However once he shut the door on this public persona he entered the very different world of his studio, a tiny plain walled room without modern convenience or décor, disassembled in 1998 and reconstructed at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. This room suggests an ascetic monk’s cell more than a famous artist’s studio, austere and without windows, lit by one skylight and one free hanging blue daylight bulb, often depicted in his paintings, using walls as a palette. Here he painted daily, alone in sober silence, using cut and sliced photos instead of living models, intensely concentrated within his psyche, an antidote to his evening’s excess.
In this room they found prized relics of spiritual significance; photos of the C13th Cimabue Crucifixion that influenced his own Crucifixion work, the C17th Velazquez Pope that influenced his screaming Pope series, a statue of the death mask of the mystic poet, William Blake. There were photos of icons too. And it’s true that Bacons favourite choice of form was not modern, but the medieval religious triptych. These things obviously mattered to him and his art.
Like icon painters, Bacon worked repetitively on limited set compositions, isolated figures that look out from minimal flat backgrounds in spaces without perspective or natural light and shadow. Like them he moulds those figures with loving care and reverence and without anatomy, in limited coded colours. It’s as if his studio conditions created the same state of Mind as medieval iconographers, inwardly attentive, descending deep into the Psyche/Soul to recover and record the inner significance of outer form.
Bacon is misunderstood. He really belongs to the tradition of ‘Transfigurative Art’, not distorting but transforming, not shocking but astonishing, not brutalizing or inhuman but attempting to portray qualities uniquely human, “that deepen the mystery”. His work transports us beyond sense perception and appearance to capture the living essence or soul of a subject and his paintings breathe on the canvas.
“There is the appearance”, he says, “and then there is the energy within the appearance, a living quality that emanates”. These are iconographic sentiments where the painting is considered the living embodiment of a figure, not representation. In icons the eyes were always painted last to seal the most important point of the painting because the “eyes were the window of the soul” where inside meets outside, not the vanishing point of post Renaissance linear perspective, but the meeting point of the unseen with seen, the place where two worlds meet. (That’s why the eyes were always scratched out by iconoclasts, to deny that presence). Bacon’s figures also centre from the eyes instead of principles of perspective.
This is all starkly medieval for a self-styled modern hedonist! “Image, not illustration”, Bacon says of his work. And it’s interesting that ‘image’ is also the meaning of ‘icon’ from the Greek ‘eikon’. Image is of the Imagination unique to Man and special to William Blake whose death mask must have been a constant reminder of this process to Bacon, the expanding Imagination that makes our Inside bigger than our Outside, like the tardis in Doctor Who!
Those artists who restrict themselves to appearance or abstraction, representation or ‘photographic’ realism, are in fact more reductive and damaging to our sensibilities than anything Bacon painted, however harmless or ‘real’ they appear. It is deceitful to pretend art is real. It is they who brutalize and dehumanize as they simulate surface sight, where as Bacon tried to paint a greater totality that includes the inside. In fact his paintings are more honest and true. We know that because we all experience an inside as well as an outside, and know how one affects the other. How he would have chuckled at the thought, that so called Realism is more distorting and disturbing and damaging to human sensibility than any of his paintings.
Privately, where things mattered in his studio and not in what he called the ‘inconsequential life’ of his nightly ramblings round Soho, he would have agreed. “I want to produce concentrated images that deepen the mystery of constantly changing appearance according to ones nervous system. Not illustration or abstract or pictorial narrative, but a maker of images, getting to the essence to give a vision of the reality of things”. So he puts himself in another’s place sympathetically, to see them from the inside as well as outside, painting with compassion rather than violence, producing effigies rather than deformities. He only painted those he loved, and he painted as an act of Love in order to capture the soul of his subjects.
Like James Joyce, Bram Stoker, Samuel Becket or recently Bob Geldof, Bacon left a conservative, rigid Ireland to engage with a modern world that would allow free expression in Life and Art, yet in that freedom they all still expressed depths of soul endemic to those cultural roots. Peering out from empty, desolate, soulless backgrounds with their lifeless logical lines and arrows, is the steady, affirming soulful gaze of Bacons figures, twisted but defiant , tortured but beautiful, showing us ourselves fully human with outsides “transfigured” by insides, just as the icon painters did before him.
Icons;anonymous 11/13th Century
Self-portrait and friends by Francis Bacon
