FRANCIS BACON RESEARCH

FRANCIS BACON

His father was a racehorse trainer so Francis Bacon grew up in a stable yard despite being asthmatic and experiencing frequent difficulty breathing in the dusty environment. This becomes apparent in his chilling use of mouths and his fascination with depicting the human scream. Bacon was often  beaten and abused by other stable hands on his father’s request. This may have been where he began to confuse pain with love. His family moved to London at the outbreak of war in 1914. His father viewed him as a disappointment and threw him out of the home for being homosexual-he sent him to live with an older man who the family considered to be ‘good company’ for Bacon, who was abused by the older man and taken to live in Berlin with him. Bacon says ‘after Berlin, I was completely corrupted.’

 Bacon returned to Britain in 1926. In 1927, he frequented Paris and Berlin-being fond of the nightlife. He found Picasso’s 1927 exhibition (Galerie Paul Rosenburg) which inspired him to begin to paint and attend the free academies. In 1928. He moved back to Britain and lived in South Kensington with his childhood Nanny, who organised gambling parties which Bacon would consider a source of companionship and income, as well as fuelling a growing addiction. He was exempt from WW2, because of his asthma. "At the end of the war in 1944, he released his works from the period. From these years emerged the works which he later considered as the beginning of his career, pre-eminently the partial bodies of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 (Tate Gallery N06171) which was first shown at the Lefevre Gallery (April 1945) to unease and acclaim alike."

One of his lovers, Peter Lacey, was shot in the nervous system in WW1 and, despite being a pianist, singer and the love of Bacon’s life, was prone to outbursts of extreme violence. Their relationship was described as sadistic, with Lacey pushing Bacon out of a window at one point-which is recorded to have only made Bacon love him more. Sometime after Peter Lacey had died, Bacon found a new lover called George Dyer, an East-End thug, who had a very soft personality that contradicted that of Bacon’s masochistic one. Bacon would paint George as he wanted him to be to fulfil his violent desires, as George could not fulfil Bacon’s needs. Francis began to emasculate him and took apart Georges face in his paintings in a sadistic way. George strongly disagreed with the way he was being portrayed.

George committed suicide in the hotel they were staying at in Paris for a show. Francis painted his dead body in the position it was in and sold it to the gallery his show was at, having to answer questions about it when he chose not to report the body and no-one was aware of George’s death less than a day earlier. The older Bacon got, the more tranquil, simple and less violent they became. He also completed 10 landscapes. On a visit to Madrid in 1992 to look for his ex-partner, Hosea, Bacon was hospitalised with pneumonia exacerbated by asthma and died on 28 April. Towards the end of his life, Bacon’s international presence expanded and he travelled regularly between New York and Paris.