ALTARPIECE FOR AN ATHEIST

FRANCIS BACON, TRIPTYCH–AUGUST 1972, 1972

(Tate Britain, London)

It was a sordid, nasty little death, the stuff artist bio-pics are made of. A Paris hotel room. Too many pills and too much booze. A typical Seventies story. He stumbled to the bathroom, tried to vomit in the sink, staggered back and sat down on the toilet. When hotel staff entered the room a few hours later, they found him still sitting there, dead. Finis. Drop curtain on the life of George Dyer, small-time London thief, artist’s model and occasional lover of the painter Francis Bacon.

Raise curtain one day later. Across the river in the massive Beaux-Arts pomposity of the Grand Palais, Bacon is overseeing the opening of a landmark retrospective of his work. An honor previously awarded only to Picasso among living painters, this exhibition is the crowning achievement of Bacon’s career. He’s on top of the world. The walls of the Grand Palais are lined with canvases showing scenes of violent sex, murder, torture, generalized brutality. Figures twisted and reconstructed by Bacon’s trademark distortions act out dramas of palpable menace in luridly painted rooms. No less distorted and disturbing are his portraits of friends and lovers, their loosely painted, blurred faces suggesting the kinetic energy of people caught in motion by a camera’s objective eye. In one of these canvases, painted years earlier, we see George Dyer sitting on a toilet.

Sometimes a coincidence is only a coincidence, but when life imitates art in so specific and dramatic a way, the mind seeks a motive, a reason beyond pure chance. What is really going on here? To call the Bacon-Dyer relationship ‘rocky’ is like saying the Marquis de Sade had a slight social adjustment problem. Bacon, a sexual masochist, was attracted to an image of the younger Dyer as an East End tough, only to discover that Dyer, when not drunk, was actually a rather sweet, gentle man. Disappointed, the domination-seeking painter tried to distance himself from Dyer. They fought. At one point, Dyer tipped off the police to a small amount of marijuana in Bacon’s studio, and the painter was brought up on drug charges. Despite all this, Bacon still permitted Dyer, after a period of ‘drying out,’ to accompany him to Paris for the exhibition. But once in the city, old habits came back with a vengeance and finally proved fatal. Michael Peppiatt, in his fine, sympathetic biography of Bacon, tells us that Dyer displayed marked pride in the paintings for which he posed, always attending gallery openings and pointing out his own portraits. So it is possible that George Dyer knew exactly what he was doing during those last moments in the hotel bathroom, that he deliberately imitated the painting, staging a Baconian suicide. In a final, fatal attempt to make contact with the painter, he carefully aimed his death like a rifle shot at Bacon’s heart.

Bacon felt the wound. Speaking to Peppiatt at the time, the painter said, "I feel profoundly guilty about his death. If I hadn’t gone out that morning, if I’d simply stayed in and made sure he was all right, he might have been alive now..."¹ Peppiatt himself remembers: "Bacon’s suffering was palpable. His face had an almost transparent pallor, and a kind of uncanny coldness emanated from him, as if his emotions had consumed his energy."² When the painter returned to the studio and put brush to canvas, images of George Dyer poured out. We see him standing in a tilted, Expressionist space, fitting a key into a lock; we see his image projected on a screen and falling surreally on the mirror-like surface of a nearby table; we see him dying, vomiting in the sink; and dead, slumped on the toilet seat; we see his picture tacked to a wall like an icon, a private image of memento mori. It’s difficult to tell at times whether these paintings function as memorial, exorcism or some combination of both, but the overall mood is powerfully elegiac. In the months and years after the fatal Paris trip, Bacon transmuted his complex feelings about Dyer’s death into some of the best paintings of his career.

The Tate Britain’s Triptych–August 1972 is one of these. Bacon often used the triptych format and was well aware of its art historical resonance, the long line of small devotional triptychs and large altarpieces that all followed the same basic formula: a central panel depicting a scene from the life of Christ or a saint flanked by two wings displaying either subsidiary scenes or portraits of patron saints. Running counter to this illustrative, religious tradition is the example of Max Beckmann, whose triptychs present three superficially separate scenes. The deeper interconnectedness of Beckmann’s panels, like that of the stanzas or cantos in a Modernist poem, only becomes clear after long study and meditation. Bacon’s practice usually follows Beckmann, eschewing narrative in favor of a more poetic, Surrealistic collision of images. In the Tate triptych, however, he seems to reference the older tradition, creating a modern, personal variation on the form of a central sacred panel flanked by saints.

In the center we see two distorted figures furiously fucking on the floor–a standard Baconian sex scene. The left wing is a seated portrait of George Dyer, and the right wing (although the facial distortion here makes identification difficult) is a probable self-portrait of Bacon, similarly seated. The three canvases are strongly unified by color and composition (all four figures framed by black doorways), but the most interesting unifying element is rarely commented upon. The black triangles at the bottoms of the wings create a sense of perspectival recession that joins wings to center panel in a manner unprecedented in Bacon’s triptychs. Despite the slight variation from panel to panel in the level at which wall meets floor, it is almost as if we are in a small theatre and these three scenes are being enacted simultaneously on a single thrust stage that pushes out into the viewer’s space. In addition to overall cohesion, this effect gives the work a quality of startling immediacy.

Of the two seedy saints flanking the central sex scene, George Dyer is the more damaged. Like a fragment of ancient statuary, his powerfully realized upper body gives way to a jagged-edged void at the chest and abdomen. A single, thin line of white paint (invisible in most reproductions) crosses this void like the trajectory of a bullet. Farther down, the wonderful raised right leg, accentuated with creamy white highlights, is suddenly amputated at the ankle and melts into the other leg, which subsequently flows down into the thin, attenuated silhouette of a foot. His eyes closed as if he’s already dead, Dyer is pierced by darkness, and the pink, viscous shape that flows down the chair legs and puddles on the floor could be a surreal shadow, a pool of melodramatic blood, or his own life seeping away.

Through his closed, deadened eyes, Dyer seems to stare across the center panel at his double, his doppelganger, his lover and brother. The Bacon figure is like a rotated mirror image of Dyer. They sit in the same pose, in the same chair, against the same black doorway, and they face the same direction. This last point is a radical departure from traditional triptych form, where both wings face inward toward the sacred center, and it serves both to emphasize the two figures’ similarity and underscore their disconnectedness. Bacon sits with his back to Dyer, his eyes are closed, his head down. He is unaware of what’s happening behind him, and the position of his arm suggests masturbation. Enclosed in his own frame, he is solipsistically wanking, and the surreal shadow-pool at his feet might very well be a puddle of semen. More importantly, the line of white paint that passes through Dyer’s form on the opposite wing can also be read as a spurt of semen, a complex symbol mixing Bacon’s guilt with desire.

While the wings show us isolated and fragmented beings, the central panel is an image of sexual connection and completeness, of ultimate fusion. Two bodies magically melt together in the heat of vigorous sex. They are joined at the feet in a curving, tubular shape, and their upper bodies merge into an almost unreadable confusion of forms. Completely transcending his rather prosaic source material (photographs of two naked men wrestling by nineteenth-century photographer Eadward Muybridge), Bacon creates a vision of oceanic sexual union, of bodies joined like waves rolling together. This is the sacred center of his unholy triptych. This ecstatic feeling, Bacon is telling us, this sense of superhuman bliss that floods the body for a few seconds at orgasm, is the only kind of transcendence we can know. In a world without gods, where religion is no longer credible, this alone is not sham or superstition. This orgasmic leaping outside the self–what the French call petit mort, ‘little death’–this feeling of overflowing pleasure and absolute emptiness, is as close as human beings can come to a mystical fusion of opposites: self and other; being and nothingness; life and death. So it is fitting that Bacon’s characters are fucking on the threshold of darkness, in the liminal space between life and death. And it’s appropriate, too, that the painter doesn’t evade the violence. Bacon the masochist knows that pain and domination are as crucial to eroticism as pleasure and submission, and he revels in the paradox that during sex we are at our most transcendent and our most purely animal. Here the pink liquid that seemed like blood in one wing and semen in the other appears to become a synthesis of the two, an emanation of this vision of violent bliss.

But this pathway to pleasure has now closed for Bacon, who sits with his back to the scene. The couple have crossed the threshold and vanished; Dyer has disappeared into the dark. There is no consolation in this profoundly unsentimental vision of death; neither religious platitudes about an afterlife nor any Romantic ‘natural supernaturalism’ that finds consolation in the continuity of nature or the spirit. For Bacon, Adonais is dead as a doornail, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. So he lives on, keeps painting. "We work in the dark," says a Henry James character, "we do what we can..."³ And that may be the meaning of the work’s right wing. With Dyer’s death, Bacon has lost the possibility of sexual contact with this man, and he can only sit alone, disengaged from the other figures, masturbating. And when he comes, he comes in paint; a thick, pinkish, viscous liquid flows from his body. In this work, masturbation is a metaphor for solitary creation, a trope that Camille Paglia has identified in art from the paintings of ancient Egypt to the novels of Jean Genet (a writer whose works parallel Bacon’s in many ways). Alone with the canvas, alone with his guilt and grief, Bacon can still paint–and paint furiously, rage at the loss with the liquid force of his brushwork. In the face of destruction he can still create. Painting is the only thing left.

Recalling that Bacon’s earliest major works were Picasso-inspired Crucifixions and that throughout his career, with the famous screaming popes and other works, he frequently placed himself in conversation with the imagery of religious art, I am compelled to view this undeniably atheistic vision in religious terms. It is a religious painting without religion, a vision of transcendence without supernaturalism. This painting appreciates that the age of St. Theresa is long gone, and that ecstasy now comes at the hands of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘naked angels’ instead of Bernini’s tastefully draped ones. And it appreciates that the possibility of ecstasy, like all possibility, ends with the annihilation that is death. Contra Dylan Thomas, death shall have its dominion, and that dominion will be everywhere. If religious painting deals with the ultimate meanings of life, death and afterlife, this is a great religious painting, perhaps the last great work in a tradition stretching back to Giotto and Cimabue (whom Bacon especially admired). This is Francis Bacon’s devotional triptych for an age of atheistic Existentialism. It is an altarpiece for our time.

NOTES

1. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon, 247.

2. Ibid., 248.

3. James, "The Middle Years," Selected Tales, 254.

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