# Francis Bacon: The Emerging Artist (Part 1)

An episode of [Stories of Art](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1877705944), 4 May 2026, 49 min.

Audio: https://episode.flightcast.com/01KQSNVX6ZY7KWZTJGS6YF6PCT.mp3

How did the horrors of the Second World War influence Francis Bacon's first great masterpiece? And what impact did his troubled childhood have on his life and art? Join Alastair and James as they explore the early life and work of one Britain's greatest artists. If you would like to see the artworks James and Alistair reference in this episode, please switch to video in your podcast app. Artworks in this episode include: Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, Tate Gallery, London Francis Bacon, Crucifixion, 1933, Private Collection For more great art content visit www.heni.com or visit the Heni Talks YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox Additional Research: Catherine Ingram Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac

## Transcript

[0:01] Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm James Fox. And I'm Alastair Souk. Deep in the chambers of a hot orange hell, three grey-skinned monsters writhe and scream. One perches on a table, neck roving like a vulture, sniffing flesh. Another, with ears for eyes, howls at its neighbours. But the one in the middle appears to have spotted us.
[0:31] Rotating its bandaged head in our direction, it opens its mouth and bears a ghoulish set of blood-stained teeth.
[0:39] That, Alistair, is chilling. It's what it is. It's also Francis Bacon's three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion, which he made towards the end of the Second World War in 1944. It's a painting, well, to be precise, three paintings, of such seismic importance that the British art critic John Russell wrote, there was painting in England before three studies and painting in England after them, and no one can confuse the two.
[1:09] Do you agree? I do agree. It's impossible to disagree. This is genuinely a before and after moment in British arts, not just in the 20th century. But I find these pictures, this triptych, scarring. You know, it's easy to say it's unforgettable, but it's almost painful to look at this stuff.
[1:28] You describe, I mean, that's horrible, that idea of sniffing flesh, but it's so nightmarish, this image, and it feels so redolent and evocative of all of the nightmarish, catastrophic suffering that was going on at the time that it feels like the perfect distillation, articulation of the times. And it announces the arrival of this new talent, doesn't it, in British art, Francis Bacon, still reasonably young. He has done stuff before, but he always says that his career dates from this moment, from 1944. Yes.
[1:57] Yes, it's clearly a breakthrough moment. And I think it is the first of many, many masterpieces made by Francis Bacon over the next, what, 50 years or so of his career. And for me, and I'm sure you agree, Alistair, Bacon is, he's one of the all time greats.
[2:11] Well, he had a retrospective. He had two at the Tate in his life. And the later one in the 80s, the director famously said he was the greatest living painter. Yeah. So I think he himself, he also had a sort of, he could be quite self-critical. And he had this idea that his pictures would either end up in the National Gallery, which they may yet do now that it's expanding in London, National Gallery, and accommodating 20th century pictures, or in the dustbin. And many of them did. And many of them did because he destroyed so many works. Yeah.
[2:41] But he's an artist, I think, who perhaps more than any other really seemed to capture the brutal truths of the human condition. And Bacon's life, Alistair, is almost as dramatic and shocking as his paintings. Can I say, James, just before we get stuck in, there is a big irony in my mind about this, because as you say, the stories of Bacon's life are incredible. But famously, he is an artist who resisted any form of storytelling and narrative in his paintings. He hated it.
[3:11] And so we have this slightly unenviable task of trying to tell a narrative about a very non-narrative artist and artworks, which I hope you're right to that challenge. He thought narrative was incredibly boring, but there is nothing boring about Francis Bacon's life. And so over the next three episodes, we are going to do a proverbial deep dive into this astonishing individual. So this is the first in our three-part series on the life and work.
[3:39] of Francis Bacon. Well, let's begin at the beginning. Francis Bacon is born on the 28th of October, my sister's birthday actually, 1909 in Dublin, Ireland. He's not actually Irish. Both of his parents are English. And we should remember, of course, that at this time...
[4:05] Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. He's from a pretty well-to-do family. So his father, who's known as Eddie Bacon, comes from a long line of military men. They date their ancestry all the way back to the original Francis Bacon. Who was he again? Well, the Elizabethan statesman, philosopher, mathematician, the inventor of the scientific method. So there's a great sort of lineage there. But Francis Bacon's father is a captain. He served during the Boer War.
[4:31] But he's now in Ireland as a racehorse trainer. So he spends much of his time out in the paddocks. He's shooting a lot of pheasants. He's hunting foxes. That's the kind of thing he's doing. He's an outdoors man. He's a real outdoors man. And not all that affectionate or really a very nice character. No, we will come to that. He's a horrible man. And we should also talk about Bacon's mother. So his mother is called Winnie Firth. She brings the money to the family. So she's from an
[4:56] unbelievably wealthy family of Sheffield industrialists. They're steel producers, they make ammunition, they make cutlery. And so it's this perfect combination, really. It's a classic Edwardian combination of the status of this upper middle class father's side with the enormous wealth of the nouveau riche mothers. And I think Eddie doesn't, he may not even really love
[5:20] his wife or that much. I think it's a marriage of convenience. Yeah, okay. It's a marriage of convenience. But Bacon grows up in this pretty well-to-do household. They've got a big house, 13-room house in the countryside outside of Dublin. He is the second son, so he's got an older brother. He's got two sisters. He's got a younger brother.
[5:39] As Yusuf's implied, none of the children are close to their parents. Mainly because it sounds like the dad was just so monstrous as a figure. I think they just also, the parents just weren't interested. I mean, Winnie, Francis Bacon's mother, was far more interested in socialising than she was with her children. Yeah, she's sort of self-absorbed. Completely self-absorbed, but relatively benign. Yeah.
[6:03] And the father, who is, as you say, a tyrant, is far more interested even in his Labradors than he is in his children. So the children barely see, the Bacon children barely see their parents. They spend most of their life in this nursery, the back of the house with the wonderfully named Nanny Lightfoot. Yes, Jessie. Jessie Lightfoot. Jessie Lightfoot. She's a big character. Very important figure in Bacon's life. Important figure. And they spend most of their day with her. They only come out to see their parents, what, for 30 minutes a day.
[6:29] which is probably a good thing given... Sounds very Edwardian. Yes, I mean, it's not like that nowadays, is it? Those were the days to see your children half an hour a day. I'd love that. Anyway, so they only see their parents for half an hour a day, which is probably a good thing for them because the father is always enraged. He's always angry about something. I think the adjective belligerent is often used about Eddie Bacon.
[6:52] Yes, storming around the house, screaming, shouting, throwing things. Francis Bacon sees himself as the runt of the litter in many ways. He's painfully shy, which is quite weird when you consider what we know of Bacon and what we'll describe of him later on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a complete transformation. It's a transformation. It's sort of self-fashioning, isn't it, in a way?
[7:13] It really is. It's an incredible testament to his will that he can go from being so shy to being so incredibly gregarious in the centre of every party that he was at. Yes, but he was paralysed by his shyness early on. He's very effeminate. He's also sickly, so he suffers from asthma. Yes, and this is important. This is so important, and the asthma is...
[7:34] In many ways, it's aggravated by their lifestyle. It's aggravated by life in the countryside, by all the animals that are in the house. And of course, every time he spends time with animals, he becomes very unwell. And his father, not particularly sympathetic to this condition. So the more unwell Bacon becomes, the more his father exposes him to animals, the more he makes him ride the pony and play with the dogs. And this creates a terrible sort of feedback loop in the household.
[8:01] And Bacon's father is of the view, as you might imagine, a military man from that generation, that you just have to make a man of your children. And so he often sends, and this is what Bacon said, he would be regularly sent to the stables where he would be whipped by the grooms.
[8:16] Yeah, now this is a very key anecdote because I think I may be correct in saying that the source wasn't Bacon. It's posthumous. There's a woman called Caroline Blackwood who later in the series we may come on to, second wife of Lucian Freud, artist, very good friends of Frances Bacon, and she's the source for this story. Do we think it definitely happened or it's one of those stories that feels like it? Because the premise is that the dad was such a monster
[8:44] that he was inviting his young, unmarried stablehand grooms to whip his son, to whip him into shape, which sounds almost conveniently brutal, given the brutality we find in Bacon's paintings later on. It also feels, though, consistent with the kind of man his father was.
[9:03] um we we don't know for certain bacon has particular stories about the grooms he says that he has early sexual experience with these grooms as well and that's an important element of the childhood because as bacon turns 13 14 15 he becomes increasingly aware that he is gay
[9:22] and as you might imagine, this is not something that would be understood or accepted by his father. No. And there's a particular moment, it's one of the most famous stories in all of... This is one he, Bacon, did tell. He's told many, many times that age 16, he is in his parents' bedroom when his father finds him trying on his mother's underwear. And this, Bacon always described, was the moment he was essentially exiled from the house. And before we go...
[9:50] It's worth just adding an extra layer, I think, of nuance to this relationship, because what Bacon recalled when he looked back about his dad was he, my father, didn't love me. I didn't love him either. But it was very ambiguous because I was sexually attracted to him, to the dad.
[10:07] So later in life, I mean, this is very, very complex, psycho, erotic desire, complex thing going on. And also just before he is kicked out of home for good, I'd love to just have a moment for you come across Granny Supple.
[10:25] No, tell me about Granny Supple. Granny Supple, because it sounds in many ways horrible, his childhood. And he, Bacon, later said, you know, he was living under this sort of shadow of threat. So there's the personal threat of violence at home, but also there's the threat of the First World War. There's the threat of everything that's going on between...
[10:42] Ireland and trying to escape English control and that sense of violence, which was latent at the time. But his maternal grandmother was a woman who was known in the family as Granny Supple. And Granny Supple... Granny Supple, Nanny Lightfoot. They're fantastic names, aren't they? They are. They're beautiful. I mean, you couldn't really make them up. Granny Supple supposedly hated her son-in-law, Eddie. Right.
[11:04] And I think this endeared her to Francis, young Francis, immensely. So by 1926, he's 16 years old and he's living alone in London. He, in later years, said that he was completely cut off. That's not entirely true. His mother was still paying him some money. So he was receiving £3 a week.
[11:23] It was probably quite a lot in those days for a teenager. Yeah, it's not bad, but it wasn't quite enough. So he did have to take up some jobs. And this is one of the funniest episodes in Bacon's life when he has to take up these odd jobs. So the first job he has in London...
[11:37] is he becomes a chef. He becomes a chef to a wealthy solicitor somewhere in London. It doesn't last very long. Then he becomes a housekeeper to another wealthy person. That doesn't last because one evening, shortly after starting the job, his boss is in the fanciest restaurant in London, the Ritz. And who does he see at the table next to him but the 16-year-old Francis Bacon drinking champagne? So that job in. You see, that weekly allowance stretches quite far. Clearly £3 was sufficient.
[12:03] And then the next job he gets is to work in a women's clothes store, which you might imagine he probably enjoyed. He quite enjoyed. But he really takes a disliking to his boss and starts writing these anonymous poison pen letters. And when the boss and the owner of the shop finds out that Francis Bacon is the author, he is thrown out of that job as well.
[12:24] I think he sort of looked back on this stage of his life and he said, I can't say I was what's called moral. No. Well, that's the other thing he was doing. He was augmenting his income by sleeping with wealthy older men and often stealing from them while they slept. Sometimes being caught. And he was caught in the act at least once.
[12:42] And so, you know, I think it would be fair to say that Bacon is drifting at this point. Yes. And drifting is kind of a key thing that he does again and again in his life. There are later periods when he's actually an established artist and he's still drifting as a sort of default drift mode, which is particular to Bacon.
[13:02] But eventually he will settle very much in London. But there's quite a lot to get through before he does. Well, let's get to the next phase. So obviously I think his parents, by the end of 1926, they obviously have recognised that he's not going anywhere, that things aren't really working out. And in early 1927, they come up with an idea. They hear that this relative of theirs, a cousin I think, called Hyatt Cecil Harcourt Smith... Yeah.
[13:30] Another ex-military guy, 10 years older than Francis Bacon, is going on a trip to Berlin.
[13:36] And they think, oh, get Francis to go with him. I mean, what on earth are they thinking? Well, they're thinking if anyone can make a man of Francis Bacon, it's Harcourt Smith. Well, he's meant to be what he's sort of ultra masculine. Yes. Mustache. Very straight back. Like the Kitchener poster. You can imagine exactly that sort of sense of a man. So in the spring of 1927, Francis and Harcourt Smith head off to Berlin.
[14:02] Very exciting place to go at this point. You know, this is Berlin in the middle of the Weimar Republic. Obviously, the Weimar Republic has just suffered this period of very significant inflation. So the exchange rate is very favourable. They stay in the fanciest hotel in Berlin, the Hotel Adlon. Total luxury. Have you ever been to the Hotel Adlon? I have.
[14:21] I went once, about 20 years ago, I went for lunch. I couldn't even afford the bottled water. So it was about 20 euro for a bottle of water. So it didn't help much. Back in the day, though, you could be dining at the Ritz on £3 a week. You could live at the Adlon for two months. Well, this is what they did. So they go to the Adlon. Of course, Berlin at this point is tremendously culturally exciting. This is the city of...
[14:43] of cabaret. It's the city of avant-garde cinema. Battleship Potemkin has just come out. Is this Weimar Republic era? Weimar Republic, yeah. And it's, you know, it's the city of the Bauhaus in its pomp. It's the city of unbelievable cultural excitement. You know, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender are there.
[15:04] But also license in terms of behaviour, right? I think that's really important. Sexual morays. It's a real city of sex. It's full of brothels, full of sex workers. There's a lot of homosexuality. There's a lot of, you know, cross-dressing. It turns out that Harcourt Smith, is that his name? Harcourt Smith. He was quite sexually voracious himself, was he not? That is why,
[15:23] he went. I mean, ultimately, that was why he had recently divorced and he thought, well, let's become a sex tourist for a bit. And so he went there for the sex and he shagged everything that moved when he was there, including his cousin Francis Bacon. But that's what Bacon says. They ended up in bed. It's one of those stories that he would always relate and he would make a joke out of it because I think he loved the irony that his hated father had sent him there with Harcourt Smith
[15:51] the ultra-macho guy, and Harcourt Smith had then seduced him. It was the last thing Eddie Bacon would have possibly wanted. No, I mean, disaster. Yeah.
[16:01] It's also a little bit sort of slightly grim, isn't it, as a story from thinking about it from the vantage point of today. I mean, he's a teenager at this point. Yeah, 17 years old. So homosexuality is illegal anyway. OK, it's tolerated in Berlin. But there's something where he is completely exploited and essentially abused by Harcourt Smith. But Bacon himself put this kind of strange gloss on it later in life. He seemed to relish it.
[16:24] Yeah, and then he's very quickly discarded. So Harcourt Smith finds someone else, and Bacon is left alone. And he decides, well, I've still got some money left. I'll go to Paris. And so he then, in the later spring of 1927, moves to Paris. Do you think it's worth just fleshing out? Because you mentioned this important film that he possibly first saw in Berlin, Battleship Potemkin. And this was a...
[16:48] Well, what is the movie? It's a film by Sergei Eisenstein, and it's seen as an absolutely pivotal film in the history of cinema. It's the first time you see proper montage taking place. And there's a particular scene, a very famous scene on the Odessa steps, where there's a lot of farce-cutting
[17:06] And there is a particular moment in which you see a nurse screaming. Yes, key. Key scene. Her glasses are broken. She's screaming. And this scream will prove to be very important for Bacon later on. So he is getting some cultural experiences. He's having a lot of sexual experiences. But...
[17:24] But he doesn't actually end up spending that long in Berlin before he moves to Paris. And I just think, what a gap year, Alistair. Can you imagine having a gap and going to Weimar Republic Berlin and then Paris in the 1920s? Yeah, it's a beast, Thailand, isn't it? It really is. I mean, Paris in the 1920s is the cultural capital of Europe. Everyone is there. Picasso and the Surrealists, Giacometti is there. You've got Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein. Do you think he at this time is tracking all of that stuff?
[17:52] Or do you think he's just sort of following his nose, having a good time? The drifter still, it's the drifting mode. I think he's still drifting. He does, to be fair to him, while he's in Paris, he learns French and learns it very quickly and very well. Yes. He does also, he encounters another screen. So later he becomes famous as the painter of...
[18:12] the scream. But there is this scream that he encounters outside of Paris, this place called Chantilly. And there's a museum there. And there's a painting by the 17th century Baroque classical French painter, Nicolas Poussin. And it depicts the massacre of the innocents. And it's an awful biblical theme. And in it, there's a woman, a mother, who is screaming as her to try and protect her infant, I think.
[18:39] And Bacon, for the first time that we know of in his life, because this was something he did again and again later in his artistic career, he became, when he encountered this picture, because he spent some time in Chantilly for a little while during this French moment, he became obsessed with it.
[18:56] And he said that it was probably the best human cry ever painted. So even though he is still very young and he's drifting around, he's clearly absorbing things, which much later are very important for the way he's making art. Yeah. I mean, the other thing he absorbed, very different kind of artwork. In the summer of 1927 in Paris, he sees an exhibition of Picasso's drawings.
[19:18] Yeah. And this has a really significant impact on him. And he begins after that to start drawing and painting a lot. It's the first moment, really. He's done a little bit of art earlier on in life. It's the first moment he really starts to seriously think, maybe this is something I could do.
[19:33] Have you ever come across him talking about that? Why he found... Because it was meant to be such an epiphany, this show of the drawings by Picasso in 1927 in Paris. And I think those drawings were quite varied from Picasso's career to that point. But in the 20s, Picasso starts creating a lot of pictures in which you have these bone-like figures.
[19:55] which also become influential on the young Francis Bacon. We shall see it in a few moments. Yeah, we shall. Sorry, I'm jumping ahead. But Bacon has a very, very complex and important relationship with Picasso. Picasso is perhaps his greatest influence in some ways, but they never meet. And actually, I think Bacon tries to avoid meeting him. We'll come to similar things like that later on with other artists. So he starts to think about perhaps a life as a creative professional.
[20:23] But he doesn't choose to become an artist. No. He chooses to become an interior designer. I know. It's so weird, this. So bizarre. In retrospect, it seems completely bizarre that that's the decision he makes. And so he returns end of 1928 after a year and a half in Paris. He returns to London.
[20:40] He's 19 years old now. He thinks, I'm going to become an interior designer. So how much do we know about the stuff that he was actually designing and making? What was it? What did it look like? Well, we know a little bit. So he opens a showroom in a garage in South Kensington. And he starts showing some of his designs. So there are some cubist rugs. Right. Again, the influence of Picasso is there. He's making these tubular metal bits of furniture that are very much inspired by
[21:08] the Bauhaus that he would have probably seen in Berlin and probably Eileen Gray's furniture that he would have seen in Paris. And so it's classic modernist design furniture that was quite a dominant thing, an important thing on the continent, but really not so big a deal in Britain at this time. It does get him noticed. The thing I always take away from this is that
[21:30] It's not hugely, it's not totally original, what he's creating. But what he is revealing is he has really good streak of good taste, where he can very quickly identify innovations of others and absorb them and start to make work, which in this case is quite imitative, but later when he becomes a visual artist, it's
[21:52] possible that he's doing the same thing at points. And I wonder how much you think that his interior design work, which he later rejected, he was not proud of it, but I wonder how much you think you can start to trace or there are echoes of it later in the paintings. I think that's really interesting. Well, indeed, during this period as an interior designer, he was actually making
[22:22] The rugs and the tables and the chairs. So there is some kind of connection. I don't think he's found his voice yet as an individual, but the interior design business is pretty successful, actually. He gets some quite influential clients. He sells work to Rad Butler's wife, to the novelist Patrick White, to the art historian Douglas Cooper.
[22:43] And he's doing his paintings. And increasingly, during the 1930s, he starts to think, well, maybe I should become a painter. And in 1933, he paints his first, I wouldn't call it his first masterpiece. Oh, I don't know. Do you like it? I think this is quite an incredible picture. OK, well, talk us through it, Alastair. This is called The Crucifixion. It's from 1933. It's quite an unusual work. Yeah.
[23:06] So for a long time, whenever I came to Francis Bacon, he would begin his career with that 1944 triptych that you described at the start of this part. And the only picture that was readily available that he'd created prior to that, which people knew about, was this painting depicting the crucifixion from 1933. And it is brilliantly nightmarish in a true Baconian style.
[23:36] Part skeletal, part X-ray. Yeah, it looks like an X-ray, doesn't it? It's black and white. Sort of figure, who is clearly Christ, on this dark cross against a very black background. So, as you say, white, very starkly picked out, but is both skeleton-like and has that vaporous, strange, insubstantial quality of maybe an X-ray. Or some people think it looks like a part of a sort of bat that's strung up. Yes, it's part skeleton, part ghost, isn't it? Yeah. It feels very phantom-like.
[24:06] And there's this other form which seems to be emerging from the chest of the crucified figure as though this is an attendant leaning up towards Christ. And it's something where the head is just this tiny dot, almost the same size as the hands which are on the cross.
[24:23] I mean, it has a lot. I mean, bear in mind that he's 23 when he paints this. Yes, you can see the influence of Picasso, but it is hugely, it's got so much poise, I think, and its own presence already at this point. I think for British art in the early to mid 1930s, this is pretty remarkable.
[24:41] And we know it caught the eye of, because I brought this into prop, James. Yes. I know you've got a copy of this as well, but this is a very famous book called Art Now by an art critic, Herbert Reid. I love Herbert. Right on my hero is Herbert Reid, one of the great art writers of the 20th century. Amazing figure. And this was published in 1933, and it contains a reproduction of Francis Bacon's crucifixion. And pretty amazing when you consider Bacon...
[25:05] completely unknown at this time, ends up in Herbert Reid's book, next to the work of Picasso, this unbelievably famous individual. And not only that, the painting then goes on to be purchased by a very distinguished art collector called Sir Michael Sadler.
[25:21] So I think Bacon, by 1933, is thinking, I'm on a roll. The x-ray thing is very interesting here because Sadler wanted another picture of him done by Bacon. And he sent Bacon an x-ray of his skull.
[25:37] which Bacon incorporated into another crucifixion, which has survived from this period. So I actually, genuinely, I don't really quite know whether the X-ray thing was Bacon's interest or Michael Sadler was bringing that to him. But X-rays...
[25:55] medical imagery. These are things that become very, very important for Francis Bacon as an artist. Absolutely, they do. And we will see much more of that as we go through. So he's had this success with the crucifixion of 1933. And he thinks, I can make a career as an artist now. So at the beginning of 1934, the next year, he stages his first one man show as an artist. It's not organised by a dealer. He organises it himself.
[26:22] And he includes seven oil paintings and various other works. And this exhibition, he's got very high hopes for it. Yeah. It's a disaster. It's a disaster. No one goes apart from his friends. And the only reviews he gets are terrible. Can I read you? Yeah, yeah. What do we have? This is a review from The Times. Okay. The Times says, The difficulty with Mr Francis Bacon is to know how far his paintings and drawings may be regarded as artistic expression.
[26:52] And how far is the mere unloading on canvas and paper of what used to be called the subconscious mind? As the latter, they are not of much consequence except by way of release to the artist. Certainly most of the seven paintings are too large for anything they have to say. Confidence in Mr Bacon is not increased by the information that it is proposed to hold a series of his work at this gallery.
[27:15] I like the way you've given this poor review a very pompous, very pompous voice. Have you ever written a review like that? I think what's interesting about that to me is that it identifies something which, and this is astute, we're in a world of post-Sigmund Freud. And so everything that Bacon is about, in a funny way, although it's still quite shocking, but it's about trying to, as he would always put it, paint sensation.
[27:38] So it's not painting of the intellect. It's trying to dig in mind, that sense of the unconscious or the subconscious, as that reviewer says. And I suppose at that time, it's still seen as that's quite a shocking thing. It would continue to be a shocking thing the next decade. But in a sense, the reviewer has identified something in the way that Bacon is approaching his art. Yeah, but I think the really, really awful thing for Francis Bacon of that review is it is not...
[28:05] not outraged or shocked or horrified. It is bored. It's got this withering sense of, oh, he's going to do more of these shows. And Bacon, who was, as you said, at the very start of this episode, was very self-critical in many ways. He was broken by this review. He destroyed almost everything from that exhibition. He fell into this drug-addled depression and despair. And in 1935, he basically gives up exhibiting altogether.
[28:33] And what he actually does instead is he sets up illegal gambling venues. With Jessie. Yes, with Jessie. With the nanny. With Nanny Lightfoot. She's key. Again. So he's back to drifting again. Yeah. And so I think the second half of the 1930s, he's not really painting that much. He's mostly running these casino nights. He's not exhibiting at all.
[28:52] And in some ways he's on the verge of being lost to the history of art. Just another name in the long list of artists who have tried and failed to make it. He's had a pretty good life so far. I think he's enjoyed himself. But Alistair, in 1939, something is going to happen that would change everything for him. And we will find out what after the break.
[29:15] A reminder that if you want to see the artworks we're discussing, you can switch to video in your podcast app at any time. And if you're enjoying this episode, please consider following Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts and maybe even leave a review.
[29:40] Welcome back to Stories of Art. It is September 1939 and Britain has declared war on Nazi Germany. This is a decision that will change the course of British and European history, but it will also change the course of Francis Bacon's life. And I think Alistair create the conditions for his second coming as an artist. I'm sure you're right.
[30:01] Well, he's now 29. So he's 29 years old. He's drifting yet again. Conscription is in place early on in the war. He is determined not to fight. Have you heard this story? I think I know where you may be going. Go on, remind me.
[30:16] Well, Bacon is determined not to fight in the war, not because he's lacking in courage. I mean, Bacon is an unbelievably brave man who has an astonishing tolerance for physical pain in the bedroom and elsewhere. But I think he just, you know, he comes from a family of military men. His father, who he kind of hated, was a military man. And I think he doesn't want to be that kind of Bacon. So he's thinking, how can I get out of this?
[30:42] And remember, he's got asthma. So the night before his medical, he goes to the kennels beneath Harrods, because there were apparently kennels beneath Harrods back then. Right. He rents an Alsatian. He rents it. He rents an Alsatian. By the hour. Yeah. By the hour. And spends the night with the Alsatian in bed. Oh, God. Yeah.
[31:00] And after a night of, you know, hugging this extremely big hairy dog, he's wheezing. He's got rashes all over his face. Covered and fleas. And he duly fails his medical. Right. Success. Success. Money well spent. Money well spent. And so he ends up working on the home front as an air raid warden, serving actually with some bravery.
[31:21] I mean, it's important to sort of remember that because that story does make out that he was quite cowardly. He's in it for himself. He isn't really part of the war effort. But actually, a lot of the things he was doing, he was working for the air raid precautions in civil defence. So it's firefighting and also recovering dead bodies.
[31:39] It's not an easy job at all. And he served with great valour. And I'm sure those experiences must have played into everything that's kind of going on in his head and will eventually come out on canvas. I think absolutely that's the case. And it's also really the first time he's ever had structure in his life. You know, when he's had to wear a uniform, when he's had to get somewhere for a specific time. So I think that plays an important role.
[32:00] It doesn't last that long. It doesn't last that long. Again, we come back to the asthma because at this early phase of the Second World War, the Blitz was ongoing and it was creating enormous amounts of dust and smoke in the air. And he starts to get sicker and sicker. And so he has to actually leave London. So he moves to this cottage, rents a cottage in Hampshire. Ah, with someone. His first big important lover in his life.
[32:25] Eric Hall. Who often is referred to in the literature as an alderman. So I think sort of upstanding pillar of the community type. Married man and falls in love with Bacon. Buys some of Bacon's early pictures, later donates them to the Tate. And at this point, they do spend some time in this cottage in Hampshire, which is odd given that Bacon is, we associate him so much with the city. He hated the countryside.
[32:53] He hated trees. He hated animals. He hated the sound of birds. We later bought a place in the country. Well, this is true. But, I mean, actually, when you see photographs of the cottage, to me it looks like heaven. Right. For him it was hell. You know, he was stranded away from the clubs and the nightclubs and the bars of Soho. It's interesting you say it was hell because the three studies for the figures at the base of a crucifixion. Don't give a game away, Alistair. But, I mean, the idea of it sort of being hellish
[33:20] I think I'm right in saying that one of those, part of it may have begun in the cottage, right? Yes. Is that right? I think, you know, with all the time he has for free in this cottage, he ends up doing a lot of drawing, a lot of sketching. He's also drawing on...
[33:36] photographs that he's getting from Picture Post magazine and Life magazine. And it is a really, actually, very productive phase in his career, in that this period, enclosed in this play, gives him this opportunity to start experimenting and to start finding his own voice. And he absolutely does. The work we will see later comes, in many ways, out of this laboratory phase in his life.
[33:58] I think what I was trying to drive at is I quite like the idea that everyone associates that triptych with all of the hellish things that are happening in the world at the time, that perhaps it really came from the personal hell of being stuck in this cottage in the country. Yes, quite possibly. Well, he doesn't spend that long there because as soon as the Blitz dies down and the air becomes clearer in London, he does get back to London as soon as he can. And he starts working up the ideas that he's been developing down in Hampshire. He starts working up into a series of
[34:25] of larger paintings but he doesn't yet have an opportunity to show them but then a lucky set of events happen that allow him to do this so there is a fancy gallery on new bond street called the gallery and it is planning a big show in early 1945 so just before the end of the war of
[34:48] When Ben Nicholson, who's a very famous figure in British art at this point. Abstract. Abstract artist. Yes, abstract artist working in St Ives at that point. And he's going to be a very important figure in this show. He pulls out. I don't know why, but he pulls out of the show. And they need to find someone to fill his space. Yeah.
[35:08] They go for a like for like replacement. They actually ask Graham Sutherland, who is another very celebrated British artist, very influential figure at this time, and a friend of Francis Bacon. And Graham Sutherland writes this to the gallery. This is what Graham Sutherland writes. He says...
[35:26] As for the painter to take Ben Nicholson's place, it seems there is not much choice other than John Piper, another British artist. I should really prefer Francis Bacon, for whose works you know I have a really profound admiration. It is true he has shown very little, but nowadays with every Tom, Dick and Harry showing yards of painting without much selection or standard, this is refreshing, and his recent things, while being quite uncompromising...
[35:53] have a grandeur and brilliance which is rarely seen in English art. And the dealer relents. The dealer says, well, if you prefer Francis Bacon, I shall try him. This is not the first time that Sutherland's recommendations will really help Bacon on his way. Yeah. We'll find that later. But it also reminds me of, there's a very famous quote, which comes from just a few years later, 1946, which again involves Graham Sutherland,
[36:18] And it's the art historian and former director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clarke, of civilisation fame, much later, saying to Sutherland, you and I may be in a minority of two, but we may still be writing thinking Francis Bacon has genius. Big word to be using, particularly when in places like the Times, a few years earlier, you've got that much more condescending tone. But, you know, these are people who are really spotting
[36:46] young talent. Yeah, exactly. So the show opens in April 1945. Remember, at this stage, Alistair, Bacon's hardly shown anything for years and years and years, really since that show of 1934, 1934. He's kind of disappeared from the art scene. So the show opens at the Lafayette Gallery in April 1945. This is still a few months before the end of the Second World War. And Bacon shows two pictures. He shows Figuring a Landscape,
[37:12] And he shows three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion, which we discussed at the very start of this episode. Do you think it's worth just having a recap of what it looks like? I think so. Do you want to describe this remarkable picture? Or three pictures? Three pictures. It's a triptych. It's a triptych. We should say a triptych is three canvases or three panels, three pictures together. In each one, you've got this...
[37:38] amorphous, stone-coloured, bulbous, fleshy form in the middle. They all have these very phallic long necks, which seem to be moving around, roving. They are eyeless. One, you can see an ear, but they also have mouths. And they're presented against this scorching hot, vivid orange in each case. The middle one seems to be perching on top of...
[38:05] It looks like sort of old brown furniture, the base of some Regency table, perhaps. And it has this horrible off-white grubby bandage which is wrapped around that neck. And this mouth with red lips, the teeth picked out, which I think, as you'd said at the start of this whole part, seems to be swivelling towards us. Mm-hmm.
[38:29] It's a bit like much later, you know, Andy Warhol would depict Marilyn Monroe and that famous Cupid. It's a sort of perversion of an alluring kiss, if you like. And then in the right hand panel, you have the leg of one of these forms. In this strange, it looks like a bit of a doormat or maybe yellow scrubby grass.
[38:49] And it's really stretching out its neck as though it's in pain. And instead of a head, it does have this ear, but it just all seems to be about this gaping wide jaw. So you see, again, teeth and you can't quite tell. Is this a scream of pleasure? Well, probably not. It seems to be much more a scream of pain.
[39:10] And the whole thing is so out of nowhere in terms of there are precedents clearly thinking about Picasso's work. But to a British audience seeing it, this must have been totally shocking. It is a shocking picture, Alastair. It's difficult to know how to begin interpreting it. But I think one way in, one initial way in might be religion itself, because I think it's clearly making certain references to the history of religious art. The triptych, of course, the three part picture is a very important part of Christian art.
[39:40] And of course, it's got the word crucifixion in it, which of course immediately reminds you of perhaps the most important iconography in Christian art, which is the crucifixion of Christ. But the weird thing is he's not religious. No, he's a devout atheist. Yeah. But he's obviously riffing on it in some way.
[39:57] So deliberately trying to what? Attack it? Subvert it? It's iconoclastic in that sense, is it? I think that's possibly part of it. I mean, I think if we think about the way that the crucifixion is depicted in Christian art, you have Christ on the cross and you also have, and let's remember the title of this picture, it's called Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. And often in Christian art, you have figures at the base of a crucifixion. You have the Virgin Mary, usually the Mother of Christ. You might have the Mary Magdalene.
[40:27] John the Evangelist, maybe John the Baptist. And it's worth saying as well that Bacon himself said that he did at some point intend to create a large crucifixion that this triplet would accompany. He never did. He painted other crucifixions. There are other paintings that may have been sort of surrogates for that. But he clearly is thinking totally within this Christian framework of
[40:49] of how the picture should operate. Yeah. But one of the big differences is that the crucifixion in Christian art is ultimately, for all of the suffering, for all of the pain, for all of the death, it is ultimately about salvation because Christ is suffering for the benefit of humanity.
[41:05] This has none of that. No. There is no salvation. There is no redemption. This is just horror and violence and brutality. Well, there's also, I mean, it's an obvious thing to say once you know about the sources, but these particular figures, they're not Christian at all. They come from a pagan world. They come from Greek tragedy.
[41:25] Well, yeah, we should talk about that, actually. So I think that is the more important reference as far as he's concerned. He is very interested in Greek tragedy. He's very interested in Aeschylus. And particularly, there's a trilogy of plays by Aeschylus called the Oresteia, which is
[41:42] So this is 5th century BC. Yes. We should probably summarise the story. Could you? Oh, okay. Okay, so the Oresteia, from what I remember, is it's a very brutal series of plays in which it's set during the Trojan Wars
[41:57] And Agamemnon, who is the king, I think he sacrifices his daughter in order to secure favourable wins for the fleet. And then when his wife, who's called Clytemnestra, when she finds out he's killed their daughter, she murders him. And then when their son, I think his name is Orestes, who gives the name to the play, when Orestes finds out that Clytemnestra has killed his dad, he then murders her.
[42:23] It's a big cycle of violence, vengeance. It's a chain reaction of family brutality. You see, I think that he... Well, we know that Bacon, during... At this moment, in the war years, he becomes very interested in an academic study about Aeschylus that's published in 1942 by a man called WB Stanford, and it's called Aeschylus in His Style...
[42:44] And in it, you have this academic translating passages from the Oresteia. And it's almost like these fragments, the atmosphere, rather than the actual narrative of the plays that seem to excite Bacon so much. There's one very famous quote that he, Bacon, would repeatedly throughout his life refer to, which I think comes from this study and the Oresteia more generally. And the quote is, the reek of human blood smiles out at me.
[43:13] Well, that's exactly what the figure in the middle of this triptych is doing. It is exactly that, because they represent, don't they, these things called the Eumenides. Oh, yes, the Furies. This is really important, actually, because in the play The Oresteia, after Orestes has killed his mother, this is seen as a truly kind of the worst thing you could possibly do. He gets tormented by these Furies that are like Dementors in Harry Potter or something. And what are we mentioning? These are sort of, in classical Greek terms, they're kind of an emanation of guilt.
[43:43] Yes. So you're hounded by your own inner demons, but they've been externalised. Yes. And these furies, and Bacon is visualising his own furies in a sense. Is that what's going on here? Yes. I think in the ancient Greek, in the Greek play, they are these monstrous figures who follow him everywhere he goes. They torment him. They are, as you say, embodiments of guilt and rage and vengefulness. Yes.
[44:04] But I think for Bacon, perhaps, they are embodiments of the monsters that live within all of us. They're the things that haunt us when we close our eyes at night and the regrets and all those other kinds of things. And I think that's a really important part of understanding this painting and why he chose the triptych, not just in allusion to religious iconography, but to the fact that there are three furies in the Oresteia.
[44:28] A couple of things to throw at you. Yes. Do you think you've spoken about his homosexuality? Is that an important context here? These creatures, they're so phallic, those necks. This is a time where it wasn't very easy. You certainly couldn't be openly gay. Yeah.
[44:45] Is that one context, perhaps, in terms of inner demons his own life experience is bringing to this? And the other is, of course, the war context and the run-up to the war because we know that he's very interested in news photography. We know that he's making paintings which seem to be of these dictator-like figures, some of which have been adapted, others have been destroyed. And he loves, seemingly, if love is quite the right word,
[45:11] photographs of Nazis at rallies with big wide open mouths as they're haranguing a crowd. Yes. And do you think that these are other contexts which can help us unpick what's going on in this triptych? I think it's impossible not to look at this triptych and not see a dark reflection of the times. He's painting this in 1944. He's creating this image in a context that
[45:36] in which the war is raging, in which the truth of the Holocaust is beginning to emerge. The shadow of nuclear war will soon be there as well.
[45:46] When you look at that bandaged face in the middle, there are sort of military connotations perhaps of that. And so it's hard not to see this picture in some ways as an indictment of a world that is murderous. But also within British art history, because you've mentioned a couple of names, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, who are associated with this movement called neo-romanticism within British art. And neo-romanticism is happening just in the run-up to when this picture is created. Mm-hmm.
[46:13] And it's a very different beast, as it were. It's kind of about nature. There's a certain nostalgia. There's a melancholy. It's a reaction against almost the modern world. There's a more nostalgic strain to it. And this seems like such a kind of...
[46:29] Fuck you, basically. It's a complete kind of affront, a clean break with neoromanticism. Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. I love neoromanticism as well, but they're both different responses to this kind of event. But don't you think that the part of what this is about is Bacon saying...
[46:46] So neoromanticism is all well and good, but it's not true. And what he's trying to express is something which is honest. He's saying, look, the world is an atrocious place for all sorts of reasons. And he's created an image which is you can't parse it literally. You can't tell its story in a crisp way, but it's so evocative as a result. And it seems to express some wider truth. Absolutely. And I think that is certainly the case at the time.
[47:16] world like a freight train and this is what the art historian john russell who i cited at the start of this episode this is what he wrote he said they caused a total consternation we had no name for them and no name for what we felt about them visitors tempted into that gallery by the already familiar name of graham sutherland were brought up by images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut with a snap at the sight of them
[47:41] And, you know, there are records, actually, of people running out of the gallery. I can't imagine it. I mean, I've never run out of an exhibition. But there are records of people running out of the gallery after seeing this triptych because it was so horrific. This is still happening decades later when Bacon's showing in Paris and people are going around saying it's like looking at his art like being punched in the face. Decades later.
[48:02] And it's interesting, you mentioned Sutherland again, I'm just thinking about that neoromanticism context in the natural world. Looking at the triptych, the right-hand image, that strange beast seems to be putting an arm or a leg into the only bit of what looks like nature within this composition, that strange yellow scrubby grass.
[48:22] And it seems to be causing it immense distress and pain. It's as if it's hot as fire or it's giving it an electric shock and it's responding. So it's, again, a total contrast, a deliberate assault on everything that neoromanticism held dear. Yes. Well, let's bring this episode to an end, Alastair. Francis Bacon is suddenly famous. Almost overnight, this virtually unknown artist had become the rising star of British painting
[48:49] But he was only just getting started, wasn't he? And in the next episode, we will discuss Bacon's rapid ascent as an artist, his decadent lifestyle, and the violence and tragedy that led its call. Goodbye. Goodbye. To see my film about Francis Bacon, visit the Henny Talks YouTube channel, and a comprehensive book on his works is available to buy at henny.com.

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