Francis Bacon: Triumph and Tragedy (Part 3)

Following the death of his lover, did Bacon paint one of the darkest paintings in the history 20th century art? And why is opinion so split on Bacon's late work? Join Alastair and James as they argue it out in the last episode on the life and work of one of art history's most colourful characters - Francis Bacon. To see the artworks from this episode, click switch to video wherever you get your podcasts. Artworks in this episode include: Micheal Andrews, The Colony Room I, 1962, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester Francis Bacon, Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1951, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Francis Bacon, Henrietta Moraes, 1966, Private Collection Francis Bacon, Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe, 1968, Private Collection Francis Bacon, Miss Muriel Belcher, 1959, Private Collection Francis Bacon, Triptych, May–June 1973, 1973, Private Collection Francis Bacon, Study of the Human Body, 1981-82, Musée national d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris Francis Bacon, Second Version of Triptych 1944, 1988, Tate Gallery, London Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, Tate Gallery, London Francis Bacon, Blood on the Floor - Painting, 1986, Private Collection Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Self-Portrait, 1983, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu 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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Alastair Sooke?

  Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm Alastair Soup.

• 0:04James Fox?

  And I'm James Fox.

• 0:09Alastair Sooke?

  We're in a bar, a dim, crowded space with dark green walls, colour of broccoli, James. You can almost hear the din as leaning against those walls lounging on stools the regulars banter and chat. Some look quizzical, one or two appear combative, as if, who knows what time it is, they're already sozzled. The air is thick, seemingly with gossip, accusations, indiscretions. And in the foreground of this scene, for surprise, surprise, James, I am describing a picture, a painting. It's loosely painted, as if to suggest the very state of intoxication. There's a figure with his back to us who's dressed in a black, blouson jacket, a flash of hot pink, maybe a shirt collar, escaping at the neck,

• 0:50Alastair Sooke?

  sitting on a gilt chair by the bar, resting his right elbow on the counter. And he seems very comfortable, very relaxed. If he isn't the proprietor, then surely he's some sort of master of ceremonies, he's holding court. And we can't see his face, but that enormous spherical pudding-shaped head, as big as a bowling ball, is unmistakable. He's Francis Bacon. So, slightly controversially, James, I thought we could begin this third and final part of our mini-series about Francis Bacon by describing a painting by another artist altogether. Micheal Andrews, notoriously shy artist, but an artist who was part of the same so-called School of London circle. And that painting I've been describing, it's called Colony Room One, painted in 62,

• 1:36Alastair Sooke?

  depicts, I think you could call it the epicentre, or I am epicentre, if you can have more than one, of Bacon's world, which is this private members' club of the Colony Room in Soho. And the reason I really wanted to start with it is because I think it gives us a sense of Bacon's sociability, his gregariousness, and also the very personal turn that his art at this moment, as we're moving into the 60s, took.

• 2:03James Fox?

  Yeah. Well, as you say, that painting was made in 1962, a momentous year for Francis Bacon. Francis Bacon, and we described in our previous episode, episode two of this three-part series, how Bacon's success as an artist had been building really since the mid 1940s. And in May 1962, he gets this huge retrospective at the Tate Gallery. But on the very day of the opening, Alastair, he learns that his one-time lover, Peter Lacey, has died. So this then is the final episode in our epic story of the life and work of Francis Bacon.

• 2:46James Fox?

  Alastair, you began this episode with the Micheal Andrews painting.

• 2:51James Fox?

  And it seems like a really good opportunity to talk about the circle, the social circle in which Bacon was mixing. Bacon in the 1920s had been in Montparnasse and had seen the café culture, the artists and the writers, the mixing and the drinking. This in some ways is London's answer to it, isn't it? This is a cultural hub, the heart of what is now, I suppose, the swinging 60s.

• 3:13Alastair Sooke?

  So, totally. And what we, I think, have established in the course of our previous parts is that Francis Bacon sometimes drifted in life. And certainly during the 50s, he doesn't really have a fixed studio address. He's drifting around from place to place. He's spending time in Tangier as well as in London. But from this moment in the early 60s, he is in London. He has the studio in South Kensington that he is going to maintain for the rest of his life at Seven Rees Muse, around the corner from the V and A. And some people have described this, I think, very compelling. He has the most important room in Francis Bacon's life. And he has more of a pattern to his life now, where he will

• 3:55Alastair Sooke?

  do some work in the studio, but for his entertainment, he goes to Soho, where he has a lot of fun with a wide circle of people, a coterie, a kind of core group. And you've mentioned that moment where he has the Tate retrospective in 1962. And it's a real watershed.

• 4:14James Fox?

  Absolutely.

• 4:15Alastair Sooke?

  So it ends with a new painting he creates, which is a triptych, a large-scale triptych, it's now in New York at the Guggenheim, depicting a crucifixion. And in a sense, that throws forward to a mode that continues throughout Bacon's late phase and late career, these big, grand triptychs. But there is another mode, which is more personal and more about Bacon's social connections, which is why I wanted to start with that Micheal Andrews painting of The Colony Room, where from this point, he starts to produce quite a lot of portraits. And the portraits he produces are of those who are closest to him.

• 4:56James Fox?

  So who are they? Who are the people in the mix? Obviously, he's just lost Peter Lacey. He's crestfallen after the death of Peter Lacey in 1962. But he has a lot of other friends that are in his circle at this point. Who are the big figures?

• 5:11Alastair Sooke?

  So there's a bunch of them, and I'm hoping we're going to concentrate on a couple. One of those is a woman called Muriel Belcher, infamous proprietoress of The Colony Room.

• 5:24James Fox?

  Wonderful surname.

• 5:25Alastair Sooke?

  Amazing. I mean, there's so many good names in this. Lightfoot, what was the ultra-masculine guy in Berlin called? Harkort Smith.

• 5:33James Fox?

  Harkort Smith, Hyatt.

• 5:34Alastair Sooke?

  Granny Supple.

• 5:35James Fox?

  Granny Supple, Nanny Lightfoot.

• 5:37Alastair Sooke?

  Fantastic drama.

• 5:38James Fox?

  Muriel Belcher. Okay, so what's Muriel Belcher all about?

• 5:41Alastair Sooke?

  So Muriel Belcher, well, if it's okay, let's come on to Muriel Belcher, because she's worth exploring in a little bit of depth. But I just want to kind of establish, before we get stuck into the specifics and a bunch of people, you know, one of them we've already met. So Lucian Freud, the artist, very close friends. Now, if you recall, in part two, we spoke about Lucian Freud, and I think I said that Francis Bacon's first named portrait of one of his intimates, his friends, was a portrait from, I think, 51, of Lucian Freud, in which Freud came for a sitting and he discovered that Bacon had been using a photograph of Franz Kafka. Um, as the source for the image, quite weird, but very telling.

• 6:23Alastair Sooke?

  Now, at the end of the fifties, Bacon is still making portraits and he is basing those on life. But things go quite badly wrong. And there's a fun little story to tell here where around about nineteen sixty, he's making a portrait of the photographer Cecil Beaton, photographer of English high society, big figure in twentieth century British culture. And Beaton has written about, spoken about what the experience was like. And I think he was quite shocked. He loved Bacon's company. He described Bacon, the artist, as wise and effervescent and an inspired conversationalist.

• 7:04Alastair Sooke?

  But he didn't really love the portrait that Bacon made because you can imagine Bacon's approach, given his love of raw meat and those screaming popes and the screaming heads and the animal-like pictures that we've encountered in the earlier parts of this mini-series.

• 7:19James Fox?

  It's not John Singer Sargent, is it?

• 7:20Alastair Sooke?

  It is not Sargent at all. So Beaton's response to, he sees the image that's being painted and he says, um, "The face was hardly recognisable as a face, for it was disintegrating before your eyes, a swollen mass of raw meat and fatty tissues." Which is a brilliant description.

• 7:39James Fox?

  That's a really good description, actually.

• 7:40Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, that's exactly what a Bacon portrait is like.

• 7:42James Fox?

  It's a great compliment for Bacon, as far as he would be concerned.

• 7:45Alastair Sooke?

  Totally, but Beaton, at the time, he didn't love it. And I think Bacon did not enjoy this interaction. He very discreetly destroys this portrait of Cecil Beaton. And it's a turning point for him because he realises, he wants to get into portraiture. He wants to continue doing that, but he doesn't want to work from life and have that awkwardness, where he referred to it as the injury he's inflicting on his sitter. He doesn't want to have that discussion.

• 8:09James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 8:10Alastair Sooke?

  So what he does is he commissions one of his Soho intimates, a friend called John Deacon, who is a photographer. He worked for British Vogue. He has the distinction of having been hired and fired twice by British Vogue and supposedly made lots of models. Cry, big, big drinker, surprise, surprise. Caustic tongue, that's the idea of Deacon. Deacon loved Bacon. He said that he could be wonderfully tender and generous, but also had curious streaks of cruelty, especially to his friends. And Bacon gets Deacon to take photographs of a number of these people, which he, Bacon, then uses as source imagery to create the portraits.

• 8:55Alastair Sooke?

  And there's a very famous moment where Bacon asks Deacon to take pictures of a woman called Henrietta Mares.

• 9:02James Fox?

  Oh, this goes very badly.

• 9:04Alastair Sooke?

  It doesn't go that well. She was a big figure on the Soho scene, quite chaotic, very charming. Some people later, well, a friend, artist Maggie Hamblin, called her Queen of Soho, you know.

• 9:17James Fox?

  They were lovers for a while.

• 9:18Alastair Sooke?

  They were lovers. I sort of rather, I don't know why I so diplomatically said friend, but yes. And Henrietta Mares was a really bohemian figure who fell in love with Lucian Freud. Another artist, John Minton, left her a house in Chelsea where she brought up her children. She was also very beautiful. Deacon persuades her that he, Bacon's behest, should take naked pictures of her, Henrietta Mares. She's initially a bit reluctant to do it, but after a few drinks, she agrees. And this photo shoot happens. And these pictures, which are quite sort of down at heel, she's naked on a, on a, on a bed.

• 10:02Alastair Sooke?

  They feel almost like soft porn, perhaps sort of Victorian style. They have an erotic component.

• 10:07James Fox?

  And my recollection of this story as well is that once the photo shoot begins, it begins to unravel in that Deacon keeps asking her for ever more pornographic poses. He asks her to spread her legs and so on and so forth. She's not comfortable with this. She says Francis Bacon wouldn't have wanted this. And Deacon pushes and pushes and pushes. And then, of course, when the photographs get back to Bacon, he's not happy with them.

• 10:29Alastair Sooke?

  No, so they have to do the entire session again. But there's a horrible sort of denouement to that story because later on, Henrietta, who, Henrietta Mares, who had qualms about doing these naked photographs at all, discovers that Deacon is in a pub.

• 10:45James Fox?

  Oh, yes.

• 10:45Alastair Sooke?

  Selling them ten shillings apiece to sailors. So i- is essentially selling them as pornography.

• 10:52James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 10:52Alastair Sooke?

  So she was exploited. And it's one of those stories, quite interesting, the reception of. People in Bacon's circle, I mean, that story probably 20 years ago would have been told in a slightly jokey way.

• 11:05James Fox?

  But in the Me Too age, it feels very different, doesn't it?

• 11:07Alastair Sooke?

  It does feel different.

• 11:08James Fox?

  But one thing I would say is that Bacon uses those photographs, certainly the second round of photographs that Deakin takes, they become extremely important for Bacon's working life, and he ends up making a number of images based on them of Henrietta.

• 11:23Alastair Sooke?

  He does. She becomes the most depicted woman in Bacon's paintings. There's a very famous painting where she's lying on a bed and she has a hypodermic syringe. I think we referred to it in one of the earlier parts, which you can see in her arm. Now, I wanted to mention that, you know, classically, people talk about that because later in life, she had a hard drug problem. Don't quite know whether she was ever injecting heroin. This painting predates that drug abuse. I wonder about a painting like that.

• 11:55James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Alastair Sooke?

  You know, it seems like having the syringe there, which Bacon said was just a way of nailing the figure onto the bed.

• 12:03James Fox?

  Oh, so it's a kind of crucifixion in a way?

• 12:05Alastair Sooke?

  A kind of crucifixion, in a funny way, inverted, because you see her upside down. I wonder whether, you know, what's your take on it? Is that just shock tactic? It starts to feel quite melodramatic.

• 12:18James Fox?

  Yes, it does.

• 12:19Alastair Sooke?

  I think there are elements of Bacon, particularly as we get later on into the life story, where that melodrama comes to the fore, and I think is maybe now, in our world, slightly falling out of favour. I don't know.

• 12:31James Fox?

  Is it also maybe slightly more literal than his usual paintings? It feels very literal, and a number of people at the time saw it as, is this a comment on drug abuse and drug addiction and the scourge that is running through Britain in the 1960s?

• 12:45Alastair Sooke?

  So she's one of the, the member of the Cotery, but, I mean, you mentioned Muriel Belcher. I mean, we should talk about her, not least because we began this part with this description of the Colony Room, which is this private members' club in Soho, famous, famous, notorious, this drinking den, if you like, that Muriel Belcher oversaw. And she's an incredible Character. She was Jewish, lesbian, came from Birmingham to London in nineteen thirty seven. She ran a gay club in Soho called The Sphinx and she sets up the Colony Room. And Bacon comes across it in the forties and Muriel Belcher likes him.

• 13:26Alastair Sooke?

  And she spots that he is a charming figure who is a leader in social terms. And she propositions him. She says, look, I will give you ten pounds a week and free drinks. If you can bring the right kind of clientele into the colony.

• 13:43James Fox?

  Or the wrong type.

• 13:44Alastair Sooke?

  Very much the right type in this context being a very different sort of thing. And Bacon loves the arrangement and it becomes the Colony Room, one of his favourite drinking spots. There are a number of other restaurants and bars. There's a place called Wheeler's. There's the Gargoyle Club.

• 13:58James Fox?

  The French House.

• 13:58Alastair Sooke?

  The French House. But the Colony Room really has this, as part of the myth, the legend of Francis Bacon and his circle. A lot is set in that room that Micheal Andrews has depicted early on.

• 14:09James Fox?

  Isn't it fascinating to think back at his childhood? If, if listeners can recall the very beginning of the first episode when we described Bacon as a child. He was painfully shy. He could barely even make eye contact with other people. And now he is the ringleader of this great social circle. It's an extraordinary transformation of self fashioning, isn't it? That Bacon has undergone in the, what, fifty years or so since he was born.

• 14:34Alastair Sooke?

  I, I, I think it's a testament to that, the strength of his character. Despite all of those early setbacks, that feeling of being an outsider, of not being loved. I mean, what a, what a terrible beginning. But he's so independent in terms of his spirit and, and, and quite fiercely so. And he's now hanging out with the opposite of a wallflower. I mean, Muriel Belcher was someone who she'd greet patrons with the phrase, hello, cuntie. Which we might need to bleep out, I'm not sure. She referred to Bacon as um her daughter. So she's transposing genders. She was really loyal to those she loved, ruthlessly horrible to those that she didn't like. And I don't know, it's just, I wanted to give a little vignette, I mean, with the green walls of the Colony Room, which. Sometimes you find that green in.

• 15:17James Fox?

  The broccoli walls.

• 15:18Alastair Sooke?

  The broccoli walls, you find them in Bacon's paintings. So just a little bit of a sense of what his life was like, oscillating between South Kensington, working in the chaos of the Rees-Meus studio, making portraits then of the people he's hanging out with by night in Soho.

• 15:34James Fox?

  Yeah, so he's at the heart of a social group, isn't he? He's lost Peter Lacey, but very soon he will find another lover. And so I'd like to talk a little bit, Alistair, about this figure. His name is George Dyer. So one night, it's an amazing story. I don't think it's true, but I'm going to tell the story anyway, because this is a podcast called Stories of Art.

• 15:55Alastair Sooke?

  When has it ever stopped you before?

• 15:57James Fox?

  Exactly. Never let the truth get between me and a good anecdote. So this begins one night in 1963. So this is about a year after Lacey's death. Bacon is in his studio and he hears a smash and a crash. And a burglar, it seems, has crashed through the skylight and has fallen onto the floor in the studio. Bacon rushes to the studio, confronts the burglar. And then, this is classic Bacon, he says to him, I'm going to call the police unless you have sex with me. And so this is a man called George Dyer. So George Dyer, very different figure from Peter Lacey. He's not from an upper middle class background.

• 16:36Alastair Sooke?

  I've definitely heard a different story.

• 16:37James Fox?

  Have you? Maybe I just completely invented this.

• 16:40Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, it's brilliant.

• 16:41James Fox?

  This is one story. We should remember that Bacon was a storyteller. He exaggerated, he invented. This was part of his self fashioning that we've talked about. So all of the stories that he told about his childhood, about his love life, you know, you have to take them with a little bit of a pinch of salt. But often they are, you know, they disclose a bigger truth.

• 17:01Alastair Sooke?

  And in this case, George Dyer was a criminal from South East London.

• 17:05James Fox?

  George Dyer was an East Ender. He was from a family of petty criminals. He was associated with the Cray brothers. So these twins who tyrannised London in this period. But he was also a kind of quite gentle, naive, vulnerable man, who was significantly younger than Bacon. So Bacon is in his 50s now, 53, 54. George Dyer is 20 years younger, so he's in his 30s. And they become lovers. It is a very different relationship to the one that Bacon has with Lacey. I mean, I think-

• 17:38Alastair Sooke?

  Bacon's not in control in the Lacey relationship.

• 17:40James Fox?

  He's absolutely not.

• 17:41Alastair Sooke?

  But it's the flip, the flip, the sort of reverse in this.

• 17:43James Fox?

  Yeah, as you said in the previous episode, Bacon plays the masochistic role in the Lacey relationship. I think Bacon loves Lacey more than Lacey loves Bacon. This is a different kind of relationship. I think the first thing to say is Bacon is a much bigger deal now, so he's wealthier, he's more famous, he's more confident. And George Dyer definitely plays the more submissive, more masochistic role in this.

• 18:07Alastair Sooke?

  Although he looks like quite a manly man. And clearly, part of the appeal for Bacon is, it's sexual magnetism.

• 18:13James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 18:13Alastair Sooke?

  He loves George Dyer's physique and he loves depicting George Dyer's physique in his paintings.

• 18:18James Fox?

  Yeah, but George struggles with this relationship, just as Bacon had struggled in the Lacey relationship. He can't handle the alcohol, and which of course, Lacey and Bacon could handle.

• 18:28Alastair Sooke?

  But he also, what does he have to do? Like, when Bacon's painting, George is off just hanging around, drinking inevitably in his soho.

• 18:37James Fox?

  And he becomes an alcoholic. I mean, I don't know if Bacon was ever an alcoholic, was a heavy drinker, but he was able to not drink when he wanted to, and he was able to manage his alcohol consumption. George Dyer was not able to do so. And I think the drink exacerbated his own insecurities in this relationship, being the junior partner. So the relationship results in fights, in arguments, just as it had with Lacey. Dyer threatens suicide at one point, he takes an overdose, he set fire to Bacon's studio. At one point, at the sort of nadir of the relationship, he even calls the police. Have you heard this story?

• 19:15Alastair Sooke?

  It's a very weird episode, this.

• 19:16James Fox?

  It's very weird. He's so furious with Bacon, so determined to try and catch his attention, that he calls the police and says, look, Francis Bacon, that artist, he's a drug dealer, he's dealing in cannabis. And so the police actually raid Bacon's studio. They do find some cannabis in the studio.

• 19:32Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, it's so chaotic in the studio, it's incredible that they could find it. Unless it had been sort of placed on top of the pile of all of these photographs and everything that's torn, all of the detritus.

• 19:41James Fox?

  Yeah, and I think that the irony of it is Bacon didn't really smoke cannabis. Because of his asthma, he wasn't a big smoker, he took a lot of other drugs, prescription drugs especially, drank a lot of alcohol, wasn't a big smoker at all. But they charge him, there's a court case, he's eventually acquitted. So this relationship is really difficult and it drags on and off and on again through the 1960s and into actually the early 1970s.

• 20:05Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, worth just saying that, you know, this character that I mentioned before, John Deacon, he takes photographs of George Dyer as well. There's a very famous one which Bacon used again and again as a source for his paintings, where you see George Dyer almost naked in the studio, but he's wearing these white underpants.

• 20:24James Fox?

  Yes.

• 20:25Alastair Sooke?

  These, I think they are just Y-fronts.

• 20:26James Fox?

  Yes.

• 20:27Alastair Sooke?

  And there's something really quite pathetic about, I mean, in a way, the Y-fronts kind of, you wonder whether that was part of the artistic appeal. Rather than just having this, you know, specimen of manhood, you've got someone who's clearly, that has that vulnerable side that you're describing, where he's retaining a little bit of modesty for the camera.

• 20:45James Fox?

  Yes.

• 20:46Alastair Sooke?

  And there's something about that which perhaps captures Bacon's imagination.

• 20:50James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 20:51Alastair Sooke?

  And he uses it as a source again and again.

• 20:52James Fox?

  I feel so, very sorry for George Dyer. I think he's, as we say, a vulnerable individual who is thrown into this social circle that is so beyond anything he knows.

• 21:02Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 21:03James Fox?

  He's seeing Francis Bacon, mixing with the great and the good, becoming ever wealthier, ever more famous, and he just can't cope, he can't cope with it. And he's trying desperately to hang on to his coat tails as Bacon goes higher and higher and higher.

• 21:17Alastair Sooke?

  But it's so weird because when you often see the photographs of him and Bacon together at the time, Dyer just looks like an extremely stylish, well-dressed, sort of gangland suit style figure. And they look like they're having a brilliant time. There's a photograph that I came across recently where, I can't remember the date, I think it's 65, and they're together on the Orient Express. And it looks, it just, it somehow looks glamorous.

• 21:42James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 21:43Alastair Sooke?

  A great holiday, you know, these two people in love. But you read about it and you discover that already then, you know, this is what, only two years after they've met, there were lots of arguments, cracks, strains in the relationship.

• 21:55James Fox?

  Yeah. But we should say that the 1960s is an unbelievable decade for Bacon as an artist. I mean, the 60s is a period when obviously, British culture, British art is very fashionable around the world, it's got a real moment, and Bacon is part of that. He's becoming, you know, extremely successful and famous around the world. TV shows, documentaries are being made about him, he's becoming a celebrity.

• 22:18Alastair Sooke?

  He's rich.

• 22:18James Fox?

  And he's really rich.

• 22:20Alastair Sooke?

  He can afford champagne for his real friends and real pain for his sham friends.

• 22:24James Fox?

  Oh, that's very good.

• 22:25Alastair Sooke?

  As he would always say in the colony room.

• 22:26James Fox?

  That's very good. And in October nineteen seventy one, Alastair Bacon receives the honour he has longed for.

• 22:35Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 22:35James Fox?

  For so many years. He receives a massive retrospective, not in London, but in Paris. At the Grand Palais of all places. And, you know, this is an honour, I think, that only one living artist had ever had before.

• 22:50Alastair Sooke?

  And also remember, in episode one, in the first part of this series, we spoke about the fact that early on, crucial moments in his formative years, Bacon is in Paris.

• 23:00James Fox?

  Yes.

• 23:00Alastair Sooke?

  For a considerable chunk of time. And throughout his life, he's quite besotted with it.

• 23:04James Fox?

  Yes.

• 23:05Alastair Sooke?

  He loves the sense of sophistication. If you're making it in Paris, you really have made it. Later on, he gets a flat there, he spends a lot of time there, he has friends there. So this is, this is a huge deal for him.

• 23:15James Fox?

  This is a huge deal. He's a real Francophile. He remembers back in nineteen twenty seven in Paris, seeing that Picasso exhibition, revering Picasso. Picasso is the only person who has had an exhibition in their lifetime.

• 23:28Alastair Sooke?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:29James Fox?

  While alive at the Grand Palais. And now, nineteen seventy one, Bacon gets it as well. So it is really, really exciting moment.

• 23:38James Fox?

  George Dyer asks if he can travel to Paris with Bacon for the show. Bacon's quite reluctant for this to happen because Dyer, of course, is drinking a lot. He's, he's.

• 23:49Alastair Sooke?

  Erratic.

• 23:50James Fox?

  He's erratic, he's a liability in social circles. But he agrees and they stay together at the Hotel de Saint Pierre in Paris. Bacon is very busy with the preparations leading up to the show, so he's leaving Dyer on his own quite a lot. And the night before the formal opening of the show, the night before the private view, Dyer, who's alone in the hotel room, he gets incredibly drunk. He finds some of Bacon's prescription drugs, probably sleeping pills, swallows the whole lot, becomes very, very unwell, as you could imagine. He staggers from the bedroom through to the bathroom, tries to vomit them into the sink, ends up vomiting blood into the sink,

• 24:31James Fox?

  and then slumps back onto the toilet and dies on the toilet, aged thirty seven.

• 24:38James Fox?

  Extraordinary moment, deeply tragic moment. And of course, we talked in our first episode about Francis Bacon's love of the Greek tragedies. If you've read the Greek tragedies, you know that hubris is always accompanied by nemesis, that triumph is always followed by disaster. And that is absolutely the case here. Bacon is like a character from Greek tragedy. Peter Lacey, of course, we discussed in the previous episode, died on the eve of Bacon's first retrospective at the Tate in 1962. And now George Dyer dies on the eve of the second retrospective in Paris nine years later. You know, you couldn't write it, Alistair, and if you did write it, you wouldn't believe it.

• 25:20James Fox?

  But out of this second tragedy, Bacon, I think, will make some of his finest ever works. So to hear more about them, join us after the break.

• 25:36James Fox?

  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.

• 25:58James Fox?

  Welcome back to Stories of Art. We ended the first part of this episode with this great combination of triumph and disaster. Bacon gets this extraordinary retrospective exhibition in Paris in 1971. But on the eve of that show, his lover, George Dyer, dies, either accidentally or by suicide. It's never entirely clear. Bacon pulls himself together for the show. Have you seen some of the footage? The footage is incredible, Alistair. There is footage of him on the day of the opening of the exhibition. He's well dressed, he's smart, he's drinking champagne, he's smiling, he's shaking hands. You know, the president of France is there.

• 26:34Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 26:35James Fox?

  But you can tell in his face, there's a kind of glazed expression on the face.

• 26:39Alastair Sooke?

  I think the phrase sometimes uses this sort of strange detachment that he has. But it doesn't mean that he's not feeling and not feeling extremely intensely. And I think one of the things he's really feeling is guilt.

• 26:52James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 26:53Alastair Sooke?

  It's his drugs that Dyer has overdosed on. And actually Bacon, I mean, in the first part of this episode, we spoke about John Deakin, the photographer, he was there in Paris as well. Bacon had tasked him with looking after Dyer, who had made suicide attempts before. And on this particular night, Deakin had thought, right, well, I'm off out. I'm going to go and enjoy myself in Paris, and Dyer was left alone. Actually, just finish the Deakin thing, he was actually quite ill himself, and he too died quite soon afterwards. And I think this is a real testament to the loyalty that Bacon could inspire in his friends. But Deakin named Bacon as his next of kin.

• 27:38Alastair Sooke?

  Bacon had to identify his body and also pay for his funeral expenses. And this is just a brief moment of levity in amongst this rather dark thing. He said that this was the last dirty trick that Deakin played on me. But, you know, he later says to David Sylvester, at least when those interviews with David Sylvester, the art critic, had published, so important. He said, "I've had a very unfortunate life because all the people I've been really fond of have died, and you don't stop thinking about them, time doesn't heal."

• 28:09James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 28:09Alastair Sooke?

  And that guilt motivates a whole series of paintings, doesn't it? Which are dealing with the death of George Dyer. In a funny way, it's almost as if in death, George Dyer becomes an even more central figure in Bacon's art than he had been in life.

• 28:27James Fox?

  Yeah, there's a longer passage that I'd like to read, actually, which really develops that thought. So this is what Bacon said in the aftermath of Dyer's death. He said, "There it is. He's dead, and nothing will make him come back. I've always known that it would go wrong. If I'd stayed with him rather than going to see about the exhibition, he would be here now. But I didn't, and he's dead. Those things have always been impossible. I've had the most disastrous kind of life in that way. Everybody I've ever been fond of has died. They've always been drunks or suicides. I don't know why I seem to attract that kind of person. There it is. There's nothing you can do about those things. Nothing." Bacon actually becomes obsessed with this death.

• 29:10James Fox?

  He goes back to the hotel regularly. He asks to stay in the same suite. He sleeps in the bed that Dyer spent his last night in. He washes his face in the basin that Dyer threw up in. He sits on the toilet that Dyer died on. He can't get it out of his system. And in fact, the only way he can get it out of his system is through painting this series of pictures that you've already referred to that all reflect on the death of Dyer. They're often known as the Black Triptychs.

• 29:40Alastair Sooke?

  The Black Triptychs, because you see so much darkness within them. But there's one in particular that we want to discuss, isn't there?

• 29:46James Fox?

  This is called Triptych, May-June 1973. It's another triptych, another three canvas picture. Can you describe what we're looking at?

• 29:55Alastair Sooke?

  So I'm just going to describe it as if we don't know anything about George Dyer. What we see are three interiors and there's a doorway without a door, which is in a red wall towards the back of the space in each one. And on the other side of the doorway, there's just a lot of black gloom, a void. And within that voidy space, in each case, there is a painting of a naked man. Mostly you just see either his head, his torso. But on the left, he's sitting on a toilet. In the middle, you just see his head in the gloom. And above him, there's a bare light bulb. And on the right, he seems to be related somehow to a sink.

• 30:41Alastair Sooke?

  And on the left and right, you also see down in the foreground in what looks like a grey mushroom coloured floor, a white arrow pointing in the direction of the threshold and the figure on the other side. But, you know, it's interesting to me, and I think this is where you were about to go. This is an artist in Francis Bacon who hated storytelling. He hated narrative. But this is almost kind of documentary life.

• 31:10James Fox?

  Oh, it absolutely is. Yeah, I think this is, this triptych is recording the final moments of George Dyer's life. So on the right hand canvas, this is him vomiting into the wash basin. You can even see, if you look closely, you can see the blood streaming out of his nose. On the left hand canvas, he is slumped lifelessly on the toilet. This is how the body was found. This is where Dyer died.

• 31:37James Fox?

  And you'll see on both of those canvases, you've mentioned them already, these arrows. These arrows, I think, allude to crime scene photographs. I think that's what he's trying to allude to.

• 31:46Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 31:47James Fox?

  But the middle canvas is the one I find the most mysterious. You can see Dyer is in the bathroom. There's a light bulb, as you say, hanging over his head. He's lurching forward. So I think this is the moment he actually dies. I think this is the moment of actual death. And the reason I think that is because of this shadow, this strange bat-like form.

• 32:13Alastair Sooke?

  Which intrudes from the doorway into the our area, the lit room.

• 32:17James Fox?

  Yes, it emerges from the door, almost like a monster from the bathroom, or almost like a pool of black blood. It is, I think, the shadow of death. I've got to say, I'm not exaggerating here, Alice. I think it's one of the most terrifying things in the history of art. And the more you look at it, the more truly horrifying it is. And I hope that our listeners will get a chance to look at it.

• 32:36Alastair Sooke?

  I find it melodramatic.

• 32:37James Fox?

  Do you? You don't like it?

• 32:39Alastair Sooke?

  I think it's too much.

• 32:40James Fox?

  Oh.

• 32:41Alastair Sooke?

  I'm sorry to tell you.

• 32:43James Fox?

  Well.

• 32:44Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, I, I, I, do, do you not think it's just, it's teetering on the edge of being the equivalent of Purple Prose?

• 32:51James Fox?

  I don't know. I think it's this use of, it's this turning of darkness into a kind of physical material. Turning darkness into a pool of liquid. I find it tremendously powerful. It also disrupts the symmetry of the picture to some extent, you know, so you've, you, if, if you, if it, if it were, if it were not there, the picture would feel a little bit more four-square.

• 33:13Alastair Sooke?

  I love all of that. It's just, it's the bat-like quality that I slightly object to, that just some reason, I just feel it takes it into something that feels so raw, suddenly becomes like, there's that note of artifice somehow, which takes you out of it, for me, anyway.

• 33:29James Fox?

  Yeah. I, I, I, I find it terrifying. I remember going to see this picture, I think it's in Switzerland, and standing in front of that shadow and just thinking, oh my God, this is just brutal, absolutely brutal picture. It's a remarkable painting, I think, it's a remarkable triptych, and one of a number of incredible triptychs that Bacon makes in this period in the 1970s.

• 33:50Alastair Sooke?

  I think it has, there's a, there's definitely, there's a grandeur to it and a sort of simplicity almost to the composition. And it feels elevated. So you're looking at it even without knowing the whole Dyer backstory. There is that feeling of. We're in a tragic realm.

• 34:05James Fox?

  Hmm.

• 34:06Alastair Sooke?

  There's that immense sense of personal catastrophe that just is writ large.

• 34:11James Fox?

  Do you feel it, do you feel it slightly prurient, perhaps? I mean, do you feel it's a sort of invasion of Dyer's privacy? That capturing not just a private moment in a bathroom, but the moment of sordid, pathetic death?

• 34:28Alastair Sooke?

  I think we're probably being quite prurient now in rehashing the story, which

• 34:35Alastair Sooke?

  to any sort of would be art historian, art critic, biographer type is irresistible. Why, why wouldn't you? But in a sense, for this painting to really endure, it can't just be hanging on the framework, the narrative of George Dyer's death. And I think it, you don't actually need all of that to still get the power of this image, it hitting that nervous system, if you like, in a mysterious way. You might look at it puzzled by, why is that figure slouched on the loo on the left? Why is there this other figure who seems to be vomiting into a basin on the right?

• 35:12Alastair Sooke?

  But the power of it is clearly trying to talk in more universal terms about mortality, death in things.

• 35:21James Fox?

  Do you know, I've been in that hotel room.

• 35:23Alastair Sooke?

  No.

• 35:24James Fox?

  Yeah. I made, 15 years ago, I made a series for the BBC about modern British art.

• 35:29Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 35:30James Fox?

  And we told the story of George Dyer and we found the hotel and we found the room number that they stayed in and we did a sequence in the room.

• 35:37Alastair Sooke?

  But is, is, can anyone stay there now?

• 35:39James Fox?

  You can stay there, it's still a hotel available to the public.

• 35:42Alastair Sooke?

  Is there a little plaque on the rooms you go in saying?

• 35:44James Fox?

  George Dyer died on the toilet here. It's actually extremely disappointing. You get to the hotel and it's just like any other hotel. It's like a business hotel. It doesn't have quite the.

• 35:55Alastair Sooke?

  Do they make anything of this? Or this is terrible PR for the hotel, isn't it?

• 35:58James Fox?

  They had no clue what was going on. Our, you know, production team booked that specific hotel room. They had no clue that we were even filming in there. So anyway, it was, it was a slight underwhelming experience when you consider the hotel, just the hotel room, like any other hotel room. But I think that this. Bacon's obsession with this particular story is really, really important. And I think it's a major, major work of art. And just to say, Alistair, that he's now in his mid 60s or so. He's very much sort of, he's not a young man anymore.

• 36:30Alastair Sooke?

  No.

• 36:30James Fox?

  And I think it would be worth discussing in the last 10 minutes or so of this episode, what we think about Bacon's late work.

• 36:39Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 36:40James Fox?

  I mean, I, as I know you have, we've analysed many artists' careers and creative people's careers over the years. And what I find, and I'm generalising hugely here, you get three different kinds of trajectories for creative figures. So one trajectory, I'll call the early risers. These are the people who sort of are astonishing early on. They do their greatest work as, as young men and women, and then they quickly tail off. So, you know, Oasis, for instance, you know, first two albums, fantastic, diminishing returns after that. Renoir, we've talked about Renoir in this series before, Renoir fantastic in the 60s and the early 1870s, not much after that. So you've got the early risers.

• 37:24James Fox?

  You've also got the middle ages. So these are the figures who start slowly, they reach their maturity, they produce their greatest works mid-career, and then they slightly tail off. So that might be someone like Titian.

• 37:36Alastair Sooke?

  Although late Titian.

• 37:37James Fox?

  I don't think late Titian is as good as mid-career Titian. And then you have the late bloomers. You have the artists who get better and better and better as they go on. So Paul.

• 37:47Alastair Sooke?

  Rembrandt.

• 37:48James Fox?

  Rembrandt, Paul Cezanne gets better and better.

• 37:51Alastair Sooke?

  Matisse has quite a nice second life towards the end.

• 37:53James Fox?

  Matisse is pretty good all the way through, isn't he?

• 37:55Alastair Sooke?

  He is.

• 37:56James Fox?

  Sibelius, the composer, if you're looking at music, excellent work at the end of his life. I think, you're going to disagree with me, lots of people will, I think Bacon is one of those figures. I actually think Bacon gets better and better and better.

• 38:08Alastair Sooke?

  That is madness.

• 38:09James Fox?

  Do you disagree?

• 38:10Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, there's a. I've got two words for you, James.

• 38:13James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Alastair Sooke?

  Cricket pads.

• 38:15James Fox?

  I love the cricket pads.

• 38:17Alastair Sooke?

  So towards the end of his life, he starts painting these stumped figures wearing cricket pads, inspired by a book, probably with David Gower.

• 38:26James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 38:26Alastair Sooke?

  What is he doing?

• 38:28James Fox?

  I think, you know, there is a fantastic catalogue of Resoné online of Bacon's work. And you can actually see all of the paintings by decade, all in one, you know, in one vision. You can see the thumbnails.

• 38:40Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 38:40James Fox?

  And what I think for me, and again, it's a matter of personal taste. Lots of people really prefer the earlier work.

• 38:45Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 38:46James Fox?

  But for me, when I look at those works, I think the work of the 50s is better than the 40s. The work of the 60s is better than the 50s. The work of the 70s is better than the 60s. And I think actually his finest works are made in the last 10 years of his life, in the 80s and early 90s.

• 39:01Alastair Sooke?

  I am stunned slash appalled to hear this. Can I give you a more cogent argument for why I don't agree?

• 39:08James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Alastair Sooke?

  What people often say when they're looking at very late Bacon in the 80s is you have a new sensibility. And there's a sense bizarrely of a kind of calmness. The paint style becomes quite different. He's using

• 39:25James Fox?

  Aerosols.

• 39:26Alastair Sooke?

  Aerosols, spray paint.

• 39:27James Fox?

  Fantastically well.

• 39:28Alastair Sooke?

  And that he's looking to a different old master often, Angre, the French neoclassical painter. And so I put it to you, Dr. Fox, that you are loving the bit of Bacon that is least Bacon. Bacon is all about that sense of the tumult, the anxiety, the unknown terrors of the 20th century. And he reaches almost, I think some people have compared it to late Shakespeare, a more level sort of plateau in the 80s, where the spirit is different. But it's not Bacon.

• 39:59James Fox?

  Oh, I completely disagree. I think Bacon becomes more Bacon at the end. I think what he's doing in those early works is he is often like a young man. He is straining for effect. He is using paint in often unwieldy ways. He is often too explicitly monstrous in his iconography. And I think he settles down. He has this confidence towards the end of his career when he is just painting figures, painting faces, painting self-portraits.

• 40:29Alastair Sooke?

  It becomes too tasteful, is the problem. In the very first episode, we heard about him being an interior designer. That DNA is there throughout and it comes to the fore, I think, looking at those late pictures. You suddenly see it again, that sort of innate sense of, it's a kind of weird taste. It may be a very perverse taste, it may be blood red and about flesh, but it is dictating too much. And the sense of the unconscious, that sense of the real source, the power of the imagery, I think, starts to ebb away and he's repeating. It becomes slightly formulaic, you see these letters, electroset letters, you see the cricket pads. And he also repeats stuff that he's done before.

• 41:12James Fox?

  Well, he always did that.

• 41:14Alastair Sooke?

  He, he, fair enough.

• 41:15James Fox?

  He cannibalises himself from the very start.

• 41:17Alastair Sooke?

  But if, but if you look at the three studies for the figures at the base of a crucifixion from the very end of his life, you're not seriously going to sit here and tell me you prefer that to the one from 1944.

• 41:26James Fox?

  Absolutely, I do.

• 41:27Alastair Sooke?

  No.

• 41:27James Fox?

  I don't think the 1944 one is anywhere near as good as the later work. I think, again, it is, you know, the surfaces are messy.

• 41:34Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, but the first one is, that's the original.

• 41:36James Fox?

  The technique is unresolved and he's going too far with the subject matter to try and shock people. That's great, it's great that he's shocking people, it's a very important work. But I think as he becomes more and more mature, more and more confident in himself, he allows the technique, he allows the surface, he allows the, the simple subject matter that he's working on, whether it's just faces or people, sometimes no figures at all, to do the talking. I find that work extremely accomplished, extremely powerful. And you say he's moving away from himself at the end of his career. I think it's the opposite. I think ultimately what Bacon's work is about is about the human condition. It's about the nature of existing in the world. And I think he moves towards pictures, there's a famous picture that he makes, I think in the 1980s,

• 42:21James Fox?

  called Blood on the, Blood on the Floor.

• 42:23Alastair Sooke?

  Hmm.

• 42:24James Fox?

  Where he doesn't even need a figure, he doesn't need a figure to capture that story, he just needs a speck of blood. And that feels to me so economical, so absolutely essential to what his vision is of his art, without needing anything extraneous. I think he also makes some of his finest self-portraits in this period. Don't you find those late self-portraits, the ones he makes in the mid-eighties, when he's an old man, these wonderful triptychs, full-length portraits with this sagging face, the aerosols of causing this kind of asthma-like rash across his face, don't you find those really powerful? And moving and vulnerable and fragile. And in some ways, the simplicity of the form,

• 43:03James Fox?

  the kind of smoothness of the surfaces allows you to see through them better to what he's trying to tell us, which is, I'm a person approaching the end of my life.

• 43:13Alastair Sooke?

  I think you make a very, very compelling case. Cogently put, I mean, yes, they're very powerful. I prefer the self-portraits from, say, the mid-seventies, when, you know, post-George Dyer's death. And I think we need to be careful about lumping together all of late Bacon. I mean, this part started at the beginning of the sixties. He dies in, what, ninety-two?

• 43:31James Fox?

  Ninety-two.

• 43:32Alastair Sooke?

  Ninety-two. And really, that sort of late phase, the calmness, the more ethereal, that's really the eighties, isn't it?

• 43:40James Fox?

  I would definitely take an eighties Bacon. If someone offered me one, I'd take that way over the heads of the late nineteen forties.

• 43:47Alastair Sooke?

  But don't you just feel that somehow the heat of, it's the heat of inspiration, the heat of the originality is not there? There's all of the things you've described, which is the real accomplishment. And there's a sense of tremendous confidence in how you create an image. But there's something there which is lacking, is missing from what there had been before. A sort of rawness has gone.

• 44:09James Fox?

  The rawness has gone. Yeah, the rawness has gone, the heat has gone, but I think the light is ever brighter.

• 44:16James Fox?

  But, you know, by the end of his life, Bacon is a huge, huge figure, isn't he? By the time of the eighties and nineties. But he never loses this sense of humility, I guess. Humility isn't quite the right word. He rejects every honour the state gave him. OBEs, CBEs, MBEs, Companions of Honour, Orders of Merit. He retains this kind of humanity all the way through. There's a great story from him at the end of his life. He's sitting at this banquet. And there's this guest next to him, she doesn't recognise how famous he is. And she said, oh, and what do you do? And he says, I'm an old puff.

• 44:52Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 44:52James Fox?

  And it's just wonderful. And but at the same time, Alastair, in the eighties, his health is declining. He's obviously suffered from asthma throughout his life. He's got lung problems, he's got heart problems. He begins collapsing in public. He's really suffocating slowly with his own failing lungs. He actually has to carry around an oxygen canister at one point. And in April nineteen ninety two, he makes a journey to Spain. He's told not to go by his doctor, but he does it anyway. He probably knows that he doesn't want to die in England. He can barely get off the plane. He gets very ill very quickly after arriving in Spain and having a couple of martinis.

• 45:34James Fox?

  And he ends up moving into the best room in the best private hospital in Madrid. And at eight thirty AM on the twenty eighth of April, he has a heart attack and dies. And what I find very powerful is a few days later, Alastair, in nineteen ninety two, he is cremated. And on his wishes, there's no service and no mourners. I find that so powerful that this this man of unbelievable fame and wealth, a man with so many friends, who'd lived a life of such decadence, would choose to end his days in such a humble way.

• 46:07Alastair Sooke?

  Is there a twist in the tale, though? Because, of course, he ends up in a clinic where he is being looked after by nuns.

• 46:15James Fox?

  Yes.

• 46:16Alastair Sooke?

  And he dies in a bed where there's a crucifix.

• 46:19James Fox?

  In a Catholic country.

• 46:20Alastair Sooke?

  In a Catholic country, above his bed, the famous atheist, who has depicted crucifixions throughout his life. Do you think he could have had some sort of last minute conversion and changed that? That sort of sense of nihilism suddenly was out the window when he was confronting the end?

• 46:35James Fox?

  I don't think he would, Bacon would have ever had a conversion when it came to religion. He was a devout atheist from start to finish. But but there was something about, I don't know, choosing to go to. Choosing to go to a Catholic country, choosing to die in such a place. It feels meaningful in some kind of way and I can't quite get to the grips of why. Shall we talk for a few minutes about his legacy, Alastair?

• 47:03Alastair Sooke?

  I think one of the legacies is just that he is such a big figure. In terms of the myth, the legend of Francis Bacon. Partly it's to do with that famous studio he had for so many years towards the end of his life. This very small space, first floor in South Kensington, where he would create. I think there was only really room for, in these triptychs, just a single canvas per time. And all of his sources were there, just trampled over the floor, paint all over the walls. This sort of very fertile, in terms of imagination, space. And it all plays into this idea that we have of Francis Bacon as being an enormously colourful, charismatic person. Just as we have been discussing.

• 47:44Alastair Sooke?

  So many incidents from his life, which are unbelievably compelling before you even get into the art itself. I found myself re-watching that very famous South Bank show.

• 47:55James Fox?

  I love that.

• 47:56Alastair Sooke?

  So this is in the 80s. He has his second retrospective at the Tate in his lifetime. He's called the greatest living painter by the director of the Tate. And around that moment, he's interviewed by Melvin Bragg for the South Bank show. And I wonder if you've ever had a filmed experience interviewing someone, anything like that?

• 48:19James Fox?

  I've had to interview someone who got completely naked during the interview. But that's as far as I've gone. But no, this is telly gold, isn't it?

• 48:26Alastair Sooke?

  So it's a very, very, you sort of think it might be a conventional interview to begin with. There's a situation where they're in a dark room and they're together looking at images from Bacon's career, which are being projected on a slide. Then Melvin goes with Francis to visit him in the studio and then it all kicks off. They go round the corner to some, I think it's an Italian place, and they just drink.

• 48:48James Fox?

  There's a moment when he's got this bottle of wine in a basket in this very 80s way. Francis. And he can barely even stand. Trying to pour this pianti into the glass and they're both completely pissed off.

• 48:59Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, I mean, it's incredible. I think Bragg later spoke about, I mean, I didn't realise this, but he'd been on the wagon, he said, for a few weeks in Cumbria, working on a novel prior to doing this. This was an alcoholic waterfall. I love this line. He said that eventually he finds his way home, my liver leaping up to my ribs like a salmon.

• 49:19Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, you know, when you watch it, you can see what he meant.

• 49:22James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 49:22Alastair Sooke?

  But there again, it's sort of, it's funny because Bacon lives in a different age. And actually, in some ways, looking at that documentary, he's quite self-conscious on camera. There are points where he forgets what he's saying. He has to refer to some notes that he's made. And I think you see this carapace of gregarious, charming, you know, could be withering, kind of high camp Francis Bacon, but also a sense of vulnerability. And I think he taps into that vulnerability, his own autobiographical vulnerability, so often in the work.

• 49:55James Fox?

  Yes.

• 49:56Alastair Sooke?

  And that gives it some of that power.

• 49:58James Fox?

  Yeah. When it comes to legacy as well, I think I'm going to say something that's completely overblown, but you don't like the melodrama of Bacon. I'm going to be melodramatic. You know, there are said to be three narcissistic wounds suffered by humanity. Have you heard this?

• 50:13Alastair Sooke?

  No, I have not.

• 50:13James Fox?

  So the first comes with Copernicus, when Copernicus tells us that the earth is not the centre of the universe. The second comes with Darwin, when Darwin tells us that we are evolved from other creatures. And the third comes from Freud, when Freud tells us that we aren't even in control of our own minds. And I think Bacon should be added to that list. I think Bacon is the fourth narcissistic wound to humanity. Because I think Bacon's work, it reveals almost the most appalling truth of them all, which is that, you know, despite our philosophies, despite our religions, despite our podcasts, that we are just really sacks of flesh and blood, living these crude, meaningless lives

• 50:55James Fox?

  in an uninterested universe. And of course, we may not agree with that assessment. I hope, I mean, I hope most of us don't, but I do think that as a body of work, that is a message that Bacon imparts. And that, I think, is why we continue to find it so terrifying and appalling and shocking. But it's also what makes it so perpetually important.

• 51:17Alastair Sooke?

  On which cheery note, come back next week for some more depressing... No, I think you're absolutely right. I mean...

• 51:24James Fox?

  It adds up to something, doesn't it? It adds up to a view of the world and a view of humanity that not that many artists' work does.

• 51:32Alastair Sooke?

  I think the thing that I struggle with slightly as a critic these days is almost Bacon overkill. He's such a big figure. There are so many shows of Bacon's work which you see again and again. And in a sense, there's something quite... It can sometimes feel like there's a formulaic quality to the way he makes images, something quite almost artificial. He loves the gilt frames, the glazing. I don't think that speaks to a very contemporary sensibility. That's fine. But if you can... If I can set that to one side, then at its core, there is something which is totally unvarnished and true.

• 52:12Alastair Sooke?

  And it is that sense of rawness. It is that sense of actually the atrocious quality of... This planet, again, cheery thought. But he's just telling it as it is in the best works. And, you know, whether it's, you say, the paintings punch you in the face, they catch you by the throat. He talked about the painting operating just like that on the nervous system. At their best, that is exactly what they do. I mean, you react for all of everything we've said over the last three hours of this miniseries, whatever it is, you have to go and see the paintings themselves because they have that frenzied, violent, kind of excitement, if you like, in the meaningless of existence.

• 52:49James Fox?

  Yeah. Well, what an incredible body of work, what an incredible life story. It's been a pleasure to go through it so carefully with you, Adam Sturrock.

• 52:57Alastair Sooke?

  Thank you, James.

• 52:58James Fox?

  Goodbye.

• 52:59Alastair Sooke?

  See you next time.

• 53:05Alastair Sooke?

  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.