Book Review

Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology

Published at Hyperallergic as A Multi-faceted Look at Francis Bacon’s Psychology

book cover

“Head I” (1948) Oil and tempera on hardboard, Approx. 40½ x 29½ in. (103 x 75 cm) – irregular,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2019
In association with Thames & Hudson, The Estate of Francis Bacon has published the first in
a series of books intended to elucidate Francis Bacon’s emotional motivations behind his
celebrated paintings through the perspective of art, neuroscience and psychology. I say
elucidate, rather than explain, as Bacon constantly railed against the banality of illustration,
albeit his source imagery was often illustrative photography: Eadweard Muybridge’s naked
male wrestlers, and perplexing photos from spiritualist séances, and a screaming image from
Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film The Battleship Potempkin, being foremost examples. But Bacon
famously tried to reject all narrative closure concerning his paintings. As I do, this book wishes
to respect that wish and to protect Bacon’s work against the crippling crunch of closure.

On the surface of it, Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology, is absolutely splendid to
look at. Printed on lush mat paper stock are a plethora of color reproductions of Bacon’s
paintings and a few images that influenced him, like the late-1920s biomorphic surrealist period
that Pablo Picasso created on the beach at Cannes. Like with the darkly heated “Head I” (1948)
and enigmatic elegiac “Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer” (1968), many reproductions
gloriously take up a full page. For me this is excellent, in that I cannot abide sustained looking
at Bacon’s actual paintings that sit behind the glass that he insisted upon putting over his
visceral surfaces. Wondering why he so insisted, I found Joanna Elizabeth Russell has relayed
that Bacon used glass to separate them from their surroundings (that is what a frame without
glass does too) and because it was impossible for him to varnish them as he used reverse
unprimed canvas. Bacon wished to preserve the distinction between the matt canvas surface
and his painting of the figure with thicker glossy areas of paint which he thought would be lost
through the use of varnish (so leave them unvarnished). Durham also reports that Bacon felt
that glass was a better substitute than varnish “for unifying the painting and giving added depth
without losing this matt surface” (the matt is absolutely destroyed with glass’s shiny reflectivity)
and that although glass is undoubtedly beneficial for the protection of the delicate surfaces from
the accumulation of dirt—this was never cited as a motive by Bacon.

The end result, for me, is that the glass kills the unaffected blasé grandeur of the paintings and
tames the vividness of his spasmodic curling strokes. Could someone be bold and please chuck
the glass for Bacon’s upcoming exhibition Books and Painting at Centre Pompidou? For I agree
with Bacon (in 1963) that great art unlocks the valves of intuition and perception about the
human situation at a deep level. So one must spend time looking deeply at his paintings,
gleaning the haptic thought embedded in them, and that requires memory acting in unison
with the imagination unhindered by a glass impediment.

Contemplating-feeling the intensity of Bacon’s images as I leisurely read the book’s first text by
artist Christopher Bucklow, my mind naturally drew comparisons with Gilles Deleuze’s book
Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation that stressed sensation’s cognitive component, but reproduced
no Bacon paintings at all. Bucklow, by tracking an asserted daimon unconscious urge within
Bacon’s oeuvre as the scourged white male body, delivers some eloquent and compelling
passages that stress the importance of Bacon’s memory-fueled-instincts, blurred by booze, of
his sexual attraction to his father in shaping his sensibility for physical lust and his comparable
visceral ideas of art. The story goes that his father found the teenaged Bacon wearing his
mother’s underwear and brutally beat him in the same Irish horse stable where Francis first
enjoyed rough sex with a stable boy. Thereafter, women’s sexy fishnet stockings became a
mainstay of the artist’s wardrobe as a way to ward off his bouts of melancholia.

Next, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Steven Jaron brings a neuroaesthetic reading to
Bacon’s sensate self-pleasures concerning his destructive drinking, sexual brutality, and
gambling and risk, maintaining that these elements became part of Bacon’s ‘hard wiring.’
Intelligently, Jaron’s psychological-based essay fruitfully turns to Deleuze’s attempt at a
philosophy of immanence (a.k.a. transcendental empiricism) with Bacon and his art as example
when questioning some of the implications of the artist’s habitual compulsive obsessions with
‘the wound.’ Indeed, Deleuze has clearly described how Bacon ascends from actual wounded
figurations to virtual sensations through his use of the diagrammatic field of consistency.
According to Deleauze, Bacon found through his détournement of illustration-type images a way
to paint in the non-narrative sweet spot of sensation that oscillates between the actual and the
virtual.

I find this argument compelling, but Bacon’s sensation of sensational ‘wounding’ seems most
concisely explained (if one, after all, wishes a convincing explanation) by Bacon’s flagrant
masochistic ferocity. As Jaron mentions, it is well known that Bacon began in Berlin in 1927 to
enjoy the brutality of sadomasochism. He especially enjoyed being beaten up by his great love
Peter Lacy, who died of suspicious causes in Tangiers on the cusp of Bacon’s 1962 Tate
retrospective. Bacon’s relationship with George Dyer, whom he met in late-1963, was also laced
with stormy masochism and ended in tragedy. Just before the opening of Bacon’s 1971
Retrospective at the Grand Palais, Dyer was found dead from a drink/drug overdose squatting
on the toilet in their bathroom at the Hotel des Saint-Pères.

“Portrait of George Dyer Crouching” (1966) Oil on canvas 78 x 58 in. (198 x 147 cm), Private collection © The Estate of
Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2019

“Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer” (1968) Oil on canvas 78 x 58 in. (198 x 147.5 cm) Sara Hildénin Foundation,
Sara Hildénin Art Museum, Tampere, Finland © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2019

Such brushes with violent sex and death speak directly to the implied risks concerning Bacon’s
virtuoso hit-or-miss engagements with the fluidity of oil paint: risks of creative-destruction that
obviously enriched his matière. Bacon’s flamboyant painterliness, arrived at as if by chance or
accident on flat monochrome fields of unassailable aplomb, exemplifies Andre Breton’s
Surrealist declaration that ‘beauty will be convulsive or cease to be.’ Yet Dada-based Surrealist
chance operations are scarcely mentioned in the book. Perhaps because in his late work Bacon
dispensed with flicking brushwork accidents and chance.

The psychoanalyst Darian Leader also offers stimulating insights into the artist’s emotional and
painterly flagellations by assigning Bacon’s drive to negate debt a central position in his artistic
motivations (gambling and drinking debts, but also his artistic appropriation debts). This insight
is followed up with a meditation on Bacon and the mirror from a Lacanian psychoanalytic
perspective, including two key inverted mirrored incidents of great emotional impact for the
artist. Peter Lacy and George Dyer both died, assumedly of alcohol and drug poisoning, on the
eve of Bacon’s most important art exhibitions, but it is weirder than that. As Leader tells it,
Bacon and Lacy broke up when Lacy found Bacon in flagrante delicto with an Arab rent boy in
their bed in Tangiers; and Bacon found Dyer with an Arab rent boy in their hotel room in
Paris, just before he croaked. Leader next speculates on the impact that Bacon’s asthma may
have had on his reoccurring depictions of the human mouth, particularly in terms of the scream
from The Battleship Potempkin that Bacon repeatedly painted in his Pope series inspired by
Velázquez’s painting “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” (1650). Leader focuses next on the
ejaculatory spurts of white paint Bacon would flick at his paintings in terms of the late-night
beatings the artist would seek out cruising for rough sex in Earl’s Court after a through round
of drunken bar-hopping in London’s West End.

Next, John Onians explores Bacon’s creative-destructive instinct in terms of neural plasticity
and probes Bacon’s mind through a study of the curved horizontal lines in Bacon’s paintings.
Onians postulates that these curved spatial lines come from the modernist tables Bacon made
in the late-1920s (one is reproduced here) in the style of Le Corbusier and also points out that
these curved thin lines echo the curved rails of the horse racing track where Bacon’s father lived
out his career as a horse trainer and breeder. This is followed by a review of Bacon’s more
general interest in animal intensity.

Semir Zeki and Tomohiro Ishizu close the book out with a fascinating (if dry) neuroscientific
academic paper on the brain science behind Bacon’s method of shocking by way of facial and
figure deformation.
 “Figure at a Washbasin” (1976) Oil and dry transfer lettering on canvas 78 x 58 in. (198 x 147.5 cm) Museo de Arte
Contemporáneo de Caracas © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2019

Though probably not every extravagant extreme of the artist’s life and work has been addressed
here, Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology is a rewarding plunge into Bacon’s brain
that every painter and lover of painting should take.

Joseph Nechvatal

Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology, edited by Martin Harrison with essays by
Christopher Bucklow, Steven Jaron, Darian Leader, John Onians and Semir Zeki is available at Amazon.