1:56pm Wednesday 17th September 2008
By Claire Hack
CLAIRE HACK recalls why controversial and unconventional artist Francis Bacon’s new exhibition at the Tate is such a draining but rewarding experience.
FRANCIS Bacon’s art is not conventionally beautiful. Nor is it easy to understand or merely aesthetically pleasing. It’s challenging, fraught with pain and emotional torture, and visiting the major retrospective of his work at the Tate Britain is an exhausting experience.
It’s also a rewarding experience, however, and offers much more than a casual wander through the gallery’s permanent collections might.
Bacon never compromises for the sake of conformity or the comfort of viewers and his depictions of human forms in their most primal, bestial state, with gaping, screaming mouths open a window into a tormented soul.
His Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), one of his most celebrated works, is a disturbing, uncomfortable image of the pontiff, shrieking in either fear or anger, stripping away his authority and leaving just the man, the animal.
And much of his early work shares this sense of utter despair and isolation, with lone figures painted in dark, muted colours trapped within “space frames”, or cage-like structures, which are imposed on them by the artist.
Bacon also refused to varnish his paintings and preserved all of them behind glass panels so that it’s impossible to look at them without seeing oneself reflected back, as trapped within them as their subjects.
The exhibition is broadly chronological, divided into 10 rooms - Animal, Zone, Apprehension, Crucifixion, Crisis, Archive, Portrait, Memorial, Epic and Late - each home to a different period in his artistic life.
From the sensual, ambiguously sexualised nudes to the strange, distorted portraits of friends and lovers - and especially George Dyer, whom Bacon reputedly met when he was burgling the artist’s flat - the visitor is offered a wide-reaching look at the life of a complex man.
His relationship with Dyer, often tempestuous, was to have a profound impact on all his work and his Triptych in Memory of George Dyer (1971) both celebrates and laments him, laying bare the artist’s feelings of loss and guilt.
From the early 1970s, following Dyer’s suicide, Bacon began painting a series of these triptychs, trios of paintings exploring a single theme or image, but the earliest examples were his studies of crucifixion, dating from the mid-1940s.
Painted against backdrops of unbroken fiery red, Bacon, a lifelong atheist, took the crucifixion as “just an act of man’s behaviour” and depicts gruesome images of human entrails, bleeding and bursting from headless bodies.
He juxtaposes these with surreal, distorted creatures, half-human, half-beast, which he later likened to Greek Furies, replacing traditional Christian saints.
It’s these that are perhaps the most disturbing and the most affecting of the works displayed, although there are comparatively few of them, and it’s difficult to spend a long time looking at them - not least because the room in which they are located is one of the smallest in the exhibition.
Although the exhibition is comprehensive, it’s poorly organised, requiring visitors to double back on themselves at various points and to pile into cramped rooms such as Archive, which is far too small for its contents.
This room is home to the myriad photographs and books from which Bacon drew inspiration and offers perhaps the best insight into his character.
From medical books to the 19th century photography of Eadweard Muybridge to the photos of friends taken by John Deakin, the provenance of many of his most famous works is suddenly clear.
Francis Bacon is at the Tate Britain until January 4 2009. Tickets are £12.50, with concessions for senior citizens, students, job seekers, children aged 12 to 18 and disabled people. Tate members and children under 12 accompanied by adults go free.
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