Francis Bacon: Post War Success (Part 2)

Which portrait by the 17th century Spanish master Velázquez inspired one of Bacon's most celebrated works? And why is his painting Two Figures considered a groundbreaking image? Join Alastair and James as they chart Bacon's life and work in the decades after the Second World War. If you want to see the artworks referenced in this episode - check the images out by switching to video on your podcast app. Artworks in this episode include: Francis Bacon, Head VI, 1949, Arts Council Collection, London Francis Bacon, Painting 1946, 1946, Museum of Modern Art, New York Francis Bacon, Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1951, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Lucian Freud, Portrait of Francis Bacon, 1952 Francis Bacon, Head I, 1949, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Francis Bacon, Head II, 1949, Ulster Museum, Belfast Francis Bacon, Head III, 1949, Private Collection Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Innocent X, 1650, Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome Francis Bacon, Man in Blue I, 1954, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1953, 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 Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: Head VI 00:02:43 Painting 1946: Consolidating Success 00:09:13 Meaning in Bacon's Art 00:11:47 Graham Sutherland and Erica Brausen 00:13:44 Monte Carlo: Gambling and Drift 00:19:04 Lucian Freud: An Intense Friendship 00:26:00 The 1949 Hanover Gallery Show 00:30:59 Velázquez's Pope Innocent X 00:35:25 Head VI 00:42:02 Peter Lacy: The Love of His Life 00:51:54 The Tate Retrospective and Tragedy

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 Alistair Sook.

• 0:04James Fox?

  And I'm James Fox.

• 0:10Alastair Sooke?

  A white-faced ghoul, dressed in a cape of sensuous, smeary purple, like a smashed grape, and sitting on an insubstantial golden throne, is screaming at the top of his lungs. Except we can't hear him, because, a bit like, I dunno, a distressed genie stuffed back in his lamp, he's trapped in a transparent but claustrophobic box which is muffling his agonised cries. You have these long, vertical, black stripes in the background which seem to flicker like dark flames and appear to consume him. His cranium's already disappeared, as if he's vaporising before our eyes. And what's that, that thing that's dangling from the top of the box, tormenting him even further?

• 0:52Alastair Sooke?

  It's a tassel, which threatens to tickle the tip of his nose. Nose tickling, for eternity, they're probably worse punishments, James, in store for sinners in hell, but the painting that I've just described, which is called Head Six, and was painted by Francis Bacon in 1949, is still, is still a pretty terrifying vision, right?

• 1:10James Fox?

  Yeah, it's terrifying, and it's an image that's really complex, really elusive, full of really interesting references, and we are going to be digging deeper into it later in this episode. Shall we begin, Alistair, by just reminding listeners to where we got to?

• 1:24Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, we need a recap.

• 1:26James Fox?

  This is, of course, the second episode of a three-part series on the life and work of Francis Bacon, so just to remind ourselves what we covered in the previous episode. Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909, had a pretty unhappy childhood, drifted as a teenager, he spent a decadent period of time in Berlin and Paris in the 1920s, before returning to London and becoming an interior designer.

• 1:49Alastair Sooke?

  Slightly unexpected, slightly unexpected. His first attempts at painting in the 1930s were a mixed bag, he had a breakthrough work, A Crucifixion, in 1933, but a follow-up exhibition was, was really disappointing for him. But in 1945, aged 35 years old, he made his name with that breakthrough work, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. And this is the moment which he marked out as the beginning of his artistic career.

• 2:17James Fox?

  Yes, he's 35 but it's the beginning for him, and what he has to try to do now is to consolidate the success of Three Studies from 1945. Could he do it? Of course he could. So this is the second part of our three-part mini-series on the life and work of Francis Bacon.

• 2:44James Fox?

  So, Alastair, we're now in 1945, 1946. Bacon has had an enormous success, really, a breakthrough moment with Three Studies. He's now got to try to build on that. And he's obviously very confident, because he, very quickly, in early 1946, embarks on what will be his largest painting to date. So it's a six-and-a-half-foot tall

• 3:07Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 3:07James Fox?

  painting. And it's called, very imaginatively, Painting 1946.

• 3:12Alastair Sooke?

  Yes, indeed.

• 3:14James Fox?

  It's a really fascinating image. Do you want to talk us through it?

• 3:17Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, I mean, it's worth, just before I dive into it, worth explaining that the piece I described at the very start of this part comes a few years later, 1949, and that one's called Head Six. That's also a key work in Bacon's oeuvre, and we're going to get there, hopefully, by the end of this part. But the milestone along the way is Painting 1946, which is, it was actually bought really early on by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

• 3:44James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 3:44Alastair Sooke?

  It's still there. And although in Britain, perhaps, we, because it's in the Tate, are very familiar with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which we ended the last part of this series with, this painting is, it's as much of a masterpiece.

• 3:59James Fox?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a really fascinating image. So I'm looking at it now, there's a bright pink room, and hanging from the middle of the ceiling, there's an enormous beef carcass with its limbs outstretched. So it's like another crucifixion.

• 4:16Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 4:17James Fox?

  This time it's not a human figure at all.

• 4:18Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 4:18James Fox?

  It's an animal, dead animal. And in front of and beneath that meat... There's a ghostly figure of a man, again with half a face, no eyes.

• 4:29Alastair Sooke?

  So he's in black?

• 4:30James Fox?

  He's wearing some suit and he's underneath an umbrella.

• 4:33Alastair Sooke?

  And the umbrella seems to be cast. Is it a shadow that means we can't see the top half of his face? But it's very disconcerting.

• 4:40James Fox?

  It's bizarre. And Bacon himself said that he arrived at this painting completely by chance. So he'd started, I think, painting a chimpanzee. And then he'd turned it into a bird of prey.

• 4:51Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 4:52James Fox?

  And then suddenly alighted at this, and all the images that arrived in this picture just sort of coagulated on the canvas, almost without him knowing. That's how he described it.

• 5:02Alastair Sooke?

  Well, so he's always seemingly tapping into the unconscious in some way.

• 5:06James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 5:06Alastair Sooke?

  And it's not quite a splurge, which you then find on canvas. But what you are seeing is something that cannot be very easily reduced to the various elements that have gone into its making. So that huge side of meat, the beef, the cow carcass in the background that looks like the crucified Christ, he's obsessed with butchers. There are stories that he'd go down to Harrods just to look at the meat counter. He loves the aesthetics of raw flesh, the colour of it.

• 5:35James Fox?

  There is a sort of meat counter here in the picture.

• 5:37Alastair Sooke?

  Do you think he's a sort of, he's a butcher, this guy?

• 5:40James Fox?

  Well, I mean, there is, yeah, there is that element. You've got the little, the cuts of meat laid out on some kind of table in the foreground, as a butcher might do it.

• 5:48Alastair Sooke?

  You also have, in the foreground, on that sort of table-like form, and it's tempting to think back to his career as an interior designer with his tubular furniture, because here it looks like there's a sort of balustrade or something in front of this man. You also have these forms that look a little bit like, are they maybe microphones? And some of the imagery that I think Francis Bacon has been looking at, thinking about at this moment in the run-up to and then in the Second World War, he's thinking about dictator types who are talking to the crowds. It's public address, it's mass communication. And maybe this sinister figure in black, who, by the way, has a buttonhole, bizarrely, just a yellow, I don't quite know what type of flower it is, but a flash of yellow at his chest.

• 6:33Alastair Sooke?

  Is he a sort of monstrous bully-cum-ape-cum dictator?

• 6:39James Fox?

  Yes.

• 6:39Alastair Sooke?

  Is that who he represents? Why the umbrella?

• 6:43James Fox?

  I know, well, you know, there was a, I mean, again, that reminds me perhaps of political figures. So Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, always went everywhere with an umbrella.

• 6:52Alastair Sooke?

  I love this detail. I've come across this on, in fact, I mentioned that this painting is in the collection of Museum of Modern Art. I think their gallery label talks about Neville Chamberlain. I don't think this guy's anything like Neville Chamberlain. I think it's terribly unfair that Neville Chamberlain, Mr. Appeasement, looks like this imposing dictator type. And actually, I think you often find, British art historians seem less keen on the Neville Chamberlain theory. But I take the point about the umbrella, maybe in some way, that's part of the source that's kind of coming into Francis Bacon's head.

• 7:23James Fox?

  But what's certain is it's hard not to look at this picture as, in some ways, an expression of the times, to a world emerging from war and genocide, and of course, nuclear warfare in 1945.

• 7:36Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, the war detail, just before we move on from that, it's important, in the background of the picture, behind the carcass of meat, you have these three purple blinds, which are being pulled down. And supposedly, the source for these blinds is an often circulated photograph of Adolf Hitler's bunker, where you saw something similar. So these aren't literal allusions to the times, but clearly, this is an expression of the awful atrocious zeitgeist, a sort of sensibility of feeling in Europe in the mid 1940s, in the wake of the Second World War.

• 8:14James Fox?

  Yeah, it's very easy to read this as an indictment of the failure of politics, of the brutality and violence at the heart of global affairs at this time.

• 8:22Alastair Sooke?

  And interesting to think that he was already at this point, because it's so important with Francis Bacon to understand this is how he works, but he's using things, disparate sources, he's thinking about paintings by Rembrandt, slaughtered oxen, he's thinking about news photography, he's thinking about this picture of Hitler's bunker, he's mixing all of these things up to create this image, to create something that feels extremely new, and for some people... As much as it was shocking, it was also really exciting.

• 8:52James Fox?

  Yes.

• 8:52Alastair Sooke?

  And the person I'm thinking of is his great, his friend at the time and great champion is the British artist Graham Sutherland.

• 8:59James Fox?

  Yes. But just one final thing on the painting before we go. We've talked about some of these sources of interpretation, but one of the challenges we always have with Francis Bacon, you mentioned this actually at the start of the first episode, is resistance to narrative. He was also deeply resistant to meaning in some ways.

• 9:17Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 9:18James Fox?

  He didn't, you know, there are lots of interviews, there were amusing interviews later on when he was on the BBC.

• 9:22Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 9:22James Fox?

  When people say, oh, are you talking about, is this about the war or is this about religion? And he'd always say, no, it's not about anything.

• 9:28Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, a brilliant example of that is there's a, in the sixties, he does a painting where there's a nude lying on a bed and in this woman's arm, there's a hypodermic syringe, there's a needle. And people are like, why have you done that? Or there's another painting where he's got a swastika and an armband on a figure in a crucifixion. And people would say, well, it's clearly about the Nazis. I mean, there it is. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, he would completely deny it.

• 9:49James Fox?

  He really denied it. There's a great line that he used where he said, after all, if you could explain it, why would you go to the trouble of painting it?

• 9:58Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 9:58James Fox?

  So I think we're always, as art critics, as art historians, trying to pull apart these paintings, try to understand what they're saying. There's always this friction when you come to Bacon, because he would always say, well, the image just appeared. And the goal is simply to create an image that is powerful and meaningful and that it impresses on your, if you like, nervous system.

• 10:19Alastair Sooke?

  So, which is the phrase he would always use.

• 10:21James Fox?

  Nervous system.

• 10:22Alastair Sooke?

  That sort of sense of visceral immediacy of the picture. I guess partly what he's doing is he wants to preserve a certain mystique about his art. If something can be easily analysed and just quickly defined, it loses its sense of power. So there's this bizarre, almost contradiction in Francis Bacon where he's an atheist, he paints religious imagery, I mean, this is sort of quasi crucifixion in a way, painting 1946, but he is an atheist, he doesn't believe in God, and yet in his art, he wants that sense of spiritual mystery almost, an equivalent of that. If you were being cynical, you might think that... He wanted to do that because it just suited his ends. It sort of preserved his sense of his own career, if you like.

• 11:06Alastair Sooke?

  But I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that visual art is not, it can be, but it's typically not a verbal medium.

• 11:13James Fox?

  Yes.

• 11:13Alastair Sooke?

  And of course, he is kind of right. You know, we can do our descriptions at the beginning of these episodes where we describe a work of art. But when you see it, if it's good, you're getting that impact immediately.

• 11:26James Fox?

  Absolutely.

• 11:26Alastair Sooke?

  Without having to sit around, mess around, doing what we're doing.

• 11:29James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 11:29Alastair Sooke?

  So in a sense, even though, I mean, I don't want to completely undermine the purpose of this podcast, but I'm just following Francis Bacon's lead.

• 11:36James Fox?

  Well, I think it's that inscrutability of his pictures that is what makes them so unbelievably powerful. And this picture in particular had an enormous impact on people at the time. Graham Sutherland was deeply impressed by it.

• 11:49Alastair Sooke?

  Well, that's, we were coming to Graham Sutherland, weren't we? So, I mean, he, I've always been slightly puzzled by the friendship between them. I don't think necessarily of, I certainly don't think of Graham Sutherland as of an equivalent caliber and power as an artist to Francis Bacon, but they were friends. And we found out, as you told us in the first part, that Graham Sutherland helped kickstart Bacon's career earlier on. And he plays an important role with painting nineteen forty six as well, doesn't he? Because he sees it and he's really impressed with it.

• 12:17James Fox?

  Yes. And he ends up getting a woman, an extraordinary female art dealer called Erica Browson, to come and see the picture. And she goes in the autumn of nineteen forty six to Bacon's studio. And she sees painting nineteen forty six and she is dumbfounded.

• 12:34Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, but you know how she's sort of almost prepped for it. I think they meet first in the bar of the Ritz.

• 12:38James Fox?

  Oh, I didn't know this. Of course it's the Ritz.

• 12:40Alastair Sooke?

  Of course it's the Ritz. And that meeting goes well. And then possibly slightly oiled, they then go and go to the studio. And, and she sees this picture that she's been tipped off about by Graham Sutherland. And she buys it.

• 12:58James Fox?

  She buys it for two hundred pounds. She says to Bacon, can I get it? Can I, I'll give you two hundred pounds. Will you, will you sell it to me? He says, yes. She goes to the bank, she takes out two hundred pounds in cash, she gets forty five pound notes. She returns to the studio and she hands this cash to him. This is a very significant sum of money at that time. This is two hundred pounds at that point in nineteen forty six. Is pretty much the average annual wage for a British person. It's like twenty five, thirty thousand pounds today.

• 13:25Alastair Sooke?

  She later sells it to MoMA, to the Museum of Modern Art, for, I think, two hundred and forty.

• 13:28James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Alastair Sooke?

  So she makes a bit of a profit.

• 13:30James Fox?

  She makes a profit. But can you imagine, Alistair, writing a nice piece for The Telegraph and someone, a biker, coming over that evening with twenty five thousand pounds in cash?

• 13:37Alastair Sooke?

  That's how it used to be.

• 13:38James Fox?

  Yeah, well, so if I got that cash, I would do my windows.

• 13:42Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 13:42James Fox?

  You'll probably replant your garden. Bacon goes to Monte Carlo.

• 13:46Alastair Sooke?

  He's, he's got other plans.

• 13:47James Fox?

  Of course he goes to Monte Carlo. So he travels to Monte Carlo a couple of weeks after making that sale.

• 13:53Alastair Sooke?

  I quite like the, I think in our first episode about Bacon, we established that there are these moments in his life where he, he drifts. He's in drift mode. And here, with these proceeds, he goes full drift.

• 14:04James Fox?

  He goes full drift. He moves to Monte Carlo. The exchange rate once again is very favourable. So he can live in splendor. He's eating lobster thermador and caviar. He's drinking Dom Perignon. And he's spending an enormous amount of time in the casino.

• 14:21Alastair Sooke?

  So gambling, I'm not sure we've established this yet, but Francis Bacon was an inveterate gambler. He loved gambling. He loved roulette. And it's not just sort of, salacious isn't quite the right word, but thinking about the biographical detail. It's interesting when you think about his art.

• 14:41James Fox?

  Oh, absolutely, absolutely. So, yes, first of all, let's just say that he's, he's spending hours and hours in the casino. So he's arriving at ten in the morning and leaving at four the following morning. Roulette is his favourite thing because it's a game of complete chance. There's no skill. There's no game playing in it. You're just either lucky or you aren't lucky.

• 14:59Alastair Sooke?

  And sometimes he was really lucky.

• 15:01James Fox?

  And sometimes he would make money, but more often than not, as all gamblers experience, you end up getting unlucky. But I think you're completely, I think you're really on to something. I think the gambling is a real master key into understanding his personality and also the way he worked.

• 15:17Alastair Sooke?

  So, so, so bear in mind that his whole sort of philosophical framework is we live in a, a godless world without meaning.

• 15:24James Fox?

  Life is meaningless. It's a game of cha, life is a game of chance. Life is roulette. You get lucky, you don't get lucky.

• 15:29Alastair Sooke?

  And, and he applied that when it comes to making paintings because chance would be an essential tool for him later in his life, throughout.

• 15:38James Fox?

  Yeah, he's a massive risk taker in life and in his work.

• 15:43Alastair Sooke?

  He's also, I wonder whether he's a slight sort of, um. Could be a bit of a bullshitter, because what I love about the Monte Carlo years is he's aware that he's met this dealer who's given him this money, and she's essentially funding him, and she's setting up a gallery in London called the Hanover Gallery, which is showing the latest cutting-edge contemporary art, and he's going to have a show there. And eventually, he will have a show there, and that's where Head Six, the painting I described at the start, will be shown. But he obviously is going to have to make some work for it, and he's telling all in sundry, "Yeah, Monte Carlo, great place, wonderful lights." He's writing back to the Sutherland, saying, "You know, it's really good for pictures. They're falling ready-made into the mind," as there he is in Monte Carlo. He says, "I

• 16:26Alastair Sooke?

  paint dozens every week there." 1947, not a single work by Francis Bacon survives. 1948, one painting by Francis Bacon survives. Now, we know he was really ruthless about self-editing. He destroyed a lot of work, didn't feel was satisfactory, and maybe in those years, he did produce some work which he destroyed.

• 16:48James Fox?

  That's part of the risk-taking element. That's part of the chance. You know, his pictures, the way he works, very impulsively, he either triumphs, or it's a disaster and he destroys the canvas. So, yes, as far as we know, he's not producing a great deal in Monte Carlo.

• 17:01Alastair Sooke?

  But he does discover something there, which is, again, very important in terms of technique and his approach for the rest of his life to painting, which is, maybe he's had some bad luck in the casino, and he's suddenly out of funds again, but he is at least trying to paint, and he runs out of canvas. So typically, for an artist, you're painting on the so-called primed side of the canvas, and that means it's been prepared, and the preparation, which has been laid down, like a sort of off-whitey colour, allows, it takes paint very well. And Francis Bacon had run out of primed canvases on which to continue working. So out of desperation, really, around this time, he just decides

• 17:44Alastair Sooke?

  to do something, and remember, he didn't go to art school, he's self-taught, so throughout his career, he's full of these idiosyncratic ideas when it comes to technique. He flips around a primed canvas, he's already painted. And he starts painting on the so-called unprimed, the wrong side of the canvas, which is the sort of raw side, and he realises that he loves the effect.

• 18:06James Fox?

  Yes.

• 18:06Alastair Sooke?

  Because it has a much thicker weave and the the paint that comes on, and I think this links back to our chance discussion. You can't, with the primed side, if something goes wrong, you can kind of wipe it back, start again. With the unprimed side, it's there for good.

• 18:20James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Alastair Sooke?

  So you're taking your chances. You're going to make a mark. It's indelible. He quite likes the thrill. It suits his temperament somehow to do that. And also you can get thinner applications of paint that somehow get stained in the the bite, if you like, of that raw side of the canvas. It means that he likes the effect. So he is, despite not being very productive, he's making some important for him artistic discoveries in Monte Carlo.

• 18:46James Fox?

  So he runs out of money in Monte Carlo after a couple of years. I'm actually surprised he he lasts that long when you consider the expenditure.

• 18:53Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 18:54James Fox?

  He comes back to London the end of the 1940s and is working towards this exhibition. But by this stage, he already has a very close new friend who's a pretty important figure in his own right.

• 19:04Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, now, look, when we spoke about this episode beforehand, James, where there was some discussion about, we really want to tell this story.

• 19:11James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Alastair Sooke?

  It's not really linked to the Monte Carlo bit. It's not particularly linked to the 1949 show that we're coming to. It's an interlude. But it's a fun interlude because it's the story of the friendship between Francis Bacon and another really important 20th century British painter who also painted the figure at a time when that wasn't very fashionable, Lucian Freud. And interestingly, they're introduced by a mutual friend who's appeared a few times already in our podcast, Graham Sutherland, in the mid 1940s.

• 19:41James Fox?

  He's the puppet master, isn't he, Sutherland?

• 19:42Alastair Sooke?

  He does seem to be. I never really thought he had it in him, but.

• 19:45James Fox?

  We should, we should say something before we move on. We should say something about Lucian Freud. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud.

• 19:50Alastair Sooke?

  He is. Born in Berlin.

• 19:52James Fox?

  Born in Berlin. And he emigrates with his parents. They're a Jewish family, of course. And they emigrate from Berlin to London in 1933. He's significantly younger than Francis Bacon.

• 20:05Alastair Sooke?

  I think he's 13 years younger.

• 20:07James Fox?

  Yes.

• 20:07Alastair Sooke?

  And that dynamic is quite important. Lucian clearly looks up to him.

• 20:10James Fox?

  Yes.

• 20:11Alastair Sooke?

  In that sense, they they do have something in common. They're both kind of.

• 20:17James Fox?

  They're both kind of exiles from their place of birth.

• 20:20Alastair Sooke?

  They're outsiders.

• 20:20James Fox?

  They're outsiders. Francis Bacon, of course, not living in Dublin where he was born into the high society that he went on to reject. And of course, Lucian Freud leaving Germany in 1933.

• 20:32Alastair Sooke?

  They both paint the figure.

• 20:33James Fox?

  They both paint the figure.

• 20:34Alastair Sooke?

  They both love gambling.

• 20:36James Fox?

  Yes.

• 20:37Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, there are a lot of links.

• 20:38James Fox?

  Yes.

• 20:39Alastair Sooke?

  And there is a moment when they become, as friends, inseparable.

• 20:44James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Alastair Sooke?

  They're hanging out the whole time. It's a very, very intense friendship. I always wonder whether possibly something more.

• 20:52James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 20:52Alastair Sooke?

  And.

• 20:53James Fox?

  Well, they both love sex.

• 20:54Alastair Sooke?

  They do.

• 20:55James Fox?

  They both love drinking, as you say. They both love gambling.

• 20:58Alastair Sooke?

  There's a really nice, Freud's daughter, Annie Freud, she recalls this idea of Bacon and Freud, Lucian, spending all their afternoons, evenings together in Soho and all the restaurants and bars. And her description of this was, it was a kind of public verbal lovemaking, telling stories, being absolutely scandalous, and looking fantastic.

• 21:22James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 21:23Alastair Sooke?

  You know, there's this real obsession. There's a lovely also, I mean, this is an irresistible little anecdote, but in the 40s, Freud marries a woman called Kitty Garman, daughter of a sculptor, Jacob Epstein. Marriage doesn't work out. In 1953, he marries again. He marries a woman called Lady Caroline Blackwood. Bacon is at the wedding. Caroline Blackwood's description of this whole period is that she had to have dinner with Bacon nearly every night for more or less the whole of my marriage to Lucian.

• 21:53James Fox?

  How romantic.

• 21:54Alastair Sooke?

  Pause. We also had lunch. I mean, there's this idea that there was no escape whatsoever. But later on, things start to sour. So, I mean, I know we're now jumping around with the chronology. They've met in the 40s. They've become very, very good friends. But the friendship, they end up actually estranged. I've never quite got to the bottom of it.

• 22:14James Fox?

  No.

• 22:14Alastair Sooke?

  They both make portraits of each other. The first named portrait of someone that Francis Bacon does is a portrait of Lucian Freud, where it's typically for Bacon, the sauce he uses, at that stage, he's working from lunch. With sitters, but Freud turns up, he finds this portrait which dates in the early 50s, almost finished already. And the source he's been using, that Bacon's been using, is a photograph of the young writer Franz Kafka.

• 22:38James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 22:38Alastair Sooke?

  So quite strange. Freud himself depicts Bacon. There's one beautiful painting, I'm sure you know it. Which is on copper from the 50s, in Freud's early hyperrealist style, really exquisite, close up of Bacon's head. Bacon's big pudding shaped head, which he Bacon loathed. And it sort of brings us almost to the end of this little Freud interlude because that picture ends up much, much later going on loan to a show from the Tate to a show in Germany, in Berlin. And it's stolen. And Freud's clearly really, really upset about this. And then if we fast forward even further to, I think, 2001-ish, he's about to have his own retrospective at the Tate.

• 23:23Alastair Sooke?

  And he would love for this picture to be in the show. And he pulls off this stunt where he issues all of these posters, which he puts up around Berlin. I think you can get hold of them. I've always, I just, I would love to have one framed. Could be a Christmas present change, if you're thinking about that down the line. And these posters, they have a black and white image of the lost, stolen portrait of Francis Bacon by Lucian Freud. And above, in red, the word wanted. It's a wanted poster. It's an appeal. Now, the picture doesn't turn up as a result of it, but I find it so interesting because by that point, they, well, by that point, Francis Bacon was dead.

• 24:00James Fox?

  Yes.

• 24:00Alastair Sooke?

  But they'd long been estranged. And that word wanted, I don't know whether you think this is reading too much, but there's a sense of um regret, desire in that, not just for the portrait perhaps. Francis Bacon is missing from his life. He played such a key role and he's gone.

• 24:18James Fox?

  Oh, so heartwarming, Alistair. But you know.

• 24:21Alastair Sooke?

  Well, can I, can I ju- ju- I mean, just to finish that, because I, I, what isn't heartwarming is um what Bacon said about the fade out of their friendship. There's a wonderful recent two-part biography of Lucian Freud by William Fever. He talks about this in, in the biography. Supposedly Francis Bacon said about Freud leaving him. First of all, he calls him she, very typical Bacon move. He goes, she's left me after all this time and she's had all these children just to prove she's not homosexual. So it really was total kind of, by the end, they hated each other's late work. Um, but yes, there we should perhaps draw a line under the interlude.

• 25:04James Fox?

  Yeah, but I think they are two Titanic figures of figurative art in the 20th century. I mean, Freud, perhaps the only person to equal Bacon and to match Bacon in terms of the power and the accomplishment of his vision, but such different artists as well. I mean, obviously Freud worked from life typically, very, very slowly, very, very meticulously. Bacon hardly ever worked from life. He worked from photographs, as we shall see, very impulsively and quickly.

• 25:31Alastair Sooke?

  It's quite interesting that in the 50s, and this is now, this is a bit of an aside, but Lucian Freud's style changes really radically. It goes from that hyper-realist, quite exquisite style early on to something which is a lot freer. He has kind of coarser brushes and lots of people's credit the friendship with Francis Bacon, that Bacon represented a slightly looser sense of freedom, both in his personality and in his art, and influenced younger Lucian Freud in that sense.

• 25:58James Fox?

  Yeah, so let's return to the story, Alistair. So he's come back from Monte Carlo, completely broke, run out of money, desperately needs an exhibition, desperately needs to sell some pictures. And in 1949, so he's now, what, 40 years old, 38, 39, 40 years old, he has his first official one-man show. He's done a one-man show of his own back in the 30s that listeners may remember was a complete disaster. This is his first proper one-man show at the Hanover Gallery, and it is a really important exhibition and a really important milestone in the history of Bacon's career.

• 26:35Alastair Sooke?

  So he's got to produce, I mean, it is, and he's got to produce quite a lot quite quickly to fill it. And perhaps as a result, the sense of ambition, the grandeur, the scale that you find in the Three Studies picture of 44 and in painting 1946, he goes down a different route. He paints a series of heads and the first five of these six heads have a particular feel. They're against a very dark, monochromatic background and it seems that Bacon is looking at imagery. Photography of wildlife, because you have these heads which look like they are mostly a scream and you see in the teeth these fangs. So is he looking at chimpanzees here?

• 27:19Alastair Sooke?

  It's a sense of, these primates maybe, they're snarling. Are they, is it aggressive? Are they frightened? But again, this, we established in part one, that he becomes very interested in the idea of the scream, the mouth. You're starting to see that articulated here in these series of heads.

• 27:38James Fox?

  Do you rate these works? I mean, I've looked at them quite closely in preparation for this episode. I don't think they're very good. I think they're, I mean, Head Six, which we'll come to, is a great picture, but the first five, they're very hesitant pictures. They're very unresolved pictures. They're almost in the process of erasing themselves. They don't feel, for me, like they're quite working. But at the same time, it does feel like a major step forward in his career. I think it's, he's moving away to some extent from monsters towards the human form. Not fully, but he's moving towards the human figure that will become a very important motif, the most important motif in his career for the next few decades. I think they're also important because they're

• 28:22James Fox?

  not perhaps straining for effect in the way that Three Studies, in the way that Painting 1946 were using very strident colours, very explicitly violent imagery to really shock the viewer. They feel quieter than that.

• 28:36Alastair Sooke?

  I'm not sure I'd use the word quiet. They still feel like there's something howling. I think they distill a central preoccupation of Bacon's, which is that sense of man's animal nature, a kind of brutal vision of the universe, and a howl in response to that, if you like. They're not, they lack any seductive qualities of that orange background in Three Studies for Figures at the base of Crucifixion, which, for all of its repellent, obscene, bulbous imagery, it somehow is still quite... Ravishing isn't quite the right word, but there's an appeal there, sort of visual optical appeal. These are really quite mysterious, dark, muted things.

• 29:21Alastair Sooke?

  But for me, it really is all about that head six, because it's such a step change. There's a departure in this series that he creates. And suddenly, you have something which isn't resembling a part of an ape, but is clearly a human figure. And as I described at the start of this part, seems to be, well, is wearing some purple cape that looks ecclesiastical, is in this odd box, there's an element of a throne behind him, and the centre of it, underneath the tickling tassel, underneath the nose, is, again, the mouth, screaming.

• 30:05Alastair Sooke?

  But there's a real mystery, a sense of suddenly he's found a new source of inspiration that he's tremendously excited by, and creating a work of art that as a result is phenomenally important in his career.

• 30:19James Fox?

  And this source of inspiration will prove to be a really pivotal and important factor of his painting for the next 10 years at least, and we will talk more about it.

• 30:31Alastair Sooke?

  We're not going to reveal it now.

• 30:32James Fox?

  No, you have to wait until after the break.

• 30:37Alastair Sooke?

  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.

• 31:04Alastair Sooke?

  So, welcome back to Stories of Art. It is James, well, it's 1949. And is this right, James? This is Francis Bacon's first solo show.

• 31:13James Fox?

  It's his first solo show at the Hanover Gallery.

• 31:16Alastair Sooke?

  In London.

• 31:17James Fox?

  In London.

• 31:17Alastair Sooke?

  And, and he's already established himself as a very challenging provocative presence on the post-war British art scene. He's emerged, but here he is at the Hanover Gallery, showing a series of heads, heads one to six. And I think where we left things was with the crucial step change that we find in head six, where suddenly you have this figure who looks like he's in ecclesiastical robes. And there is a reason for that.

• 31:46James Fox?

  Yes.

• 31:47Alastair Sooke?

  Because there is a new source that Francis Bacon is excited by and he will be obsessed with for many years to come.

• 31:55James Fox?

  Yes, there's a new kid on the block in Francis Bacon's imaginative life, and that new kid is a 17th century Spanish artist called Diego Velázquez. So he is obviously one of the great painters of the 17th century. I've actually met many artists through my careers, I'm sure you have as well, who consider him to be the greatest of them all. He's a real painter's painter, Velázquez. He's most famous for Las Meninas, this extraordinary, life-changing group portrait, which is the star exhibit in the Prado.

• 32:29Alastair Sooke?

  Very complex picture.

• 32:30James Fox?

  Very complex, including a self-portrait.

• 32:32Alastair Sooke?

  A royal, royal context here.

• 32:35James Fox?

  Yes. But his, I think his greatest single portrait is the portrait of Pope Innocent the 10th, which he paints in 1650. There are lots of stories swirling around this picture, many of them apocryphal probably, but the usual story is that Velázquez finds himself in Rome. He offers to paint Pope Innocent the 10th. The Pope doesn't want to be painted. Velázquez shows him a previous work he's, he's made. The Pope is so impressed that he agrees. Velázquez goes on to paint Pope Innocent the 10th, and when he's finished it, the Pope looks at the painting and goes, "It's too true."

• 33:14Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 33:14James Fox?

  "It's too true." And of course, that's probably an apocryphal statement.

• 33:17Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 33:17James Fox?

  But at the same time, it's completely right.

• 33:20Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 33:20James Fox?

  Because in this picture...

• 33:23James Fox?

  Velázquez captured this absolutely intense, inescapable, terrifying presence of the Pope. And I remember-

• 33:33Alastair Sooke?

  Is it worth just describing what it looks like?

• 33:35James Fox?

  So this is a seated portrait of Innocent the Tenth. He is seated at this gold throne with a red curtain behind him. He's holding this letter which bears the signature of Velázquez. And he is wearing the Pope's robes. He's wearing this unbelievable shimmering silk red cape and red hat. And he is looking out at you with unbelievable power and authority. Of course, the Pope is the ultimate figure of earthly authority. It's a wonderful piece of painting.

• 34:06Alastair Sooke?

  He just looks so wily.

• 34:07James Fox?

  He does, he does. I remember, Alastair, when I was 18 or 19 years old, I made my first ever visit to Italy. I went in order to see lots of paintings and frescoes. So I was already a bit of an art fetishist at that point. And I remember going to see this picture in Rome. And my knees actually buckled in front of it. It's one of those paintings that is so intimidating, so terrifying, that you feel it is looking at you more than you are looking at it. It feels more real than you. And you tower in front of it.

• 34:40Alastair Sooke?

  The amazing thing about that anecdote is you did the opposite of what Francis Bacon did.

• 34:45James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 34:45Alastair Sooke?

  Francis Bacon became obsessed with this portrait. He collected obsessively reproductions of it. He had them throughout his studio. He painted it in various variations again and again. But when he had the opportunity to go and see that portrait in reality in Rome, he didn't do it. He didn't want to.

• 35:01James Fox?

  He goes to Rome, the height of his obsession with this picture. He goes to Rome in 1954. He's there for, I think, two months, does not go to see the picture. He's too scared to go to see the picture because it is that kind of, it's got that presence.

• 35:14Alastair Sooke?

  He didn't want his knees to buckle.

• 35:15James Fox?

  No, he didn't want his knees to buckle. It's got that burning intensity to it. He sees the picture through reproductions, mostly black and white reproductions.

• 35:23Alastair Sooke?

  Well, don't you-

• 35:23James Fox?

  Ah, okay.

• 35:24Alastair Sooke?

  Go on then. Where are you going with that? So in head six, as we have established, I believe the cape looks rather like a smashed grape. And

• 35:32James Fox?

  Famously.

• 35:33Alastair Sooke?

  Yes, and the

• 35:34James Fox?

  Immortally.

• 35:34Alastair Sooke?

  Because, because grapes, they can be purple. In the Velazquez portrait, clearly that cape is red. Now Bacon perhaps doesn't know that. He's looking at it in reproduction.

• 35:47James Fox?

  In black and white.

• 35:48Alastair Sooke?

  And as a result, it's quite possible he just gets the colour wrong and he opts for what he thinks is a liturgical ecclesiastical purple.

• 35:56James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Alastair Sooke?

  But he does credit this painting as being, I mean, I think his phrase for it is, this is my first subject.

• 36:04James Fox?

  Yes.

• 36:05Alastair Sooke?

  Which I find odd because he obviously, the crucifixion, he's attempted in various guises already by this point, but he calls this, the start of this, this long series of variations of Velazquez, it's his first subject.

• 36:16James Fox?

  Yeah, well, it's his first single source, I suppose, that he keeps returning to again and again and again. He says, it's like a schoolboy having a crush on their housemaster.

• 36:25Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 36:26James Fox?

  So he really becomes obsessed with this picture.

• 36:28Alastair Sooke?

  But of course, the crush image is, I mean, you know, it's very interesting because that suggests something.

• 36:33James Fox?

  Talk about crushed grapes again.

• 36:34Alastair Sooke?

  Crushed grapes, left, right, centre. He, it suggests something that would be quite a positive, you know, what this is not is a straightforward homage to Velazquez's portrait. I mean, what do you think in head six? What do you think he's doing to Velazquez? And then, and then, you know, we can widen out, think about the, the series that follows. It seems that he is attacking an emblem of authority. That's what it, it seems above all to, to me. It's a sort of violent iconoclastic urge somehow.

• 37:06James Fox?

  I think so. I think obviously the Pope is the ultimate figure of authority. And I think we have to understand that at this point in the early, late 1940s, early 1950s, Francis Bacon is emerging as a mature artist in his own right. He's trying to establish himself in the world as a figure on his own terms. And what people do in those circumstances, they have to challenge the authority, they have to challenge the people who come before them.

• 37:33Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 37:33James Fox?

  And when you think about it with the Pope, it embodies all different kinds of authority that Bacon might be wanting to challenge. The first, his father. Well, the Pope is a father figure.

• 37:42Alastair Sooke?

  Il Papa.

• 37:43James Fox?

  Il Papa, the name, the name is related. So there's a challenge of the fatherly figure. There's the challenge of religion. Bacon grew up in a Christian house in a Catholic country. He's a devout atheist, so he's challenging religion. He's challenging his father and father figures, and importantly, he's challenging or taking on old masters. The artistic authority. So I think for him, his engagement with Velázquez and the Pope Innocent the Tenth painting at this particular point in his career feels like a, an important threshold that he has to pass through.

• 38:17Alastair Sooke?

  How, how much do you, genuine question, um, the father figure idea, it's so tempting.

• 38:24James Fox?

  It is, isn't it?

• 38:25Alastair Sooke?

  To read his biography into this painting and then the series that follows. He hates his dad, his father Eddie Bacon, who was potentially just so abusive towards him and had him horsewhipped by his group.

• 38:35James Fox?

  Probably always screaming at him as well.

• 38:37Alastair Sooke?

  Exactly. And but, you know, I, so I mean, do you, do you, do you think that's a total given? That that biographical psychoanalytical reading of taking down the father figure is what this is all about?

• 38:50James Fox?

  I don't think anything is a given with Francis Bacon. That's, that, that's what makes his work so unbelievably compelling.

• 38:56Alastair Sooke?

  Because another biographical interpretation that I love is it looks like this guy is screaming. But he is sitting in this box and the box could be airless. Maybe he's not screaming at all. Maybe he is gasping for air. And why is that important? Well, Bacon, chronic asthmatic throughout his life, a fit of asthma. I mean, what a terrifying experience. You feel you can't breathe. So some of that personal fear and terror is maybe writ large in this painting and the series of Variations on the Pope.

• 39:31James Fox?

  That's really, I've not heard that interpretation before. It's fascinating. I think the other thing is, of course, he's a cannibalizer of images. Remember when he went to Berlin in the nineteen twenties? He saw Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin with that famous screaming woman. So he's thinking about that. He's thinking of the previous, thinking about the previous screaming. Paintings that he's depicted.

• 39:53Alastair Sooke?

  Well, can we just pause on the scream because I mean, this maybe it's too obvious to even spell it out, but the Velázquez painting, the Pope is not screaming. So there is a, an artistic decision that's been taken, that's taken place here. He is fusing Old Master Portrait of Pope with imagery of the scream. He's obsessed with the human mouth.

• 40:15James Fox?

  Yeah, and it's one of the things that's interesting. When you go back through the, this is a, this is a bit of an aside, but when you look back at the history of art, you hardly ever see figures with their mouths open. Because their teeth were so terrible.

• 40:27Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 40:28James Fox?

  So actually, to take an Old Master painting and then almost to depict it with a mouth wide open and the teeth showing is transgressive almost in its own, on its own terms.

• 40:37Alastair Sooke?

  But Bacon, I mean, there's this, you know it, I mean, it's incredibly famous quote, but he was obsessed with mouths. He loved the movement of mouths. He loved the, these are his words, the glitter, the colour of mouths. And he said, he always hoped he could paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.

• 40:53James Fox?

  Yes.

• 40:54Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, there's nothing Monet like and sunset like about this image, but it, it gets to the heart of his fixation with it. I suppose a scream can be, there's that pleasure pain paradox. You know, the mouth is a site of primal emotion in a sense. And everything about Bacon is, what's that phrase he used, the nervous system? He wants his paintings to get you on the nervous system.

• 41:16James Fox?

  Yes.

• 41:16Alastair Sooke?

  And somehow the scream is a physical embodiment of that, that concept.

• 41:21James Fox?

  Yeah, it's, it's an extraordinary image and it will prove, the Velázquez painting will prove immensely productive for him for at least a decade. He is preoccupied with Velázquez in many ways throughout the 1950s and he returns to Velázquez actually after that as well. So it's a really, really fascinating aspect of his career and it feels like it's a very important way forward for him towards the human figure. So Francis Bacon, as we move into the 1950s, Alastair, is building on his success. He's making these extraordinary pictures inspired by Velázquez. But he's also, his romantic life, his personal life is changing.

• 42:03Alastair Sooke?

  Well, I think for people who were following his art in the 50s, they first get a sense of this in a different series of works he creates, which are known as The Men in Blue. So, related in a way to the popes, but it's not a pope this time, it's a businessman. These paintings present an anonymous business executive in a dark suit, practically blending into a monochromatic background. May have been based initially on an encounter that Francis Bacon had with a man at a hotel, the Imperial Hotel in Henley-on-Thames, which is relevant, we'll find out in a moment, why. And what Bacon told the famous art critic David Sylvester, who later published a whole

• 42:46Alastair Sooke?

  series of interviews with Bacon that are foundational for anyone who's interested in Francis Bacon as a subject.

• 42:53Alastair Sooke?

  Bacon revealed that that sense in these Men in Blue paintings of claustrophobia, of unease, might have stemmed from the fact that they were depicting the new lover in his life. The person who in fact was, by his own account, the love of his life.

• 43:08James Fox?

  Yes.

• 43:08Alastair Sooke?

  A man called Peter Lacy, who according to Bacon was always in a state of unease. Peter Lacy, this man who was neurotic, almost hysterical.

• 43:18James Fox?

  Yes. Bacon meets Peter Lacy at the beginning of 1952. He meets him in a Soho bar one night, and Lacy is, I think, the jazz pianist in the corner of the room. Lacy is a bit younger than Bacon, but he looks more, he looks older in some ways.

• 43:33Alastair Sooke?

  Very tall.

• 43:34James Fox?

  He's very tall. He's, he was in the air force during the Second World War, and he's, he's kind of good-looking in a Beagle's sort of way. He's got this curly, wavy side parting.

• 43:44Alastair Sooke?

  Although he didn't fight in the Battle of Britain. It's often said he did.

• 43:47James Fox?

  Yes, he didn't. I think he was a test pilot or something, wasn't he?

• 43:50Alastair Sooke?

  And a former mechanic.

• 43:51James Fox?

  Yeah, he's very, on the surface of it, he's very well put together, he's quite quietly spoken, he's got a little stammer, but beneath the surface, he's got this very sadistic element to him. And Bacon falls unstoppable and helplessly in love with, with Lacy.

• 44:08Alastair Sooke?

  Well, he says, being absolutely physically obsessed with someone is like an illness.

• 44:13James Fox?

  Yes.

• 44:14Alastair Sooke?

  So this is his description of being in love with Peter Lacy in the 1950s.

• 44:18James Fox?

  It's an awful relationship in many ways. I think they do love each other, they do love each other, but... Bacon describes the relationship as one of, and this is, these are his words, continuous horror. So there are beatings, there are rapes, there are humiliations. Lacy would often want to be watched having sex with Francis Bacon. He would often get other men to have sex with Francis Bacon and then would would follow follow in afterwards. They, Lacy would, Lacy would destroy his possessions. He would destroy his paintings. At one point, he threw Francis Bacon out of a first floor window. And all of this was really prompted by alcohol. They were drinking enormous amount. I think actually Peter Lacy was probably the only man in Britain who could out drink Francis Bacon. I mean, he was drinking at his peak, three bottles of whiskey a day.

• 45:04Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, this would be a problem for him in the end, but there is a sense of yin and yang in terms of Lacy's sadism really works with Bacon's masochism. So his sex life is now very, very violent and he's often injured essentially during his encounters, his couplings, as he would call them, with Peter Lacy. And that gets depicted, it somehow comes up in some of the work that you see at this moment.

• 45:32James Fox?

  Well, there's one painting in particular called Two Figures, which he painted in nineteen fifty-three, a year after they met. So they're right in the the the heat of the relationship at that point. It is an extraordinary painting.

• 45:47Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, I mean, I I I do think it is incredible for a whole host of reasons. So you see two naked male figures who are grappling, possibly wrestling, probably something else, on a bed. A bed of rumpled white bed sheets and they're in a dark space. And you can see the contours of the room behind them sort of delineated. And there were these stripes going across, an effect that Bacon called shuttering, which makes it feel almost as though this image is, can you quite see it? It's dematerializing before our eyes.

• 46:25Alastair Sooke?

  And what people think is that if you look at the faces, you can see that these are on some, in some sense, portraits of Peter Lacy and Francis Bacon. And the lower figure has this grimace. You can see the teeth, the mouth. As these two men are having sex, is that an expression of pleasure? Again, is it an expression of pain?

• 46:52Alastair Sooke?

  This is a really radical gay painting for the time when homosexuality is illegal.

• 47:00James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 47:00Alastair Sooke?

  And it's an icon in that sense.

• 47:02James Fox?

  Yeah, I mean, it's extraordinary. This is nineteen fifty-three. So at this point homosexuality is illegal. It will be illegal until the, what, the mid to late nineteen sixties. This is a time in nineteen fifty-two, the year before, this Alan Turing, a great guy who cracked the Enigma code. He is convicted of homosexuality and is chemically castrated. The John Gilgood is arrested in the same year for homosexuality. This is a really tough thing to express. No artists really at this time are expressing this. I think I would like to say a little bit more about the genesis of this picture. And I think we haven't really talked in great detail about Bacon's method. And Bacon's method was very much based on secondary sources.

• 47:45James Fox?

  As I say, unlike Lucian Freud, who was working from life, Bacon was a cannibalizer of the age of the image. He was someone who was collecting photographs, books, newspaper cutting, newspaper cuttings, clippings, diagrams, medical textbooks, and using these images, stills from films, old master paintings, as we've discussed, and using this to fertilize his imagery.

• 48:09Alastair Sooke?

  Can I interject? Just because you mentioned Lucian Freud, and it feels like it's a really preface.

• 48:13James Fox?

  Oh, yes.

• 48:14Alastair Sooke?

  It's an apposite thing to say. This painting, Two Figures, belonged to Lucian Freud, who had it for decades, I believe hung it in his bedroom, make of that what you will, and refused to lend it, which may be some of the source of the animosity in later life between Freud and Bacon.

• 48:35James Fox?

  I think it definitely annoyed Bacon when that picture wasn't lent to shows. So Bacon is constantly cannibalizing, digesting the world of images, the world, as Walter Benjamin would call it, the age of mechanical reproduction all around him. And one of the most important sources for Bacon, the one he used more than almost any other, was Edward Mybridge's work.

• 48:56Alastair Sooke?

  Edward Mybridge.

• 48:58James Fox?

  Yes, he renamed himself many times.

• 49:00Alastair Sooke?

  He took the Anglo-Saxon. Jackson version of Edward or something.

• 49:03James Fox?

  I think his real name was Edward Mugridge or something like that.

• 49:05Alastair Sooke?

  But let's not do him down, he's an important figure.

• 49:07James Fox?

  Very important figure, Victorian photographer who produced these pioneering studies of motion in which he would show in this kind of stop motion way, he would show people, animals, horses for instance, in this kind of stop motion photography to show how they actually moved. And one of Mybridge's studies focused on wrestlers, these two male wrestlers, and the techniques they're using to, I mean, I don't know the specific vocabulary surrounding wrestling, but the techniques they're using to throw each other over their shoulders.

• 49:38Alastair Sooke?

  Their holds.

• 49:38James Fox?

  Their holds, exactly, and their grips and things like that. And Bacon loved this image, and this is absolutely the source material for this picture. And of course, what is always the case with Bacon is he takes the source material and he subverts, he does something very interesting with it. He takes an image that is a kind of pretty staid image of people wrestling, a study of motion, and turns it into this homoerotic homosexual image.

• 50:06Alastair Sooke?

  You also spoke about his relationship with the old masters. And one of his favourite old masters was Michelangelo, an artist I know very close to your own heart. And Bacon particularly loved Michelangelo's drawings.

• 50:21James Fox?

  Yes.

• 50:22Alastair Sooke?

  And he loved the sense of the musculature that you could see, that was clearly of key importance for Bacon. And so what you find in an image like Two Figures is you've got all of these layers where you've got Mybridge's photography, you've got Michelangelo's drawing somehow in there, the male nude as a time honoured motif for the old masters. You've got his own life, the intimacy, the autobiography, Peter Lacy and him going at it on a bed. And you have as well a sense, I think through that shuddering, I quite like this interpretation, that because of the illicit nature of homosexuality at the time, somehow in the way it's been painted.

• 51:03James Fox?

  Feels voyeuristic, doesn't it?

• 51:04Alastair Sooke?

  It does. It sort of feels somehow covert. It's sort of, it is happening in the privacy of, it appears to be a bedroom. But that shuttering effect makes it almost dematerialise. Is it there, is it not? Are we, can we quite trust what we're seeing with our own eyes? So all of those different layers are coming together and somehow they're saying something about that moment about, about the time.

• 51:26James Fox?

  Yeah, it, it, it is remarkable. And when this picture gets shown in the Hanoverian, it's pretty amazing. They do agree to show it. They put it on the first floor, so the police won't easily see it and there won't be complaints. So it's a really, really powerful picture for the reasons you describe in so many different ways. That, that relationship with Peter Lacy continues through the 1950s. And of course Bacon is becoming more and more successful across that decade. And in May 1962, Alastair, so Bacon is now 52 years old. He gets his first major retrospective at the Tate Gallery of all places. This is a very significant honour.

• 52:08James Fox?

  He knows it and it's a full picture essentially of his entire career to date. Featuring most of the great works we have discussed over the last two episodes.

• 52:19Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, it's worth saying that by this point, Lacey himself has actually moved to Morocco, to Tangier. Which was a place where you could be more openly, you could be gay. There was a period where it was tolerated, if you like. He's playing the piano again at some bar there and the relationship has, by the early 60s, they're no longer together. But yes, there's this moment of potential great personal triumph in terms of Francis Bacon's career.

• 52:48James Fox?

  And the exhibition is an unbelievable success. I mean, 100,000 people go to see this exhibition. The reviews are rapturous. Can I read another Times review?

• 52:57Alastair Sooke?

  I wish you'd find one in the Telegraph, James.

• 52:59James Fox?

  I'm sorry, I didn't find a Telegraph one. The Times one, this is, and I think it's, you know, it captures the transformation between the 1930s, that Times review then, and the Times review now. He says, they, they say in 1962, "This is the black night of the 20th century soul. Images of a man which are terrifying, violent and at times bestial. Yet they are royal and proud and silent. No other painter of our day. And for once the phrase can be left as it stands without worrying about the word British. Could make these five large galleries look so nearly like an exhibition by an old master."

• 53:35James Fox?

  But as always with Bacon, Alistair, triumph and tragedy would intermingle because on the 24th of May, the very day that exhibition opens, Bacon receives a telegram. And that telegram tells him that Peter Lacy is dead, died at the age of 46, brought about by drink. So this is a devastating blow for Bacon. Lacey, for all of his failings, was the love of Bacon's life, probably the only man he ever truly loved in that regard. So what would happen next? Would Bacon kick on and continue to build on his success as an artist? Or would he fall to pieces? Well, you will have to find out in our next and final episode.

• 54:18Alastair Sooke?

  Goodbye.

• 54:19James Fox?

  Goodbye.

• 54:25James Fox?

  To see Alistair in a film about Francis Bacon, visit the Henny Talks YouTube channel. And a comprehensive book on his works is available to buy at henny.com.