Francis Bacon: The Emerging Artist (Part 1)

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

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

• 0:01James Fox?

  Welcome to Stories of Art, I'm James Fox.

• 0:04Alastair Sooke?

  And I'm Alastair Sooke.

• 0:09James Fox?

  Deep in the chambers of a hot orange hell, three grey-skinned monsters writhe and scream. One perches on a table, neck roving like a vulture, sniffing flesh. Another, with ears for eyes, howls at its neighbours. But the one in the middle appears to have spotted us. Rotating its bandaged head in our direction, it opens its mouth and bears a ghoulish set of blood-stained teeth. That, Alastair, is...

• 0:41Alastair Sooke?

  Is chilling, is what it is.

• 0:42James Fox?

  It's also Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which he made towards the end of the Second World War in 1944. It's a painting, well, to be precise, three paintings, of such seismic importance that the British art critic John Russell wrote: "There was painting in England before Three Studies, and painting in England after them, and no one can confuse the two." Do you agree?

• 1:10Alastair Sooke?

  I do agree. It's impossible to disagree. This is genuinely a before-and-after moment in British arts, not just in the 20th century. But I find these pictures, this triptych, scarring. You know, it's easy to say it's unforgettable, but it's almost painful to look at this stuff. You describe, I mean, that's horrible, that idea of sniffing flesh, but it's so nightmarish, this image, and it feels so redolent and evocative of all of the nightmarish catastrophic suffering that was going on at the time, that it feels like the perfect distillation, articulation of the times. And it announces the arrival of this new talent, doesn't it, in British art? Francis Bacon, still reasonably young. He has done stuff before,

• 1:52Alastair Sooke?

  but he always says that his career dates from this moment, from 1944.

• 1:57James Fox?

  Yes, it's clearly a breakthrough moment, and I think it is the first of many, many masterpieces made by Francis Bacon over the next, what, 50 years or so of his career. And for me, and I'm sure you agree, Alistair, Bacon is, he's one of the all-time greats.

• 2:11Alastair Sooke?

  Well, he had, he had a retrospective, he had two at the time in his life, and the later one in the 80s, the director famously said he was the greatest living painter.

• 2:20James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 2:21Alastair Sooke?

  So I think he himself, he also had a sort of, he could be quite self-critical, and he had this idea that his pictures would either end up in the National Gallery, which they may yet do now that it's expanding in London, National Gallery, accommodating 20th century pictures, or in the dustbin.

• 2:37James Fox?

  And many of them did.

• 2:38Alastair Sooke?

  And many of them did because he destroyed so many works.

• 2:41James Fox?

  But he's an artist, I think, who perhaps more than any other really seemed to, to capture the brutal truths of the human condition. And Bacon's life, Alistair, is almost as dramatic and shocking as his paintings.

• 2:53Alastair Sooke?

  Can I say, James, just before we get stuck in, there is a big irony in my mind about this, because as you say, the stories of Bacon's life are incredible, but famously, he is an artist who resisted any form of storytelling and narrative in his paintings. He hated it. And so we have this slightly unenviable task of trying to tell a narrative about a very non-narrative artist and artworks, which I hope will rise to that challenge. He thought narrative was incredibly boring, but there is nothing boring about Francis Bacon's life.

• 3:28James Fox?

  And so over the next three episodes, we are going to do a proverbial deep dive into this astonishing individual. So this is the first in our three-part series on the life and work of Francis Bacon.

• 3:48James Fox?

  Well, let's begin at the beginning. Francis Bacon is born on the 28th of October, my sister's birthday, actually, 1909, in Dublin, Ireland. He's not actually Irish, both of his parents are English. And we should remember, of course, that at this time... Ireland is part of the United Kingdom.

• 4:07Alastair Sooke?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:08James Fox?

  He's from a pretty well-to-do family, so his father, who's known as Eddie Bacon.

• 4:12Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 4:13James Fox?

  Comes from a long line of military men, that they date their ancestry all the way back to the original Francis Bacon.

• 4:18Alastair Sooke?

  Yes, who was he again?

• 4:19James Fox?

  Well, the Elizabethan statesman, philosopher, mathematician, the inventor of the scientific method. So there's a great sort of lineage there. But Francis Bacon's father is a captain. He served during the Boer War, but he's now in Ireland as a racehorse trainer.

• 4:34Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 4:34James Fox?

  So he spends much of his time out in the paddocks. He's shooting a lot of pheasants. He's hunting foxes. You know, that's the kind of thing he's doing.

• 4:40Alastair Sooke?

  He's an outdoors man.

• 4:42James Fox?

  He's a real outdoors man.

• 4:43Alastair Sooke?

  And not all that affectionate or really a very nice character.

• 4:47James Fox?

  No, we will come to that. He's a horrible man.

• 4:48Alastair Sooke?

  Okay.

• 4:49James Fox?

  And we should also talk about Bacon's mother. So his mother is called Winnie Firth. She brings the money to the family. So she's from an unbelievably wealthy family of Sheffield industrialists. They're steel producers, they make ammunition, they make cutlery. And so it's this perfect combination, really. And it's a classic Edwardian combination of the status of the sort of upper-middle-class father's side with the enormous wealth of the nouveau riche mothers.

• 5:16Alastair Sooke?

  And I think Eddie doesn't, he may not even really love his wife all that much.

• 5:21James Fox?

  I think it's a marriage of convenience.

• 5:23Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, okay.

• 5:24James Fox?

  It's a marriage of convenience, but Bacon grows up in this pretty well-to-do household. They've got a big house, 13-room house in the countryside outside of Dublin. He is the second son, so he's got an older brother, he's got two sisters, he's got a younger brother. As you said, imply, none of the children are close to their parents.

• 5:45Alastair Sooke?

  Mainly because it sounds like the dad was just so monstrous as a figure.

• 5:49James Fox?

  I think, I think they just also, the parents just weren't interested. I mean, Winnie, Francis Bacon's mother, was far more interested in socialising than she was with her children.

• 5:58Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, she's sort of self-absorbed.

• 5:59James Fox?

  Completely self-absorbed, but sort of relatively benign. And the father, who is, as you say, a tyrant, is far more interested even in his labradors than he is in his children. So the children barely see, the Bacon children barely see their parents. They spend most of their life in this nursery, the back of the house, with the wonderfully named. Nanny Lightfoot.

• 6:19Alastair Sooke?

  Yes, Jessie. Jessie Lightfoot. She's a big character, very important figure in Bacon's life.

• 6:24James Fox?

  Important figure, and they spend most of their day with her. They only come out to see their parents, what, for thirty minutes a day, which is probably a good thing, given.

• 6:31Alastair Sooke?

  Sounds very Edwardian, this.

• 6:33James Fox?

  Yes, I mean, it's not like that nowadays, is it? Those were the days.

• 6:35Alastair Sooke?

  Exactly.

• 6:36James Fox?

  See your children for half an hour a day. I'd love that. Anyway, so they only see their parents for half an hour a day, which is probably a good thing for them because the father is always enraged. He's always angry about something.

• 6:48Alastair Sooke?

  Hmm, I think the adjective belligerent is often used about Eddie Bacon.

• 6:52James Fox?

  Yes, storming around the house, screaming, shouting, throwing things. Francis Bacon sees himself as the runt of the litter in many ways. He's painfully shy, which is quite weird when you consider what we know of Bacon and what we'll describe of him later on.

• 7:09Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a complete transformation.

• 7:10James Fox?

  It's a transformation.

• 7:11Alastair Sooke?

  It's sort of self-fashioning, isn't it, in a way?

• 7:13James Fox?

  It really is.

• 7:13Alastair Sooke?

  It's incredible testament to his will that he can go from being so shy to being so incredibly gregarious in the centre of every party that he was at.

• 7:21James Fox?

  Yes, but he was paralysed by his shyness early on. He's very effeminate. He's also sickly, so he suffers from asthma.

• 7:29Alastair Sooke?

  Yes, and this is important. This is very important.

• 7:31James Fox?

  This is so important, and the asthma is, in many ways, it's aggravated by their lifestyle. It's aggravated by life in the countryside, by all the animals that are in the house. And of course, every time he spends time with animals, he becomes very unwell, and his father, not particularly sympathetic to this condition. So the more unwell Bacon becomes, the more his father exposes him to animals, the more he makes him ride the pony and play with the dogs. And this creates a terrible sort of feedback loop in the household. And Bacon's father is of the view, as you might imagine, a military man from that generation, that you just have to make a man of your children. And so he often sends, and this is what Bacon said, he would be regularly sent to the stables where he would be whipped by the grooms.

• 8:16Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, now, this is a very key anecdote because I think I may be correct in saying that the source wasn't Bacon. It's posthumous. There's a woman called Caroline Blackwood, who later in the series we may come on to, second wife of Lucian Freud, artist, very good friends of Francis Bacon, and she's the source for this story. Do we think it definitely happened, or it's one of those stories that feels like it? Because the premise is that the dad was such a monster that he was inviting his young unmarried stablehand grooms to whip his son, to whip him into shape, which sounds almost conveniently brutal, given the brutality we find in Bacon's paintings later on.

• 8:58James Fox?

  It also feels though consistent with the kind of man his father was. We don't know for certain. Bacon has particular stories about the grooms. He says that he has early sexual experience with these grooms as well. And that's an important element of the childhood, because as Bacon turns 13, 14, 15, he becomes increasingly aware that he is gay.

• 9:23James Fox?

  And as you might imagine, this is not something that would be understood or accepted by his father.

• 9:28Alastair Sooke?

  No.

• 9:28James Fox?

  And there's a particular moment, it's one of the most famous stories in all of.

• 9:32Alastair Sooke?

  This is one he, Bacon, did tell.

• 9:34James Fox?

  Told many, many times, that age 16, he is in his parents' bedroom when his father finds him trying on his mother's underwear. And this Bacon always described was the moment he was essentially exiled from the house.

• 9:48Alastair Sooke?

  And before we go, it's worth just adding an extra layer, I think, of nuance to this relationship, because what Bacon recalled when he looked back about his dad was, he, my father, didn't love me. I didn't love him either. But it was very ambiguous, because I was sexually attracted to him, to the dad. So later in life, I mean, this is very, very complex psycho erotic desire, complex thing going on. And also, just before he is kicked out of home for good, I'd love to just have a moment for, have you come across Granny Supple?

• 10:25James Fox?

  No, tell me about Granny Supple.

• 10:27Alastair Sooke?

  Granny Supple, because it sounds in many ways horrible, his childhood. And he, Bacon, later said, you know, he was living under this sort of shadow of threat. So there's the personal threat of violence at home, but also there's the threat of the First World War, there's the threat of everything that's going on between. Ireland and trying to escape English control and that sense of violence, which was latent at the time. But his maternal grandmother was a woman who was known in the family as Granny Supple. And Granny Supple-

• 10:54James Fox?

  Granny Supple, Nanny Lightfoot.

• 10:56Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:56James Fox?

  They're fantastic names, aren't they?

• 10:57Alastair Sooke?

  They are. They're beautiful. I mean, you couldn't really make them up. Granny Supple supposedly hated her son-in-law, Eddie.

• 11:03James Fox?

  Right.

• 11:04Alastair Sooke?

  And I think this endeared her to Francis, young Francis, immensely.

• 11:09James Fox?

  So by 1926, he's 16 years old and he's living alone in London.

• 11:14Alastair Sooke?

  Hmm.

• 11:14James Fox?

  He, in later years, said that he was completely cut off. That's not entirely true. His mother was still paying him some money. So he was receiving three pounds a week.

• 11:23Alastair Sooke?

  It's probably quite a lot in those days for a teenager.

• 11:26James Fox?

  Yeah, it's not bad, but it wasn't quite enough. So he did have to take up some jobs. And this is one of the funniest episodes in Bacon's life, when he has to take up these odd jobs. So the first job he has in London is he becomes a chef. He becomes a chef to a wealthy solicitor somewhere in London. Doesn't last very long. Then he becomes a housekeeper to another wealthy person. That doesn't last because one evening, shortly after starting the job, his boss is in the fanciest restaurant in London, the Ritz. And who does he see at the table next to him but the 16-year-old Francis Bacon drinking champagne? So that job ends.

• 11:59Alastair Sooke?

  You see, that weekly allowance stretches quite far in those days.

• 12:02James Fox?

  Clearly three pounds was sufficient. And then the next job he gets is to work in a women's clothes store, which you might imagine-

• 12:08Alastair Sooke?

  He probably enjoyed.

• 12:09James Fox?

  He quite enjoyed.

• 12:10Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 12:10James Fox?

  But he really takes a disliking to his boss and starts writing these anonymous poison pen letters. And when the boss and the owner of the shop finds out that Francis Bacon is the author, he is thrown out of that job as well.

• 12:24Alastair Sooke?

  I think he sort of looked back on this state of his life and he said, I can't say I was what's called moral.

• 12:29James Fox?

  No, well, that's the other thing he was doing. He was augmenting his income by sleeping with wealthy older men and often stealing from them while they slept.

• 12:38Alastair Sooke?

  And sometimes being caught in the act of doing it.

• 12:40James Fox?

  And he was caught in the act at least once. And so, you know, it's, I think it would be fair to say that Bacon is drifting at this point.

• 12:47Alastair Sooke?

  Yes. And drifting is kind of a key thing that he does again and again in his life. There are later periods when he's actually, he's an established artist and he's still drifting. There's a sort of default drift mode, which is particular to Bacon. But eventually he will settle very much in London, but there's quite a lot to get through before he does.

• 13:09James Fox?

  Well, let's, let's, let's get to the next phase. So obviously, I think his parents by the end of 1926, they obviously recognised that he's not going anywhere. That things aren't really working out. And in early 1927, they come up with an idea. They hear that this relative of theirs, a cousin, I think, called Hyatt Cecil Harcourt Smith.

• 13:30Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 13:31James Fox?

  Another ex-military guy, 10 years older than Francis Bacon, is going on a trip to Berlin.

• 13:36Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 13:36James Fox?

  And they think, ah, get Francis to go with him.

• 13:39Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, what on earth are they thinking?

• 13:41James Fox?

  Well, they're thinking, if anyone can make a man of Francis Bacon, it's Harcourt Smith.

• 13:46Alastair Sooke?

  Well, he's meant to be, what, he's sort of ultra masculine is the phrase.

• 13:49James Fox?

  Moustache, yeah.

• 13:50Alastair Sooke?

  Very straight back.

• 13:51James Fox?

  Like the kitchen poster.

• 13:52Alastair Sooke?

  You can imagine exactly that, that sort of sense of a man, yeah.

• 13:55James Fox?

  So in the spring of 1927, Francis and Harcourt Smith head off to Berlin. Very exciting place to go at this point, you know, this is Berlin in the middle of the Weimar Republic. Obviously, the Weimar Republic has just suffered this period of very significant inflation. So the exchange rate is very favourable. They stay in the fanciest hotel in Berlin, the Hotel Adlon.

• 14:19Alastair Sooke?

  Total luxury.

• 14:20James Fox?

  Have you ever been to the Hotel Adlon?

• 14:21Alastair Sooke?

  I have not, James.

• 14:22James Fox?

  I went once, about 20 years ago, I went for lunch. I couldn't even afford the bottle of water. So it was about 20 euro for a bottle of water.

• 14:30Alastair Sooke?

  You see, back in the day though, you know, you could be dining at the Ritz on three pounds a week. You could live at the Adlon for two months or something.

• 14:35James Fox?

  Well, this is what they did. So they, they, they go to the Adlon. Of course, Berlin at this point is tremendously culturally exciting. This is the city of. Of cabaret, it's the city of avant-garde cinema, Battleship Potemkin has just come out.

• 14:49Alastair Sooke?

  Is this Weimar Republic era?

• 14:51James Fox?

  Weimar Republic, yeah. And it's, you know, it's the city of the Bauhaus in its pomp. It's the city of unbelievable cultural excitement. You know, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender are there.

• 15:04Alastair Sooke?

  But also licence in terms of behaviour, right?

• 15:06James Fox?

  I think that's really important.

• 15:07Alastair Sooke?

  Sexual mores and...

• 15:09James Fox?

  It's a real city of sex. It's full of brothels, full of sex workers. There's a lot of homosexuality. There's a lot of, you know, cross-dressing.

• 15:17Alastair Sooke?

  It turns out that Harcourt Smith, is that his name, Harcourt Smith? He was quite sexually voracious himself, was he not?

• 15:23James Fox?

  That is why he went. I mean, ultimately, that was why he went. He had recently divorced and he thought, well, let's become a sex tourist for a bit. And so he went there for the sex and he shagged everything that moved when he was there.

• 15:35Alastair Sooke?

  Including?

• 15:36James Fox?

  His cousin, Francis Bacon. But that's what Bacon says, they ended up in bed.

• 15:41Alastair Sooke?

  It's one of those stories that he would always relate and he would make a joke out of it. Because I think he loved the irony that his hated father had sent him there with Harcourt Smith, the ultra macho guy. And Harcourt Smith had then seduced him.

• 15:56James Fox?

  That was the last thing Eddie Bacon would have possibly wanted.

• 15:59Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, I mean, disaster.

• 16:00James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Alastair Sooke?

  It's also a little bit, sort of slightly grim, isn't it, as a story, from thinking about it from the vantage point of today? I mean, he was, he's a teenager at this point, right?

• 16:09James Fox?

  Yeah, seventeen years old.

• 16:10Alastair Sooke?

  So homosexuality is illegal anyway.

• 16:12James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 16:12Alastair Sooke?

  Okay, it's tolerated in Berlin, but there's something where he is completely exploited and essentially abused by Harcourt Smith. But Bacon himself put this kind of strange gloss on it later in life. He seemed to relish it.

• 16:24James Fox?

  Yeah, and then he's very quickly discarded. So Harcourt Smith finds someone else.

• 16:28Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 16:28James Fox?

  And Bacon is left alone and he decides, well, I've still got some money left, I'll go to Paris. And so he then, in the later spring of 1927, moves to Paris.

• 16:37Alastair Sooke?

  Do you think it's worth just fleshing out? Because you mentioned this important film that he possibly first saw in Berlin. Battleship Potemkin. And this is, this was a, well, what is the movie?

• 16:49James Fox?

  It's a film by Sergei Eisenstein and it's seen as a... Absolutely pivotal film in the history of cinema. It's the first time you see proper montage taking place. And there's a particular scene, very famous scene on the Odessa steps, where there's a lot of fast cutting. And there is a particular moment in which you see a nurse screaming.

• 17:11Alastair Sooke?

  Yes, key.

• 17:12James Fox?

  Key scene, her glasses are broken, she's screaming. And this scream will prove to be very important for Bacon later on. So he is getting some cultural experiences. He's having a lot of sexual experiences. But he doesn't actually end up spending that long in Berlin before he moves to Paris. And I just think, what a gap here, Alistair. Can you imagine having a gap and going to Weimar Republic Berlin? And then Paris in the 1920s.

• 17:36Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, it's East Thailand, isn't it?

• 17:38James Fox?

  It really is. I mean, Paris in the 1920s is the cultural capital of Europe. Everyone is there. Picasso and the surrealist, Giacometti is there. You've got Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein.

• 17:48Alastair Sooke?

  Do you think he at this time is tracking all of that stuff? Or do you think he's just sort of following his nose, having a good time? The drifter still, it's the drifting mode.

• 17:57James Fox?

  I think he's still drifting.

• 17:58Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 17:59James Fox?

  He does, to be fair to him, while he's in Paris, he learns French and learns it very quickly and very well.

• 18:04Alastair Sooke?

  Yes. He does also, he encounters another scream. So later he becomes famous as the painter of The Scream. But there is this scream that he encounters outside of Paris. This place called Chantilly. And there's a museum there. And there's a painting by the 17th century Baroque classical French painter, Nicholas Poussin. And it depicts the massacre of the innocents. And it's an awful biblical theme. And in it, there's a woman, a mother, who is screaming as her, to try and protect her infant, I think. And Bacon, for the first time that we know of in his life, because this was something he did again and again later in his artistic career.

• 18:48Alastair Sooke?

  He became, when he encountered this picture, because he spent some time in Chantilly for a little while during this French moment, he became obsessed with it.

• 18:56James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 18:56Alastair Sooke?

  And he said that it was probably the best human cry ever painted. So even though he is still very young and he's drifting around, he's clearly absorbing things which much later are very important for the way he's making art.

• 19:10James Fox?

  Yeah, I mean, the other thing he absorbed, very different kind of artwork, in the summer of 1927 in Paris, he sees an exhibition of Picasso's drawings.

• 19:18Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 19:19James Fox?

  And this has a really significant impact on him. And he begins after that to start drawing and painting a lot. It's the first moment, really, he's done a little bit of art earlier on in life, but it's the first moment he really starts to seriously think, maybe this is something I could do.

• 19:34Alastair Sooke?

  Have you ever come across any, him talking about that, why he found, because it was meant to be such an epiphany, this show of the drawings by Picasso in 1927 in Paris. And I think those drawings were quite varied from Picasso's career to that point. But in the twenties, Picasso starts creating a lot of pictures in which you have these bone-like figures.

• 19:55James Fox?

  Yes.

• 19:55Alastair Sooke?

  Which also become influential on the young Francis Bacon.

• 20:00James Fox?

  We shall see in a few moments.

• 20:01Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, we shall, sorry, I'm jumping ahead.

• 20:03James Fox?

  But Bacon has a very, very, very complex and important relationship with Picasso. Picasso is perhaps his greatest influence in some ways, but they never meet. And actually, I think Bacon tries to avoid meeting him. We'll come to similar things like that later on with other artists. So he starts to think about perhaps a life as a creative, a creative professional. But he doesn't choose to become an artist.

• 20:25Alastair Sooke?

  No.

• 20:26James Fox?

  He chooses to become an interior designer.

• 20:29Alastair Sooke?

  I know, it's so weird.

• 20:30James Fox?

  So bizarre, in retrospect, it seems completely bizarre that that's the decision he makes. And so he returns, end of 1928, after a year and a half in Paris, he returns to London. He's nineteen years old now. He thinks, I'm going to become an interior designer.

• 20:43Alastair Sooke?

  So how much do we know about the stuff that he was actually designing and making? What was it? What did it look like?

• 20:49James Fox?

  Well, we know a little bit. So he opens a showroom in a garage in South Kensington. And he starts showing some of his designs. So there are some cubist rugs.

• 20:59Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 21:00James Fox?

  Again, the influence of Picasso is there. He's making these tubular metal bits of furniture that are very much inspired by the Bauhaus. He would have probably seen in Berlin and probably Eileen Gray's furniture that he would have seen in Paris. And so it's classic modernist design furniture that was quite a dominant thing, an important thing on the continent, but really not so big a deal in Britain at this time.

• 21:25Alastair Sooke?

  It does get him noticed.

• 21:27James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 21:28Alastair Sooke?

  The thing I always take away from this is that it's not hugely, it's not totally original, what he's creating. But what he is revealing is he has really good streak of good taste.

• 21:40James Fox?

  Yes.

• 21:40Alastair Sooke?

  Where he can very quickly identify innovations of others and absorb them and start to make work, which in this case is quite imitative, but later when he becomes a visual artist, it's possible that he's doing the same thing at points. And I wonder how much you think that his interior design work, which he later rejected. He was not proud of it, but I wonder how much you think you can start to trace, or there are echoes of it later in the paintings.

• 22:12James Fox?

  I think that's really interesting. Well, indeed, during this period as an interior designer, he was actually making paintings and displaying his own pictures alongside the rugs and the tables and the chairs. So there is some kind of connection. I don't think he's found his voice yet as an individual, but the interior design business is pretty successful, actually. He gets some quite influential clients. He sells work to Rab Butler's wife, to the novelist Patrick White, to... The art historian Douglas Cooper. And he's doing his paintings. And increasingly during the 1930s, he starts to think, well, maybe I should become a painter. And in 1933.

• 22:51Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 22:51James Fox?

  He paints his first, I wouldn't call it his first masterpiece.

• 22:54Alastair Sooke?

  Oh, I don't know.

• 22:55James Fox?

  Do you like it?

• 22:56Alastair Sooke?

  I, I, I think this is quite an incredible picture.

• 22:58James Fox?

  Okay, well, talk us through it, Alison. This is, this is a cruci-, it's called The Crucifixion. It's from 1933. It's quite an unusual work.

• 23:07Alastair Sooke?

  So, so for a long time, whenever I came to Francis Bacon, he would begin his career with that 1944 triptych that you described at the start of this part. And the only picture that was readily available that he'd created prior to that, which people knew about, was this painting depicting the crucifixion from 1933. And it is brilliantly nightmarish.

• 23:31James Fox?

  Yes.

• 23:31Alastair Sooke?

  In a true Baconian style. It's this very thin, part skeletal, part X-ray.

• 23:39James Fox?

  Yeah, it looks like an X-ray, doesn't it? It's black and white.

• 23:41Alastair Sooke?

  Sort of figure, who is clearly Christ, on this dark cross against a very black background. So, as you say, white, very starkly picked out, but is both skeleton-like and has that vaporous, strange, insubstantial quality of maybe an X-ray? Or some people think it looks like a part of a sort of bat that's strung up.

• 24:01James Fox?

  Yes, it's part skeleton, part ghost, isn't it?

• 24:03Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 24:04James Fox?

  Feels very phantom-like.

• 24:06Alastair Sooke?

  And, and there's this other form, which seems to be emerging from the chest of the crucified figure, as though this is an attendant leaning up towards Christ. And it's something where the head is just this tiny dot, almost the same size as the hands, which are on the cross. I mean, it has a lot, I mean, bear in mind that he's what, he's 23 when he paints this. Yes, you can see the, the influence of Picasso, but it is hugely, it's got so much poise, I think.

• 24:34James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Alastair Sooke?

  And, and its own presence already at this point.

• 24:37James Fox?

  I think for British art in the, in the early to mid 1930s, this is pretty remarkable.

• 24:41Alastair Sooke?

  And we know it caught the eye of, because I, I brought this into prop, James.

• 24:44James Fox?

  Yes.

• 24:45Alastair Sooke?

  I know you've got a copy of this as well, but this is a very famous book called Art Now by an art critic, Herbert Reed.

• 24:50James Fox?

  I love Herbert. My hero is Herbert Reed, one of the great writers, art writers of the 20th century.

• 24:54Alastair Sooke?

  Amazing figure. And this was published in 1933 and it contains a reproduction of Francis Bacon's crucifixion.

• 25:03James Fox?

  And pretty amazing when you consider Bacon, completely unknown at this time, ends up in Herbert Reed's book next to the work of Picasso, this unbelievably famous individual. And not only that, the painting then goes on to be purchased by a very distinguished art collector called Sir Michael Sadler. So I think Bacon by 1933 is thinking, I can, you know, I'm on a roll.

• 25:26Alastair Sooke?

  The X-ray thing is very interesting here because Sadler wanted another picture of him done by Bacon. And he sent Bacon an X-ray of his skull, which Bacon incorporated into another crucifixion, which has survived from this period. So I actually genuinely, I don't really quite know whether the X-ray thing was Bacon's interest or Michael Sadler was bringing that to him. But X-rays, medical imagery, these are things that become very, very important for Francis Bacon as an artist.

• 26:00James Fox?

  Absolutely, they do. And we will see much more of that as we go through. So he's had this success with the crucifixion of 1933. And he thinks, I can make a career as an artist now. So at the beginning of 1934, the next year, he stages his first one man show as an artist. It's not organised by a dealer, he organises it himself. And he includes seven oil paintings and various other works. And this exhibition, he's got very high hopes for it.

• 26:28Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 26:28James Fox?

  It's a disaster. It's a disaster. No one goes apart from his friends. And the only reviews he gets are terrible. Can I read you?

• 26:38Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, yeah. What do we have?

• 26:40James Fox?

  This is a review from the Times. Okay, the Times says. The difficulty with Mr Francis Bacon is to know how far his paintings and drawings may be regarded as artistic expression, and how far is the mere unloading on canvas and paper of what used to be called the subconscious mind. As the latter, they are not of much consequence, except by way of release to the artist. Certainly, most of the seven paintings are too large for anything they have to say. Confidence in Mr Bacon is not increased by the information that it is proposed to hold a series of his work at this gallery.

• 27:15Alastair Sooke?

  I like the way you've given this poor reviewer a very pompous, very pompous voice.

• 27:19James Fox?

  Have you ever written a review like that?

• 27:22Alastair Sooke?

  I think what's interesting about that to me is that it identifies something which, and this is astute, we're in a world of post-Sigmund Freud, and so everything that Bacon is about, in a funny way, although it's still quite shocking, but it's about trying to, as he would always put it, "paint sensation". So it's not painting of the intellect, it's trying to dig in mind that sense of the unconscious or the subconscious, as that reviewer says. And I suppose at that time, it's still seen as that's quite a shocking thing. It would continue to be a shocking thing the next decade, but in a sense, the reviewer has identified something in the way that Bacon is approaching his art.

• 28:00James Fox?

  Yeah, but I think the really awful thing for Francis Bacon of that review is it is not outraged, or shocked, or horrified, it is bored. It's got this withering sense of, "Oh, he's gonna do more of these shows."

• 28:13Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 28:14James Fox?

  And Bacon, who was, as you said at the very start of this episode, was very self-critical in many ways. He was broken by this review. He destroyed almost everything from that exhibition. He fell into this drug-addled depression and despair. And in 1935, he basically gives up exhibiting altogether. And what he actually does instead is he sets up illegal gambling venues.

• 28:36Alastair Sooke?

  With Jessie?

• 28:37James Fox?

  Yes.

• 28:37Alastair Sooke?

  With the nanny?

• 28:38James Fox?

  With Nanny Lightfoot.

• 28:38Alastair Sooke?

  She's key. Again!

• 28:40James Fox?

  So he's back to drifting again.

• 28:42Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 28:43James Fox?

  And so I think the second half of the 1930s, he's not really painting that much. He's mostly running these casino nights. He's not exhibiting at all. And in some ways, he's on the verge of being lost to the history of art, just another name in the long list of artists who have tried and failed to make it.

• 29:00Alastair Sooke?

  He's had a pretty good life so far. I think he's enjoyed himself.

• 29:03James Fox?

  But, Alastair, in 1939, something is going to happen that would change everything for him. And we will find out what after the break.

• 29:15James 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.

• 29:40James Fox?

  Welcome back to Stories of Art. It is September 1939 and Britain has declared war on Nazi Germany. This is a decision that will change the course of British and European history, but it will also change the course of Francis Bacon's life. And I think, Alastair, create the conditions for his second coming as an artist.

• 29:59Alastair Sooke?

  I'm sure you're right.

• 30:01James Fox?

  Well, he's now 29, so he's 29 years old. He's drifting yet again. Conscription is in place early on in the war. He is determined not to fight. Have you heard this story?

• 30:12Alastair Sooke?

  I think I know where you may be going. Go on, remind me.

• 30:16James Fox?

  Well, Bacon is determined not to fight in the war, not because he's lacking in courage. I mean, Bacon is an unbelievably brave man who has an astonishing tolerance for physical pain in the bedroom and elsewhere.

• 30:29Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 30:31James Fox?

  But I think he just, you know, he comes from a family of military men. His father, who he kind of hated, was a military man. And I think he doesn't want to be that kind of Bacon. So he's thinking, how can I get out of this? And remember, he's got asthma. So the night before his medical, he goes to the kennels beneath Harrods, because there were apparently kennels beneath Harrods back then.

• 30:51Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 30:51James Fox?

  He rents an Alsatian.

• 30:53Alastair Sooke?

  He rents it.

• 30:54James Fox?

  He rents an Alsatian.

• 30:55Alastair Sooke?

  By the hour, yeah.

• 30:56James Fox?

  By the hour and spends the night with the Alsatian in bed.

• 30:59Alastair Sooke?

  Oh, God.

• 31:00James Fox?

  And after a night of, you know, hugging this extremely big hairy dog.

• 31:04Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 31:05James Fox?

  He's wheezing, he's got rashes all over his face.

• 31:08Alastair Sooke?

  Covered in fleas.

• 31:09James Fox?

  And he duly fails his medical.

• 31:10Alastair Sooke?

  Right, success.

• 31:11James Fox?

  Success.

• 31:12Alastair Sooke?

  Money well spent.

• 31:13James Fox?

  Money well spent. And so he ends up, ends up working on the home front as an air raid ward and serving actually with some bravery.

• 31:21Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, that is important to sort of. Remember that because that story does make out that he was quite cowardly. He's in it for himself. He isn't really part of the war effort. But actually, a lot of the things he was doing, he was working for the air raid precautions, civil defence. So it's firefighting and also recovering dead bodies.

• 31:39James Fox?

  It's not an easy job at all, and he served with great valor.

• 31:42Alastair Sooke?

  And I'm sure those experiences must have played into everything that's kind of going on in his head and will eventually come out on canvas.

• 31:49James Fox?

  I think absolutely that's the case. And it's also really the first time he's ever had structure in his life. You know, when he's had to wear a uniform, when he's had to get somewhere for a specific time. So I think that plays an important role.

• 32:00Alastair Sooke?

  It doesn't last that long.

• 32:01James Fox?

  It doesn't last that long. Again, we come back to the asthma because at this early phase of the Second World War, the Blitz was ongoing. And it was creating enormous amounts of dust and smoke in the air. And he starts to get sicker and sicker. And so he has to actually leave London. So he moves to this cottage, rents a cottage in Hampshire.

• 32:20Alastair Sooke?

  Ah, with with someone. His first big important lover in his life.

• 32:25James Fox?

  Eric Hall, Eric Hall.

• 32:27Alastair Sooke?

  Who who often is referred to in the literature as as an alderman.

• 32:30James Fox?

  Yes.

• 32:30Alastair Sooke?

  So I think sort of upstanding pillar of the community type, married man and falls in love with Bacon. Buys some of Bacon's early pictures, later donates them to the Tate. And at this point, they do spend some time in this cottage in Hampshire, which is odd, given that Bacon is, we associate him so much with the city.

• 32:50James Fox?

  Well, he hated, he hated the countryside. He hated this, he hated trees, he hated animals, he hated the sound of birds.

• 32:57Alastair Sooke?

  We later bought a place in the countryside.

• 32:58James Fox?

  Well, this is true. But I mean, actually, when when you see photographs of the cottage, to me, it looks like heaven.

• 33:04Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 33:04James Fox?

  For him, it was hell. You know, he was stranded away from the the the clubs and the nightclubs and the bars of of Soho.

• 33:10Alastair Sooke?

  It's interesting you say it was hell because the three studies for the figures at the base of a crucifixion.

• 33:16James Fox?

  Don't give a game away, Alistair.

• 33:17Alastair Sooke?

  But I mean, the idea of it sort of being hellish, I think I'm right in saying that one of those, part of it may have begun in in the cottage, right?

• 33:24James Fox?

  Yes.

• 33:25Alastair Sooke?

  Is that right?

• 33:26James Fox?

  I think, you know, with all the time he has free in this cottage, he ends up doing a lot of drawing, a lot of sketching.

• 33:33Alastair Sooke?

  Okay.

• 33:34James Fox?

  He's also drawing on. Photographs that he's getting from Picture Post magazine and Life magazine. And it is a really, actually, very productive phase in his career. In that this period, enclosed in this place, gives him this opportunity to start experimenting and to start finding his own voice. And he absolutely does. The work we will see later comes in many ways out of this laboratory phase in his life.

• 33:58Alastair Sooke?

  I think what I was trying to drive at is I quite like the idea that everyone associates that triptych with all of the hellish things that are happening in the world at the time. But perhaps it really came from the personal hell of being stuck in this cottage in the country.

• 34:10James Fox?

  Yes, quite possibly. Well, he doesn't stay, he doesn't spend that long there because as soon as the blitz dies down and the air becomes clearer in London, he does get back to London as soon as he can. And he starts working up the ideas that he's been developing down in Hampshire. He starts working up into a series of larger paintings. But he doesn't yet have an opportunity to show them. But then, a lucky set of events happen that allow him to do this. So there is a fancy gallery on New Bond Street called the Le Fevre Gallery. And it is planning a big show in early 1945, so just before the end of the war, of contemporary British art. When Ben Nicholson, who's a very famous figure in British art at this point.

• 34:53Alastair Sooke?

  Abstract.

• 34:54James Fox?

  Abstract artist, well, yes, abstract artist, working in St Ives at that point. And he's going to be a very important figure in this show. He pulls out, I don't know why, but he pulls out of the show. And they need to find someone to fill his, fill his space.

• 35:08Alastair Sooke?

  So they go for a like-for-like replacements?

• 35:11James Fox?

  They actually ask Graham Sutherland, who is another very celebrated British artist, very influential figure at this time, and a friend of Francis Baker. And Graham Sutherland writes this to the gallery. This is what France, this is what Graham Sutherland writes. He says.

• 35:27James Fox?

  As for the painter to take Ben Nicholson's place, it seems there is not much choice other than John Piper, another British artist. I should really prefer Francis Bacon, for whose works, you know, I have a really profound admiration. It is true, he has shown very little, but nowadays with every Tom, Dick and Harry showing yards of painting without much selection or standard, this is refreshing. And his recent things, while being quite uncompromising, have a grandeur and brilliance which is rarely seen in English art. And the dealer relents. The dealer says, well, if you prefer Francis Bacon, I shall try him.

• 36:02Alastair Sooke?

  This is not the first time that Sutherland's recommendations will really help Bacon on his way.

• 36:08James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 36:09Alastair Sooke?

  We'll find that later. But it also reminds me of, there's a very famous quote, which comes from just a few years later, 1946, which again involves Graham Sutherland. And it's the art historian and former director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark, of civilisation fame much later, saying to Sutherland, you and I may be in a minority of two, but we may still be right in thinking Francis Bacon has genius.

• 36:34James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Alastair Sooke?

  Big word to be using, particularly when in places like The Times, okay, a few years earlier, you've got that much more condescending tone.

• 36:42James Fox?

  Yes.

• 36:43Alastair Sooke?

  But, you know, these are people who are really spotting young talent.

• 36:47James Fox?

  Yeah, exactly. So the show opens in April 1945. Remember, at this stage, Alastair, Bacon's hardly shown anything for years and years and years, really since that show of 1934, 1935, he's disappeared from the art scene. So the show opens at the Lefair Gallery in April 1945. This is still a few months before the end of the Second World War. And Bacon shows two pictures. He shows figure in a landscape.

• 37:11Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 37:12James Fox?

  And he shows three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion, which we discussed at the very start of this episode.

• 37:21Alastair Sooke?

  Do you think it's worth just having a recap of what it looks like?

• 37:23James Fox?

  I think so. Do you want to describe this remarkable picture?

• 37:27Alastair Sooke?

  So...

• 37:28James Fox?

  Or three pictures?

• 37:29Alastair Sooke?

  Three pictures.

• 37:30James Fox?

  It's a triptych.

• 37:31Alastair Sooke?

  It's a triptych.

• 37:32James Fox?

  We should say a triptych is three canvases or three panels, three pictures together.

• 37:35Alastair Sooke?

  In each one, you've got this amorphous, stone-coloured, bulbous, fleshy form in the middle. They all have these very phallic, long necks, which seem to be moving around, roving. They are eyeless, one you can see an ear, but they also have mouths. And they're presented against this scorching hot vivid orange in each case. The middle one seems to be perching on top of, it looks like, sort of old brown furniture, the base of some regency table perhaps. And it has this horrible, off-white, grubby bandage which is wrapped around that neck.

• 38:18Alastair Sooke?

  And this mouth with red lips, the teeth picked out, which I think, as you'd said at the start of this whole part, seems to be swiveling toward us. It's a bit like, much later, you know, Andy Warhol would depict Marilyn Monroe and that famous cupid, it's a sort of perversion of an alluring kiss, if you like. And then, in the right-hand panel, you have the leg of one of these forms in this strange, it looks like a bit of a doormat, or maybe yellow scrubby grass. And it's really stretching out its neck as though it's in pain. And instead of a head, it does have this ear, but it just all seems to be about this gaping wide jaw.

• 38:59Alastair Sooke?

  So you see, again, teeth, and you can't quite tell, is this a scream of pleasure? Well, probably not, it seems to be much more a scream of pain. And the whole thing is so out of nowhere, in terms of, there are precedents clearly thinking about Picasso's work, but to a British audience seeing it, this must have been totally shocking.

• 39:21James Fox?

  It is a shocking picture, Alistair, and it's difficult to know how to begin interpreting it, but I think one way in, one initial way in, might be religion itself, because I think it's clearly making certain references to the history of religious art. The triptych, of course, the three-part picture, is a very important part of Christian art. And of course, it's got the word crucifixion in it, which of course immediately reminds you of perhaps the most important iconography in Christian art, which is the crucifixion of Christ.

• 39:50Alastair Sooke?

  But the weird thing is, he's not religious.

• 39:52James Fox?

  No, he's a devout atheist.

• 39:53Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 39:53James Fox?

  So, but he's obviously riffing on it in some way.

• 39:57Alastair Sooke?

  Deliberately trying to what, attack it, subvert it? Is it, it's iconoclastic in that sense, is it?

• 40:03James Fox?

  I think that's possibly part of it. I mean, I think if we think about the way that the crucifixion is depicted in Christian art, you have Christ on the cross and you also have, and let's remember the title of this, this picture. It's called Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. And often in Christian art, you have figures at the base of a crucifixion. You have the Virgin Mary usually, the Mother of Christ, you might have the Mary Magdalene, John the Evangelist, maybe John the Baptist.

• 40:29Alastair Sooke?

  And it's worth saying as well that Bacon himself said that he did at some point intend to create a large crucifixion that this, this trip would accompany.

• 40:38James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 40:38Alastair Sooke?

  He never did. He painted other crucifixions. There are other paintings that may have been sort of surrogates for that. But he clearly is thinking totally within this Christian framework of, of how the picture should operate.

• 40:51James Fox?

  Yeah, but one of the big differences is that the crucifixion in Christian art is ultimately, for all of the suffering, for all of the pain, for all of the death, it is ultimately about salvation because Christ is suffering for the benefit of humanity. This has none of that.

• 41:06Alastair Sooke?

  No.

• 41:07James Fox?

  There is no salvation, there is no redemption. This is just horror and violence and brutality.

• 41:12Alastair Sooke?

  Well, there's also, I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's an obvious thing to say once you know about the sources, but these particular figures, they're not Christian at all.

• 41:20James Fox?

  No.

• 41:21Alastair Sooke?

  They come from pagan world, they come from Greek tragedy.

• 41:25James Fox?

  He's in, well, yeah, we should talk about that actually. So I think that is the, the more important reference as far as he's concerned. He is very interested in Greek tragedy. He's very interested in Aeschylus and particularly there's a trilogy of plays by Aeschylus called the Orystea.

• 41:42Alastair Sooke?

  So this is 5th century B.C.

• 41:44James Fox?

  Yes, we should probably summarise the story.

• 41:46Alastair Sooke?

  Could you?

• 41:46James Fox?

  Oh, okay. Okay, so the Orystea, from what I remember, is it's a very brutal series of plays in which it's set during the Trojan Wars and Agamemnon, who is the king, I think he sacrifices his daughter. In order to secure favourable winds for the fleet. And then when his wife, who's called Clytemnestra, when she finds out he's killed their daughter, she murders him. And then when their son, I think his name is Orestes, who gives the name to the play, when Orestes finds out that Clytemnestra has killed his dad, he then murders her.

• 42:23Alastair Sooke?

  It's a big cycle of violence vengeance.

• 42:25James Fox?

  It's a chain reaction of family brutality.

• 42:29Alastair Sooke?

  You see, I think that he, well, we know that Bacon during, at this moment, in the war years, he becomes very interested in an academic study about Ischylus that's published in forty two by a man called W B Stanford, and it's called Ischylus in His Style. And in it, you have this academic translating passages from the Orystea. And it's almost like these fragments, the atmosphere, rather than the actual narrative of the plays that seem to excite Bacon so much. There's one very famous quote that he, Bacon, would repeatedly throughout his life refer to, which I think comes from this study, and the Orystea more generally. And the quote is, "The reek of human blood smiles out at me."

• 43:13James Fox?

  Well, that's exactly what the figure in the middle of this triptych is doing.

• 43:15Alastair Sooke?

  It is exactly that, because they represent, don't they, these things called the eumenedes?

• 43:20James Fox?

  Oh, yes, the furies. Yeah, this is really important, actually, because in the play The Orystea, after Orestes has killed his mother, this is seen as a truly kind of the worst thing you could possibly do. He gets tormented by these furies that are like dementors in Harry Potter or something.

• 43:36Alastair Sooke?

  And what are we mentioning? These are sort of, in classical Greek terms, they're kind of an emanation of guilt.

• 43:43James Fox?

  Yes.

• 43:44Alastair Sooke?

  So you're hounded by your own inner demons, but they've been externalised.

• 43:47James Fox?

  Yes.

• 43:48Alastair Sooke?

  And these furies, and Bacon is visualising his own furies in a sense. Is that what's going on here?

• 43:52James Fox?

  Yes, I think in the ancient Greek, in the Greek play, they are these monstrous figures who follow him everywhere he goes. They torment him. They are, as you say, embodiments of guilt and rage and vengefulness. But I think for Bacon, perhaps, they are embodiments of the monsters that live within all of us. The things that haunt us when we close our eyes at night, and the regrets, and all those other kinds of things. And I think that's a really important part of understanding this painting and why he chose the triptych, not just in allusion to religious iconography, but to the fact that there are three furies in the Orystea.

• 44:28Alastair Sooke?

  Couple of things to throw at you.

• 44:29James Fox?

  Yes.

• 44:30Alastair Sooke?

  Do you think, you've spoken about his homosexuality. Is that an important context here? These creatures, they're so phallic, those necks. This is a time where it wasn't very easy. You certainly couldn't be openly gay. Is that one context perhaps, in terms of inner demons, his own life experience is bringing to this? And the other is, of course, the war context and the run up to the war.

• 44:54James Fox?

  Oh.

• 44:54Alastair Sooke?

  Because we know that he's very interested in news photography.

• 44:58James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 44:58Alastair Sooke?

  We know that he's making paintings which seem to be of these dictator-like figures, some of which have been adapted, others have been destroyed. And he loves, seemingly, if love is quite the right word, photographs of Nazis at rallies with big, wide, open mouths as they're haranguing a crowd.

• 45:17James Fox?

  Yes.

• 45:17Alastair Sooke?

  And do you think that these are other contexts which can help us unpick what's going on in this triptych?

• 45:24James Fox?

  I think it's impossible not to look at this triptych and not see a dark reflection of the times.

• 45:30Alastair Sooke?

  Hmm.

• 45:30James Fox?

  He's painting this in 1944. He's creating this image in a context in which the war is raging, in which the truth of the Holocaust is beginning to emerge. The shadow of nuclear war will soon be there as well. When you look at that bandaged face in the middle, there's sort of military connotations perhaps of that. And so it's hard not to see this picture in some ways as a, as a, as an indictment of a world that is murderous.

• 45:59Alastair Sooke?

  But also within British art history, because you've mentioned a couple of names, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, who are associated with this movement called neo-romanticism within British art. And neo-romanticism is happening just in the run up to when this picture is created.

• 46:12James Fox?

  Hmm.

• 46:13Alastair Sooke?

  And it's a very different beast, as it were. It's kind of about nature, there's a certain nostalgia, there's a melancholy.

• 46:20James Fox?

  Yes.

• 46:21Alastair Sooke?

  It's a reaction against almost the, the modern world. There's a more nostalgic strain to it.

• 46:26James Fox?

  Yes.

• 46:26Alastair Sooke?

  And this seems like such a, a kind of... Fuck you, basically. It's a complete affront, a clean break with neoromanticism.

• 46:35James Fox?

  Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I love neoromanticism as well, but they're both different responses to this kind of event.

• 46:42Alastair Sooke?

  But don't you think that the part of what this is about is Bacon saying, neoromanticism is all well and good, but it's not true. And what he's trying to express is something which is honest. He's saying, look, the world is an atrocious place for all sorts of reasons. And he's created an image which is, you can't parse it literally, you can't tell its story in a crisp way, but it's so evocative as a result, and it seems to express some wider truth.

• 47:08James Fox?

  Absolutely. And I think that is certainly the case at the time. What we know is that this painting hit its viewers, hit the London art world like a freight train. And this is what the art historian John Russell, who I cited at the start of this episode, this is what he wrote. He said, "They caused a total consternation. We had no name for them, and no name for what we felt about them. Visitors tempted into that gallery by the already familiar name of Graham Sutherland were brought up by images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut with a snap at the sight of them." And you know, there are records, actually, of people running out of the gallery. I can't imagine it. I mean, I've never run out of an exhibition. But there are, there are records of people running out of the gallery after seeing this triptych, because it was so horrific.

• 47:53Alastair Sooke?

  This is still happening decades later, when Bacon's showing in Paris, and people are going around saying, it's like, looking at his art's like being punched in the face, decades later. And it's interesting, you mentioned Sutherland again, I'm just thinking about that neoromanticism context in the natural world. Looking at the triptych, the right-hand image, that strange beast is, seems to be putting an arm or a leg into the only bit of what looks like nature within this composition, that strange yellow scrubby grass. And it seems to be causing it immense distress and pain. It's as if it's sort of, it's hot as fire, or it's giving it an electric shock and it's responding. So it's, again, a total contrast, a deliberate assault on everything that neoromanticism held dear.

• 48:37James Fox?

  Yes. Well, let's bring this episode to an end, Alistair. Francis Bacon is suddenly famous. Almost overnight, this virtually unknown artist had become the rising star of British painting. But he was only just getting started, wasn't he? And in the next episode, we will discuss Bacon's rapid ascent as an artist, his decadent lifestyle. And the violence and tragedy that led its cause. Goodbye. Goodbye.

• 49:08Alastair 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.