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Séduire, C'est Tout

2023; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 30; Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/contagion.30.0205

1930-1200

Paul Sharma,

Medieval Literature and History

One of the painter Francis Bacon's favorite bon mots was “séduire, c'est tout.”1 With such a worldview, it is unsurprising that Bacon's work and life can be understood using René Girard's insights regarding the desire to influence or be influenced by the envied model, be it a person, a crowd, or even a country, resulting in mimetic forces that unleash violence.This piece looks at Bacon's life and how the mimetic forces he experienced and intuitively understood are displayed in his painting. It examines the social and personal forces at play in four key works: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), Head VI (1949), Two Figures (1953), and Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), beginning with the work that put Bacon on the artistic map at the end of World War II, to the triptych that foretold the breakup of the long friendship between Bacon and Lucian Freud.By the summer of 1943, the dust caused by the Luftwaffe bombing raid was mostly gone from the air in London, allowing the asthmatic Francis Bacon to return to South Kensington. The same summer, Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fifth Symphony, one of the last great pieces of English neo-romanticism and arguably his greatest work, premiered at the nearby Royal Albert Hall.It is strange to think that at the same time Vaughan Williams's Fifth was being played, down the road in Cromwell Place, the preparatory ground was being laid by Francis Bacon for Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, a work that went well beyond any idea of English nostalgia and of which John Russell wrote, “There was English art before the Three Studies and there was English art after.”2Before looking at the work in more detail, it is worth examining its inception, as it follows a pattern outlined by René Girard, that of a conversion in which there is a profound change in beliefs and values. In the same way that diamonds are formed out of coal if there is high enough pressure, Girard notes that “an experience of demystification, if radical enough, is very close to an experience of conversion.”3Bacon's conversion occurred at the latter end of 1940 to 1942, a period he never discussed. He retreated to the country sixty miles outside London, to recover from his asthma and very likely from some form of breakdown, following a period as an air raid warden in London.The formula for each conversion is unique, and for Bacon, the catalyst bringing his experiences of art, the Blitz, his view of society, and his personal history together into a single style was the recently issued W. B. Stanford's Aeschylus in His Style: A Study in Language and Personality. A clue to Stanford's importance is Bacon later recalling that “some of the images are so startlingly beautiful in there and so exciting I go on reading it over and over again.”4Stanford's insight into the use of a combination of a highly expressive and at the same time formal style in Aeschylus enabled Bacon to gather his influences and preoccupations of the previous decade to create his vision and, arguably, his first fully impactful works. (It could be said that the first work of real originality was the 1933 painting Crucifixion (Figure 1), a protype of the 1944 triptych, being of sufficient force to be included in Herbert Read's Art Now review of the same year).Stanford argued that the Greek playwright's “style was not of the unobtrusive, subtly modulated kind that escapes criticism,” adding, “One is reminded of the strained, almost grotesque figures of a painting by El Greco . . . and the reason for both of these Greeks’ extraordinary style is similar—the tension between an original and forcible mind and a conventional and highly formalised mode of expression.”5As a model to follow, no doubt Aeschylus had many advantages for Bacon. The playwright worked in a different medium and came from a distant era, radically reducing the possibilities and dangers of mimetic rivalry. Aeschylus used unconstrained imagery and was not afraid of taking chances; there was no notion of classical poise and structure. And importantly, Aeschylus had no followers—the Greek writer operated in a tradition of one. Therefore, at this point with a model and attitude he could follow, located at a right distance, Bacon could go his own way.As René Girard entered his twenties in France, Francis Bacon's triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (Figure 2) was shown in a group exhibition at the Lefevre gallery in London's West End in April 1945, the month before VE (Victory in Europe) day.The triptych's images, painted on cheap board because of war shortages in 1944, looked like nothing else that had ever been displayed in Britain. Although there were contemporary depictions of the crucifixion, such as those by Roy de Maistre, there could be no doubting that Three Studies came from a different worldview. There is the mixing of Greek and Christian imagery (pagan goddesses at a crucifixion), making the Three Studies perhaps a closing work in the line of European painting overtly based on the classics.For an instinctive artist such as Bacon, many things are felt before they are understood, and the triptych captures many of the themes later examined by Girard: violence, the sacred, the friction between the pagan and Christian worlds, and the crucifixion itself. And as Bacon stood not just near the end of the Second World War, but perhaps at the closure of a cycle of violence begun as Napoleon's armies marched out of France, his triptych presages René Girard's comment many years later in Battling to the End: Interviews with Benoît Chantre: “At the heart of European conflicts, the world's future would depend on the face-off between the Passion and archaic religion, between Christ and the Greeks.”6Unnamed in the title, although later confirmed by Bacon, the triptych depicts three Eumenides (the “Gracious Ones,” also known as the Furies), which in turn mirror the threefold nature of Aeschylus's Oresteia. These guardians of justice make their appearance in the final work of the trilogy, and seek revenge according to the ancient rules, on Orestes for his killing of his mother, Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra had murdered her husband Agamemnon mainly because (although there were other motives) he agreed to the sacrificial killing of their daughter Iphigenia to the gods, so that the gods would alter the wind direction and allow the Greek fleet to sail toward Troy.What made these figures shocking was the combination of the level of violence in the depictions of the figures, and the rough handling of the paintwork and neon-bright orange backgrounds, reminiscent of the colors of the charred remains of a burned-out house from the London Blitz. Even though it was near the end of a six-year war, examining why there might be violence was shocking, with the images intimating Girard's words concerning the loss of archaic religion: “It is the loss of sacrifice, the only system able to contain violence, which brings back violence among us.”7In addition to the handling of the paint and the use of color, what also made Three Figures so different from the other paintings shown in London at that period was the Nietzschean atmosphere of the work, giving a radically different air to that of the neo-romanticism of Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, and Vaughan Williams, or the modernism of Barbara Hepworth. It is hard to imagine this passage from Beyond Good and Evil (1886) being applied to any painter but Bacon at the time: “There is a great ladder of religious cruelty with many rungs . . . at one time one sacrificed human beings to one's god, perhaps precisely those human beings one loved best—the sacrifice of the first-born present in a prehistoric religion belongs here.”8Three Figures is also a long way away from the work of the then 22-year-old Lucian Freud, who interestingly was one of few people to see Three Figures in the studio before the Lefevere exhibition.9 Unlike Bacon, who never displayed any of his drawings or preparatory work (he claimed to always draw directly onto the canvas, which is not entirely true), Freud was noted for his technical skills, a typical work being Head of a Girl (1945, Figure 3), a painting with a high level of detail, although with exaggerated features, most notably the eyes. Unlike Bacon, his work of the period does not display any clear brush strokes, and while Three Figures and much of Bacon's work at that time can be situated within the category of history painting, Freud's painting is nearly always within the class of portraiture, or still life.From the 1940s onward, and then through the 1950s and into the 1960s, Bacon and Freud would become closer, seeing each other nearly every day when they were in London. For Freud, the influence of the older Bacon would be slow but clear, as the two painters’ styles, concerns, and personal lives drew closer together, followed by the inevitable mimetic crisis some twenty-five years later. But for now, the styles of work, their ages, and their relative positions within the English art world meant that there were few possibilities for rivalry.In 1927, Bacon was living as part lodger, part house guest, with a family in Chantilly, France, after spending some time in Berlin, Germany.10 During his stay, he saw Nicolas Poussin's circa 1625 Massacre of the Innocents (Figure 4) on display nearby at the Musée Condé de Chantilly. The painting's subject is Herod's instruction that all boys under the age of two in the town of Bethlehem and the immediate vicinity be slaughtered, so that any newborn infant could not steal his throne. Bacon later noted that the painting's central figure had a scream that was “probably the best human cry in painting.”11It is likely that during the time in Chantilly, or shortly after a move to Paris, Bacon saw Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, depicting the 1905 mutiny of the Potemkin's sailors due to their poor conditions, a presage of the Russian revolution in the following decade. The film contains a key montage, shown in Figure 5, a nanny screaming after being shot in the eye through her pince-nez and a baby's pram falling and rattling down the many stairs of the Odessa Steps.Although not seen directly in Bacon's paintings at the time, these two images had a long-term resonance. Working between Monaco and London for the next few years after the 1945 exhibition, Bacon embarked on a series of heads, although not described directly by their anonymous titles, most likely based on the crowd that mocked Christ, with Head I the key work of 1948.William E. Cain, in Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture (2022),12 drew my attention to Girard's comment that the mob that calls for Jesus's death “is constituted and nourished by swallowing up everything that passes within its reach. It is the black hole of violent mimeticism: where mimeticism is most dense, the mob emerges,”13 adding that “all the actors and witnesses to the crucifixion are already hostile to Jesus or they become so, for mimeticism spares no one.”14Head I (Figure 6) is one of the strangest and most disturbing paintings in British art, a mixture of an ear pulled upward by a string and a snarling chimpanzee with exposed canines set against a background of steel tubes; the work both attacked and redefined the notion of European portraiture. As with Three Figures, which depicted a figure on a sculptor's armature, Head 1 also continues to explore the European painting tradition by deploying another old master studio device—strings, or a tassel—which was used as an arm support in paintings such as The Jester Calabacillas by Velazquez.As if commenting on Head 1 directly, Girard wrote that his “goal was to shed light on what is known as the process of hominization, the fascinating passage from animality to humanity that occurred thousands of years ago. My hypothesis is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have to find a way of dealing with contagious similarity . . . the mechanism that reintroduces difference in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else is sacrifice.”15A year later, in 1949, Bacon produced the first of the series that defined the painter for many, with the innocuously named Head VI (Figure 7). This was the first of the screaming popes, an early postmodern combination of Velazquez's portrait of Innocent X from around 1650 and the scream of the nanny from Battleship Potemkin, continuing Bacon's engagement with the European painting tradition. Head VI is painted using expressive brushwork, with the pope enclosed within a glass box, black striations both behind and in front of the figure, fragments of an ornate chair (such as that in the Velazquez portrait), and a curtain tassel, or painter's arm support.It took Bacon four years to make the journey from Three Figures at the end of the war—“Let us dare to say that we, the French and Germans, are responsible for the devastation that is underway because our extremes have become the whole world”16—to Head VI, the “phantom figure who sits at the heart of Rome.”17Head VI gives Girard's comments on Benedict XVI further significance, “Owing to its spiritual pre-eminence, the papacy has always been a sort of island in Europe . . . in the history of Europe the pope's status is special. . . . His untouchable nature, which has increased as the papacy's temporal control has declined . . . explains in itself why there has been an effort to appropriate the pope. . . . The reason for this growing hatred is mimetic, because the pope's autonomy is in the process of being achieved. . . . The pope is scandalous because he is independent.”18 It could be said that Girard's words on the pope's autonomy give increased resonance to Bacon's decision to place the pope within the glass enclosure.As discussed earlier, it was from the late 1940s that Bacon and Freud began to deepen their friendship, seeing each other most days. For Bacon, it was intriguing to be with someone who could glide through London society effortlessly, while for Freud, Bacon was “the wildest and wisest”19 person he knew. No doubt, it also helped reduce rivalry that their work could be clearly delineated with clear ground around each painter's territory, with Bacon, in effect, being a modern-day history painter and Freud a portraitist with a background in surreal pastoralism. In terms of technique, they were also very far apart, with Bacon's paintwork being open and driven by chance, while Freud's remained careful and deliberate.During the 1950s the two painters’ concerns began to converge. While Bacon continued for many years to explore religion and European history art directly, with further series of pope paintings and a sequence reworking van Gogh's The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, he would now focus his attention on his direct surroundings and more often paint the people around him, including, of course, Lucian Freud. The portraits would normally be in a claustrophobic interior setting, with the interiors having the air of anonymous hotel or rented rooms like Freud's work, whereas in the past the figure would often be in a landscape, or in an opulent interior.In the case of Freud, his work during the 1950s comprised mostly portraits of figures in a room, having shifted away from any explicit surrealist or pastoral imagery. The settings for the work overlapped with Bacon's, such as Interior in Paddington (1951), while there remained key differences, such as the glimpse of an exterior and markedly different paintwork, with Freud retaining a draftsman-like approach, such as in his 1952 portrait of Bacon. However, overt brush marks were now starting to show, such as in Man in a Headscarf (1954).It was also during this period that Freud purchased Two Figures (1953, Figure 8), a painting of Bacon and his then lover Peter Lacy (like Bacon's father, an ex-serviceman), which Freud promptly hung above his bed. Freud bought the work privately as the work was not shown at Bacon's gallery, as at the time in the United Kingdom homosexual acts were unlawful, and it was likely that there would be police action should it be shown publicly.Given that Freud hung the work in his bedroom and knew that Bacon (his masochism being no secret) is the lower figure in the painting, the upper person in Two Figures could be a viewed as a mimetic model for Freud. Moving the painting from its position from above his bed would be to break this mimetic spell, and for many years, much to Bacon's annoyance, Freud refused to loan Two Figures, saying, “It wouldn't be the same when it came back.”20During the 1960s, Bacon by and large had completed his move away from historical and mythological painting towards portraiture, while Freud's paintwork had significantly opened up and become more fluid. As a result of the changes in their subject matter and style, the mimetic qualities, for example, of Bacon's portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1966, Figure 9) and Freud's Resting Nude Portrait IV (1963, Figure 10) are clear in the figure positioning, near-abstract background, and quality of the paintwork. Bacon and Freud were now at the stage where, as Michael Kirwan comments, “Mimesis therefore encounters fewer and fewer barriers; in place of external mediation, we have more and more internal. This world is characterised by intense competition, rivalry, envy and jealousy.”21The mimetic impacts on their friendship can be seen in Three Portraits of Lucian Freud (1969, Figure 11), which has all three figures enclosed within a frame that is more distinct than that used in Head VI. As a result of the convergence of their styles, these frames (a device never used by Freud) can be viewed as a mechanism to contain or restrict Freud physically and physiologically, to put distance between the painter and painted, as Bacon came to terms with the bipolarity caused by mimetic influence.Given Bacon's investigation of mimetic desires, it is unsurprising that Girard's ideas are echoed in the interviews with David Sylvester in Brutality of Fact.I believe that Bacon instinctively and clearly understood that there was more to his portraits than the simple duality suggested by Sylvester. With the insights provided by Girard, it could be said that Three Studies of Lucian Freud contains the understanding of a triangle of influences between subject, object, and model, such that when subject and model occupy the same social and, in this case, artistic space, there is competition due to internal mediation.As Girard commented, “In a world where we are judged by our friends and loved ones, serene models no longer have any meaning. Meaning has been interiorised, the models are there within reach. They invade me for an instant and I think I can dominate them, but then they escape, and it is they who dominate me. I am always too far or too close to them.”23 From this viewpoint, Bacon's portraits carry the push and pull of mimetic attraction and repulsion, with Three Studies of Lucian Freud unveiling the mimetic forces experienced by Bacon as he passed “through the hell of bipolarity, the never-ending come-and-go of mimetic desire that makes us feel like we are everything when the ‘god is near,’ and like nothing when the god moves away.”24Given Bacon's stance on life, it is unlikely that he agreed, or could live with Girard's solution to mimetic rivalry based on Pascal's metaphor of the precise distance from a painting to see it properly: “Excessive empathy is mimetic, but excessive indifference just as much. Identification with the other has to be envisaged as a means of correcting our mimetic tendencies. . . . Identification makes it possible to see the other from the right distance.”25By the time Bacon came to paint Three Portraits of Lucian Freud, the painters had known each other for two decades. Only a few years later, the two would fall out as personal and professional differences increased. Bacon and Freud began to drift further apart, driven in part by long-term resentments and Freud's successful show at London's Hayward Gallery in 1974, after which he was “seen as a painter in his own right.”26Late in Bacon's life, in 1991, the painters’ paths crossed in London restaurant. Freud walked directly past Bacon, ignoring him, with Bacon noting, “That's the way things are.”27