Homosexuality, lesbianism, sadomasochism and masochism, pedophilia, underage sex, small white faces, these keywords can be stacked into a heavy A film that is illegal in most countries.
But sometimes they can also form a tragedy of a bad original family.
If Bacon had chosen, I believe he would have been willing to give up all his talents and wealth in exchange for a happy childhood, enlightened parents, and a peaceful mind—things he had never been able to pursue all his life. ”
Bacon's childhood was miserable.
Unlike Caravaggio's tragic death of both parents, Bacon was swept out of the house by his father as a disgrace.
▲ Bacon carrying two slices of beef (I call it bacon from the meat factory)
The painter Francis Bacon was related by blood to Francis Bacon, who said "knowledge is power", and was a descendant of his half-brother.
In 1909, Bacon was born into a glorious military family. His father was a colonel when he was young, and after retiring from the army, he opened a horse farm, and his mother inherited the steel coal mining enterprise, and his life was very prosperous.
Heaven gave Bacon everything enviable, and he made a huge joke with him.
Bacon has had a fetish for women since childhood, likes masculine men, loves makeup and dresses, has a weak and shy personality, and is completely like a girl.
It seems to him today that he may be a transgender person – he lives in the soul of a girl in his heart so that everything can be explained.
But at the time, every female trait he exhibited was perverted behavior, evidence of his psychological distortions.
Bacon's mother turned a blind eye to him, and the mother who played the role of mother in his life was Jessie Lightfoot, the family's old nanny.
……
His father's violence hurt Bacon even more.
Bacon suffers from severe allergic asthma and is allergic to both horses and dogs. But his father believed that these could be overcome with a strong will, and used violence to force him to become a "real man".
"A gay friend of Francis told me that he once confessed that his father, the terrible, failed trainer, arranged for his youngest son to spend his childhood under the systematic, vicious whipping of his Irish groom."
—The New York Review of Books, vol. 39, No. 15, September 24, 1992
Bacon's sexual consciousness awakened exceptionally early, and from the beginning of his youth, he quietly made a date with the horse farm workers.
During the day, workers beat bacon with a whip at the behest of their fathers;
At night, Bacon went to bed with the man who smoked him;
In this way, he gradually grew into a masochist.
▲ The famous "Screaming Pope" series (right), a tribute to Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (left)
Bacon's preference for dictatorial themes stemmed from his tough and unreasonable father.
In 1924, Bacon tried women's clothing for the first time, dressing up as a flirtatious modern girl at a masquerade ball.
He wore an Eton College coat and beaded dress, high heels on his feet, flaming red lips, and a long-mouthed cigarette pole.
"Women's clothing is only zero times and countless times."
This phrase that modern people use to ridicule the women's clothing boss has become Bacon's hypnotic.
In 1926, at the age of 17, Bacon was kicked out of his home. Because his father found him wearing his mother's underwear, he looked at himself in the mirror and felt self-pity.
In the second half of 1926, Bacon moved to London.
He was poor, but he didn't want to make a living by petty theft.
Bacon got a job at a women's clothing store, and he was finally free to try on his favorite dress. But not long after, an anonymous letter appeared in the boss's mailbox, and Bacon was fired on the spot. (Who sent the letter, everyone should be able to guess it)
Bacon has since fallen and begun to make money with his flesh. He specifically attracted the gay rich and made them pay for themselves.
Ironically, Bacon's two patrons were a relative of his mother and a subordinate his father,ckott Smith.
Smith was a masculine horse breeder, and his father wanted bacon to learn more about his masculinity. Bacon claimed that his father had the "uncle" "hold his hand" and "train him to be a man". (sic: his father had asked this "uncle" to take him 'in-hand' and 'make a man of him'. ）
Bacon's father's inaccuracies have reached the point of blindness. Not only did he not discover that his son had sexual fantasies about him, but he also did not find that he was entrusted with a non-person— this "reliable subordinate" was extremely irresponsible and liked to trick young boys into bed.
The result was bacon and "uncle" "holding hands" rolled onto the bed.
In 1927, Bacon and Smith moved to Berlin.
Just a month later, Smith left 18-year-old Bacon in a foreign country. Confused and helpless, Bacon wandered around Berlin for a month and then to Paris.
"Of course, he quickly got tired of me and eloped with a woman... I didn't really know what to do, so I stopped for a while. ”
At the exhibition in Paris, Bacon was exposed to art for the first time and also met well-wishers.
Connoisseur Yvonne Bocquentin took bacon in. During his three months at Pocundin's house, Bacon appeared frequently in major exhibitions, eagerly absorbing the fragrance of art and discovering his artistic talent.
Most of Bacon's works are restless, full of fear and anger.
The root of his lifelong insecurity is that he didn't have anything stable and reliable around him before he became an adult.
The fear of suffocation brought about by congenital asthma, frequent moves lead to no friends, his mother hates him, his father is ashamed of him, his lover abandons him and goes away...
If there was one more person bacon could rely on in his life, it must be the old nanny, Lightford.
The old man who once brought a little maternal warmth to the young Bacon will give him decades of stability in the time to come.
(In fact, the closest and most trusted people to artists with unhappy and psychologically fragile families are their assistants and nannies.) For example, Yayoi Kusama and Louis Bourgeois. ）
▲ Spider represents Bourgeois's mother, who hardly works on the subject of her father because he is a domestic alcoholic
In the winter of 1928, Bacon, who had transformed into an interior designer, returned to London to rent his first studio.
He shares a floor with collector Eric Alden and his old nanny, Lightford. In addition to his creations, he also needed a part-time telephone operator to supplement his family.
Bacon's studio is an impressive mess, the paint drawings are layered on top of each other, there is no place to stay, and they can be put on a hot search today:
What nanny can tolerate such an environment? I'm afraid I'm not blind.
Lightford was also blind, and she was blind because of her old age.
Lightford was also an odd person, walking freely in Bacon's obstacle-like studio and sleeping at night at the kitchen table— the only open space the Bacon family could clean up. Not only that, but she also helped Bacon open an illegal casino at home, which was an important source of income for him.
Bacon inherited his father's inaccurate view, and the boyfriend was more than a scum. (Given that Bacon is a masochist, maybe these scum were deliberately picked by him...) ）
In 1929, he met patron and lover Eric Hall, and love and bread merged into one.
However, what he ushered in was not sincere love, but a twisted and even cruel love relationship. Eric is a man of the family, abandoning his wife and son to travel around Europe with bacon to gamble, and kicking him away when he is bored.
In 1944, Bacon, who was unable to participate in World War II because of asthma, created a work that shocked the art world, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.
Bacon said the three characters were inspired by the three goddesses of destiny.
Due to Bacon's dark and eerie fate, the three portraits also present nightmarish deformities. Evil and twisted, with their loud mouths roaring with exhaustion, they struggled desperately on the bed of torture.
In 1951, the death of the old nanny who had accompanied Bacon for 42 years undoubtedly dealt a huge blow to him.
The last harbor fell apart, and Bacon fell deeper and deeper into the tide of perversion and lust.
Being Bacon's lover was a difficult task, especially after his inception.
The poor bacon will still make a small white face in order to make a living.
Since his fame, he has erected a body of spikes, revealing his chaotic and evil nature. Either hurt each other with another hedgehog, or mercilessly stabbed a soft heart, and Bacon's love affair almost never ended well.
Bacon's lover, Peter Lacey, was a handsome Air Force pilot on the outside, but privately a violent sadist.
He tore up Bacon's paintings, beat him, and left him drunk in the street. The two often fought and fought, almost strangling each other.
Bacon was both painful and enjoyable, painting countless dark, twisted and talented paintings.
After the two broke up, Bacon lost inspiration for a while. Suddenly, one day, he painted a new painting that shocked the world, showing a man lying on his bed, bloodied by a shotgun.
Just as everyone was competing for praise, the news of the death of his ex-boyfriend Peter came - it turned out that the deceased in the painting was himself.
In 1963, one of Bacon's most important lovers, George Dale, entered his life.
George came in through the window, and he went to Bacon's house to steal something and was caught on the spot. Bacon threatened him: "Go to bed with me, or call the police." ”
Bacon is not a reliable, responsible man.
On the one hand, he longs for a man who is very strong mentally and physically, who controls everything and becomes his patron:
Throughout her life, Francis was looking for her ideal partner. He would say that my dream lover was the body of a footballer with Nietzsche's mind. ”
On the other hand, strong insecurity and the tragedy of being betrayed many times make it difficult for him to trust others, and he is more inclined to choose a weaker lover and control him strongly:
"He always had the upper hand in the relationship and then complained that his lover was too mentally retarded."
Throughout his life, Bacon was caught in a whirlpool of contradictions, and had no time to take care of others.
But Dale was as vulnerable as he was, begging him for a shred of care, but getting nothing.
"Dale was barely educated and knew nothing about art, but he adored Francis like a pet puppy – which also put him at risk."
Dale was at odds with high society, and the stars that surrounded Bacon's dignitaries and admirers were unbearable, and he had to indulge in alcohol day after day.
Bacon painted many portraits of him, but Dale couldn't read any of them.
▲ George Dale Triptych
Dell did everything he could to get Bacon's attention.
He took a little white face back to the hotel, thinking that Bacon would be furious about his cheating, but Bacon just complained that the little white face had a bad foot and moved to the next room.
To punish Bacon, Dale committed suicide on the day of his most glorious day, the retrospective of the Grand Palais in Paris.
In the early hours of the morning, George died in a gunshot.
On the same day, Bacon concealed the news of his death and pretended to be indifferent to the exhibition.
At night, looking at George's corpse sitting on the toilet, Bacon collapsed.
▲ "Dead Man on the Toilet" (referring to Dale)
Dale had been ignored by Bacon during his lifetime, and after his death, he could finally remain in Bacon's mind forever, lingering until his death.
This paranoid man finally defeated his lover who was even crazier than him with death.
Bacon suddenly realized how important Dale was to him, that his imprisonment, indifference, arrogance, and strength had killed Dale, and that he had become the same person as his parents he hated.
Dale wakes Up Bacon with his own blood and drags him out of the abyss of madness.
Bacon lifted himself up from the confusion of lust and confronted for the first time the grand and inevitable philosophical issue of "death."
5 years later, another lover healed Bacon's broken heart.
Despite having so many lovers, Bacon was still a lonely soul.
He was only sexually related to his lovers, and even George Dale was not allowed to live in his house. The original family caused too much psychological shadow to Bacon, he avoided family relations, and was completely indifferent to the intimacy and warmth of family affection.
It was John Edwards who changed all that.
▲ Edwards Triptych
Edwards was Bacon's fan, and he loved Bacon as much as Dale, but was more optimistic, witty, and temperamental than he was.
He is good at cold treatment, and can make Bacon's attacks on a whim all missed.
"When Bacon starts throwing tantrums or starts giving a nasty tongue, Edwards will say, 'I'm leaving now, Francis.'" Then it will leave directly. ”
Edwards, who knew nothing about art, often asked Bacon, "Why do you always paint me like a monkey?" ”
Despite this, he remained the most harmonious lover with Bacon.
Edwards was 40 years younger than Bacon, who poured out all the paternal love he longed for and never received. The relationship between the two was not so much a lover as father and son, and Bacon established Edwards as his sole heir.
In his later years, Bacon became more and more suffering from asthma, but he still could not change his rebellious nature.
In 1992, Bacon went to Madrid against his doctor's advice to meet his last lover, Capello, but was infected with pneumonia and admitted to the hospital.
Soon after, he died of a heart attack.
▲ Bacon's last work, "Bull", between black death and white life, he is slowly dissipating
Some argue that Bacon was a talented artist;
Some people think that Bacon is a bastard who lives in chaos and harms others and harms himself;
But how many people know that the beginning of all tragedy and legend is just an indifferent mother and a violent father?
If you want to know more
Please pay attention to "QingYi Hui" to see more content
This article is for sharing only, if there is any infringement, please contact to delete