Date: 29-04-1992
Owning Institution:
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999      
Subject:   20th Century    

THE PAINTER Francis Bacon died yesterday. He was 82.

''I have often thought upon death and I find it the least of all evils,'' wrote Francis Bacon's namesake and ancestor, the Elizabethan philosopher.

For Bacon the painter, the opposite was true. Death was the greatest of evils: ''I have a feeling of mortality all the time,'' he once said. ''Because, if life excites you, its opposite, like a shadow, death, must excite you. Perhaps not excite you, but you are aware of it in the same way as you are aware of life, you are aware of life, you're aware of it like the turn of a coin between life and death . . . I'm always very surprised when I wake up in the morning.''

Mortality was Bacon's great theme, his keen sense of his own mortality the driving force behind his art. His paintings are not pleasant, embodying a singularly bleak view of human existence, but they have a power born of obsession that is unique in British post-war art.

Storyless, enigmatic compositions, characteristically painted in triptych format, they place the emphasis on prime biological fact; figures - usually male - scream, couple bestially, vomit or defecate, depicted as lurid agglomerations of bodily matter, raw flesh that seems on the point of putrefaction. Their beauty is the beauty of rottenness.

''I've always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses,'' he said, and Bacon's figures, frequently isolated on the flattest and most uninflected areas of pure colour, almost like clinical specimens, have something of the slaughterhouse about them. ''We are meat, we are potential carcases,'' he said, and painted the fact.

Bacon's place in art history is assured, yet it is also true that art historians have never known quite what to make of him. He distrusted interpretation of his paintings and, when pressed on the possible symbolic significance of his work, insisted: ''I'm not saying anything.'' He was never the member of a school or movement in painting and neither did he found any.

Bacon was singular - an artist for whose work there are few if any precedents in modern art, an artist whose work has had little issue in subsequent painting - but he was also one of those rare artists who give visual expression to the mood of their times. His art, despite his protestations, has taken on the status of symbol, and that, in the end, is the source of its significance.

Bacon's subject is twentieth- century man, unaccommodated man, living in a world that has been voided of spiritual significance. His subject matter has often been, in one sense, traditional - he is the only twentieth-century painter to have made a significant contribution to the tradition of crucifixion imagery - yet in Bacon's case that has tended to emphasise his originality, the gap that separates him from the art of the past. Bacon's crucifixions are bloody, thoroughly untranscendental paintings, his Christ a joint of raw meat or (as he once put it) ''a worm crawling down the cross''.

They are not, strictly speaking, sacrilegious paintings, but they are profoundly pessimistic. Man, in Bacon's world, is an unregenerate, bestial creature, a secular being for whom ''religious possibilities have been cancelled''. Among Bacon's most famous paintings are the series of screaming heads he painted from the late Forties on. Questioned about the violence of his paintings, Bacon answered that he had lived in violent times. He spent the years of the First World War in London, and then lived in Ireland during the early years of the Sinn Fein movement; he was in Berlin in 1927-28 and then in Paris until the outbreak of the Second World War. It was this, perhaps, that made it possible for him to paint the crucifixion as ''just an act of man's behaviour, a way of behaviour to another''.

It is probably significant that Bacon came to his maturity at a time when the various utopias projected by the art of early modernism were coming to seem sad, unrealistic fantasies.

It is one of the paradoxes of Bacon's career that he should have managed to conjure images of such majesty and grandeur from such pessimism; it is the miracle of his career that Bacon's sense of pointlessness, his nihilism, should have kept him painting with such vitality and such fervour into his old age.

He once said that the most exciting person is one ''totally without belief, but totally dedicated to futility''. He was describing himself.