Colm Tóibín/text;
Francis Bacon's original expression of human anxiety and instincts still seems alive and important today.
From 29 January, "Francis Bacon: Man and the Beast" will be held at the Royal Institute of Art in London, an exhibition spanning 50 years of his creative career, showcasing the painter's fascination with animals – how to rely on animals to shape and distort the human body; at the most extreme moments of his life, his images are almost unrecognizable as human beings or beasts, and the exhibition will feature some of Bacon's earliest works and his last paintings. Colm Tóibín revisits Bacon's work from the perspective of the fusion of animals and humans in 20th-century art and literature.
Bacon, Second Edition of Triptych, 1944, 1988, 198x147.5 cm
In a painting in which the figure can neither speak nor move, the viewer can only see its still posture; in a painting, the body is in a physical state, but the soul may also shine. When the artist creates the illusion of life, the expression of the subject may be vague, vivid, and fresh, but it is captured and frozen in a second.
Bacon's work, while depicting desire and decay, seems to have an almost pleasurable feeling. To him, man is flesh, rotting, aching, swooping, screaming. The frame canvas, and even the paint itself, is an invisible cage. If you are not careful, the animal will escape from the painting.
Bacon, The Owl, 1956, 61x51 cm
In literature, animal protagonists create stark and memorable narratives that blend cold comedy with relentless nightmares. For example, in Kafka's Metamorphosis, director Neil Jordan's short story "The Dream of the Beast," or in the English poet Thom Gunn's poetry about man and animals, there is always a sense that there is a force within the male figure struggling for a stronger, more real, and more simple life. While the high society around him moved in the shadow of an elegant world, the animal stood there calmly, mixed with shame and sudden self-amusement.
Kafka's story is similar to many of the images created by Bacon, where the animality of humans is camouflaged and controlled. In Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up from an "uneasy dream" and realizes that he has become a beetle, but he does not continue to panic and continue his life as a salesman. But when he did not contribute materially to the family, the family reversed the previous attitude of respect for him and gradually showed a face of indifference, disgust, and hatred.
In Bacon's Character Studies I and Character Studies II from 1945 to 1946, or Three Figures and Portraits (1975), the animal sense of the characters is both exposed and hidden. It is reminiscent of the moral of Kafka's work that the ego hidden under the costume is fragile, trembling, frightened, but also eager to be seen and understood. The conflict in their work lies in the gap between order and rationality, and the indescribable fear and longing.
Bacon, Character Studies II, 1945-1946, 145x129cm
Kafka's work is like a prophet, full of premonitions of the coming Of Nazis, and the words are full of gloomy temperament because they seem to know that war is coming. In addition to writing about insects lurking inside humans and preparing to surprise the world, Kafka wrote a story called "The Dog's Investigation," in which his dogs tend to look more humorous and decent-minded than humans. Most of Bacon's paintings were written after World War II, when philosophy and literature confronted the isolation of humanity and the evil forces lurking within. This theme has been shown in Bacon's earliest works, such as the Cross of 1933, where he saw the cross as a symbol of helplessness and cruelty rather than redemption.
Bacon, Chimpanzee Research, 1957, 152.4x117cm
When dogs and chimpanzees dominate Bacon's paintings (as in Chimpanzee Studies), we can see two things. First of all, the artist confessed his concerns. He stripped the characters of their costumes and left them naked to make them more alive. The second thing was that he placed the beasts on a stage usually reserved for human subjects, thus giving them comical dignity.
Neil Jordan's 1983 novel The Beast's Dream is a literal expression of Bacon's work. He explores the image of a lonely masculine person, which makes it feel uneasy in any social situation. In the novel, the protagonist is covered with a fading mask. "I suddenly felt fear that my body was about to be exposed. I realize now that whatever the appendages are, they are slowly leaving me. ”
This recognition appeared in Bacon's 1953 Portrait Studies of male figures, or in George Dyer's Crouching Portraits of 1966. Not only do their poses hint at their inner animality, but Bacon's way of painting also shows a dramatic humanity—humans living in modern society but suffering in ways that animals don't.
Thus, all of Bacon's paintings bring the viewer a sense of tension, between lonely, fearful, self-aware figures and roaring, predatory, malicious, chilling figures. Bacon played with the contest between man and animal, intellect and instinct, fragility and savage power.
Bacon, Portrait of George Dale Crouching, 1966, 98x147 cm
In August 1937, Samuel Beckett, in a letter about the work of the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats (brother of the poet Yeats), offered his views on the figures in the paintings: "Yeats places the heads of men and women side by side in the picture, in the irreversible unity and the insurmountable boundlessness, everything is endowed with a calm acceptance beyond tragedy."
Although Bacon's painting evokes a sense of human isolation and dramatizes the barbarian's battle with the ego, Bacon does not ask the audience to sympathize with his characters. As Beckett described Yeats as "his image is shaped by calmness"; Bacon's vision is relentless and harsh.
Bacon, Bullfighting Research No. 1, 1969, 198x147cm
Although the figures in the paintings are captured, displayed, and fixed, this does not mean that the images created by Bacon are stable and easy to understand. He hints at the rough and vibrant inner life of his subjects. This struggle can be seen in the way the paint is applied, especially on the face. Bacon's portraits are textured, energetic, and multitude of tones, appearing vaguely, with a painful dignity, and a frightening animal response, and the vitality of Bacon's work also comes from this duality.
But it is still incorrect to say that Bacon's characters have both body and soul, but rather that there is an external body guarding the inner beast. The English poet Tom Gunn explored the evolution and emergence of inner beasts, and his poem The Falconer offers a glimpse of dark and powerful human relationships through the metaphor of man and the bird of prey:
You are only half civilized,
Tamed me.
Only the eyes,
I'm afraid of losing you,
I lost the choice to keep
Gentle prey.
Gunn's poetry sees the ego as a mask of some inner force and emerges in another form of power, or in the fight against more moderate social forces and triumph. In Gunn's poem "The Rite of Passage", the wording evolves repeatedly into new certainties as men turn into beasts. Psalm Opening:
Something is happening.
The horns glowed on my head.
and:
My blood is like light.
After the almond branches,
Snowflake-like horns,
I waited, out of sight.
The "I" here is both ominous and fragile, and the voice is both confident and calm. Both Gunn's beast poems and Bacon's figures have a primitive sense of pain that is close to that of an animal, but can only be understood if it is understood, and they are not howling, but shouting out a word with a lasting memory.
Bacon, Chimpanzee, 1955, 152.5x117.2 cm
Bacon liked the simple idea that "meat is meat," but simplicity was never enough for him. The figures in his paintings seem to have been born for hunting and foraging, but their wild nature includes the feeling that they possess not only instincts, but also dark knowledge. They seek not only food and blood, but also something inexplicable and hard to obtain. Bacon's task was not to give them symbolic value or to present them on canvas as metaphors; they had to be authentic and unique, and they had to be entirely themselves. They threaten the audience with duplicity and weird behavior, and their pain is special.
In the painting, Bacon is not to express, but to find hidden energy in the process of deformation, distortion, and smearing of the image, and he observes what may appear with the movement of the brush. As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote, Bacon "erased his face." In dealing with animal figures, Bacon was "not interested in the form of animals, but in the use of animals as a feature".
Bacon's paintings are anti-"Darwinian" in which he explores the possibility of evolution moving sideways, backwards, and inwards. The face of the person in the painting is distorted and unpeaceful. He liked the form of crouching, bending, galloping, roaring, screaming, and swooping (Triptych: Human Studies, 1970). For the most part, they were extremely lonely, and, as Beckett put it, their loneliness was frightening.
The pain in Bacon's work is reflected not only in the face itself, but also in the posture, the figures seem to cower everywhere, and the animals become the disguise of man. Bacon realized the visual possibility of mixing biological forms, erotic shapes, and weird body parts. The men, women, and beasts in his paintings have strong desires. Bacon also liked teeth and was fascinated by the shape of the mouth.
Beginning in 1949, Bacon included monkeys in his paintings, when his Painting of Head IV was a gloomy image in which people and monkeys seemed to blend strangely together. In his Crouch, the man has an ape pose under his head. This pose also appeared in works such as Crouching Nude and People around 1951. In Man and The Monkey (1951), in particular, the person feeding the caged monkeys almost becomes the requester, and the monkeys become the dominant figures in the paintings.
Bacon, The Man with the Dog, 1953, 152x117cm
During the same period, Bacon produced six large works of dogs. The first, which began in 1952, shows a roaring bastard dog standing in a green circle with a calm road and a palm tree in the background, making the picture even more threatening. In 1953's The Man with the Dog, the man is conspicuously absent, just a shadow, and the dog that dominates the picture curls up and moves toward the manhole cover on the sidewalk, in a scene of washed pastel colors. He created an abstract landscape, except for the lines of sidewalks, manhole covers and dogs.
Bacon, Avatar 6, 1949, 91.4x76.2cm
Bacon's animals are not like humans. They were endowed with all animality. On the other hand, even for the portraits of the Pope, their fears and hunger are from the heart, not just the spirit. What excites Bacon is the possibility of vision. For him, the days when humanity could pose as civilized and comfortable in the world are over. The genius of his is that the images he creates using the concept of man and beast are not only disturbing, but also visually striking and unclear; but enough to shock the nervous system.
Note: This article is compiled from the website of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, originally titled Desire and Decay: Animal Instincts in Bacon Paintings, by Colm Tobin, an award-winning novelist, poet and essayist; the exhibition will run until 17 April 2022.
Editor-in-Charge: Weihua Gu
Proofreader: Yan Zhang