pushed in photomontage, photo- and rayograms, double exposures, printing in negative and double printing, as well as more experimental techniques, prized especially by the Surrealists, such as solarisation.42 Bacon witnessed the rise of ‘a new culture of illustrated magazines’43 in 1920s B ­ erlin, and experienced how there, and in London and Paris, ‘modernist photography and avantgarde film, as well as nascent photojournalism and “candid camera” imagery [informed] artistic sensibilities’.44 The Australian artist’s Roy de Maistre’s technical advice was not only pivotal for Bacon’s transformation from interior designer to a painter in the early 1930s, but right at the beginning of his career the older colleague probably introduced him to collecting and using photographs as a starting point for his paintings,45 which de Maistre himself did in works such as Procession, 1937.46 Richard Hamilton recalled a major shift in 1956, ‘where I thought art doesn’t need to come out of reality … all I needed for stimulation was ­secondhand pictures in film and TV magazines, newspapers.’47 In post-war L­ ondon, Bacon’s interest was shared by fellow painters ranging from Rodrigo Moynihan, Victor W ­ illing, to Michael Andrews;48 the younger colleagues possibly encouraged by his example.49 The ‘age of mechanical reproduction’,50 which Walter Benjamin diagnosed in 1936 after the war turned into an age of mass media.51 The aim to absorb and explore the impact the mass media had on the visual world was a defining trait of British and American Pop art positions.52 American Pop art of the 1960s, for example Andy Warhol’s work, emulated mass media culture by producing works which ‘reproduced photographs from newspapers, magazines, celebrity portraits and the like’53 in traditional painting that mimicked mechanical techniques. Slowly, the attitude towards photography changed, its impact no longer 41 Ibid. 42 Cf. ibid. 43 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016), p. 283. 44 Harrison 2005a, p. 69; Bacon was in Berlin in 1927, moved to Paris the same year and settled in London in 1929, see Harrison 2016b, pp. 76–77. 45 Cf. David Marr, Patrick White: A Life (London: Cape, 1991), p. 169. 46 Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930–1968 (Roseville: Craftsman House; [Great Britain]: G&B Arts International, 1995), p. 119, plate 47 and figure 18: De Maistre painted The Procession, 1937, after a photograph of The Duke and Duchess of Kent leaving their home in Belgrave Square published in The Star, 12 May 1937. 47 Richard Hamilton quoted in Michael Bracewell, ‘Works of Political and Moral Motivation’, in Richard Hamilton: Modern Moral Matters, exh. cat. London: Serpentine Gallery, 2010 (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2010), p. 22. 48 Cf. Harrison 2002, p. 56, and pp. 59–61. 49 Cf. ibid., p. 54. 50 Benjamin 2008. 51 Cf. Campany 2003b, p. 150. 52 Cf. Uwe M. Schneede, ‘English Pop Art Seen in Retrospect’, in Pop Art in England: Beginnings of a New Figuration 1947–63, exh. cat. Hamburg: Kunstverein Hamburg, 1976; Munich: Städtische Galerie Lenbachhaus, 1976; York: City Art Gallery, 1976 (Hamburg: Kunstverein Hamburg, 1976), pp. 4–9, p. 4. 53 Campany 2003a, p. 17.

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restricted to being in competition with painting but affecting other media as well, including cinema, theatre, performance and literature.54 Painters used photographs more confidently and more openly ‘until by 1970 it was almost taken for granted that there was something archaic or retarded about a painter who did not somehow make use of photographic images.’55 Thus, Bacon was part of a long-established and enduring tradition, which the artist himself was well aware of and familiar with.56 Bacon’s tendency towards abstraction is equally well-embedded in the history of art. Modern art was driven by the wish to overcome academic conventions and traditions, while at the same time, released from the obligation to represent by photography, it was forced to reinvent itself.57 In this context, illusionistic painting was no longer perceived as necessary or suitable for the creation of ‘a window onto the world’,58 and ‘the visual clarity and truth assumed to reside in representation’59 lost their significance. As a consequence, modernism became ‘the great quest beyond representation’.60 Accepting the impossibility of being faithful to a three-dimensional reality in a two-dimensional medium, painting started to challenge the assumption of artificial perspective and a fixed viewpoint.61 In fact, the modernist idea that the natural world could not be seen as ‘“steadily and whole”’62 from a privileged viewpoint at a particular moment in time first manifested itself in painting, for example in Paul Cézanne’s capturing the Mount St. Victoire from numerous perspectives.63 Objectivity was exposed as an illusion.64 Picasso’s proto-Cubistic Les Demoiselles d’Avignon from 1907 can be seen as the preliminary climax of this thinking, carrying to extremes the counter-intuitive perspectives of Édouard Manet and the colour planes of Cézanne.65 In mature Cubism, further developed by Picasso together with Georges Braque, the world was systematically split up into discrete parts, which were shown from different sides and angles, not painted to size, and depicted in various distances to the subject, which produced 54 Cf. ibid., pp. 16–17. 55 Russell John 2001, p. 70. 56 Bacon described Peter Rose Pulham’s text ‘The Camera and the Artist’ in The Listener, 24 January 1952, pp. 144–146, as being ‘among the finest writing on the subject’, Francis Bacon cited from Harrison 2002, p. 54, found in the studio: RM98F244:2: Frank Van Deren Coke, The Painter and the Photograph: From Delacroix to Warhol, rev. and enl. edn (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), and RM98F125:36: fragment from Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), first edition from 1968. 57 Cf. William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Art (Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 9; Peter Childs, Modernism, The New Critical Idiom, ed. by John Drakakis (London: University of Sterling, 2000), p. 108; Coke 1981, p. 299; Dietrich 1993, p. 1. 58 Craig G. Staff, Modernist Painting and Materiality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), pp. 7–8. 59 Joseph J. Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 51. 60 Ibid. 61 Cf. Everdell 1997, p. 11, p. 245. 62 Ibid., p. 11. 63 Ibid. 64 Cf. ibid. 65 Cf. ibid., pp. 243–247.

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composite images in a manner similar to collage66 – and not unlike many of Bacon’s figure studies. Painters such as Van Gogh and Edvard Munch explicitly did not want to ‘represent but (self-)express’67. They wanted to show how reality felt instead of how it looked, which makes them forerunners of the Expressionist movement.68 Abstract art was now ‘autonomous’69, no longer reliant on more familiar concepts of reality, so that form and colour became independent entities. Among the first purely abstract works were Wassily Kandinsky’s Fighting Forms from 1914 and Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Black Square in 1915. Pure abstraction was further pursued, for example, by the De Stijl Group in the Netherlands from 1917, who strove for a ‘universal language of form that was intended to be concentrated, clear and logical.’70 Art Informel, Tachism, Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting, with Jackson Pollock’s No.5, 1948 as a prime example, and Colour Field Painting in the manner of Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950–1951 are just some of the many abstract post-war movements.71 Art increasingly concentrated on itself and its form, it ‘had to be about art before it could be about the world: either form before content, or form as content’,72 and became more self-referential.73 No longer asked to bend their material in order to document reality, artists shifted their attention towards an exploration of the material itself, and assigned an intrinsic value to it.74 This ‘medium-specificity’75 was the guiding idea in the highly influential art critic Clement Greenberg’s theories on modernism.76 For Greenberg, only inept artists still subordinated their medium to their subject matter.77 Only pure abstraction could overcome academic traditions, he thought, which in painting meant abandoning all that is illusionistic and not intrinsic to the medium and the material, including realistic perspective and attempts to create three-dimensionality, in favour of affirming the picture plane and accepting its flatness.78 According to Greenberg, any medium had to be stripped down to the bare bones of its material conditions and means to make each art form unique in itself.79 When Bacon rose to fame as a figurative painter in the 1950s, the Western art world felt the ‘increasing dominance of New York and of Abstract 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79

Cf. Childs P. 2000, p. 112. Childs P. 2000, p. 118. Cf. ibid., pp. 118–119. Dietmar Elger, ‘Paintings of Autonomous Signs’, in Modern Art, ed. by Hans Werner Holzwarth and Laszlo Taschen (Cologne/London: Taschen, 2011), pp. 218–230, p. 219. Ibid., p. 226. Cf. ibid., p. 230. Childs P. 2000, p. 111. Cf. e.g. Dietrich 1993, p. 1. Cf. Staff 2011, p. 7. Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (London/Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 38. Greenberg’s ideas are echoed also by Michel Foucault, see Tanke 2009, p. 50. Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, Partisan Review, 7.4 (July/August 1940), 296–310, reproduced in Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. by Charles Harrison and Paul Woods (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), pp. 562–568, p. 563. See Greenberg 2003, p. 566; Dietrich 1993, p. 1. See ibid., p. 566.

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E­ xpressionism’.80 Bacon got in touch with abstraction perhaps again via de Maistre, who had experimented with colour theories and abstract compositions since the 1910s;81 but he also spent time in St. Ives in 1959, which was then the centre of British abstract art, represented by painters such as Patrick Heron.82 Abstraction dominated modernism in art practice and theory and was regarded by many as superior to figurative art.83 The friction between figuration and abstraction was a defining element of modern art,84 and was negotiated by Bacon on every canvas. In this he was not alone and his contemporaries, labelled as The School of London, were seen to be on a similar endeavour,85 as was the work of Nicolas de Stäel.86 Yet, parallel to abstraction, a figurative tradition as represented by the work of André Derain, Henri Matisse, Chaim ­Soutine, Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio Morandi, and Alexej von Jawlensky for example, continued to develop independently.87 Josef Paul Hodin established that several underlying currents, such as Post-Impressionism and Fauvism, were rooted in Van Gogh, Paul Gaugin and the Nabis, which he thought never to have vanished. In his opinion Expressionism, derived from Van Gogh and Munch, manifested itself for instance in the Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter groups, and was continued by Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka, Max Weber, and Jack Levine in America, and by Bacon in Great Britain, whom he saw as an heir to Surrealism and Expressionism.88 In Hodin’s view, art movements like Surrealism depended on representation and could be rated as reactions against abstraction.89 The common denominator of modernist figurative painting was, according to Hodin, the focus on the human and the human experience.90 Recently, similar sensitivities and shared concerns have been traced in the exhibition All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life at Tate Britain, which centred on figurative British Post-war art by Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Euan Uglow, R.B. Kitaj, and others, but expanded the time line to include Sickert and Soutine on the one side and contemporary painters including Paula 80 Martin Harrison, ‘Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt’, in Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt, ed. by Pilar Ordovas, exh. cat. London: Ordovas, 2011 (London: Ordovas, 2011), pp. 26–49, p. 26. 81 Cf. Bryan Robertson, ‘Preface’, in Roy de Maistre: A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings from 1917–1960, exh. cat. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1960 (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1960), pp. 3–4, p. 3 82 Cf. Harrison 2005a, pp. 136–143. 83 Cf. Josef Paul Hodin, ‘Representational Art and Abstraction’, in Figurative Art since 1945 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), pp. 9–34, p. 11, the discussion was fierce, cf. Ernst Gombrich arguing against abstract art, see his ‘The Tyranny of Abstract Art’, 1958, and Meyer Schapiro and Harold Rosenberg arguing in favour of it, see Jones 2005, p. 122 and p. 136. 84 Cf. ibid., p. 9. 85 Cf. Tom Hunt, ‘Painting Inside Out’, in The Mystery of Appearance, Conversations Between Ten British Post-War Painters, ed. by Catherine Lampert, exh. cat. London: Haunch of Venison, 2011/2012 (London: Haunch of Venison, 2011), pp. 113–123, p. 115. 86 Cf. Hodin 1971, p. 24. 87 Cf. ibid., pp. 11–12. 88 Cf. ibid., p. 12 and p. 21. 89 Cf. ibid., p. 12. 90 Cf. ibid., p. 9.

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Rego, ­Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Jenny Saville on the other.91 In Britain, the curator Elena Crippa stated that there was a long history of ‘representation of life in all its force, enlivened and intensified’.92 Some issues, she thought, are ongoing and could not be resolved within one generation so that in this respect ‘we are still part of modernity’.93 Modernist figuration found its own way of differentiating itself from its academic predecessors and was a far cry from mimesis and naturalistic representation. The works gathered in Peter Selz’s show New Images of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959 were a case in point.94 Pieces by Germaine Richier, Alberto Giacometti, Eduardo Paolozzi, Reg Butler, and Bacon were for their thwarting and deforming of naturalistic representation described as a ‘weird gathering of monsters and ghosts – faceless or distorted creatures, grimacing creatures with grotesque expressions or in masks, grasshoppers with human faces – a really terrifying company which seemed to be protesting against a technically perfect and unthinkingly functional world’.95 This kind of dark, twisted and existentialist figuration was often related to current traumas such as the concentration camps, Hiroshima, and the continuous nuclear threat.96 In a twist on Greenberg’s precept that ‘form was content’,97 artists in this tradition had a pronounced but different emphasis on material. Recalling W.H. Auden’s famous line ‘to me, Art’s subject is the human clay’,98 a focus on materiality was not seen as a pathway to abstraction but on the contrary as imbuing figurative content with a notion of life, provoking visceral reactions by committing to oil paint, a medium the artists understood as mimicking bodily substances. Soutine, for instance, is said to have shared with Bacon the perception of oil paint as a living substance,99 Sickert stated that ‘the plastic arts are gross arts, dealing joyfully with gross material facts’100 and Freud, echoing Bacon, claimed that ‘I want the paint to work as flesh does’.101 This resulted in paint laden canvases, such   91 Cf. Elena Crippa, ‘The Embodied Life of Painting’, in All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life, exh. cat. London: Tate Britain 2018 (London: Tate Publishing, 2018), pp. 12–25, p. 15.   92 Ibid., p. 16.   93 Ibid., p. 15.   94 Peter Selz, exhibition New Images of Man, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959.   95 Wieland Schmied, ‘The Imaginary and the Fantastic’, in Figurative Art since 1945, by J. P. Hodin [et. al.] (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), pp. 123–147, p. 123.   96 Cf. Schmied 1971, p. 123; see also Elena Crippa, ‘Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti’, in All Too ­Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2018), pp. 83– 89, p. 83.   97 Greenberg paraphrased in Jones 2005, p. 129.   98 First verse of poem ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ by W.H. Auden (first published in Louis MacNeice and W.H. Auden, Letter from Iceland (London: Faber and Faber, 1937)), R.B. Kitaj borrowed this line for the title of his exhibition The Human Clay: An exhibition (London: Hayward Gallery, 1976), quoted from Crippa 2018a, p. 14.   99 Cf. Elena Crippa, ‘The Raw Facts of Life’, in All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2018), pp. 67–81, p. 67. 100 Walter Sickert, ‘Idealism’, The Art News, 12 May 1910, p. 217, quoted from Crippa 2018a, p. 15. 101 Lucian Freud, in conversation with Michael Auping, 7 May 2009, cited from ‘Lucian Freud in conversation with Michael Auping’, in Lucian Freud: Portraits, ed. by Sarah Howgate, Michael Auping and John

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as ­Kossoff’s Seated Woman No.2, 1959 in which ‘the figure emerged from the impasto’.102 This is also an apt description of Auerbach’s Head of E.O.W., 1960 in which the paint developed sculptural and corporeal qualities. For Bacon, influence was ‘something like this phenomenon of a sponge that absorbs everything’,103 and, as sketched out above, he keenly absorbed key aspects of the history of modern art. But Bacon did not restrict himself to a certain movement, group, or style. The alert, sensitive artist took something from here, and something else from there, without committing himself fully to one or the other: he threw paint on the canvas without being an Action Painter, drew on mass media without being a Pop Artist and availed himself of collage techniques without being a Dadaist or Surrealist. It is this liberal, selective absorption of past and contemporaneous influences and their idiosyncratic combination, free from dogma and constricting concepts, which makes him truly unique, and constitutes his own ‘alternative modernism’.104 At the same time, his artistic approach is inextricably linked to the genesis of his paintings and is mirrored in his working methods, deliberately and freely employing his studio material in his unique, Baconian style.

Richardson, pubd. in relation to the exhibition of the same name, London: National Portrait Gallery, London, 2012; Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2012 (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2012), p. 18. 102 Al Alvarez, ‘Life with Kossoff’, in Leon Kossoff: From the Early Years, 1957–1967 (New York: Mitchell-­ Innes & Nash., 2010), p. 11, quoted from Hunt 2011, p. 121. 103 Archimbaud 2010, p. 32. 104 Harrison 2002, p. 48.

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5. Appendix

Bibliography

Ades 1985 Dawn Ades, ‘Web of Images’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by Dawn Ades and Andrew Forge, exh. cat. London: Tate Gallery, 1985; Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1985/1986; Berlin: Nationalgalerie, 1986 (London: Thames and Hudson in association with Tate Gallery 1985; New York: Abrams, 1985), pp. 8–23. Ades 1986 Dawn Ades, An Introduction to Photography & Surrealism, booklet for exhibition L’Amour fou: Photography & Surrealism, London: Hayward Gallery, 1986 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1986). Alley and Rothenstein 1964 Ronald Alley and John Rothenstein, Francis Bacon. Catalogue Raisonné and Documentation (London: Thames & Hudson, 1964). Alloway 1960 Lawrence Alloway, ‘Francis Bacon’, Art International, 4.2-3 (1960), 62–63. Alloway 1963 Lawrence Alloway, ‘Introduction’, in Francis Bacon, exh. cat. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1963/1964; Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1964; Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1964 (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1963), pp. 12–25. Anon. 1953 Anon., ‘Mr. Francis Bacon’s New Paintings: Extraordinary Use of Photographs’, The Times, 13 November 1953, p. 10. Anon. 1968 Anon., ‘Francis Bacon: “Photography has Completely Altered Figurative Painting”’, Creative Camera, 54 (­December 1968), 442–443. Anon. 1972 Anon., ‘Photography Before the Dry Plate’, in ‘From Today Painting is Dead’. The Beginnings of Photography, exh. cat. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1972 (London: Arts Council, 1972), pp. 5–7. Archimbaud 2010 Michel Archimbaud, Francis Bacon: In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud (London: Phaidon 2010), orig. pubd in French (Paris: J-.C. Lattès, 1992).

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Atkinson 2000 Terry Atkinson, ‘History Painting: Painting and Recapitulation’, in History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art, ed. by David Green and Peter Seddon (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 149–162. Bachmann 2007 Karl Marx: Skizzenbücher 1955–1998, ed. by Dieter Bachmann, special edn (Cologne: Salon, 2007). Bacon 1953 Francis Bacon, ‘A Painter’s Tribute’, in Matthew Smith: Paintings from 1909 to 1952, exh. cat. London: Tate Gallery, 1953 (London: Tate Gallery, 1953), p. 12. Bacon 1962 Francis Bacon, exh. cat. London: Tate Gallery, 1962 (London: Tate Gallery, 1962). Bacon 1971/1972 Francis Bacon, exh. cat. Paris: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 1971; Düsseldorf: Städtische Kunsthalle, 1972 (Paris: [Centre national d’art contemporain], 1971). Bacon 1984 Francis Bacon, ‘Written statement’, in John Deakin: The Salvage of a Photographer, exh. cat. London: ­Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984/1985 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984), p. 8. Bacon 2005 Francis Bacon: Die Portraits, exh. cat. Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2005; Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2005/2006 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz 2005). Baldassari 1996 Anne Baldassari, ‘“Heads, Faces and Bodies”: Picasso’s Uses of Portrait Photographs’, in Picasso and ­Portraiture, Representation and Transformation, ed. by William Rubin (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), pp. 202–223. Baldassari 1997 Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror (Paris: Flammarion, 1997). Baldassari 1999 Anne Baldassari, ‘Picasso, 1901–1906: Painting in the Mirror of the Photograph’, in The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso, ed. by Dorothy Kosinski, exh. cat. San Francisco: Museum of Modern Art, 1999; Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2000; Bilbao: Fundación del Museo Guggenheim, 2000 (Dallas: Dallas ­Museum of Art, 1999), pp. 286–307. Baron and Shone 1992 Sickert: Paintings, ed. by Wendy Baron and Richard Shone, exh. cat. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1992/1993 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992). Barthes 1982 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, transl. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). Batache 1985 Eddy Batache, ‘Francis Bacon and the Last Convulsions of Humanism’, Art and Australia, 23.2 (1985), 222– 225. Baudelaire 1859 Charles Baudelaire, letter on the ‘Salon de 1859’ to Jean Morel, editor of Revue Française, Revue Française, 10 June–20 July 1859. Baudrillard 1983 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of Simulacra’, in Simulations, by Jean Baudrillard (New York: Semiotext[e] 1983), pp. 1–79.

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Lucas 2014 Raymond Lucas, ‘The Sketchbook as Collection: A Phenomenology of Sketching’, in Recto Verso: Redefining the Sketchbook, ed. by Angela Bartram, Nader El-Bizri and Douglas Gittens (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 191–205. Lynton 1962 Norbert Lynton, ‘London Letter: Bacon, Davie, Kokoschka’, Art International, 8.6 (1962), 68–69. Lynton 1987 Norbert Lynton, ‘Introduction’, in Narrative Painting: Looking Into Paintings: A Series of Three Arts Council Exhibitions Looking Into Landscape, Portrait and Narrative Painting, exh. cat. (London: Arts Council, 1987), pp. 3–22. Malone 2009a Meredith Malone, ‘Introduction’, in Meredith Malone, Chance Aesthetics, exh. cat. St. Louis, MO: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2009/2010 (St. Louis, MO: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2009), pp. 3–7. Malone 2009b Meredith Malone, ‘Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object’, in Chance Aesthetics, exh. cat. St. Louis, MO: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2009/2010 (St. Louis, MO: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2009), pp. 70–71. Manvell and Rotha 1950 Roger Manvell and Paul Rotha, Movie Parade – A Pictorial Survey of World Cinema, (London, New York: Studio Publications, 1950). Marks 1967 John Marks, The Life and Death of the Fighting Bull, photographs by José Suárez (London: Cassell, 1967). Marr 1991 David Marr, Patrick White: A Life (London: Cape, 1991). Marshall 2009 Brenda Marshall, ‘Francis Bacon, Trash and Complicity’, in Francis Bacon – New Studies: Centenary Essays, ed. by Martin Harrison (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), pp. 209–231. Masters 1965 John Masters, Fourteen Eighteen (London: Michael Joseph Publishers, 1965). Matteini and Moles 1990 Mauro Matteini and Arcangelo Moles, Naturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungsmethoden in der Restau­rie­ rung, illustrated by Andreas Burmester (Munich: Callwey, 1990). Maxwell 1925 Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (London: Heinemann, 1925). McFarland 1937 J. Horace McFarland, Roses of the World in Color (London: Cassell, 1937). McLuhan and Fiore 2008 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (London: Penguin, 2008). Mellor 1993 David Alan Mellor, ‘Francis Bacon: Affinities, Contexts and the British Visual Tradition’, in Francis Bacon: ­Figurabile, ed. by Achille Bonito Oliva, exh. cat. Venice Museo Correr, 1993 (Milan: Electa, 1993), pp. 95– 104.

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Mellor 2000 David Alan Mellor, The Barry Joule Archive – Works on Paper Attributed to Francis Bacon, pubd. in relation to the exhibition of the same name, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2000 (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2000). Mellor 2008 David Alan Mellor, ‘Film, Fantasy, History in Francis Bacon’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, exh. cat. London: Tate Britain, 2008/2009; Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009 (London: Tate Pub., 2008), pp. 50–63. Mellor 2009 David Alan Mellor, ‘Framing Bacon: Reception and Representation from Little Magazine to TV Screen, 1945– 1966’, Visual Culture in Britain, special issue: Bacon Reframed: A Themed Issue on Francis Bacon, 10.3 (2009), 227–234. Melville 1949 Robert Melville, ‘Francis Bacon’, Horizon, 20.120–1 (December 1949–January 1950), 419–23. Moraes 1994 Henrietta Moraes, Henrietta (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994). Moulin 1969 Raoul Jean Moulin, Henri Matisse: Drawings and Paper Cut-Outs (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969). Muir 2014 Robin Muir, Under the Influence: John Deakin, Photography and the Lure of Soho, pubd. in relation to the exhibition of the same name, London: Photographers’ Gallery, 2014 (London: Art/Books in association with the John Deakin Archive and the Photographers’ Gallery, 2014). Muybridge 1901 Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901). Nelson 2003 Robert S. Nelson, ‘Appropriation’, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 160–173. Newhall 1938 Beaumont Newhall, Photography: A Short Critical History, pubd. in relation to the exhibition Photography 1839–1937, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1937 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1938). O’Donnell 2009 Jessica O’Donnell, ‘”The Street … the Only Valid Field of Experience”: Francis Bacon and the Photography of John Deakin’, in Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, ed. by Logan Sisley, exh. cat. Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2009/2010 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009), pp. 88–121. O’Neill 2009 Alistair O’Neill, ‘Available in an Array of Colours’, Visual Culture in Britain, 10.3 (2009), 271–291. ‘On Sketch for a Portrait of Lisa’ 1955 ‘On Sketch for a Portrait of Lisa’, 1955, in Francis Bacon, exh. cat. London: Tate Gallery, 1962 (London: Tate Gallery, 1962), no page numbers. O’Reilly 2008 Sally O’Reilly, ‘Collage: Diversions, Contradictions and Anomalies’, in Collage: Assembling Contemporary Art, ed. by Blanche Craig (London: Black Dog, 2008), pp. 8–19. O’Sullivan 2009 Simon O’Sullivan, ‘From Stuttering and Stammering to the Diagram: Deleuze, Bacon and Contemporary Art Practice’, Deleuze Studies, 3.2 (December 2009), 247–258.

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Film and Radio Lust for Life 1956 Movie, Lust for Life, dir. by Vincente Minnelli (MGM, 1956). Francis Bacon 1964 Documentary, ‘Francis Bacon’, dir. Pierre Koralnik, prod. by Alexandre Burger, Radio Télévision Suisse ­Romande, 2 July 1964. Sunday Night Francis Bacon 1966 Documentary, ‘Sunday Night Francis Bacon’, dir. by Michael Gill and with David Sylvester interview, BBC Television, 1966. Francis Bacon 1985 Documentary, ‘Francis Bacon’, prod. and dir. by David Hinton, ed. by and with Melvyn Bragg interview, for The South Bank Show, London Weekend Television, 1985. ‘I’ll go on until I drop’ 1991 Radio broadcast, ‘I’ll go on until I drop’, Francis Bacon’s last interview, interviewer Richard Cork for ­Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio 4, first broadcast 17 August 1991 [accessed 16 March 2019]. Unfolding a Family History 2000 ‘Ianthe Knott on Francis Bacon – Unfolding a Family History’, Video interview of Ianthe Knott with Barbara Dawson and Perry Ogden, 2000 [accessed 5 July 2021].

Digital Resource E-catalogue: Christie’s, Post-War and Contemporary Art: Evening Auction 2012 Christie’s, ‘Post-War and Contemporary Art: Evening Auction‘, Christie’s, 27 June 2012 [accessed 10 ­October 2013]. Franz Kafkas ‘Briefe an Ottla‘ gehen an Marbach und Oxford 2011 AsKI KULTUR lebendig, ‘Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach: Franz Kafkas ‘Briefe an Ottla‘ gehen an Marbach und Oxford’, Arbeitskreis selbstständiger Kultur-Institute e.V., 2011, [accessed 5 July 2021].

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Bibliography

IMDb, entry on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1939 IMDb, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (dir. by William Dieterle, 1939)‘, IMDb, [n.d.] [accessed 5 July 2021]. Musée Rodin, resource: ‘Rodin and Photography‘ Musee Rodin, ‘Rodin and Photography’, Musee Rodin, [n.d.] [accessed 5 July 2021].

307

308

Ribs

Subject

33-03 The Crucifixion, 1933

Panel

Ribs

DECADE:

Painting

33-01 Crucifixion, 1933

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Ludwig Grünwald, Atlas-Manuel des ­Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses­Nasales (Paris: Bailliere et fils, 1903), no page number, ‘Sclérose du lobe inférieur du ­poumon gauche’ (inverted) Notes: found in Reece Mews: RM98F105:140J: two fragments, Ludwig Grünwald, Atlas-Manuel des ­Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses Nasales (Paris: Bailliere et fils, 1903), tab.5, fig.1: ‘Epulis’ Ludwig Grünwald, Atlas-Manuel des ­Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses ­Nasales (Paris: Bailliere et fils, 1903), no page number, ‘Sclérose du lobe inférieur du ­poumon gauche’ (inverted) Notes: found in Reece Mews: RM98F105:140J: two fragments, Ludwig Grünwald, Atlas-Manuel des ­Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses ­Nasales (Paris: Bailliere et fils, 1903), tab.5, fig.1: ‘Epulis’

1930s

Source

Yes

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings Suggested by

Identified by

Painting

44-01 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944

DECADE:

36-01 Studio Interior, c.1936

CR

Centre

Left

Panel

Michael Sadler, X-ray photograph

Skull

Mouth

Table, figure

Profile

Figure

Suggested / Lost source

Subject

Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, ­Phenomena of Materialisation: A ­Contribution to the Investigation of ­Mediumistic Teleplastics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920), fig.66 ‘Enlargement of portion of fig.64, Eva Carrière’ Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), ‘Getting On and Off a Table’ plate 513, second row, frame three and third row, frame five Notes: found in Reece Mews: ­RM98F105:140J: two fragments, Ludwig Grünwald, Atlas-Manuel des ­Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses ­Nasales (­Paris: Bailliere et fils, 1903), tab.5, fig.1: ‘Epulis’

1940s

Pablo Picasso, Jeune fille dessinant dans un intérieur, 1935, Bacon probably knew this work as a photographic reproduction in Cahiers d’Art, special edition ‘Pablo Picasso 1930–1935’ (1936)

Source

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 30

Suggested by

p. 39

RM98F105:140J Boxer 1975,

RM98F138:1

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison 2005a, p. 10

Harrison 2005a, pp. 34

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

309

Painting

310

Figure

Figure

45-03 Man Standing, 1945

45-05 Figure in a Landscape, 1945

Figure and Mouth Figure

Mouth

Subject

Figure

Right

Panel

45-02 Seated Man, 1945

45-01 Man in a Cap, 1945

CR

Photograph, Eric Hall dozing on a chair in Hyde Park

Suggested / Lost source Simplicissimus, 28.9 (28 May 1923) 107: Th. Th. Heine, cartoon ‚Wie sieht Hitler aus?‘, hier ‚Oder ist der Mund die Haupt­ sache?‘. Boxer suggests this as a generic source. Cartoon of Adolf Hitler by Erich Schilling, 1927 Joseph Goebbels, Picture Post, 13 July 1940 Notes: picture of Joseph Goebbels photo­ graphed by Sam Hunter in Cromwell Place in 1950, Hunter 1952, p. 12 Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf Hitler at a window at Hradčany Castle, Prague, on 15 March 1939 Notes: picture of Adolf Hitler photographed by Sam Hunter in Cromwell Place in 1950, Hunter 1952, p. 12 Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf Hitler at a window at Hradčany Castle, Prague, 15 March 1939, first published in ­Illustrierter Beobachter, 23 March 1939 Notes: picture of Adolf Hitler photographed by Sam Hunter in Cromwell Place in 1950, Hunter 1952, p. 12

Source

Yes

Yes

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 36

Davies H. M. 1978, p. 41

Davies H. M. 1978, p. 41

Boxer 1975, p. 50

Boxer 1975, p. 49

Suggested by

Davies H. M. 1978, p. 40

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

46-02 Figure Study II, 1945

45-06 Study for a Figure, 1945

CR

Panel

Bouquet, profile

Table, figure

Profile

Photograph of Joseph Goebbels receiving flowers Photograph of Ethiopian chicken ­sacrifice, ­Minotaure, 2nd issue, 1933

Photographs of dictator screaming in a microphone

Figure

Setting, hedge

Suggested / Lost source

Subject

Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (­London: Heinemann, 1925), ‘Frontispiece. ­Chapter VII’, ‘Face to Face with the ­African Buffalo’ Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, ­Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920), fig.66 ‘Enlargement of portion of fig.64, Eva Carrière’ Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), ‘Getting on and Off a Table’ plate 513, second row, frame three and third row, frame five

Source

RM98F138:1

RM98F22:107

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Boxer 1975, p. 77

Boxer 1975, pp. 67–68

Boxer 1975, p. 165

Davies and Yard 1986, p. 16

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

311

Painting

46-03 Painting 1946, 1946

CR

Panel

312

Mouth, chin

Tassel

Rose

Spatial setting, umbrella

Subject

Suggested / Lost source Torn leaf, overdrawn and mounted on support, Peoples of all Nations: Their Life Today and Story of their Past, ed. by J.A. Hammerton, 7 vols (London: The Fleetway House, 1922–1924), I, p. 147 J. Horace McFarland, Roses of the World in Color (London: Cassell, 1937), p. 6, ‘Amelia Earhart’ Notes: found in Reece Mews: RM98F105:93: torn leaf, J. Horace McFarland, Roses of the World in Color (London: Cassell, 1937), pp. 163 and 164, ‘The Polyantha Rose, Mlle. Cécile Brunner’ Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf Hitler at a window at Hradčany Castle, Prague, 15 March 1939 Notes: picture of Adolf Hitler photographed by Sam Hunter in Cromwell Place in 1950, Hunter 1952, p. 12 Ludwig Grünwald, Atlas-Manuel des ­Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses ­Nasales (Paris: Bailliere et fils, 1903), tab. 1, fig. 1, chin, lower lip and teeth of a man with scurvy Notes: found in Reece Mews: RM98F105:140J: two fragments, Ludwig Grünwald, Atlas-Manuel des ­Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses ­Nasales (Paris: Bailliere et fils, 1903), tab.5, fig.1: ‘Epulis’

Source

Yes

Yes

RM98F1A:23

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Suggested by

Günther 2011, p. 9

Günther 2011, p. 9

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

46-04 Landscape with Car, first version ‘Figure Getting out of a Car’, 1945

CR

Panel

Car

Figure

Figure

Head

Background colour Swags

Subject

Photographs of Hollywood film crews

Photographs, ­ itler speaking at H a rally, decoration on a canopy Photograph of Benito Mussolini

Suggested / Lost source

Yes

RM98F136:17

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Eduard Fuchs, Illustrierte Sittenge­schichte, II, ‘Die Galante Zeit’ (Munich: Albert Langen, 1909), colour plate ‘Die Gärtnerin. Galanter französischer Farbstich von Moret nach Aug. De Saint-­Aubin’, between pp. 200–201 Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), VI, plate 248, ‘Sitting Down on the Ground’, row one, frame 3 Heinrich Hoffmann, Der Führer grüßt die OverArbeitsmänner, 1938 painted

Lipstick advertisement, Vogue, March 1946, inside cover

Source

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, appendix A4

Harrison 2005a, p. 50 Harrison 2005a, p. 50 Günther 2011, p. 7

Harrison 2005a, p. 50

Suggested by

Stephens 2008, p. 92

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

313

314

Curtain

Arrow

Pince-nez

Subject

49-01 Head II, 1949

Panel

Head

Painting

48-01 Head I, 1948

CR

Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, ­Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (­London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920)

Suggested / Lost source Notes: Torn leaf, overpainted, Heinrich Hoffmann, ‘The Führer Who Commands’, Picture Post, 13 July 1940, leaf photographed by Sam Hunter in the Cromwell Place studio, 1950, illustrated in: Francis Bacon, ed. by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, exh. cat. (London: Tate Britain, 2008), p. 16, ill. no. 2 Robert M. and Ada W. Yerkes, The Great Apes A Study of Anthropoid Life, 3rd edition (London: Yale University Press, 1945), p. 294, fig.100 Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman K.C. Clark, Positioning in Radiography, third edition (London: Ilford Limited, W.M. Heinemann (Medical Books) LTD, 1942), cf. e.g. plate 712, p. 256

Source

RM98F138:1

RM98F136:18

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Sylvester 2000, p. 33

Suggested by

Davies H. M. 1978, p. 79 Harrison 2016a, p. 190

Harrison 2016a, p. 180

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

49-07 Head VI, 1949

49-03 Head IV (­Man with a Monkey), 1949

49-02 Head III, 1949

CR

Panel

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Figure

Notes: picture of man carrying a monkey photographed by Sam Hunter in Cromwell Place in 1950, Hunter 1952, p. 12 Cover of Picture Post magazine, 9 October 1948 Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Picture of man carrying a monkey

Mouth

Spatial setting

Man, monkey

Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, ­Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920)

Curtain

Source

Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Suggested / Lost source

Pince-nez

Subject

RM98F138:1

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Daniels 2009a, p. 76

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, image caption between pp. 20–21

Sylvester 2000, p. 33

Suggested by

Melville 1949, pp. 419– 423

Davies H. M. 1978, pp. 80–81

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

315

316

Figure

Figure

50-04 Study after Velázquez, 1950

Background

50-03 Study for a Figure, 1950

DECADE:

Figure

Subject

50-02 Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1950

Panel

Figure

Painting

49-08 Study from the Human Body, 1949

CR

Postcard of Monte Carlo, cf. 52-03

Suggested / Lost source

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 268, captioned “Arising from the ground”, third row, fourth frame Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Eric Hosking and Cyril Newberry, Birds in Action, London: Collins, 1949, p. 79, ‘Barn Owl with Vole’

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), ‘Men Wrestling’, plate 346, row three, frame one 1950s

Source

RM98F114:79

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Suggested by

Cappock 2005b, p. 138

Coke 1981, p. 166

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

Composition

51-01 Figure with Monkey, 1951

Figure

Pince-nez, scream

Subject

Figure

Panel

50-06 Painting, 1950

50-05 ‘Study after Velázquez’, 1950

CR

Photographs of animals in zoos

Suggested / Lost source

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650 Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Max Hirmer, photograph of sculpture, Daughter of Niobe, c.440 BC, in Museo delle Terme, Rome, widely published

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Source

Yes

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison 2005a, p. 100 Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 48 and 50

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

317

Painting

318

51-04 Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1951

51-03 Study for Nude, 1951

CR

Panel

Figure

Curtain

Numbers

Numbers derive from Muybridge’s motion studies

Corner of photo­ graph, wire mesh fence of an enclosure, visible in photo­graph by Sam ­Hunter, ­Cromwell  Place, 1950, reproduced in ­Hammer and Stephens 2009, ill. no. 9, p. 326

Enclosure

Figure

Suggested / Lost source

Subject

Hans Surén, Man and Sunlight (Slough: Sollux Publishing Co., 1927), no page number Black and white photograph, Franz Kafka with his sister Ottla in front of the Oppelt-­Haus in Prague, c.1914, frontispiece to Max Brod, Franz Kafka: Eine Bio­ graphie (Erinnerungen und Dokumente) (Prague: Heinrich Mercy Sohn: 1937), Ottla is edited out for the frontispiece

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 317, ‘Athlete Heaving a 75-pound Rock’, row two, frame two

Source

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Sylvester 2000, p. 60

Suggested by

Kelley 1996, p. 104 Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 51 and 52

Coke 1981, p. 168

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

5107D

Pope III, 1951

Pince-nez and scream Spatial setting, figure, throne

Spatial setting, figure, throne

Subject

51-06 Pope II, 1951

Panel

Spatial setting, figure, throne

Painting

51-05 Pope I, 1951

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Photographic illustration of Pope Pius XII being carried through the Vatican, as seen in Sam Hunter’s photographs of Bacon’s working material, 1950, Hunter 1952, p. 12: David Seymour, His Holiness, Pius XII, is carried in ‘sedia gestatoria’ through the Sala Ducale on the anniversary of his coronation as Pope 1949, 1949 (detail)

Photographic illustration of Pope Pius XII being carried through the Vatican, as seen in Sam Hunter’s photographs of Bacon’s working material, 1950, Hunter 1952, p. 12: David Seymour, His Holiness, Pius XII, is carried in ‘sedia gestatoria’ through the Sala Ducale on the anniversary of his coronation as Pope 1949, 1949 (detail) Photographic illustration of Pope Pius XII being carried through the Vatican, as seen in Sam Hunter’s photographs of Bacon’s working material, 1950, Hunter 1952, p. 12: David Seymour, His Holiness, Pius XII, is carried in ‘sedia gestatoria’ through the Sala Ducale on the anniversary of his coronation as Pope 1949, 1949 (detail) Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Source

Yes

Yes

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alloway 1963, p. 20

Alloway 1963, p. 20

Alloway 1963, p. 20

Suggested by

Hammer 2012b, p. 167

Hammer 2012b, p. 167

Hammer 2012b, p. 167

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

319

Painting

320

Numbers

Figure

52-01 Study for Crouching Nude, 1952

Spatial setting

Pincenez and scream Figure

Subject

Spatial setting

Panel

51-09 ‘Figure’, 1951

51-08 Crouching Nude, 1951

CR

Small numbers derive from ­Muybridge’s motion studies

Suggested / Lost source

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 317, ‘Heaving a 75-lb. Rock’, row two, frame two David Churchill Somervell, 100 Years in Pictures: A Panorama of History in the Making (London: Odhams Press, 1951), p. 26, ‘1936 Nazi Rally at Nuremberg’ David Churchill Somervell, 100 Years in Pictures: A Panorama of History in the Making (London: Odhams Press, 1951), p. 26, ‘1936 Nazi Rally at Nuremberg’ Illustration from ‘Mauled by a Lion in Africa’, in Picture Post, 9 August 1947, p. 13: ‘The Cameraman Loses Consciousness’

Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Source

RM98F105:64

RM98F105:64

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 56

Hammer 2012e

Suggested by

Harrison 2016a, p. 248

Alloway 1963, p. 19

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

52-02 House in Barbados, 1952

CR

Panel

Whole composition

Figure

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 161, captioned ‘Jumping, standing high jump’ Photographic reproduction, Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, 1903, as seen in Sam Hunter’s photographs of Bacon’s working material, 1950, Hunter 1952, p. 12 Black and white photograph, Peter Lacy’s house in Barbados, c.1950s

Figure

Source

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 317, ‘Athlete Heaving a 75-pound Rock’, row two, frame two, plate 328, ‘Man rowing with rowing machine’

Suggested / Lost source

Figure

Subject

RM98F248:4

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 56

Boxer 1975, p. 142

Suggested by

Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no.180

Anna ­Hiddleston, exh. cat.: Francis Bacon 1909–1992 Retro­ spektive 1996/1997, p. 102 Davies H. M. 1975, p.68

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

321

Painting

322

52-07 Study for a Head, 1952

52-06 Study for a Portrait, 1952

52-05 Study of a Head, 1952

52-04 Landscape, 1952

52-03 Dog, 1952

CR

Panel

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Head

Cinerama premiere programme, 1952, overpainted by Bacon Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

David Churchill Somervell, 100 Years in Pictures: A Panorama of History in the Making (London: Odhams Press, 1951), p. 26, ‘1936 Nazi Rally at Nuremberg’

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 704: ‘Dog; walking; mastiff. Dread’

Source

Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

‘inspired by photo­graphs’

Postcard of Monte Carlo, now lost

Suggested / Lost source

Pince-nez

Scream and pincenez Spatial setting Pince-nez

Spatial setting

Background

Dog

Subject

RM98F17:109

RM98F105:64

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Davies H. M. 1978, p. 108 Davies H. M. 1978, p. 108

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 58–60 Davies H. M. 1978, p. 108

Boxer 1975, p. 163

Suggested by

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 58

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 58

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

52-14 Elephant Fording a River, 1952

Elephant

Spatial setting

Figure

Subject

52-12 Study of ­Figure in a Landscape, 1952

Panel

Spatial setting

Painting

52-11 Landscape, 1952

CR

Suggested / Lost source Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 J. E. Burns, Adventures in Wildest Africa: On a Big Game Hunting Expedition (­London: Walker & Sons, 1949), p. 14 Black and white photograph, possibly taken by Francis Bacon, Peter Lacy, mounted on leaf William S. Smith, ­History of Egyptian Sculpture and Painting, published on behalf of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (London: The Oxford University Press, Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1949) Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (London: Heinemann, 1925), ‘Frontispiece. Chapter VII’, ‘Face to Face with the African Buffalo’ Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (London: Heinemann, 1925), ‘Three elephants in open bush clearing snapped at sixteen paces distance at the moment one of the trio detected the author with his camera’, chapter III, plate 6

Source

RM98F22:107

RM98F130:167

RM98BC33

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Suggested by

Harrison 2016a, p. 280

Davies H. M. 1978, pp. 140– 143

Finke 2009b, p. 134

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

323

324

Rhinoceros, 1952

Painting

52-17 Dog, 1952

52-16 Dog, 1952

5215D

CR

Panel

Spatial setting

Dog

Spatial setting

Rhinoceros

River

Subject

Suggested / Lost source

David Churchill Somervell, 100 Years in Pictures: A Panorama of History in the Making (London: Odhams Press, 1951), p. 26, ‘1936 Nazi Rally at Nuremberg’ Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 704: ‘Dog; walking; mastiff. Dread’, row three, frame three David Churchill Somervell, 100 Years in Pictures: A Panorama of History in the Making (London: Odhams Press, 1951), p. 26, ‘1936 Nazi Rally at Nuremberg’

Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (London: Heinemann, 1925), ‘Evening on the Amala’, chapter IV, plate 1 Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (London: Heinemann, 1925), ‘The second ball makes it spin round and collapse on its forelegs’, Chapter VIII, plate 6

Source

RM98F105:64

RM98F105:64

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Suggested by

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 62 and 63

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, Appendix B Destroyed, D8 Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 62

Harrison 2016a, p. 280

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

Marching figures

52-22 ‘Marching ­Figures’, 1952

Background

Spatial setting

Dog

Subject

Figure

Panel

52-21 ‘Man on a Rowing ­Machine’, 1952

52-19 Man Eating a Leg of Chicken, 1952

52-18 Landscape, South of France, 1952

CR

Postcard of Monte Carlo, cf.  52-03 Photograph of the Marquis de Cuevas eating chicken with his fingers

Suggested / Lost source

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 328, ‘A naked man sits on a rowing machine and rows’, row one, frame three Amédée Ozenfant, Foundations of ­Modern Art (London: John Rodker, 1931), p. 14, ‘The Egyptian and British Army’

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 704: ‘Dog; walking; mastiff. Dread’, row three, frame four David Churchill Somervell, 100 Years in Pictures: A Panorama of History in the Making (London: Odhams Press, 1951), p. 26, ‘1936 Nazi Rally at Nuremberg’

Source

Yes

RM98F105:64

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 66

Suggested by

Harrison 2005a, p. 10

Harrison 2016a, p. 294

Harrison 2016a, p. 288

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

325

Painting

326

Figure

Scream, pince-nez

53-02 Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope ­Innocent X, 1953

Figure

Figure

Subject

Figure

Panel

53-01 Study of a Nude, 1952

52-23 ‘Figure with Raised Arm’, 1952

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Notes: loose leaf from book found in studio: RM98F1A:22 Thomas Eakins, Marey Wheel photographs of unidentified model, 1884 (illustrated in Gordon Hendricks, The Photographs of Thomas Eakins (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1972), p. 84, ill. no. 113, not (!) direct source) Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 307 ‘Man Throwing Discus’ Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 163, ‘Man Performing Standing Broad Jump’ Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Source

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Davies H. M. 1978, p. 109

Suggested by

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 67

Harrison 2016a, p. 298

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Pince-nez

53-07 Study for ­Portrait I, 1953

Figure

Dog

Subject

53-06 Man with Dog, 1953

Panel

Mozzetta

Painting

53-04 ‘Man on a ChaiseLongue’, 1953

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 704: ‘Dog; walking; mastiff. Dread’ Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Source

Yes

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 70

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Suggested by

Davies H. M. 1999, p. 13–15

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

327

Painting

328

53-09 Study for Portrait III, 1953

53-08 Study for a Portrait II, 1953

CR

Panel

Figure

Pince-nez

Figure

Pince-nez

Subject

Suggested / Lost source

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Source

Yes

Yes

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Suggested by

Davies H. M. 1999, p. 13

Davies H. M. 1999, p. 13

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

53-12 Study for Portrait VI, 1953

53-11 Study for ­Portrait V, 1953

53-10 Study for Portrait IV, 1953

CR

Panel

Pince-nez

Figure

Pince-nez

Figure

Pince-nez

Subject

Suggested / Lost source

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Source

Yes

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Suggested by

Davies H. M. 1999, p. 13

Davies H. M. 1999, p. 13

Davies H. M. 1999, p. 13

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

329

Painting

330

53-14 Study for Portrait VIII, 1953

53-13 Study for Portrait VII, 1953

CR

Panel

Figure

Pince-nez

Figure

Pince-nez

Figure

Subject

Suggested / Lost source

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Source

Yes

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Suggested by

Davies H. M. 1999, p. 13

Davies H. M. 1999, p. 13

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Spatial setting

Legs

Legs

53-17 Study of a ­Baboon, 1953

53-18 Study for ­Figure I, 1953

53-19 Study for ­Figure II, 1953 53-20 Study of Figure in a Room, 1953

Figure

Spatial setting

Subject

53-16 Sphinx II, 1953

Panel

Spatial setting

Painting

53-15 Sphinx I, 1953

CR

Suggested / Lost source Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 David Churchill Somervell, 100 Years in Pictures: A Panorama of History in the Making (London: Odhams Press, 1951), p. 26, ‘1936 Nazi Rally at Nuremberg’ David Churchill Somervell, 100 Years in Pictures: A Panorama of History in the Making (London: Odhams Press, 1951), p. 26, ‘1936 Nazi Rally at Nuremberg’ J. E. Burns, Adventures in Wildest ­Africa: On a Big Game Hunting Expedition (­London: Walker & Sons, 1949), p. 14 Fragment of leaf, mounted on support, George Platt Lynes, Christopher Isherwood, 1946, Vogue, April 1947, p. 71 George Platt Lynes, Christopher Isherwood, 1946, Vogue, April 1947, p. 71, mounted on support Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 538: ‘Legless Boy Climbing in and out of Chair’

Source

Bacon Estate

Bacon Estate

RM98BC33

RM98F105:64

RM98F105:64

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Davies H. M. 1978, p. 135

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 76

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 75

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

331

Painting

332

Shed

Spatial setting Figure

53-28 The End of the Line, 1953

53-29 Study for a Portrait, 1953 53-32 ‘Pope’, 1953

Head

Subject

Figures

Centre

Panel

53-24 Two Figures, 1953

53-23 Three Studies of the Human Head, 1953

CR

‘Freely ­improvised from a drawing in […] Phenomena of Materialisation’

Suggested / Lost source

Cinerama premiere programme, 1952, overpainted by Bacon Cinerama premiere programme, 1952, overpainted by Bacon Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650 Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300

TIME, the Weekly Newspaper, Atlantic Edition, 62.3 (20 July 1953) p. 25, ­photograph of Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent speaking Torn leaf, Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, edition not specified, ‘Some Phases of a Wrestling Match See Series 20’ Liam O’Leary, The Silent Cinema (Littlehampton Book Services Ltd; Dutton Vista Pictureback, 1965), p. 14, photograph of W.K.L Dickson first film studio, ‘Black Maria’

Source

Yes

RM98F17:109

RM98F17:109

Bacon Estate

RM98F1A:80

RM98F248:10

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alloway 1963, p. 18

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 80

Suggested by

Harrison 2016a, p. 368

Harrison 2005a, p. 132

Günther 2011, p. 45

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

Blocks of stone

54-12 Sphinx, 1954

Figures

Setting

Setting

Subject

Figure

Panel

54-03 Study of a Figure, 1954

54-01 Two Figures in the Grass, 1954

CR

Photographs of the Giza Sphinx

Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies for the grid Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (London: Heinemann, 1925)

Suggested / Lost source

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 357: ‘Two Men Wrestling’ Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 325, ‘Lifting and holding two 50-lb dumbbells’, frame 6

Source

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison 2016a, p. 400

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, ­Appendix  A, A9

Harrison 2016a, p. 378

Davies H. M. 1978, p. 153

Davies H. M. 1978, p. 153

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

333

Painting

334

54-14 Figure with Meat, 1954

54-13 Study of a Dog, 1954

CR

Panel

Figure

Carcasses

Spatial setting

Dog

Subject

Suggested / Lost source

Notes: RM98F1A:203: (different) torn leaf, Jean Éparvier, A Paris sous la Botte des Nazis (Paris: R. Schall, 1944), no page number John Deakin, Francis Bacon between sides of meat, 1952, first published in Vogue in July 1962, p. 78 Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650 Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 704: ‘Dog; walking; mastiff. Dread’ Jean Éparvier, A Paris sous la Botte des Nazis (Paris: R. Schall, 1944), no page number

Source

Yes

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison 2005a, pp. 160–161

Hammer 2012b, p. 185, 186, ill. nos. 112– 113

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 90

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Black and white photographs, life mask of William Blake, National Portrait Gallery Black and white photographs, life mask of William Blake, National Portrait Gallery

Head

Head

Figure

Black and white photographs, life mask of William Blake, National Portrait Gallery

Suggested / Lost source

Head

Subject

55-01 Study for ­Portrait I (after the Life Mask of ­William Blake), 1955 55-02 Study for ­Portrait II (after the Life Mask of ­William Blake), 1955 55-03 Study for Portrait III (after the Life Mask of William Blake), 1955 55-05 Small Study for Portrait, 1955

Panel

Figure

Painting

54-15 Pope, 1954

CR

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650 Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300

Source

Yes

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 91–92

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 91–92

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 91–92

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

335

336

56-01 Self-Portrait, 1956

Head

Head

Head

Subject

55-10 Study for ­Portrait IV (after the Life Mask of ­William Blake), 1955 55-16 Sketch for a Portrait of Lisa, 1955

Panel

Figure

Painting

55-06 Study for a Head, 1955

CR

Photograph of Pope Pius XII, working material now lost Black and white photographs, life mask of William Blake, National Portrait Gallery

Suggested / Lost source

Kurt Lange, König Echnaton und die Amarna-Zeit: Die Geschichte eines Gottkünders (Munich: Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliches Lichtbild, 1951), ‘23 Echnaton. Gips. Berlin’ Hermann Ranke, The Art of Ancient Egypt: Architecture, Sculpture, Paintings, Applied Art (Vienna: Phaidon Press, 1936; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936), plate 130, Queen Nefertiti Black and white movie, William Dieterle, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1939, prod. Pan Berman, Charles Laughton as ‘Quasimodo’

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300

Source

RM98F22:10

RM98F105:91

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison 2016a, p. 452

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 95–96 Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 91–92

Suggested by

Harrison 2016a, p. 452

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Hat

Figure

Figure

56-05 Study for ­Portrait II, 1956

56-06 Study for ­Portrait I, 1956

Subject

56-03 Study for ­Portrait of Van Gogh I, 1956

Panel

Head

Painting

56-02 Head, 1956

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Kurt Lange, König Echnaton und die Amarna-Zeit: Die Geschichte eines Gottkünders (Munich: Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliches Lichtbild, 1951) ‘23 Echnaton. Gips. Berlin’ Photographic illustration of Vincent Van Gogh, The Painter on the Road to ­Tarascon, 1888, probably Wilhelm Uhde, L. Goldscheider, Vincent Van Gogh (­London: Phaidon, 1951), pl. 69 Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Source

Yes

Yes

RM98F105:91

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Identified by

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Alley and Harrison Rothenstein 2016a, 1964, p. 458 pp. 101–102

Suggested by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

337

338

Figures

Spatial setting Spatial setting

57-01 Figures in a Landscape, 1956

57-03 Study for Figure V, 1956 57-04 Study for Figure VI, 1956 57-05 Study for Portrait IX, 1956

Spatial setting, figure

Figures

56-11 ‘Figures in a Landscape’, 1956

Owls

Head

Subject

56-08 Study for Portrait V (after the Life Mask of William Blake), 1956 56-09 Owls, 1956

Panel

Spatial setting

Painting

56-07 Man Carrying a Child, 1956

CR

Black and white photographs, life mask of William Blake, National Portrait Gallery

Suggested / Lost source RM98F105:64

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Cinerama premiere programme, 1952, overpainted by Bacon

Drawing RM98F17:109

RM98F137:6 Eric J. Hosking, Cyril Newberry and Stuart G. Smith, Birds of the Night (London: Collins, 1945), plate 71 ‘Newly fledged long-eared Owls’ Illustration from ‘Mauled by a Lion in Africa’, in Picture Post, 9 August 1947, p. 13: ‘The Cameraman Loses Consciousness’ Illustration from ‘Mauled by a Lion in Africa’, in Picture Post, 9 August 1947, p. 13: ‘The Cameraman Loses Consciousness’ Cinerama premiere programme, 1952, Drawing RM98F17:109 overpainted by Bacon Cinerama premiere programme, 1952, Drawing RM98F17:109 overpainted by Bacon

David Churchill Somervell, 100 Years in Pictures: A Panorama of History in the Making (London: Odhams Press, 1951), p. 26, ‘1936 Nazi Rally at Nuremberg’

Source

Harrison 2016a, p. 468

Identified by

Hammer 2012e

Boxer 1975, Harrison p. 159 2005a, figs. 223 and 224, p. 202 Hammer 2012e

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 91–92

Suggested by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

Shadow

Spatial setting

Hat

57-10 Study for Portrait of Van Gogh II, 1957

57-11 Study for Portrait of Van Gogh III, 1957

57-12 Study for Portrait of Van Gogh IV, 1957

Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 162, ‘Woman Sitting Down in Chair and Drinking Tea’, frames 5 and 6 in the centre row John Deakin, Patrick MacNee on the set of Powell and Pressburger’s 1950 film, The Elusive Pimpernel, holding up two monkeys, reproduced in The Tatler and Bystander, 9 February 1949 Photographic illustration of Vincent Van Gogh, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888, probably Wilhelm Uhde, L. Goldscheider, Vincent Van Gogh (­London: Phaidon, 1951), pl. 69 Photographic illustration of Vincent Van Gogh, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888, probably Wilhelm Uhde, L. Goldscheider, Vincent Van Gogh (­London: Phaidon, 1951), pl. 69 Photographic illustration of Vincent Van Gogh, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888, probably Wilhelm Uhde, L. Goldscheider, Vincent Van Gogh (­London: Phaidon, 1951), pl. 69

Body

Source

Film still, Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, screaming woman

Suggested / Lost source

Head

Subject

Chimpanzee

Panel

57-09 Study for Chimpanzee, 1957

57-08 Study for the Nurse in the Film ­Battleship Potemkin, 1957

CR

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 110– 111 Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 110–111

Paul ­Rousseau, cf. Harrison 2016a, p. 496 Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 110–111

Davies H. M. 1978, pp. 116–117

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 109

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

339

340

Hat

Whole composition

57-15 Van Gogh in a Landscape, 1957

57-16 Figure in a Landscape (Miss Diana Watson), 1957

Setting

Spatial setting

Subject

57-14 Study for Portrait of Van Gogh VI, 1957

Panel

Spatial setting

Painting

57-13 Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V, 1957

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (London: Heinemann, 1925), ‘Frontispiece. ­Chapter VII’, ‘Face to Face with the ­African Buffalo’

Jos de Gruyter, The World of Van Gogh Le Monde de Van Gogh Die Welt von Van Gogh, photographs by Emmy ­Andriesse (The Hague: Daamen, 1953), p. 141 Photographic illustration of Vincent Van Gogh, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888, probably Wilhelm Uhde, L. Goldscheider, Vincent Van Gogh (­London: Phaidon, 1951), pl. 69 Photographic illustration of Vincent Van Gogh, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888, probably Wilhelm Uhde, L. Goldscheider, Vincent Van Gogh (­London: Phaidon, 1951), pl. 69 Photograph, Francis Bacon, Diana Watson, Byland Abbey, Yorkshire, c.1938

Source

RM98F22:107

RM98F130:156

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 110–111

Suggested by

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 114– 115

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Figure

Head

Head

Head

57-24 ‘Figure in Sea’, 1957

58-01 Self-Portrait, 1958 58-03 Head I, 1958

58-04 Head II, 1958

Figure

Arms

Subject

57-22 Study for ­Portrait, 1957

Panel

Figure, glasses, hat

Painting

57-18 Van Gogh Going to Work, 1957

CR

John Deakin, Peter Lacy at Smithfield Meat Market, c.1957

Suggested / Lost source

Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar, at GolfeJuan in 1937, L’OEIL: Revue d’Art, no. 22, October 1956 John Deakin, Peter Lacy at Smithfield Meat Market, c.1957 John Deakin, Peter Lacy at Smithfield Meat Market, c.1957

J. Horace McFarland, Roses of the World in Color (London: Cassell, 1937), p. 164, ‘Mons. J. Pernet-Ducher, the originator of many of the best roses, including the so-called Pernetiana type. This photograph, made in June, 1922, by John C. Wister, at Venissieux, near Lyons, France, is believed to be the best picture of this extraordinary rose-worker, now deceased’ Stefan Lorant, anthology of photographs from Lilliput magazine, 1940 pp. 172– 173: ‘The Ruler of Germany’, ‘The Terror of the Zoo’ and ‘Chamberlain and the Beautiful Llama’ Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Source

RM98F17:69, RM98F108:21A

RM98F17:69, RM98F108:21A

RM98F105:93

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison 2016a, p. 544

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68 Harrison 2009a, p. 78

Harrison 2005a, pp. 88–89

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

341

Painting

342

Colours

59-03 Two Figures in a Room, 1959

Figures

Figure

58-11 ‘Figure in a Room’, 1958

Throne

Head

Subject

Figure

Panel

58-10 ‘Figure on a Dais’, 1958

58-05 Seated Man, Orange Background, 1958 58-09 ‘Pope with Owls’, 1958

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Illustration from ‘Mauled by a Lion in Africa’, in Picture Post, 9 August 1947, p. 13: ‘The Cameraman Loses Consciousness’

John Deakin, Peter Lacy at Smithfield Meat Market, c.1957, third row, third frame Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650 Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 27, ‘Man Performing Standing Broad Jump’, fourth row, first frame (reversed) Illustration from ‘Mauled by a Lion in Africa’, in Picture Post, 9 August 1947, p. 13: ‘The Cameraman Loses Consciousness’ J. E. Burns, Adventures in Wildest ­Africa: On a Big Game Hunting Expedition (­London: Walker & Sons, 1949), p. 17

Source

RM98F16:209E

Yes

RM98F108:21A

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison and ­Daniels 2008, comment no.152–153 Hammer 2012e

Suggested by

Harrison 2016a, p. 556

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

60-05 Pope No. 2, 1960

Figure

Head

59-14 Head of Man – Study of Drawing by Van Gogh, 1959

DECADE:

Head

59-13 Miss Muriel Belcher, 1959

Figure

Figure

Subject

Figure

Panel

59-10 Study from Portrait of Pope ­Innocent X by Velásquez, 1959

59-06 Lying Figure, 1959

CR

John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, 1959 (date by Breuvart)

Suggested / Lost source

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Reproduction of drawing, Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait, c.1885 (F.1378), reproduced in Vincent Van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh (London: Thames & Hudson), II, p. 510 1960s

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300

Hans Surén, Man and Sunlight (Slough: Sollux Publishing Co., 1927), no page number Fred Astaire, Life magazine, 30 December 1940, p. 36 Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Source

BB.15.01-03 (second book donation to Dublin, from Dales Farm)

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Breuvart 1996, p. 133

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Suggested by

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, p. 128

Harrison 2016a, p. 570

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

343

344

Figure

Monkey

Subject

60-07 ‘Pope and Chimpanzee’, 1960

Panel

Figure

Painting

60-06 Pope No. 3, 1960

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 V. J. Stanĕk, Introducing Monkeys (­London: Spring Books 1957)

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Source

Yes

RM98F1A:151

Yes

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Suggested by

Harrison 2016a, p. 602

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Figure

61-04 Paralytic Child Walking on all Fours (from Muybridge), 1961

Sofa

Head

61-03 Seated ­Woman, 1961

61-07 Woman on a Red Couch, 1961

Figure

Subject

60-17 Seated Figure, 1960

Panel

Head

Painting

60-14 Seated Figure, 1960

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 John Deakin Archive: JMO_12817: double exposure, John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, c.1964 Notes: photos not conclusivly dated Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 539, ‘Infantile paralysis; child, walking on hands an feet’, third row, third frame Torn leaf, overpainted, Umbro Apollonio, ‘La Bienalle’, L’OEIL, October 1956, p.42

RM98F16:218: Black and white photograph taken outside Wallace Heaton Camera Shop, Bond Street (Polaroid Land Picture), contained in a cardboard frame of Peter Lacy wearing a pin-striped suit, c. 1959 Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Source

RM98F103:3

Yes

RM98F16:218

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison 2016a, p. 632

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Suggested by

Finke 2009b, p. 138

Bacon, title

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

345

346

Head

61-10 Study for a Pope III, 1961

Figure

Figure

Subject

61-09 Study for a Pope II, 1961

Panel

Figure

Painting

61-08 Study for a Pope I, 1961

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, ­­­Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920) fig.194, president Poincaré as manifested by Eva Carrière Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Source

RM98F114:20 

Yes

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Cappock 2005b, p. 111

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Figure

Figure

61-13 Study for a Pope VI, 1961

Subject

61-12 Study for a Pope V, 1961

Panel

Figure

Painting

61-11 Study for a Pope IV, 1961

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Source

Yes

Yes

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

347

Painting

348

Circle around eye Figure

61-21 Head III, 1961

61-23 Nude, 1961

Head

61-20 Head II, 1961

Figure

Figure

Subject

Head

Panel

61-19 Head I, 1961

61-14 Crouching Nude, 1961

CR

Suggested / Lost source

K.C. Clark, Positioning in Radiography (London: Ilford Limited, WM. Heinemann (Medical Books) LTD), 1939 Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 19, overweight female nude, ‘Walking, commencing to turn around’, Abnormal Movements, first row, tenth frame

John Deakin, Peter Lacy at Smithfield Meat Market, c.1957

Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 180 ‘Woman Turning and Rising from Sitting on Floor’ frame 2 and 3, second row John Deakin, Peter Lacy at Smithfield Meat Market, c.1957

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300 John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961

Source

RM98F17:99

RM98F17:99

RM981A:107

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison 2016a, p. 662 Cappock 2005b, p. 34 Harrison 2016a, p. 666

Suggested by

Harrison 2016a, p. 652 Harrison 2016a, p. 652

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

62-08 Head, 1962

Head

Right

Head

Head

Bed, figure

Centre

Right

Meat

Left

62-04 Three ­Studies for a ­Crucifixion, 1962

62-07 Study for Three Heads, 1962

Head

Subject

62-03 Seated Figure, 1962

Panel

Head

Painting

61-24 Seated Figure, 1961

CR

Photograph of Allen Ginsberg on a bed

Suggested / Lost source

Unknown photographer, Peter Lacy outside Wallace Heaton Camera Shop, Bond Street, c. 1959 John Deakin, Peter Lacy at Smithfield Meat Market, c.1957 Cecil Beaton, Francis Bacon in the Battersea studio, 1960, paint-spattered and crumpled, illustrated: Peppiatt 2006a, cover image

John Deakin, Peter Lacy at Smithfield Meat Market, c.1957, third column, second last, reversed Paris Match, 25 November 1961, p. 46

John Deakin, Peter Lacy at Smithfield Meat Market, c.1957, folded, torn, paint-spattered

Source

Dash of paint over face

Suggested by

Yes

RM98F17:99

RM98F16:218

RM98F22:27

John ­Richardson quoted in Harrison 2016a, p. 686

2016a, p. 680

RM98F108:21A Harrison

RM98F22:44 Print torn and folded, part of left forehead missing

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

349

Painting

350

63-02 Man and Child, 1963 63-03 Turning Figure, 1963

63-01 Lying ­Figure with ­Hypodermic Syringe, 1963

62-09 Study for ­Portrait of P.L., 1962 62-10 Seated Figure on Couch, 1962

CR

Panel

Spatial setting Spatial setting

Head

Photograph of Allen Ginsberg on a bed

René Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire du Cinéma, 7th edn, Histoire encyclopédique du Cinéma I, Le Cinéma Français (Paris: Robert Laffont MCMXLVII, 1947), fig. no. 31: ‘Jane Marnac et Henry Bosc dans La Goualeuse d’Alexandre Devarennes’.

Notes: Same as in 62-04 John Deakin, Peter Lacy at Smithfield Meat Market, c.1957 Picture Post, June 8 1940, p. 25

John Deakin Archive: jd_0192_c_n001: John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961

Figure

Bed

Fragment of leaf with illustration by Don Bachardy of Igor Stravinsky and a notice of Bachardy’s first exhibition, Queen, London (27 September 1961), p. 4

Sofa

Source

John Deakin, Peter Lacy at Smithfield Meat Market, c.1957

Suggested / Lost source

Head

Subject

Yes

RM98F17:99

Drawing RM98NF98 

RM98F17:99

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

John ­Richardson quoted in Harrison 2016a, p. 686

Vanel 1996, p. 172

Suggested by

Günther 2011, p. 39

Harrison and ­Daniels 2008, comment no.185

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

6307D

Study of ­Portrait of P.L. from Photographs, 1963

63-04 Study for Self-Portrait, 1963 63-05 Study for Portrait on Folding Bed, 1963

CR

Panel

Figure

Bed

Figure

Figure

Subject

Photograph of Allen Ginsberg on a bed

Suggested / Lost source

Notes: Same as in 62-04 John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961

Notes: found in Reece Mews: RM98F105:25: loose leaf, René Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire du Cinéma, 7th edn, Histoire encyclopédique du Cinéma I, Le Cinéma Français (Paris: Robert Laffont MCMXLVII, 1947), fig nos.: 98–101. Luitpold Dussler, Die Zeichnungen des Michelangelo (Berlin: Verlag Gebrüder Mann, 1959) p. 39, catalogue number 194r: Studies for the Sistine Ceiling and the Tomb of Pope Julius II, c.1508–1512, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964

Source

RM98F17:124

RM98F1A:87, RM98F16:298

RM98F137:5

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

John ­Richardson quoted in Harrison 2016a, p. 686

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

351

Painting

352

63-13 Portrait of Henrietta ­Moraes, 1963 63-14 Study for Portrait (with Two Owls), 1963

63-12 Three Studies for Portrait of Henrietta ­Moraes, 1963

CR

Figure

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300

Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

John Deakin Archive:jd_0194_d_n001: John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes in the French House pub, Soho, late 1950s John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961

Head

Figure

John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961

Head

Right

Yes

RM98F17:124

RM98F1A:107

Alley and Rothenstein 1964, pp. 67–68

Cappock 2005b, p. 47 Cappock 2005b, p. 47

Head

RM98F1A:107

Bacon, title

John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961

RM98F22:44

Suggested by

Cappock 2005b, p. 47

Right part of foreHead is ripped off

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

John Deakin Archive: jd_0194_e_n001: John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes in the French House pub, Soho, late 1950s

John Deakin, Peter Lacy at Smithfield Meat Market, c.1957, folded, torn, paint-spattered

Source

Centre

Suggested / Lost source

Head

Head

Subject

Left

Panel

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Head

Figure

Right

64-02 Study for Henrietta ­Moraes on White Ground, 1964 Right 64-03 Double ­Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, 1964

Sofa

Head

Head

Head

Right

Left

Head

Centre

64-01 Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1964

Head

Left

63-15 Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1963

Subject

Panel

Painting

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Fragment of leaf with illustration by Don Bachardy of Igor Stravinsky and a notice of Bachardy’s first exhibition, Queen, London (27 September 1961), p. 4

John Deakin, contact sheet, Frank ­ uerbach (on the left) and unknown A man, c.1964, row one, frame one

John Deakin, Lucian Freud, in his studio (?), early 1960s Notes: probably painted from picture of same series John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 John Deakin, Lucian Freud, in his studio (?), early 1960s

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

Source Suggested by

Drawing RM98NF98 

RM98NF131

2016a, p. 742

RM98F130:179 Harrison

RM98F128:26D

RM98F112:08

RM98F149:20

RM98F24:15

2016a, p. 738

RM98F105:105 Harrison

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

353

Painting

354

64-05 Study for ­Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1964 64-06 Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1964

64-04 Study for ­Portrait of Henrietta ­Moraes, 1964

CR

Left

Panel

Figure

Head

Bed

Figure

Sofa

Figure

Head

Subject

Photograph of Allen Ginsberg on a bed

Suggested / Lost source

John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964

Notes: Same as in 62-04 John Deakin, Lucian Freud in a Street, c.1964

John Deakin, Lucian Freud in a street, c.1964 John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961 Fragment of leaf with illustration by Don Bachardy of Igor Stravinsky and a notice of Bachardy’s first exhibition, Queen, London (27 September 1961), p. 4 John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961

Source Suggested by

RM98F1A:197, RM98F17:25

Harrison 2016a, p. 750

2016a, p. 750

RM98F104:131 Harrison

John Richardson quoted in Harrison 2016a, p. 686

2016a, p. 742

RM98F130:179 Harrison

Drawing RM98NF98 

RM98F1A:107

RM98F104:131

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

Panel

Head

Head

All

64-09 Three Studies Left for Portrait of George Dyer (on light ground), 1964

Head

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

John Deakin, George Dyer in Soho, c.1963

Head

Head

John Deakin, Lucian Freud in a street, c.1964 John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

Head

John Deakin, Lucian Freud in an interior, c.1960s

Source

John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964

Photomat strips

Suggested / Lost source

Figure

Head

Subject

Right

64-08 Three Studies Left for Portrait of George Dyer (on pink ground), 1964 Centre

64-07 Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1964

CR

RM98F105:105

RM98F149:20, RM98F17:162

Fold anti­- RM98F17:89A cipates shadow on face

RM98F105:105

RM98F104:131

RM98F1A:197, RM98F17:25

RM98F1A:213:17:1, RM98F1A:213:17:4, RM98F1A:213:17:5

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison 2005a, p. 171

Günther 2018, p. 100

Harrison 2016a, p. 750

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

355

Painting

356

64-12 Study for ­Portrait (­Isabel ­Rawsthorne), 1964

64-11 Study for Self-Portrait, 1964

64-10 Three Figures in a Room, 1964

CR

RM98F16:298, RM98F1A:87

John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964

Figure

Head

RM98F12:17:1

RM98F1A:170, RM98F1A:87

Drawing RM98NF98 

RM98F24:15, RM98F17:89A

RM98F108:3 Omission reflects in painting

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

RM98F22:128, RM98F17:158

John Deakin, George Dyer in Soho, c.1963 Fragment of leaf with illustration by Don Bachardy of Igor Stravinsky and a notice of Bachardy’s first exhibition, Queen, London (27 September 1961), p. 4 John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a Bed, c.1964

John Deakin, George Dyer in Soho, c.1963

Source

Polaroid of Francis Bacon outside Wallace Heaton Camera Shop, Bond Street, c.1959 John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

Suggested / Lost source

Head

Figure

Sofa

Head

Right

Centre

Head

Subject

Centre

Panel

Farr 1999b, p. 134

E–catalogue: Christie’s, Post–War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction 2012

Günther 2018, p. 100

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

65-01 Crucifixion, 1965

CR

Right

Left

Panel

Arm band, ‘suggested by swastika an old coloured magazine photograph showing Hitler surrounded by other nazis’

Figure

Figures

Torn leaf, overpainted, Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of ­Boxing (London: Spring Books, 1959), no page numbers

Sunday Times Colour Section, 18 February 1962, feature ‘The Buried Life of Adolf Hitler’, p. 18, photographs Hugo Jaeger, text Constantine Fitzgibbon, image of Adolf Hitler Jacques Henry Lartigue, The Grand Prix of the A.C.F. June 26 1912. Photograph of his father’s racing car 1913

Figure

Source

Overpainted leaf, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 124, ‘Woman Walking Downstairs, Picking up Pitcher, and Turning’

Suggested / Lost source

Figure

Subject

RM98F130:170

RM98F114:140

RM98F105:147

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Leiris 1983, pp. 41–42

Suggested by

Günther 2011, p. 37

Harrison 2005a, pp. 186 and 187, figs. no. 206 and 207 Harrison and ­Daniels 2008, comment no.53 Boxer 1975, pp. 180– 181

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

357

Painting

358

65-03 Study from Portrait of Pope ­Innocent  X, 1965

65-02 After ­Muybridge  – Woman ­Emptying a Bowl of Water and Paralytic Child on All Fours, 1965

CR

Panel

Figure

Notes: for example, RM98F1:3: Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1948), p. 300

Yes

Bacon, title

Identified by

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 539, ‘Infantile paralysis; child, walking on hands an feet’, third row, third frame Photographic illustration, Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c.1650

Suggested by

Figure

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Bacon, title

Source

Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), ‘Woman Throwing Basin of Water’, plate no.159, second row, frame 3

Suggested / Lost source

Bowl, not posture

Subject

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

John Deakin, Lucian Freud, in his studio (?), early 1960s Probably picture from same series John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a Tear street in Soho, c.1964 echoes in black stroke

Head

Head

Left

65-06 Three ­Studies Left of Isabel ­Rawsthorne (on light ground), 1965 Centre

Head

Head

John Deakin, Lucian Freud, in his studio (?), early 1960s

Head

Left

65-05 Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1965

Head

Centre

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

RM98F17:98

RM98F17:63

RM98F128:26D

RM98F112:08

RM98F24:54

RM98F11:2

RM98F17:158, RM98F22:128

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Head

Source

Left

Suggested / Lost source

65-04 Three Studies for Portrait of Isabel ­Rawsthorne, 1965

Subject

Panel

Painting

CR

Cappock 2005b, p. 42 Harrison 2016a, p. 779

Harrison 2016a, p. 779

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

359

360

Painting

Right

Panel

66-02 Portrait of George Dyer Staring at Blind-Cord, 1966

65-09 Portrait of Lucian Freud (on Orange Couch), 1965

Right

65-07 Three ­Studies Left of Isabel Rawsthorne (on white ground), 1965 Centre

CR

Figure

Couch

Head

Figure

Head

John Deakin, Lucian Freud in a Street, c.1964 John Deakin, Lucian Freud in an interior, c.1960s Torn leaf, overpainted, Umbro Apollonio, ‘La Bienalle’, L’OEIL, October 1956, p.42 John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964 John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964 John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964

Head

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

Source

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

Suggested / Lost source

Head

Head

Subject

RM98F1A:16, RM98F1A:164

RM98F103:3

RM98F24:79

RM98F104:131

RM98F1A:87

RM98F24:54

RM98F17:158, RM98F22:128

RM98F1A:156

RM98F16:262 Tear echoes in brushstroke on the tip of the nose

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Suggested by

Harrison 2016a, p. 812

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

66-05 Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1966

66-04 Three Studies of Henrietta Moraes, 1966

66-03 Henrietta ­Moraes, 1966

CR

Head

Right

Profile

Head Figure

Centre

Head

Right

Figure

Head

Centre

Left

Head

Bed

Figure

Subject

Left

Panel

Photograph of Allen Ginsberg on a bed

Suggested / Lost source

John Deakin, Lucian Freud, 1950s John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964 John Deakin, Lucian Freud, in his studio (?), early 1960s John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

Notes: Same as in 62-04 John Deakin Archive: jd_0194_e_n001: John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes in the French House pub, Soho, late 1950s John Deakin Archive: jd_0194_k_n001: John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes in the French House pub, Soho, late 1950s John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes in the French House pub, Soho, late 1950s John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964

John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961

Source Suggested by

RM98F16:5, RM98F130:82, RM98F16:81, RM98F108:3

RM98F112:08

RM98F1A:43

RM98F1A:17

RM98F1A:87

RM98F104:93

Harrison 2016a, p. 802

p. 156 John ­Richardson quoted in Harrison 2016a, p. 686

RM98F130:179 Vanel 1996

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

361

Painting

362

Panel

66-08 Three Studies Left for ­Portraits: Isabel ­Rawsthorne, Lucian Freud and J.H., 1966

66-06 Study of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1966 66-07 Lying Figure, 1966

CR

Head

Bed

Whole composition

Photograph of Allen Ginsberg on a bed

Notes: Same as in 62-04 John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

John Deakin Archive: jd_0192_d_n001: John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961 Notes: no frame matches painted figure exactly Torn leaf, Francis Bacon, exh. cat. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1963/1964; Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1964; Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1964 (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1963), p. 72: Illustration of Francis Bacon, Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe, 1963, mounted on cardboard

Figure

Source

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

Suggested / Lost source

Head

Subject

RM98F1A:156

RM98F16:6

RM98F22:128, RM98F17:158

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

John ­Richardson quoted in Harrison 2016a, p. 686

Harrison 2016a, p. 708

Suggested by

Günther 2011, p. 19

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

66-12 Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1966

66-10 Portrait of Isabel ­Rawsthorne, 1966 66-11 Three Studies of George Dyer, 1966

66-09 Portrait of George Dyer Talking, 1966

CR

Head

Head

Centre

Right

Head

Right

Head

Head

Centre

Left

Head

Head

Colour

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964 John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 John Deakin Archive: JMO_13247: John Deakin, colour photograph of George Dyer and John McDonald, c.1965 John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

Head

Source

John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964

Suggested / Lost source

Figure

Subject

Left

Panel Suggested by

RM98F24:54

RM98F1A:156

RM98F122:128 and RM98F17:158

RM98F1A:163

RM98F149:44A, RM98F24:15

RM98F108:3

RM98F1A:156

RM98F1A:163

2016a, p. 812

RM98F16:292M Harrison

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Günther 2018, p. 98

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

363

Painting

364 John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 John Masters, Fourteen Eighteen (­London: Michael Joseph Publishers, 1965), p. 85: ‘A facial injury (from Nie wieder Krieg)’ John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

Head

Profile

Frontal

Head

Right

67-02 Portrait of George Dyer, 1967

Figure

Head

John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, c.1964

Head

Centre

RM98F1A:163

RM98F244:11

RM98F1A:163

RM98F17:85A, RM98F24:15

RM98F1A:163

RM98F1A:158

Bacon Estate

Notes: illustrated in Harrison 2005a, p. 162, ill. no.178 John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, c.1964

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Bacon Estate

Source

John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, c.1964

Suggested / Lost source

Head

Subject

Left

Panel

66-16 ‘Seated Figure and Carpet’, 1966 67-01 Three Studies Right for a Self-­ Portrait, 1967

66-15 Portrait of George Dyer Riding a ­Bicycle, 1966

66-13 Three ­Studies of Muriel Belcher, 1966

CR

Identified by

Farr 1999b, here, photos dated 1959 Farr 1999b, p. 140, here, photos dated 1959

Farr 1999b, Harrison p. 140, 2005a, here, photos p. 162 dated 1959

Suggested by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

67-07 Study for Head of ­Lucian Freud, 1967 67-08 Four Studies All for a Self-­ Portrait, 1967

67-04 Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1967 67-05 Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1967 67-06 Study for Head of George Dyer, 1967

Study for Left Head of ­Isabel ­Rawsthorne; Study for Head of George Dyer, 1967 Right

6703a, 6703b

Panel

Painting

CR

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

Head

Head

John Deakin, Lucian Freud in a street, c.1964

Photomat strips, Francis Bacon, taken in Aix-en-Provence, 1966

Head

Head

Head

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

Head

Source

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

Suggested / Lost source

Head

Subject

RM98F104:131

RM98F16:5, RM98F130:82

RM98F11:2

RM98F11:2

RM98F1A:163

RM98F1A:156

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Suggested by

Harrison 2005a, p. 171

Harrison 2005a, p. 169, see fig. nos. 201–203

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

365

Painting

366 John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961 J. P. Müller, My System: 15 Minutes’ Work A Day For Health’s Sake (London: Link House/Athletic Publications, 1939), ­Exercise 13, ill. no.82. Bacon held an undated edition of this book: see RM98F108:69. Notes: Bacon held an undated edition of this book: RM98F125:2. RM98F149:20: John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

67-13 Portrait of George Dyer Staring into a Mirror, 1967

Head

Figure

Figure

67-11 Study for a Portrait, 1967

Figure 2

Head

Source

K.C. Clark, Positioning in Radiography, (London: Ilford Limited, WM. Heinemann (Medical Books) LTD, 1939), plate 399, no page number Jacques Guillaume, photograph of French boy in the Ivory Coast ‘joue au singe’, Paris Match, 28 March 1959, p. 27 Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), ‘Men Wrestling’, plate no.69, third row, second frame John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961

Suggested / Lost source

Figure 1

Subject

Figures

Panel

67-10 Two Figures on a Couch, 1967

67-09 Three Studies from the Human Body, 1967

CR

Yes

RM98F130:179

RM98F1A:107

RM98F16:54

RM98f16:283a

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison 2016a, p. 846

Suggested by

Harrison 2016a, p. 742

Harrison 2013, p. 36

Gowing 1972, p. 14

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

Panel

67-16 Triptych, 1967 Right

67-14 Portrait of Isabel ­Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho, 1967 67Portrait of 15D George Dyer and Lucian Freud, 1967

CR

Picture Post, 8 February 1941, pp. 20–21, Adolf Hitler meeting Ion Antonescu in 1940 Notes: Documentary, ‘Sunday Night­ ­Francis Bacon’, dir. by Michael Gill and with David Sylvester interview, BBC ­Television, 1966 Torn leaf, mounted on support, Paris Match, 16 December 1966, p. 55, ­illustration from article ‘Roi, ce n’est pas un job de tout repos’ John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 RM98F16:298: John Deakin, Lucian Freud, c.1964 Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 70, ‘Men Wrestling’, second row third frame

Curtain

Figures

Freud

Dyer

Dyer

Colour

Richard Bennett, A Picture of the ­Twenties, London: Vista Books, 1961, p. 35

Cat

Source

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

Suggested / Lost source

Figure

Subject

Harrison 2005a, p. 169

Suggested by

RM98F16:54

RM98F1A:163

RM98F16:5, RM98F130:82

RM98FBC39

Yes

Harrison 2016a, p. 858

2009, pp. 90–91

RM98F130:154 O’Donnell

Abrasion RM98F16:19 ­echoes in ­painting

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Günther 2011, p. 31

Harrison 2009b, p. 162

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

367

Painting

368 John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964

John Deakin Archive: jd_0192_d_n001: John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961

Goat

Head

Figure

Figure

67-20 ‘Goat’, 1967

68-01 Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1968 68-02 Two Studies of George Dyer with Dog, 1968 68-04 Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe, 1968

Peter Beard, detail of contact sheet, ­running boxer dog with muskrat in its mouth Peter Beard, detail of contact sheet, ­running boxer dog with muskrat in its mouth E.J. Marey, chronophotographs ‘Chèvre au pas’, 1895–1897

Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, ­Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920) fig.38 John ­Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

Source

Dog

Suggested / Lost source

67-19 ‘Dog’, 1967

Head

Arm

Subject

Dog

All

Panel

67-18 ‘Dog’, 1967

67-17 Three ­Studies of Isabel ­Rawsthorne, 1967

CR Suggested by

Vanel 1996, p. 172

p. 812

RM98F105:146, Harrison RM98F1A:44: 2016a,

RM98F22:128, RM98F17:158, RM98F11:2

RM98F16:278

RM98F16:278

RM98F22:128, RM98F17:158, RM98F11:2

RM98F138:1

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Daniels 2009b, p. 136 Daniels 2009b, p. 136 Harrison 2016a, p. 865

Günther 2011, p. 15

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Left

Bird

Jen and Des Bartlett, They Live in Africa: Nature’s Paradise (London: Collins 1967), p. 236: photograph of a flamingo

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

Figure 2

68-08 Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants, 1968

John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964

Figure 1

Notes: Same as in 62-04 John Deakin, George Dyer in Soho, c.1963

John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964

Photograph of Allen Ginsberg on a bed

Bed

Source

Figure

Suggested / Lost source

Subject

68-06 Portraits of Lucian Freud, 1968 68-07 Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1968

Panel

Head

Painting

68-05 Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror, 1968

CR

Yes

RM98F16:5, RM98F130:82, RM98F16:81, RM98F108:3

RM98F24:31, RM98F23:28

RM98F105:140V, RM98F1A:163 (more complete version)

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio John ­Richardson quoted in Harrison 2016a, p. 686

Suggested by

Günther 2011, p. 11

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

369

370

Head

Bed

Centre

69-02 Portrait of Henrietta ­Moraes, 1969

Head

Head

Figure

Subject

Right

Panel

Figure

Painting

68-10 ‘Figure ­Opening Door’, 1968

CR

John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes in the French House pub, Soho, late 1950s

Photograph of Allen Ginsberg on a bed

Suggested / Lost source

Notes: Same as in 62-04 Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), Plate 63, ‘Man Shadow Boxing’, second row, second frame

Gjon Mili, Adolf Eichmann sitting in sun in exercise yard outside his cell at Djalameh Jail, 1961, cf. e.g. LIFE, 14 April 1961, p. 25 John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

Notes: found in Reece Mews: RM98F213:39: Jen and Des Bartlett, They Live in Africa: Nature’s Paradise (London: Collins 1967), p. 236 is missing John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964

Source

RM98F1A:184

RM98F1A:44, RM98F233:1

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

John ­Richardson quoted in Harrison 2016a, p. 686

Harrison 2005b, p. 93

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

Figure

Head

Right

Centre

Head

Centre

69-07 Three ­Studies of Lucian Freud, 1969

Head

Left

69-06 Three Studies of Henrietta Moraes, 1969

Figure

Bed, figure

Subject

Bull, torero

Panel

69-04 Study for Bullfight No. 1, 1969

69-03 Lying Figure, 1969

CR

John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes in the French House pub, Soho, late 1950s

Photograph of Allen Ginsberg on a bed

Suggested / Lost source

John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes in the French House pub, Soho, late 1950s John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes in the French House pub, Soho, late 1950s John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964

Notes: Same as in 62-04 John Deakin Archive: jd_0193_e_n001: John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961 John Marks, The Life and Death of the Fighting Bull, photographs by José Suárez (London: Cassell, 1967), pp. 92–93, fig.45 Notes: found in Reece Mews: RM98F136:4: John Marks, The Life and Death of the Fighting Bull, photographs by José Suárez (London: Cassell, 1967), pp. 92 and 93 missing

Source

RM98F24:70

RM98F104:93

RM98F24:74, RM98F24:75

Yes

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Farr 1999b, p. 143

Vanel 1996, p. 172

John ­Richardson quoted in Harrison 2016a, p. 686

Suggested by

Cappock 2005b, p. 41

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

371

Painting

372

69-11 Three Studies of George Dyer, 1969

69-09 Study of a Portrait of a Man, 1969 69-10 Three Studies for Portraits (including Self-Portrait), 1969

CR

Figure

Right

Head

Head

Centre

Right

Head

Head

Centre

Right

Head

Head

Left

Head

Figure

Subject

Left

Panel

Suggested / Lost source

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

John Deakin, Bacon in Roland Gardens, 1967 John Deakin, George Dyer in Soho, c.1963

John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964

John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964

John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964

John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964

John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964

Source

Torn, folded

Torn, Folded

Torn, folded

Suggested by

RM98F1A:163

RM98F105:105

RM98F16:5, RM98F130:82, RM98F16:81, RM98F108:3

RM98F1:36

RM98F1:19, RM98F16:299F

RM98F1:19, RM98F16:299F

RM98F1:19, RM98F16:299F

Finke 2009a, p. 131

Finke 2009a, p. 131

RM98F1A:87, Farr 1999b, RM98F107:44, p. 143 RM98F16:298A

RM98F1A:87, Farr 1999b, RM98F107:44, p. 143 RM98F16:298A

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

Moraes

DECADE:

70-01 Studies of George Dyer and Isabel Rawsthorne, 1970

Head

Head

Bull, torero

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

Notes: found in Reece Mews: RM98F136:4: John Marks, The Life and Death of the Fighting Bull, photographs by José Suárez, London: Cassell, 1967, pp. 92–93 missing Torn leaf, mounted on support, affixed with two paper-clips, Thomas Wiseman, Cinema (London: Cassell, 1964), p. 158, film still from Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, 1959 John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961 John Deakin, Bacon in Roland Gardens, 1967 1970s

John Deakin, Bacon in Roland Gardens, 1967 John Marks, The Life and Death of the Fighting Bull, photographs by José Suárez (London: Cassell, 1967), pp. 92–93, fig.45

Head

Source

John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961

Suggested / Lost source

Figure

Subject

Head

Right

Panel

69-16 Self-Portrait, 1969

69-15 Study of ­Henrietta ­Moraes, 1969

69-12 Study of Nude with Figure in a Mirror, 1969 69-13 Self-Portrait, 1969 69-14 Second ­Version of Study for Bullfight No. 1, 1969

CR

Nose ripped off print

RM98F16:262

RM98F16:39

RM98F15:81

RM98F1A:40

Yes

RM98F108:32

RM98F15:81

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison 1999, p. 21

Peppiatt 1996, p. 209–210

Suggested by

Finke 2015, pp. 138– 139

Finke 2009b, p. 133 (item)

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

373

Painting

374

70-04 Triptych – Studies from the Human Body, 1970

70-02 Study of George Dyer, 1970 70-03 Studies of the Human Body in Motion, 1970

CR

Door

Creature

Left

Figure

Arturo Schwarz and Marcel Duchamp, The complete works of Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames & Hudson, 1969, p. 317, Marcel Duchamp, Door: 11 Rue Larrey, 1927 Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure Fold dein Motion (New York: Dover Publications, termines 1955), plate 63, ‘Man Shadow Boxing’ ‘split back’ in painting Arturo Schwarz and Marcel Duchamp, The complete works of Marcel Duchamp (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), p. 317, Marcel Duchamp, Door: 11 Rue Larrey, 1927 Torn page, mounted on cardboard, The Birds LIFE Nature Library, ed. by Roger Tory Peterson et al. (New York: Time Life Books, 1963), p. 55

Upper half of print missing

RM98BC36

RM98F1A:46

RM98F11:91

RM98F1A:46

RM98F1A:167

RM98F16:5, RM98F130:82, RM98F16:81, RM98F108:3

RM98F130:116

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Door

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

Source

John Deakin, George Dyer in living area of Reece Mews, c.1960s

Suggested / Lost source

Head

Dyer

Dyer

Subject

Left

Left

Panel

Beard 1975, p. 16

Harrison 2016a, p. 934

Suggested by

Harrison and ­Daniels 2008, comment no.118

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

70-05 Study of Isabel ­Rawsthorne, 1970 70-06 Three Studies of the Male Back, 1970

CR

Figure

Figure

Right

Head

Figures

Door

Figure

Figure

Subject

Left

Centre

Right

Panel

Suggested / Lost source

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964

Torn leaf, overpainted, Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of ­Boxing (London: Spring Books, 1959), no page numbers Arturo Schwarz and Marcel Duchamp, The complete works of Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames & Hudson, 1969, p. 317, Marcel Duchamp, Door: 11 Rue Larrey, 1927 Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 357, ‘Two Men Wrestling’ John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964

Source

RM98F16:5, RM98F130:82, RM98F16:81, RM98F108:3

RM98F114:82

RM98F11:2, RM98F22:128

RM98F1A:46

RM98F130:170

RM98F1A:87, RM98F107:44, RM98F16:298A

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Suggested by

Harrison and ­Daniels 2008, comment no.118

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

375

376

Head

Centre

Right

Hammock/ swing

70-10 Triptych, 1970 Left

Hammock/ swing Figures

Figure

Subject

70-09 Triptych – Centre Studies of the Human Body, 1970

Panel

Figure

Painting

70-08 Self-Portrait, 1970

CR

Photograph of Bob Johnstone

Photograph of a bird diving out of the sky in Rhodesia’

Suggested / Lost source

Notes: RM98F16:292L: fragment of black and white photograph, John Deakin, Robert Johnstone, 1960s, found in studio

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 357: ‘Two Men Wrestling’

Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 174 ‘Woman Lying Down in Hammock’ Film still, Man Ray, Les Mystères du ­Château du Dé, 1929

RM98F17:124

Bacon Estate

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a Bed, Overc.1961 painted, folded

John Deakin, Bacon in Roland Gardens, 1967

Source

Harrison 2016a, p. 958

Cappock 2005b, p. 65 Finke 2009a, pp. 128– 129. Russell John 2001, p. 102

Suggested by

Harrison 2005a, pp. 96–97

Harrison 2005a, pp. 96–97

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

71-03 Two Men Working in a Field, 1971

71-01 Second ­Version of ‘­Painting’ 1946, ­Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1971

CR

Panel

Hands, arrows

Figures

Foreground

Composition

Swags

Spatial setting

Subject

Photographs of decoration on a canopy above Hitler speaking at a rally

Suggested / Lost source

Torn leaf, Ronald Alley and John Rothenstein, Francis Bacon. Catalogue Raisonné and Documentation (London: Thames & Hudson, 1964), ill. no. 19, colour reproduction of Painting 1946, 1946 C.E. Millar, L.M. Turk and H.D. Foth, ­­­Fundamentals of Soil Science, 4th edn (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1965), p. 436 Reproduction, cartoon, Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, 1515–1516 Ben Hogan, Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf (London: Nicholas Kaye, 1957), e.g. p. 65

Torn leaf, overdrawn and mounted on support, Peoples of all Nations: Their Life Today and Story of their Past, ed. by J.A. Hammerton, 7 vols (London: The Fleetway House, 1922–1924), I, p. 147

Source

RM98NF32

RM98F17:156

RM98F1A:23

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Sylvester 2005, pp. 27–28 Boxer 1975, p. 144

Harrison 2005a, p. 50

Suggested by

Boxer 1975, p. 144

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

377

Painting

378

Profile

Profile

Centre

Right

Figure

Figure

Graeme Kent, A Pictorial History of Wrestling (London: Spring Books, 1969), p. 126 Notes: book is RM98NF55 but page 126 is missing John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews Studio, c.1964 John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

RM98F16:5, RM98F130:82, RM98F16:81, RM98F108:3

RM98F1A:163

Bacon Estate

RM98F1A:43

Figure

71-08 Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud (sideways), 1971 71-09 In Memory of George Dyer, 1971

John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a Bed, c.1964

RM98F24:17, RM98F148:17B, RM98F17:54

John Deakin, George Dyer, Roland Gardens, 1967

Head

71-07 Study for ­Portrait, 1971

RM98F1A:163

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

RM98F1A:100

Source

Double exposure, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964

Suggested / Lost source

Figure

Subject

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

Left

Panel

Profile

71-04 Study of Red Pope, 1962, Second ­Version, 1971 71-05 Study of George Dyer, 1971

CR Suggested by

Günther 2011, p. 35

Harrison 2005a, pp. 184– 186, fig. nos. 204– 205

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

72-02 Self Portrait with Injured Eye, 1972 72-06 Portrait of Man Walking Down Steps, 1972

71-10 Portrait of Isabel ­Rawsthorne, 1971 72-01 Three Studies of Figures on Beds, 1972

CR

Right

Centre

Panel

John Deakin, George Dyer in Soho, c.1963

Head

Double exposure, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964

Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 68, ‘Men Wrestling’, frame, row four

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

Source

Colour photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer walking down stone steps in Greece, 1965

John Deakin, Bacon at Roland Gardens, 1967

K.C. Clark, ­Positioning in Radiography, London: ­Ilford Limited, WM. Heinemann (Medical Books) LTD, first edition 1939

Suggested / Lost source

Figure

Head

Head

Arrowed circles

Figures

Head

Subject

Nose ripped off

RM98F105:139M

RM98F149:35D

RM98F114:82

RM98F1:34

RM98F16:262

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Davies H. M. 1978, p. 190, footnote 239

Finke 2015, pp. 138–139

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

379

Painting

380

Upper body

Lower body

72-14 Female Nude Standing in a Doorway, 1972

Figure

Left

Figure

Figure

Arrowed circles

Figures

Subject

Right

Centre

Panel

72-13 Self-Portrait, 1972

72-07 Triptych ­August 1972, 1972

CR

John Deakin, Bacon at Roland Gardens, 1967

K.C. Clark, ­Positioning in Radiography, London: ­Ilford Limited, WM. Heinemann (Medical Books) LTD, first edition 1939

Suggested / Lost source Davies H. M. 1978, p. 190, footnote 239

Suggested by

Identified by

RM98F1A:107

Harrison 2016a, p. 1026

Breuvart Bond 2012, 1996, p.177 p. 180 RM98F105:146, Breuvart RM98F1A:44 1996, p.177 Cf. eg. Harrison RM98F17:41 2016a, p. 1024 RM98F105:147 Cappock 2005b, p. 116 RM98F104:34

RM98F1:34

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure Folds, in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, over1955), plate 124, ‘Woman Walking painting Downstairs, Picking up Pitcher and ­Turning’ John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961

John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964 John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964

Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 68, ‘Men Wrestling’, frame, row four

Source

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

73-03 Triptych ­May– June, 1973

Left

73-01 Three ­Portraits Posthumous Portrait of George Dyer; Self-Portrait; Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1973

Right

Panel

Painting

CR

Arrow

Figure

‘Bacon claims he adopted the device from a book on golfing instructions’

Frederick Hornibrook, The Culture of the Abdomen: The Cure of Obesity and ­Constipation (London: Heinemann, 1935), fig. 19 and 20, [facing p. 56]

John Deakin, George Dyer in Soho, c.1963 Fragment of cover, mounted on support, Chroniques de l’Art Vivant, 39, Paris, May 1973

Head

Light switch

Photograph of Lucian Freud taken by John Deakin

Head

John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964

Figure

Source

Jacques Saraben, Francis Bacon, 1973

Suggested / Lost source

Head

Subject

Harrison 2005b, pp. 96–97

Suggested by

RM98F105:139Y

RM98F1A:73

RM98F1A:184

RM98F24:70

Davies H. M. 1975, p. 68

p. 39 Cappock 2005b, p. 41

RM98F105:146, Cappock RM98F1A:44 2005b,

Bacon Estate

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison and ­Daniels 2008, comment no.120 Günther 2011, p. 43

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

381

Painting

382

Figure 1

73-08 Figures in Movement, 1973

Colour

Figure Figure

Torn leaf, overpainted, Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of ­Boxing (London: Spring Books, 1959), no page numbers

Peter Stark, Francis Bacon, c.1974

Fragment of cover, mounted on support, Chroniques de l’Art Vivant, 39, Paris, May 1973

RM98F130:170

RM98F1A:73

Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure Fold de- RM98F11:91 in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, termines 1955), plate 63, ‘Man Shadow Boxing’ ‘split back’ in painting RM98F23:77 Nigel Henderson, The Bathers, c.1953 Peter Stark, Francis Bacon, c.1974

RM98F15:41

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Figure

Source

Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of ­Michelangelo (London: Thames & ­Hudson, 1971), p. 285, fig. 406 ‘Nude Seen from the Rear’, 1534 and 1545 (?)

Suggested / Lost source

Figure

Subject

Head

Panel

73-06 Study for Self-Portrait, 1973

73-05 Self-Portrait, 1973

73-04 Study from the Human Body (Man Turning on Light), 1973

CR

Hergott 1996, p. 228

Suggested by

Cappock 2005b, p. 69, ill. no.129, p. 70 Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no.120 Cappock 2005b, p. 69, ill no.131

Günther 2011, p. 17

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Fragment of cover, mounted on support, Chroniques de l’Art Vivant, 39, Paris, May 1973

74-02 Triptych March 1974, 1974

J. Thomson and Adolphe Smith, Street Life in London (first published London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1877, republished Yorkshire: EP Publishing Limited 1973), frontispiece, chapter, ‘A Convict’s Home in Drury Lane’

Left

Figure

Reproduction, Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, 1656, probably in José Ortega y Gasset, Velásquez (Paris: René Julliard, 1954) or (London: Collins, 1954)

All

Figure

Colour

Source

Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of ­Michelangelo (London: Thames & ­Hudson, 1971), p. 246, fig. 350: ‘Sketch for a Resurrection’, 1532–1533 Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 68, ‘Men Wrestling’, frame, row four Peter Stark, Francis Bacon, c.1974

Suggested / Lost source

Figure 2

Subject

73-10 Self-Portrait, 1973

Panel

Figures

Painting

73-09 Two Figures with a Monkey, 1973

CR

RM98F137:10, RM98F93:9

RM98F1A:73

RM98FBC6, RM98F16:33

RM98F1:34

RM98NF58

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Davies H. M. 1978, p. 190, footnote 239 Cappock 2005b, p. 69, ill no.129 Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no.120 Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no.156–157

Harrison 2016a, p. 1048

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

383

Painting

384

75-01 Two Studies from the Human Body, 1974 75-02 Self-Portrait, 1975 75-04 Three Studies for a Portrait of Peter Beard, 1975

74-04 Sleeping Figure, 1974

74-03 Seated Figure, 1974

CR

Head

Head

Head

Centre

Right

Head

Colour, light switch Figure 1

Light switch, colour Composition

Figure

Subject

Left

Centre

Panel

Photograph of Bacon in a hospital bed

Suggested / Lost source

Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975 Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975

Fragment of cover, mounted on support, Chroniques de l’Art Vivant, 39, Paris, May 1973 Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 49, ‘Man Throwing Discus’ frame four, row one John Deakin, Bacon at Roland Gardens, 1967 Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975

Torn leaf, overpainted, Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of ­Boxing (London: Spring Books, 1959), no page numbers Fragment of cover, mounted on support, Chroniques de l’Art Vivant, 39, Paris, May 1973

Source

RM98F1:40

RM98F11:7

RM98F17:38

RM98F1:36

RM98F1A:73

RM98F1A:73

RM98F130:170

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison 2016a, p. 1074

Harrison 2005a, p. 122

Suggested by

Harrison 2016a, p. 1068

Cary 2015, p. 51

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Head

Right

Head

75-10 Study for Portrait (Peter Beard), 1975 76-01 Study for Portrait, 1976

Head

Figure

75-09 Portrait of a Dwarf, 1975

Head 2

Head 1

Head

Centre

75-07 Three Figures and Portrait, 1975

Head

Left

75-05 Three Studies for a Portrait of Peter Beard, 1975

Subject

Panel

Painting

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Photograph, Leo Morhor, Michel Leiris with Francis Bacon, 1970 Leaf from book, Werner and Bedřich Forman, text by Milada Vilímková, Egyptian Art (London: Peter Nevill, 1962), plate 34–35: ‘The Dwarf Seneb and his Family. Painted limestone. Height 0.33m. Giza. IVth Dynasty.’ Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975 Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975

RM98F11:7

Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975 Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975 John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

RM98F17:38

RM98F11:83

RM98F108:68

RM98BC38

RM98F16:5, RM98F130:82, RM98F16:81, RM98F108:3

RM98F11:7

RM98F11:7

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975

Source

Harrison 2016a, p. 1076

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

385

386

76-06 Study for Self-Portrait, 1976

Head

X-ray image of human mandible Figure

Centre

Head

76-05 Triptych, 1976 Left

Right

Head

76-04 Self-Portrait, 1976

Head

Head

Subject

76-03 Studies for Left Portrait (Peter Beard), 1976 Right

Panel

Creature

Painting

76-02 Figure in Movement, 1976

CR

Suggested / Lost source Torn page, mounted on cardboard, The Birds LIFE Nature Library, ed. by Roger Tory Peterson et al. (New York: Time Life Books, 1963), p. 55 Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975 Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975 Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975 Amédée Ozenfant, Foundations of ­Modern Art (London: John Rodker, 1931), p. 59, ‘Sir Austen Chamberlain as seen in a Distorting Mirror’, mounted on carboard Photograph of Peter Beard with shaved head after his release from Kamiti prison in Kenya, 1969 K.C. Clark, Positioning in Radiography (London: Ilford Limited, WM. Heinemann (Medical Books) LTD, 1939), e.g. plate 575, p. 204 John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964

Source

RM98F17:137, RM98F17:110, RM98F112:14, RM98F17:112, RM98FLG5

RM98F1:69

RM98F1:79

RM98F1A:22

RM98F11:7

RM98F16:198

RM98F11:7

RM98BC36

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Cappock 2005b, p. 59

Suggested by

Harrison 2016a, p. 1096

Breuvart 1996, p. 198

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

7616D

Study for ­Portrait, 1976

Head

Head

Head

Head

Right

76-14 Portrait of Michel Leiris, 1976 76-15 Study for Portrait

Circular devices

Centre

Head

Head

Centre

76-10 Study for ­Portrait, 1976

Head

Left

Subject

76-08 Three Studies for a Portrait, 1976

Panel

Head

Painting

76-07 Three ­Studies for Self-­ Portrait, 1976

CR

Suggested / Lost source

John Deakin Archive: jd_0194_j_n001: John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes in the French House pub, Soho, late 1950s Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975

John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961 Ernst Friedrich, War against War! (­London: Journeyman Press Ltd, 1987), first published in 1924, p. 232: ‘War agrees with me like a stay at a health ­resort’, p. 231: ‘Many operations have to be carried out in full consciousness (without any narcotic or anaesthetic)’. John Deakin Archive: jd_0194_i_n001: John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes in the French House pub, Soho, late 1950s Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975 Photograph, by ‘Morhor’, Michel Leiris with Francis Bacon, 1970

John Rothenstein, Francis Bacon, The Masters, LXXI ([n.p.]: Knowledge ­Publications, 1967), ill. no. 5, ‘Francis Bacon’ by Lucian Freud, 1952 John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961

Source

RM98F17:28

RM98BC38

RM98F11:7

RM98F15:81

RM98F15:81

RM98F149:18

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Suggested by Günther 2011, p. 27

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

387

388

Centre

Head 2

Head 1

Profile

Umbrella

Head

Subject

Right 77-03 Study for ­Portrait, 1977 77-05 Triptych Right 1974–1977, 1977

Panel

Composition

Painting

77-01 Triptych, 1977 Left

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Peter Stark, Francis Bacon, c.1974 John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964 Torn leaf, overdrawn and mounted on support, Peoples of all Nations: Their Life Today and Story of their Past, ed. by J.A. Hammerton, 7 vols (London: The Fleetway House, 1922–1924), I, p. 147 John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 Amédée Ozenfant, Foundations of ­Modern Art (London: John Rodker, 1931), p. 59, ‘Sir Austen Chamberlain as seen in a Distorting Mirror’, mounted on carboard Leaf torn from between pp.  300–301, Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, ­Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920), fig. 195. ‘Top: President Poincare, as published by “Miroir.”

Re-photographed fragment of a photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio, c.1964, September 1974

Source

Frayed tear in original photograph (cardboard box)

RM98F114:20

RM98F1A:22

RM98F1A:163

RM98F1A:23

RM98F112:14

RM98F17:125

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Finke 2015, pp. 129– 131

Suggested by

Harrison 2005a, p. 177

Harrison 2005a, p. 177

Günther 2011, p. 9

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Figure

Head

Door

Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of ­Michelangelo (London: Thames & ­Hudson, 1971), pp. 107–108, ill. no. 103: Study for the Nude at the Right above the Persian Sibyl, 1511 Fragment of cover, mounted on support, Chroniques de l’Art Vivant, 39, Paris, May 1973 Cut-out from colour photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer, c.1965

Head

All

77-08 Three Studies for a Portrait (Gianni ­Agnelli), 1977 78-01 Painting, 1978

Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 95, ‘Man Falling Prone and Aiming Rifle’ Notes: figure 1 was painted out in July 1977 John Deakin, George Dyer in Reece Mews

Source

Torn leaf, Barnaby Conrad, Encyclopedia of Bullfighting (London: Michael Joseph), 1961, p. 14 Black and white photograph, unknown photographer, Gianni Agnelli, c.1970s

Suggested / Lost source

Bull’s legs

Figure 1

Subject

77-07 Lying Figure, 1977

Panel

Figure

Painting

77-06 Seated Figure, 1977

CR

RM98F107:28, RM98F:39

RM98F1A:73

RM98F108:42

104:126ver

RM98F17:137, RM98F17:110, RM98F112:14, RM98F17:112, RM98FLG5

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Cappock 2005b, p. 144

Suggested by

Cappock 2005b, pp. 59–60, ill. no. 102

Harrison 2005a, p. 177

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

389

390

78-11 Landscape, 1978

78-10 Figure in Movement, 1978

Figure

`It was a marvellous photograph I had of grass, and the photograph had got torn up and it formed to some extent the shape that the grass has.’

Torn leaf, overpainted, Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of ­Boxing (London: Spring Books, 1959), no page numbers

John Deakin, George Dyer in Reece Mews, c.1964

Figure

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

Source

Photograph, Michel Leiris, c.1970

Suggested / Lost source

Head

Subject

78-07 Study for ­Portrait (Michel Leiris), 1978 78-08 Study for ­Portrait, 1978

Panel

Figure

Painting

78-06 Seated Figure, 1978

CR

Tear

Suggested by

RM98F130:170

Bacon in ­Sylvester 2009, p. 162

p. 1156

RM98F105:146, Harrison RM98F1A:44 2016a,

RM98F11:8

RM98F16:5, RM98F130:82, RM98F16:81, RM98F108:3

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Cary 2015, p. 51

Bond 2012, p. 196

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

Panel

79-05 Sphinx – ­Portrait of Muriel Belcher, 1979

79-04 Oedipus, 1979

Head

Spatial Setting

Centre

79-01 Triptych – Left Studies of the Human Body, 1979

CR

Fragment from newspaper, Observer, Sunday 4 June 1978, photograph of ­Marcia Haydée performing the Tatiana role in the ballet Onegin by John Cranko

Figure

RM98F15:12

Bacon Estate

RM98F107:28

RM98F110:38

RM98F1A:33

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Torn leaf, Martin Weinberger, ­­­Michelangelo: The Sculptor (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul and New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), ill. nos. 101.1.–101.2.: ­Michelangelo, Day, Medici Chapel, San Lorenzo, ­Florence, 1526–1531, and Belvedere ­Torso, fragment of ancient statue, ­Vatican Museums Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 69, ‘Men Wrestling’, third row, second frame Kurt Mendelssohn, The Riddle of the Folds Pyramids (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974), ill. no.37, p. 134, photographic illustration of burial chamber in Khufu’s pyramid Colour photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer, mid-late 1960s John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, c.1964

Source

John Timbers, Muriel Belcher in the ­ olony Room, c.1975 C

Suggested / Lost source

Figure

Figure

Figures

Figure

Subject

Harrison 2008b, p. 10–11 Harrison 2008b, p. 10–11

Harrison 2008b, p. 10–11

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

391

Painting

392 Raphaël Gaillarde, Gamma Agency, ­Reinhard Hassert in 14 rue de Birague, 1979 Raphaël Gaillarde, Gamma Agency, Eddy Batache in 14 rue de Birague, 1979

Head

RM98F1:44

RM98F11:44

RM98F112:55, RM98F110:79 (1973)

RM98F1A:163

RM98F137:9

RM98F110:67 

RM98F110:38

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

John Timbers, Muriel Belcher in the ­ olony Room, c.1975 C Kurt Mendelssohn, The Riddle of the Folds Pyramids (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974), ill. no.37, p. 134, photographic illustration of burial chamber in Khufu’s pyramid Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), p. 94 Frank H. Netter, The Ciba Collection of Medical Illustrations (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 1965), III, p. 107 and p. 109: ‘Digestive System, Part 1, Upper Digestive Tract’. John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), p. 95

Source

Head

Suggested / Lost source

79-10 Study of Rein- Left hard Hassert; Study of Eddy Batache, 1979 Right

Mouth

Figure

Spatial setting

Figure

Subject

Figures

Panel

79-07 Two Seated Figures, 1979

79-06 Seated Figure, 1979

CR Suggested by

Bond 2012, p. 198

Bond 2012, p. 198

Günther 2011, p. 41

Günther 2011, p. 41 Günther 2011, p. 41

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

DECADE:

Painting

Figures

80-07 The ­Wrestlers after ­Muybridge, 1980

Head

Right

Carcass

Head

Centre

80-06 Carcass of Meat and Bird of Prey, 1980

Head

Left

Head

Head, colour

Subject

All

Panel

80-04 Portrait of Centre Jean-Pierre Moueix, 1980 Left

80-01 Three Studies for a ­Portrait of John ­Edwards, 1980 80-02 Three Studies for a Portrait (Peter Beard), 1980

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, J.B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 357: ‘Two Men Wrestling’

Colour photograph, Jean-Pierre Moueix, late 1970s Black and white photograph, animal carcass in a trailer, c.1960s

Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975 Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975 Colour photograph, Jean-Pierre Moueix, late 1970s

Black and white self-portrait, Peter Beard at the Bristol Hotel, Paddington, London, 1975

Photomat strips, John Edwards, c.1970s

1980s

Source

Yes

RM98F11:88

RM98F11:39

RM98F1:40

RM98F11:7

RM98F17:38

RM98F114:130, RM98F17:154

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Bacon, title

Suggested by

Cappock 2005b, p. 190 , ill. no.330

Harrison 2016a, p. 1194

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

393

Painting

394

81-03 Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981 81-04 Sand Dune, 1981

81-01 Study for Self-Portrait, 1981 81-02 Study of a Man Talking, 1981

80-08 Study for ­Portrait with Bird in Flight, 1980 80-09 Painting, 1980

CR

Left

Panel

Edward Quinn, Francis Bacon and John Edwards, standing in front of Carcass of Meat and Bird of Prey, 1980 in the Reece Mews studio, 1979 Torn page, mounted on cardboard, The Birds LIFE Nature Library, ed. by Roger Tory Peterson et al. (New York: Time Life Books, 1963), p. 55 French postcard of sand dunes, mounted on inside cover of book B.S. Johnson and Julia Trevelyan Oman, Street Children (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964). Caption in French ‘Coucher de Soleil dans les Dunes’

Figure

Dunes

Figure

John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a Bed, c.1964

Figure

Figure 2

Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 94, ‘Man Falling Prone and Aiming Rifle’, row two, frame four John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

Figure 1

Source

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

Suggested / Lost source

Figure

Subject

RM98F109:10

RM98BC36

RM98F125:12

RM98F1A:170, RM98F1A:87

RM98F16:5, RM98F130:82, RM98F16:81, RM98F108:3

RM98F104:30

RM98F16:5, RM98F130:82, RM98F16:81, RM98F108:3

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Cappock 2005b, p. 137

Suggested by

Harrison 2016a, p. 1226

Günther 2011, p. 13

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

82-06 Study for Self-Portrait, 1982 82-07 Three Studies Right for a Portrait (Mick Jagger), 1982

Chicken

82-03 ‘Chicken’, 1982

Head

Figure

Chicken

Figure

82-02 Study for the Eumenides, 1982

Profile

Peter Stark, Francis Bacon, early 1970s Barry Miles and Mick Jagger, Mick Jagger in His Own Words (London: Omnibus, 1982), p. 1

RM98F235:1

RM98F1A:198

RM98F108:81

RM98BC36

RM98F16:5, RM98F130:82

RM98F1A:161, RM98F1A:164

John Deakin, George Dyer in Reece Mews, c.1964 John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963 Torn page, mounted on cardboard, The Birds LIFE Nature Library, ed. by Roger Tory Peterson et al. (New York: Time Life Books, 1963), p. 55 Torn leaf, Terence and Caroline Conran, The Cook Book: The Complete Guide to Selecting, Preparing and Presenting Good Food (London: Mitchell Beazley 1980), p. 84, ‘Poultry’ John Deakin, Peter Lacy at Smithfield Meat Market, c.1957

Günther 2011, p. 17

Cappock 2005b, p. 81

Suggested by

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Figure

Source

Figure

Suggested / Lost source

81-06 Study for Self-Portrait, 1981 81-07 Study for Portrait, 1981

Subject

Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure Fold de- RM98F11:91 in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, termines ‘split 1955), plate 63, ‘Man Shadow Boxing’ back’ in painting RM98F22:7N Colour photograph, Michal Holtz, Francis Bacon, 1974

Panel

Figure

Painting

81-05 Study from the Human Body, 1981

CR

Günther 2011, p. 29

Harrison 2008b, p. 8

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

395

396

Painting

All

Panel

83-01 Studies of Isabel ­Rawsthorne, 1983

Head

Head

Right

Figure

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964 John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

John Deakin, George Dyer in Reece Mews, c.1964

Figure

Contact sheet, Peter Beard, images of Mick Jagger and Bianca Jagger, Exile on Main Street Tour, 1972 Back cover, Barry Miles and Mick Jagger, Mick Jagger in His Own Words (London: Omnibus, 1982) Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 54, ‘Man Batting Baseball’, row three, frame 4

Source

John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in a street in Soho, c.1964

Suggested / Lost source

Head

Background colour Figure

Head

Subject

Left

Right

82-08 Study from the Human Body – Figure in Movement, 1982 82-12 Study for ­Portrait of Isabel ­Rawsthorne, 1982 82-13 ‘Three Left ­Figures’, 1982

CR

RM98F16:249B, RM98F105:140

RM98F17:63

RM98F11:2

RM98F105:146, RM98F1A:185, RM98F105:146, RM98F1A:44

RM98F16:249B, RM98F105:140

RM98F94:3

RM98F1A:206:1

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Suggested by

Harrison 2016a, p. 1246

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

83-04 Statue and Figures in a Street, 1983

83-03 Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, 1983

83-02 Study from the Human Body, 1983

CR

Panel

Spatial setting

Spatial setting

Sphinx, composition

Figure

Creature

Figure

Figure

Subject

Suggested / Lost source Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of ­Michelangelo (London: Thames & ­Hudson, 1971), p. 285, fig.406 ‘Nude Seen from the Rear’, 1534 and 1545 (?) Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 63, ‘Man Shadow Boxing’ Torn page, mounted on cardboard, The Birds LIFE Nature Library, ed. by Roger Tory Peterson et al. (New York: Time Life Books, 1963), p. 55 Torn leaf, Paris Match, 2 June 1978, p. 99, article ‘Horreur a Kolwezi’ Black and white illustration, ­Jean-Auguste-­Dominique Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1826, in torn leaf, Didier Anzieu et al., L’Oedipe un complexe universel: Les grandes découvertes de la psych­analyse (Paris: Tchou, 1977) Iain Macmillan, Roger Baker, The Book of London, London: Michael Joseph, 1968, p. 251 Étienne-Jules Marey, La Marche de L’Homme, 1888, ‘Man Walking down Pavement’, 1888 Notes: the image features in Nicole Vedrès, Images du Cinéma Francais, avant-propos de Paul Eluard (Paris: Les Éditions du Chêne, 1945), pl. 153 on p. 90, which Bacon held in his studio (cf. e.g. RM98F22:36)

Source

Yes

RM98F17:138

RM98F17:149

RM98F23:6

RM98BC36

RM98F17:64

RM98F15:41

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio Suggested by

Günther 2011, p. 17

Günther 2011, p. 17

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

397

398

Centre

Shadow

Shadow

Shadow

Figure

Figure

Subject

83-07 Triptych, 1983 Left

Panel

Dunes

Painting

83-05 Sand Dune, 1983

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Torn leaf, Didier Anzieu et al., L’Oedipe un complexe universel: Les grandes découvertes de la psych­analyse (Paris: Tchou, 1977) I.F. Kladov, I.F. Kotomtsev et al., The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials (London: Hutchinson, 1944), no page number. no page number ‘Dr P.S. Semenovsky, a member of the Committe of Experts, examining the body of a child which had been brutally murdered by the German Fascist invaders.’ Torn leaf, Didier Anzieu et al., L’Oedipe un complexe universel: Les grandes découvertes de la psych­analyse (Paris: Tchou, 1977)

Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (London: Allen Lane, 1968), ‘121. Anon: Details from instantaneous photograph. 1860S (?)’ French postcard of sand dunes, mounted on inside cover of book B.S. Johnson and Julia Trevelyan Oman, Street Children (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964). Caption in French ‘Coucher de Soleil dans les Dunes’ John Deakin, George Dyer in Reece Mews, c.1964

Source

RM98F17:149

RM98F22:116

RM98F17:149

RM98F1A:161

RM98F109:10

RM98F125:36

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Hergott 1996, p. 210

Suggested by

Harrison and ­Daniels 2008, comment no.175

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

84-01 Still Life – Broken Statue and Shadow, 1984

CR

Right

Panel

Torn leaf, Didier Anzieu et al., L’Oedipe un complexe universel: Les grandes découvertes de la psych­analyse (Paris: Tchou, 1977) I.F. Kladov, I.F. Kotomtsev et al., The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials (London: Hutchinson, 1944), no page number. no page number ‘Dr P.S. Semenovsky, a member of the Committe of Experts, examining the body of a child which had been brutally murdered by the German Fascist invaders.’ Torn leaf, Didier Anzieu et al., L’Oedipe un complexe universel: Les grandes découvertes de la psych­analyse (Paris: Tchou, 1977)

Shadow

Shadow

Figure

Shadow

Source

I.F. Kladov, I.F. Kotomtsev et al., The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials (London: Hutchinson, 1944), no page number. no page number ‘Dr P.S. Semenovsky, a member of the Committe of Experts, examining the body of a child which had been brutally murdered by the German Fascist invaders.’ John Deakin, George Dyer in Reece Mews, c.1964

Suggested / Lost source

Shadow

Subject Suggested by

RM98F17:149

RM98F22:116

RM98F17:149

RM98F112:14, Hergott RM98F114:147, 1996, RM98FLG5 p. 210

RM98F22:116

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Günther 2011, p. 23

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

399

Painting

84-02 Diptych 1982–84: Study from the Human Body 1982– 84; Study of the Human Body – from a Drawing by Ingres 1982, 1982

CR

400

Figure

Figure

Right

Shadow

Subject

Left

Panel

Suggested / Lost source

RM98F232:1ver: torn leaf, mounted, The Art Foundation Colourprints, ­series II (French Painting since 1800) No. 1, colour photographic illustration of JeanAuguste-Dominique Ingres, Le Bain Turc, 1862

I.F. Kladov, I.F. Kotomtsev et al., The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials (London: Hutchinson, 1944), no page number. no page number ‘Dr P.S. Semenovsky, a member of the Committe of Experts, examining the body of a child which had been brutally murdered by the German Fascist invaders.’ Torn fragment from book, R. S. Whitington, An Illustrated History of Australian ­Cricket (London: Pelham, 1972), p. 91

Source Suggested by

2005d, p. 64

RM98F232:1ver Harrison

RM98F16:118

RM98F22:116

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Jessica O’Donnell, in conversation 2011

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

84-06 ‘John Edwards’, 1984

Body (Shirt) Head

Head

Left

Francis Bacon, John Edwards, late 1970s to 1980s (see also RM98F8:1A: ­Colour photograph of John Edwards in a ­domestic interior, c.1980s) John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964 Colour photograph of John Edwards, late 1970s, photographer unknown, c.1980s Francis Bacon, John Edwards, late 1970s–1980 John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964 Francis Bacon, John Edwards, late 1970s–1980s

Head

Body (Shirt) Head

John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964

Body

Right

Centre

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

RM98F8:46

RM98F1A:87, RM98F16:298

RM98F104:23B

RM98F17:42

RM98F1A:87

RM98F8:46

RM98F1A:87, RM98F16:298

Fragment of leaf, mounted on cardboard, Cut frag- RM98F130:166 The Illustrated London News, 268.6986.2 ment deter(September 1980), p. 37 mines spatial setting Bridgman’s Complete Guide To Drawing Drawing RM98F1A:117 From Life, ed. by Howard Simon (New York: Weathervane Books, 1979), p. 31, mounted on cardboard

Source

Stool

Suggested / Lost source

All panels

Subject

84-05 Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1984

Panel

Colour, Spatial setting

Painting

84-03 ‘Street Scene (with Car in Distance)’, 1984

CR

Harrison 2009a, p. 84

Cappock 2005b, p. 42

Suggested by

Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment nos.176– 177

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

401

Painting

402

85-02 Poster for the 1988 Van Gogh Exhibition in Arles, 1985 85-03 Figure in Movement, 1985

84-08 Seated Figure, 1984 85-01 Study for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1985

84-07 Study for ­Portrait of John Edwards, 1984

CR

Panel

Figure

Hat

Stool

Figure

… – taken, I imagine, from a book of photographs of David Gower which I’ve seen in your studio.’

Francis Bacon, John Edwards, late 1970s–1980s John Deakin, George Dyer in Reece Mews, c.1964 Photograph, documentary film stock, Francis Bacon, prod. and dir. by David Hinton, ed. by and with Melvyn Bragg interview, for The South Bank Show, London Weekend Television, 1985 Bridgman’s Complete Guide To Drawing Drawing From Life, ed. by Howard Simon (New York: Weathervane Books, 1979), p. 31, mounted on cardboard Photographic illustration of Vincent Van Gogh, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888, probably Wilhelm Uhde, L. Goldscheider, Vincent Van Gogh (London: Phaidon, 1951), pl. 69 RM98F1A:117

RM98F11:10

RM98F105:146, RM98F1A:44

RM98F8:46

RM98F1A:87, RM98F16:298

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Head

Source

John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1963

Suggested / Lost source

Figure (Shirt)

Subject

Sylvester in ­Sylvester 2009, p. 180

Harrison 2016a, p. 1300 (RM98F1A:28)

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

86-06 Study for ­Portrait of John Edwards, 1986

Spatial setting

86-05 Blood on the Floor – ­Painting, 1986

Head

Blood

Spatial setting, composition Face

Figure

86-04 Study for ­Portrait of Gilbert de Botton, 1986

Centre

Figure

Subject

86-02 Study for a Self-Portrait – Triptych, 1985

Panel

Creature

Painting

85-04 Painting March 1985, 1985

CR

Suggested / Lost source

Black and white photograph of Leon Trotsky’s study after his assassination, Francis Wyndham and David King, ­Trotsky: A Documentary (London: ­Penguin, 1972), p. 170 Colour photograph of John Edwards in a domestic interior, c.1980s

Colour photograph, Gilbert de Botton, c.1980s Michael Peto and Alexander Bland, The Dancer’s World (London: Collins, 1963), no page number

John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964 Robert Daley, The Swords of Spain (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1967), p. 131

Torn page, mounted on cardboard, The Birds LIFE Nature Library, ed. by Roger Tory Peterson et al. (New York: Time Life Books, 1963), p. 55 John Deakin, Lucian Freud on a bed, c.1964

Source

Cappock 2005b, p. 41

Suggested by

RM98F8:1A

2009a, p. 60

RM98F114:129 Daniels

RM98F93:1

RM98F1:35

RM98F93:11

RM98F1A:170, RM98F1A:87

RM98F24:70

RM98BC36

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Günther 2011, p. 25

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

403

Painting

404

Head

87-07 ‘Study for Portrait’, 1987

Figure

Figure

Lectern

Creature

Right

Head

Centre

Body

Figure

Subject

Left

Panel

87-05 Triptych, 1987

87-02 Study from the Human Body, 1987

87-01 Triptych 1986-7, 1986

CR

Book with photographs of cricket player David Gower in Bacon’s studio

Suggested / Lost source

Black and white photograph of Leon Trotsky’s study after his assassination, Francis Wyndham and David King, ­Trotsky: A Documentary (London: ­Penguin, 1972), p. 170 Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of ­Michelangelo (London: Thames & ­Hudson, 1971), p. 285, fig.406 ‘Nude Seen from the Rear’, 1534 and 1545 (?) Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 63, ‘Man Shadow Boxing’ Torn page, mounted on cardboard, The Birds LIFE Nature Library, ed. by Roger Tory Peterson et al. (New York: Time Life Books, 1963), p. 55 Photograph, unknown photographer, Francis Bacon in Reece Mews, late 1970s–1980s

Photograph of American president Woodrow Wilson leaving the Quai D’Orsay during the Versailles Peace ­Conference, 1919 Francis Bacon, John Edwards, late 1970–1980s

Source

Cappock 2005b, p. 55 Sylvester 2009, p. 180

Sylvester 1996b, p. 31

Suggested by

RM98F1:21

RM98BC36

RM98F15:41

Cappock 2005b, p. 142

1996b, p. 31

RM98F114:129 Sylvester

RM98F17:50

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Cary 2015, pp. 107– 108

Günther 2011, p. 13

Günther 2011, p. 17

Günther 2011, p. 17

Cappock 2005b, p. 101

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

88-03 Study from the Human Body and ­Portrait, 1988

88-02 Study from the Human Body after Muybridge, 1988

88-01 Study for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1988

87-09 ‘Figure ­Opening Door’, 1987

CR

Panel

Photograph, film stock from documentary, ‘Francis Bacon’, prod. and dir. by David Hinton, ed. by and with Melvyn Bragg interview, for The South Bank Show, London Weekend Television, 1985 Jacques Saraben, Francis Bacon, 1973

Head

Head

Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 64, ‘Man Shadow Boxing’, first row, third image

Body

Blots of paint

Francis Bacon, John Edwards, late 1970s to early 1980s

Body

Figure

Günther 2011, p. 17

Suggested by

Bacon Estate

RM98F107:28

RM98F8:14, RM98F17:60

Harrison 2005b, p. 96

Cappock 2005b, p. 55 Bacon, title

p. 224

RM98F105:146, Hergott and RM98F233:1 Vanel 1996,

RM98F11:91

RM98F15:41

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Head

Source

Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of ­Michelangelo (London: Thames & ­Hudson, 1971), p. 285, fig.406 ‘Nude Seen from the Rear’, 1534 and 1545 (?) Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure Fold dein Motion (New York: Dover Publications, termines 1955), plate 63, ‘Man Shadow Boxing’ ‘split back’ in painting John Deakin, George Dyer in Reece Mews, c.1964

Suggested / Lost source

Figure

Subject

Günther 2011, p. 17

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

405

Painting

Panel

406

89-01 Study of a Man and Woman Walking, 1989 89-02 Study for ­Portrait of John Edwards, 1989 89-03 Study of ­Portrait of John Edwards, 1989

88-06 Portrait of John Edwards, 1988

All

88-05 Second Left ­Version of Triptych 1944, 1988

CR

Head

Head

creature

Francis Bacon, John Edwards, late 1970s–1980s

Francis Bacon, John Edwards, late 1970s–1980s Torn page, mounted on cardboard, The Birds LIFE Nature Library, ed. by Roger Tory Peterson et al. (New York: Time Life Books, 1963), p. 55 Francis Bacon, John Edwards, late 1970s–1980s

Head

Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, ­Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1920), fig.66 ‘Enlargement of portion of fig.64, Eva Carrière’

Source

John Deakin, George Dyer in Reece Mews, c.1964

Reproduction of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944

Suggested / Lost source

Figure

Composition

Profile

Subject

RM98F17:50

RM98F17:50

RM98BC36

RM98F17:50

RM98F233:1

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Cappock 2005b, p. 41 Harrison, 1999, p. 23

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

90-05 Two Studies for a Portrait, 1990

90-04 Painting, 1990

407

Head

Figure

Head

Railing

Eddy Batache, Francis Bacon at Chantilly racecourse, 1978 Photograph of José Capelo John Deakin, George Dyer in Reece Mews, c.1964 Unknown photographer, colour photograph, José Capelo, 1980s–1990s

Figure

RM98F104:16

RM98F105:146, RM98F1A:44

RM98F8:97

John Ginone, Anthony Zych, 1980s

Head

90-02 Portrait of Jacques ­Dupin, 1990 90-03 Male Nude before Mirror, 1990

RM98F17:50

RM98F105:146, RM98F1A:44

RM98F8:117

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

RM98F11:91 Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure Fold in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, thigh, buttocks 1955), plate 63, ‘Man Shadow Boxing’ back RM98F11:70 Photobooth strips, Jacques Dupin, c. 1980s

Head

John Deakin, George Dyer in Reece Mews, c.1964 Francis Bacon, John Edwards, late 1970s–1980s 1990s

Body

Source

Colour photograph, of John Edwards wearing white silk shirt, c.1980s

Suggested / Lost source

Head, shirt

Subject

Figure

Left

Panel

90-01 Man at a Washbasin, 1989

DECADE:

89-04 Study for ­Portrait of John Edwards, 1989

CR

Harrison 2016a, p. 1376

Harrison 2016a, p. 1372 Harrison 2009a, p. 85 Harrison 2016a, p. 137

Hergott 1996, p. 228

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

408

91-03 Study for the Human Body, 1991

Torn leaf, mounted on support Gilbert Odd, Boxing: The Great Champions (­London: Hamlyn Books, 1974), p. 82

Head

Head

Head

Left

RM98F1:4

RM98F16:43A

RM98F1A:74

Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), plate 68, ‘Men Wrestling’, second frame fourth row The Correspondant Magazine, 24 June 1990, front cover: ‘What drives Ayrton Senna’ Unknown photographer, colour photograph, José Capelo, 1980s–1990s

Bacon Estate

RM98F8:31

RM98F107:21

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Jacques Saraben, Francis Bacon, 1973

Unknown photographer, colour photograph, José Capelo, in a car park, 1980s–1990s Unknown photographer, colour photograph, José Capelo, 1980s–1990s

Source

Figures

Photographs of Anthony Zych by John Ginone, 1980s

Suggested / Lost source

Centre

Head

Head

Head

Subject

90-07 Study for Portrait (José Capelo), 1990 91-01 Study for a Portrait March 1991, 1991 91-02 Triptych, 1991 Right

Panel

Head

Painting

Right

CR

Harrison 2005a, pp. 234 Harrison 2005a, pp. 234 Günther 2011, p. 33

Harrison 2005a, pp. 234

Harrison 2016a, p. 1384

Suggested by

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Painting

‘Man Sweeping’, c.1967

DESTROYED AND LOST PAINTINGS

92-01 ‘Self-Portrait’, 1991–1992

CR

Panel

Figure

Head

Figure

Gjon Mili, Adolf Eichmann in jail, ­fragment of page from Paris Match magazine, 15 April 1961, p. 75

Bridgman’s Complete Guide To Drawing From Life, ed. by Howard Simon (New York: Weathervane Books, 1979), p. 290 Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of ­Michelangelo (London: Thames & ­Hudson, 1971), pp. 69–70. 48: Standing Male Nude, 1505, pen, Paris, Louvre 49: Standing Male Nude, 1505, pen, Paris, Louvre John Deakin, George Dyer at Roland Gardens, 1967

Head

Leg

Source

Archie Moore and Yvon Durelle 1958, torn leaf, mounted on support, Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of Boxing (London: Spring Books, 1959), p. 176 John Ginone, Anthony Zych, 1980s

Suggested / Lost source

Head

Subject

RM98F1A:65

RM98F1A:104, 17:94, 17:113, 24:30

RM98F130:168

RM98F94:9

RM98F8:97

Bacon Estate

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison and Daniels 2008, comment no.121

Harrison 2016a, p. 1390 Günther 2011, p. 33

Günther 2011, p. 33

Suggested by

Harrison 2021, p. 233.

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

409

CR

410

‘George Dyer with Camera’, c.1968

Untitled, c.1965, ­destroyed 1973 Two Figures and Portrait, c.1977 ‘Woman with Arm Raised’, c.1959

Painting

Panel

Head (centre)

Sofa

Head

Subject

triggered by an image in Dr ­Robert M. ­Yerkes’ ­Chimpanzees’ (Robert M. and Ada W. Yerkes, The Great Apes: A Study of Anthro­poid Life, London: Yale University Press, 1929, 1945)

Suggested / Lost source

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963, and John Deakin, George Dyer in Reece Mews, c.1964

John Deakin, George Dyer in a street in Soho, c.1963

Nigel Henderson, The Bathers, c.1953

Amédée Ozenfant, Foundations of ­ odern Art (London: John Rodker, M 1931), p. 59, ‘Sir Austen Chamberlain as seen in a Distorting Mirror’, mounted on carboard Torn leaf, overpainted, Umbro Apollonio, ‘La Bienalle’, L’OEIL, October 1956, p.42

Source

RM98F16:5, RM98F130:82

RM98F23:77

RM98F103:3

RM98F1A:22

Manip- Archive ulations ­number/in studio

Harrison 2005b, p. 93

Harrison 2021, p. 225.

Suggested by

Harrison 2021, p. 233. Harrison 2006, p. 50

Harrison 2021, p. 233.

Identified by

List of Pictorial References to Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Acknowledgements

This publication started life as a Ph.D. thesis. I would like to thank my supervisors at the University of Cologne, Prof. Stefan Grohé, Prof. Norbert Nußbaum and Prof. Christian Spies, for their support. The Estate of Francis Bacon not only facilitated the research projects this study is based on, but they also very kindly funded its publication. I would like to express my very great apprecia­tion to Elizabeth Beatty, Brian Clarke, Jeremy Cook, the late Christophe Dejean, Ben Harrison, Martin and Amanda Harrison and the late Peter Hunt for their constant encouragement and support. Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane hosted my initial research project on Francis Bacon’s studio contents and granted vital access to the material then and in the following years. I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to the director Barbara Dawson and all staff, especially Jessica O’Donnell and Philip Roe. I am deeply indebted to the librarians at Tate Archives and Library, The Library of T­ rinity ­College Dublin and The British Library, especially the Newspaper Department and H ­ umanities II, whose practical help and advice were invaluable. The successful completion of this publication would not have been possible without the advice and assistance of Rebecca Daniels, Hugh Marlais Davies, Marcel Finke, Barry Joule, Richard Lannoy, Susanne Marschall, Nana Sartor, Joanna Shepard and Raaf van der Sman. Many special thanks go to Elke Cwiertnia, Pankaj Daga, Christine Eissengarthen, my parents, Rosel and Siegfried Günther, Ann McKenna, Jule Schaffer and Silke Scholtalbers.

411

Picture Credits

Alamy Stock Photo. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, dir. by William Dieterle, prod. by Pan Berman, Charles Laughton as ‘Quasimodo’ (RKO Radio Pictures, 1939): Figure 101. Jen and Des Bartlett, They Live in Africa: Nature’s Paradise (London: Collins, 1967) p. 236: Figure 81. Max Brod, Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie (Erinnerungen und Dokumente) (Prague: Heinrich Mercy Sohn: 1937), frontispiece: Figure 94. Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), p. 94: Figure 3. Robert Daley, The Swords of Spain (London: Allen Lane Penguin, 1967), p. 131: Figure 50. Collection: Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane. Photograph © Estate of Sam Hunter; Source clipping © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved: Figure 39. Collection: The Estate of Francis Bacon © The Estate of Francis Bacon. Alle Rechte vorbehalten/Bild-Kunst/ DACS 2021: Figure 6. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. Alle Rechte vorbehalten / Bild-Kunst / DACS 2021: Figure 1, 2, 7, 9 (Photograph: Perry Ogden), 10, 20, 24, 28, 30, 41, 44, 47 and 48 (Photograph: Tate), 49, 51, 52, 54, 56, 59, 62, 64, 67, 70, 73, 77, 80, 82, 84, 85, 87, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107; Plate I, VI, VII (Photograph: Perry Ogden), IX, XI, XIII, XVII, XVIII, XX, XXIV, XXVI, XXVIII, XXX, XXXIII, XXXV, XXXVI, XLII (Photograph: Tate), XLIII, XLVI, XLIX, L. Courtesy Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation Monaco/MB Art Collection: Plate XXXI. Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, ‘On the Margin of the Impossible’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, exh. cat. London: Tate Britain, 2008/2009; Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009 (London: Tate Pub., 2008), pp. 14–27, p. 16, ill. no. 2 (Photograph: Estate of Sam Hunter): Figure 76. Ludwig Grünwald, Atlas-Manuel des Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses Nasales (Paris: ­Bailliere et fils, 1903), no page number: Figure 8; tab.1, fig.1: Plate III. Martin Harrison, ‘Lost Bacons’, in Francis Bacon: Shadows, ed. by Martin Harrison (London: The Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing, supported by Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation Monaco, in association with

412

Picture Credits

Thames & Hudson, 2021), Francis Bacon Studies IV, pp. 218–241, p. 231, ill. no. 145 (Photograph: Collection & image © The Hugh Lane, Dublin. © The Estate of Francis Bacon): Plate VIII. Collection & image © The Hugh Lane, Dublin. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. Alle Rechte vorbehalten/BildKunst/DACS 2021: Figure 4, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 42, 43, 45, 53, 57, 60, 61, 63, 65, 68, 69, 72, 74, 78, 79, 83, 88, 92, 96, 98; Plate II, X, XII, XIV, XV, XIX, XXI, XXIII, XXV, XXXVII, XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLIV, XLV, XLVII, XLVIII, LI. Collection & image: © The Hugh Lane, Dublin Courtesy The Estate of Francis Bacon: Figure 15, 19, 26, 29, 46, 66, 71, 99; Plate XXVII, XXXII, XXXIV. Collection: Barry Joule © Barry Joule: Figure 5. Graeme Kent, A Pictorial History of Wrestling (London: Spring Books, 1968), p. 126: Figure 55. Roger Manvell and Paul Rotha, Movie Parade – A Pictorial Survey of World Cinema, (London, New York: Studio Publications, 1950), p. 149, p.149, ill. no. 632: Plate XXII. Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (London: Heinemann, 1925), ­Chapter VIII, Plate 6: Figure 86. J. Horace McFarland, Roses of the World in Color (London: Cassell, 1937), p. 6, tab. 1, fig.1: Plate IV. J. P. Müller, My System: 15 Minutes’ Work A Day For Health’s Sake (London: Link House/Athletic Publications, 1939), Exercise 13, ill. no. 82: Plate XXIX. Digital Image © 2021, The Museum of Modern Art/Scala Florence: Plate V. Eadweard Muybridge, Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion: All 781 Plates from the 1887 ‘Animal Locomotion’, 3 vols (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), II, p. 856, plate 248: Figure 75. Eadweard Muybridge, Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion: All 781 Plates from the 1887 ‘Animal Locomotion’, 3 vols (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), III, p. 380, plate 704: Figure 58. Paris Match, 28 March, 1959, p. 27: Figure 89. Michael Peto and Alexander Bland, The Dancer’s World (London: Collins, 1963), no page numbers: Plate XVI. Picture Post, 8 February 1941, pp. 20–21: Plate XXXVIII. Picture Post, 9 August 1947, p. 13: Figure 40.

413

Colour Plates

I  Francis Bacon, Painting 1946, 1946, oil and pastel on canvas, 198 × 132 cm, collection: Museum of Modern Art, New York.

414

Colour Plates

II  RM98F1:23: torn leaf, overdrawn and mounted on support, Peoples of all Nations: Their Life Today and ­Story of their Past, ed. by J.A. Hammerton, 7 vols (­London: The Fleetway House, 1922–1924), I, p. 147.

III  Ludwig Grünwald, Atlas-Manuel des Maladies de la Bouche, du Pharynx et des Fosses Nasales (Paris: Bailliere et fils, 1903), ­no page number, tab.1, fig.1.

IV  J. Horace McFarland, Roses of the World in Color (London: Cassell, 1937), p. 6, tab. 1, fig.1. ­‘Amelia Earhart’. V  X-radiography of Painting 1946, 1946.

415

Colour Plates

VI  Francis Bacon, Triptych 1974–1977, 1974–1977, oil, pastel and dry transfer lettering on canvas. ­Triptych, each panel: 198 × 147.5 cm, private collection.

VII  Perry Ogden, Francis Bacon’s 7 Reece Mews studio, London, 1998.

416

Colour Plates

VIII  RM98F23:77: photograph, Nigel Henderson, The ­Bathers, c.1953, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

IX  Francis Bacon, Untitled (­destroyed), c.1965.

X  RM98F15:41: torn leaf, Frederick Hartt, The Drawings of Michelangelo (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), p. 285 fig. 406: ‘Nude Seen from the Rear’, 1534 and 1545 (?), black chalk, Haarlem, Teylersmuseum, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

417

Colour Plates

XI  Francis Bacon, Study from the Human Body (Man Turning on Light), 1973, oil and alkyd paint on canvas, 200.6 × 148.4 cm, private collection.

418

Colour Plates

XII  RM98F11:91: torn leaf, folded, attached to support, inserted in plastic bag, Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion, ((possibly) London: Heinemann, 1901) plate 63, ‘Pugilist. Striking a Blow’, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

419

Colour Plates

XIII  Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait of Van Gogh V, 1957, oil and sand on canvas, 198.7 × 137.5 cm, collection: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

420

Colour Plates

XIV  RM98F130:156: torn leaf, Jos de Gruyter, The World of Van Gogh Le Monde de Van Gogh Die Welt von Van Gogh, photographs by Emmy Andriesse (The Hague: Daamen, 1953), p. 141, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

421

Colour Plates

XV  RM98F12:17:21: photograph, unknown ­photographer (maybe Peter Lacy), Francis Bacon in the South of France, c.mid-1950s, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

XVI  Michael Peto and Alexander Bland, The Dancer’s World (London: Collins, 1963), no page numbers.

422

Colour Plates

XVII  Francis Bacon, Blood on the Floor – Painting, 1986, oil and pastel on canvas, 198.1 × 147.3 cm, private collection.

423

Colour Plates

XVIII  Francis Bacon, Oedipus, 1979, oil and dry transfer lettering on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, private collection.

424

Colour Plates

XIX  RM98F110:38: torn leaf, Kurt ­Mendelssohn, The Riddle of the ­Pyramids (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974), p. 134, ill. no. 37, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

425

Colour Plates

XX  Francis Bacon, ‘Street Scene (with Car in Distance)’, 1984, oil, aerosol paint and dry transfer lettering on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, private collection, London.

XXI  RM98F130:166: fragment of leaf, mounted on cardboard, The Illustrated London News, 268.6986.2 (September 1980), p. 37, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

426

Colour Plates

XXII  Étienne-Jules Marey, La Marche de L’Homme, published in Roger Manvell and Paul Rotha, Movie Parade – A Pictorial Survey of World Cinema, (London, New York: Studio Publications, 1950), p. 149, p.149, ill. no. 632.

XXIII  RM98F125:36: fragment of leaf, Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (London: Allen Lane, 1968), ‘121. Anon.: Details from instantaneous photograph. 1860s (?)’, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

427

Colour Plates

XXIV  Francis Bacon, Statue and Figures in a Street, 1983, oil and pastel on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, private collection, Basel.

428

Colour Plates

XXV  RM98F17:138: torn leaf, Iain Macmillan and Roger Baker, The Book of London (London: Joseph, 1968), p. 251, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

429

Colour Plates

XXVI  Francis Bacon, Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1963, oil on canvas, 165 × 142.5 cm, private collection.

430

Colour Plates

XXVII  RM9817:124: fragment of photograph, John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes on a bed, c.1961, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

431

Colour Plates

XXVIII  Francis Bacon, Portrait of George Dyer Staring into a Mirror, 1967, oil on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, private collection, Europe.

432

Colour Plates

XXIX  J. P. Müller, My System: 15 Minutes’ Work A Day For Health’s Sake (London: Link House/­Athletic Publications, 1939), Exercise 13, ill. no. 82.

433

Colour Plates

XXX  Francis Bacon, Study for Bullfight No. 1, 1969, oil on canvas, 197.7 × 147.8 cm, private ­collection, Switzerland.

434

Colour Plates

XXXI  Francis Bacon working document, John Marks, The Life and Death of the Fighting Bull, photographs by José Suárez (London: Cassell, 1967), p. 92, fig. 45, found in Bacon’s Paris studio at 14 rue de Birague, collection: Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation Monaco.

435

Colour Plates

XXXII  RM98F17:89A: photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in a Street in Soho, c.1963, unfolded, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

XXXIII  Francis Bacon, Three ­Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (on pink ground), 1964, centre panel, oil on ­canvas, 35.5 × 30.5 cm, private ­collection (full ­triptych see p. 446).

436

Colour Plates

XXXIV  RM98F108:3: fragment of photograph, John Deakin, George Dyer in a Street in Soho, c.1963, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

XXXV  Francis Bacon, Three ­Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (on light ground), 1964, centre panel, oil on ­canvas, 35.5 × 30.5 cm, private ­collection (full triptych see p. 446).

437

Colour Plates

XXXVI  Francis Bacon, Portrait of George Dyer and Lucian Freud, 1967, oil on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, destroyed in a fire 1979.

XXXVII  RM98BC39: torn leaf, mounted on support, Paris Match, 16 December 1966, p. 55, illustration from article ‘Roi, ce n’est pas un job de tout repos’, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

XXXVIII  Picture Post, 8 February 1941, pp. 20–21, ‘The Man on the Spot: Antonescu before Hitler and his Gang’.

438

Colour Plates

XXXIX  RM98F114:25: torn leaf, Sunday Times ­Magazine, 20 March 1977, colour photographic ­illustration of ­Sylvester Stallone as ‘Rocky’, film still from Rocky, dir. by John G. Avildsen, prod. by Irwin Winkler, Robert Chartoff, (Chartoff-Winkler Productions, 1976).

XL  RM98F104:70: torn leaf, Wilhelm Uhde, Van Gogh, rev. and enl. edn (Oxford: Phaidon, 1981), reproduction of Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

XLI: RM98F108:33A: Dulux colour chart ‘orange’, folded, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

439

Colour Plates

XLII  T07378: Francis Bacon, sketch, oil and ink on paper, c.1956–1957, collection: Tate Britain, London.

XLIII  Francis Bacon, Two Figures in a Room, 1959, oil and sand on canvas, 198 × 141.5 cm, collection: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, ­Norwich.

XLIV  RM98F16:209E: torn leaf, J. E. Burns, Adventures in Wildest Africa: On a Big Game Hunting Expedition (London: Walker & Sons, 1949), p. 18, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

440

Colour Plates

XLV  RM98F1A:73: fragment of cover, mounted on support, Chroniques de l’Art Vivant, 39, Paris May 1973, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

XLVI  Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait, 1973 ­(73-10), oil and dry transfer lettering on canvas, 198 × 147.5 cm, private collection.

441

Colour Plates

XLVII  RM98F235:1: Barry Miles and Mick Jagger, Mick Jagger in His Own Words (London: Omnibus, 1982), p. 1, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

XLVIII  RM98F94:3: Barry Miles and Mick Jagger, Mick Jagger in His Own Words (London: Omnibus, 1982), back cover, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

XLIX  Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Portrait (Mick Jagger), 1982, oil and pastel on canvas. Triptych, each panel: 35.5 × 30.5 cm, private collection.

442

Colour Plates

L  Francis Bacon, Study for a Pope III, 1961, oil on canvas, 152 × 119 cm, private collection.

LI  RM98F209:40:2: fragment of plate, Enrique Lafuente, Velazquez (Ohio: World Publishing, Editions d’Art Albert Skira, 1960), p. 82, collection: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

443

Triptychs

102  Francis Bacon, In Memory of George Dyer, 1971, oil and dry transfer lettering on canvas. Triptych, each panel: 198 × 147.5 cm, collection: Fondation Beyeler, Beyeler Collection, Riehen/Basel.

103  Francis Bacon, Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981, oil on canvas. Triptych, each panel: 198 × 147.5 cm, collection: Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo.

444

Triptychs

104  Francis Bacon, Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants, 1968, oil and pastel on canvas. Triptych, each panel: 198 × 147 cm, collection: Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran.

105  Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, 1967, oil on canvas. Triptych, each panel: 35.5 × 30.5 cm, private collection.

445

Triptychs

106  Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (on pink ground), 1964, oil on canvas. Triptych, each panel: 35.5 × 30.5 cm, private collection.

107  Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (on light ground), 1964, oil on canvas. Triptych, each panel: 35.5 × 30.5 cm, private collection.

446