The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

  For Freud, what made the wedding diabolically complicated was not just that the groom was Lorna’s son, or that he was now married to Lorna’s niece, Kitty, while having an affair with the bride, Anne Dunn, but that Freud and Michael Wishart, who had shared rooms in London while still in their teens and then in Paris after the war, had themselves been amorously involved. Thus, finding himself in the unusual position of having been involved sexually not only with the bride but also the groom and the groom’s mother, it’s no surprise, perhaps, that Freud chose to stay away from the festivities. According to Dunn, he was jealous—and not just of her. Nonetheless, he had Kitty act as his eyes and ears, and as the party progressed she was seen by other guests going to the telephone to give him updates.

  That 1950 party was held in the home of Bacon, who lived there—another unusual arrangement—with his older lover, Eric Hall, and Jessie Lightfoot, an elderly woman who had been his childhood nanny. The flat was in Cromwell Place, South Kensington, on the ground floor of a building that had once been the home of the painter John Everett Millais. Bacon used the large space at the back of the flat—it had been a billiards room—as his studio. The same space had also been used as a studio by another earlier occupant, the photographer E. O. Hoppé. A bridging figure in the transition from soft-focus Pictorialist photography to crisp, sharp-focus modernism, Hoppé was an émigré from Munich who turned out the best photographic portraiture in Edwardian London. He also designed for the theater. Various studio props, including hangings, a black, umbrella-like cloth, and a large dais, all used by Hoppé to make his exquisite, ingratiating portraits of society beauties and great men, remained in the building, and now became props in Bacon’s very different style of portraiture.

  It was in this studio that Freud had first seen Bacon’s work—specifically, a recently completed work called simply Painting [see Plate 2]. Half a century on, Freud still remembered the event. He referred to it as “that absolutely marvelous one, the one with the umbrella.”

  It was indeed Bacon’s most dazzling achievement up until then. In a room the color of pink slime with drawn purple blinds, a man dressed in black sits in front of a hanging carcass of meat in the pitch-black shadow of an umbrella. The umbrella obscures all but his chin and mouth, which is open to reveal a lower row of straight teeth and an upper lip that has been pulped and bloodied. Although the paint handling is broad, the composition is peppered with very particular details: the yellow flower pinned to the man’s chest beneath his white collar; the Oriental rug below, rendered with a sort of smudged pointillist brio; the semicircular railing that carves out an arena-like space. (This last was a device Bacon, who was nothing if not theatrical, would use again and again in succeeding decades.)

  Freud never forgot it.

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  BACON’S CHILDHOOD WAS VERY different from Freud’s. Born in Dublin in 1909, he was the second of five children. Like Freud, he had a famous ancestor—the Elizabethan chancellor and philosopher after whom he was named. His father, Eddy Bacon, was a retired army captain. Eddy had fought in the final stages of the Boer War with the Durham Light Infantry. He saw four months of action and was awarded a Queen’s Medal with clasps. He resigned from the army shortly before his wedding to Winnie Firth, whose family, from Sheffield, had amassed a fortune in steel; but he continued to style himself “Captain Bacon.” He was known as an ill-tempered, argumentative bully with a puritanical streak. Alcohol was banned from the house, but he allowed himself to gamble on racehorses, which he trained with scant success. He ran the household along military lines.

  Francis spent long stretches of his childhood with his maternal grandmother, Granny Supple, in County Laois. But when living with his parents—and despite chronic and severe asthma—he was made to go pony riding at every opportunity. For days afterward, he would be bedridden, struggling for breath. Intending to “make a man” of his sickly son, Captain Bacon regularly arranged for the grooms he employed to horsewhip him. He would watch, too—or so claimed Bacon. (Much of this period in his life is known only through his own testimony, which tended to emphasize cruelty and drama, possibly at the expense of veracity.) Bacon liked to trail these same grooms around—“I just liked to be near them,” he said—and in his early teens he had his first sexual experiences with them.

  Just before his fifteenth birthday, Bacon was sent to board for two years at a school in Cheltenham. By this time, he seems to have developed a penchant for dressing up in female attire. A year or two later, his father discovered him admiring himself in the mirror while trying on his mother’s underwear. He flew into a rage and cast his son out of the house. Humiliated, rejected, and surely confused (he later declared that as a teen he had harbored erotic feelings toward his father, too), Bacon fled to London and was eventually sent to stay with an older cousin, who took him to Berlin. Charged with subjecting the boy to some strict discipline, this new guardian—a racehorse breeder like Eddy—turned out to be bisexual. He was also, Bacon told John Richardson, “absolutely vicious.”

  —

  AFTER BERLIN, BACON, still a teenager, spent a year and a half in Paris, and it was here that he first became serious about art. He saw films and lots of art exhibitions. One show that particularly caught his imagination was an exhibition of Picasso’s neoclassical drawings, inspired by Ingres, at Paul Rosenberg’s gallery. He quickly fell under the spell of the protean Spaniard—according to Richardson, “the only contemporary artist whose influence he would ever acknowledge.”

  When he returned to London in 1928, Bacon set out on a short-lived career as an interior designer, making furniture and rugs in a modernist idiom. He lived with his old nanny, Jessie Lightfoot—a woman who meant more to Bacon than his own distant mother. Nanny Lightfoot was an emotional support—the one steady presence in his life. Much of the day she spent knitting at the back of Bacon’s studio, and she appears to have slept through the nights on the kitchen table. She was very nearly blind. And yet, in the broader sense, she looked out for Bacon. She helped him to cook. The two had no regular source of income, and Nanny Lightfoot was not above shoplifting if the situation called for it (although for the most part she confined her role to providing cover for Bacon’s own larcenous sprees). She also helped him organize roulette parties—which were very much against the law. The money they brought in was not always enough to cover the parties’ lavish catering, but it was useful nonetheless. Standing guard by the only toilet, Nanny Lightfoot extorted generous tips from gamblers with bloated bladders.

  She was also a gatekeeper for Bacon’s love life: Using “Francis Lightfoot” as his pseudonym, Bacon placed ads offering his services as a “gentleman’s companion” in the personal columns in The Times (these ran on the front page in those days). The replies “poured in,” according to Bacon’s biographer, Michael Peppiatt. It was Nanny Lightfoot who made the selections, and her criteria were primarily financial.

  One of these gentlemen was Eric Hall. “Very severe, and very good-looking,” as Freud remembered him, he was a high-powered businessman and an epicurean, who was also a justice of the peace, a borough councilor, and the chairman of a London symphony orchestra. He had a wife and family, but after years of staying intermittently with Bacon and his nanny, he chose to join them on a more permanent basis.

  Back in 1933, Bacon had painted a work, Crucifixion, that was based on Picasso’s 1925 painting Three Dancers. But it was poorly received, and Bacon was disillusioned. So for most of the next decade, he painted only intermittently, trying out aspects of Surrealism, Post-Impressionism, and Cubism. When the war arrived, Bacon was deemed unfit for service, but he volunteered for the Air Raid Precautions rescue service. He was dismissed when dust released by the bombing of London triggered severe asthma. Hall took him out of the city for a while, and in a cottage in Hampshire he worked on a painting based, very loosely, on a photograph of Hitler getting out of his car at a Nazi rally. The painting is no longer extant, but for Bacon, the formula—painting portentous images in
spired indirectly by photographs—was a kind of breakthrough.

  In 1943, Hall took a lease on the ground-floor flat in the building at Cromwell Place. It was there that Freud first saw Painting.

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  STARTING IN 1945, FREUD often visited Bacon’s Cromwell Place studio in the afternoons. He also ran into him regularly in Soho. Freud had been twenty-two when they met; Bacon was thirty-five. He was painting furiously now, and what went on in his studio astonished Freud. Bacon was snapping British modernism out of its complacent, literary, neo-romantic past and bringing it into line with a new world scarred by war, hollowed out by futility.

  Bacon himself must have been almost as astonished. He had gained a certain amount of attention within Britain’s small and provincial art circles, but no one had been overly impressed. It was only in 1944—the year before his first meeting with Freud—that he had broken through to something strange and troubling with a painted triptych he called Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The figures in question were hideous, humped, hairless shapes with open maws, bandaged or nonexistent eyes, long necks, and tapering legs. He showed them the following year in a group show at the Lefevre Gallery in London—the same gallery that had given Freud his first solo show the year before.

  Part of what distinguished Bacon was that his imagination was responsive not just to the expected modernist stalwarts imported from the Continent, but to a whole new image bank provided by photography and film. Ever since he had seen Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in Berlin, and seen Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion photographs of humans and animals in motion, he had been obsessed by the speed and discontinuity of these modern media, and especially by the way film footage and photography hinted at loss, disruption, and death. Much of what he attempted misfired—it seemed clumsy, overly contrived, or badly designed, and Bacon destroyed it. But at least he was not looking over his shoulder.

  Freud was awed—as much by Bacon’s approach to his work as by the imagery he came up with. “Sometimes,” he said, “I’d go around in the afternoon and [Francis] would say, ‘I’ve done something really extraordinary today.’ And he’d done it all in that day. Amazing…He would slash them sometimes. Or say how he was really fed up and felt they were no good, and destroy them.”

  Bacon described Painting as “a series of accidents mounting on top of each other.” “If anything ever does work in my case,” he said elsewhere, “it works from that moment when consciously I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  —

  IT’S EASY TO IMAGINE the electrifying effect this kind of talk must have had on Freud. His own work, for all its gnarly fascinations, still amounted to juvenilia. He had been painting portraits and still lifes, or combinations of the two. Prickly studies of asymmetrical objects—both human and animal, vegetable and inanimate—all subjected to his intense, hawklike scrutiny. His drawing was increasingly fastidious and stylized. The wandering, high-spirited gaucheness of his teenage years was in the process of being disciplined. He had lately adopted a penchant for careful cross-hatching and stippling, both derived from engraving techniques. A classical calm, reminiscent of the nineteenth-century painter Ingres and reinforced by close attention to the folds and patterns of clothes, had taken possession of his line. He was toying, too, with unusual effects of light: reproducing every dimple, for instance, on the backlit skin of an unripe tangerine. He made drawings of boys in tailored jackets with scarves or ties and big, brimming eyes. He rendered hair strand by strand. His most powerful painting was a still life of a dead bird—a heron splayed out on a flat surface, every feather of its disheveled plumage accorded its own distinct shade of gray.

  How could he not be fascinated by Bacon’s risky, theatrical approach? Or by his utter lack of sentimentality about his own efforts? “I realized immediately,” Freud said much later, “that his work related immediately to how he felt about life. Mine on the other hand seemed very labored. That was because it was a terrific lot of labor for me to do anything…Francis, on the other hand, would have ideas which he put down and then destroyed and then quickly put down again. It was his attitude that I admired. The way he was completely ruthless about his own work.”

  Just as important was Bacon’s visceral love of oil paint. He handled paint with an urgency that, at this stage, was entirely absent from Freud’s own careful filling in of the spaces defined by his lines. There was something chancy and erotic about it. And then there was Bacon’s commitment. “He was extraordinarily disciplined,” recalled Freud. For days and sometimes weeks at a time, he might float through life. But when it came time to create—usually with a show imminent—he shut himself in his studio and worked without interruption.

  —

  BUT WHAT AFFECTED FREUD just as powerfully as Bacon’s work was his attitude to life in general. He had an expansiveness, a generosity, a way of negotiating people and situations that came as a revelation to Freud. “His work impressed me,” he said, “but his personality affected me.”

  When asked what had struck him about Bacon when they first met, Freud’s reply was both fond and funny. “Really admirable,” he said, rolling the r’s at the back of his throat (a persistent holdover from his Berlin upbringing). “I’ll give you a simple example: I used to have a lot of fights. It wasn’t because I liked fighting, it was really just that people said things to me to which I felt the only reply was to hit them. If Francis was there, he’d say, ‘Don’t you think you ought to try and charm them?’ And I thought, Well…! Before that, I never really thought about my ‘behavior,’ as such—I just thought about what I wanted to do and I did it. And quite often I wanted to hit people. Francis wasn’t didactic in any way. But it could be said that if you’re an adult, hitting someone is really a shortcoming, couldn’t it? I mean, there should be some other way of dealing with it.”

  The two men were by now close. But there were other artists, in many ways just as important—including Frank Auerbach, who remained Freud’s closest long-term friend and most trusted confidant. In the aftermath of war, the atmosphere was alive and permissive: “It was sexy in a way, this semi-destroyed London,” recalled Auerbach. “There was a curious feeling of liberty about because everybody who was living there had escaped death in some way.” (Like Freud, Auerbach was born in Berlin, but he had not been so lucky; his own parents had died in a concentration camp in 1942, three years after sending him to safety in England.) They would all meet at night in Soho, hopping among familiar haunts, bumping into one another usually by chance rather than design. There was Wheeler’s, Bacon’s favorite restaurant. There was also the Gargoyle Club, high above the corner of Dean and Meard streets. It had a ballroom, a drawing room, a room for coffee, and an atmosphere (according to its chronicler David Luke) of “mystery suffused with tender eroticism.” Henri Matisse had designed some of the interiors; some were in a Moorish vein, with walls covered in mirror fragments. Opposite the Gargoyle, also on Dean Street, was the Colony Room, otherwise known as Muriel’s, after the proprietor, Muriel Belcher. It was a small room at the top of some ramshackle stairs—the sort of place, as Bacon’s friend Daniel Farson recalled, “where you couldn’t get much for ten bob but you could get an awful lot for nothing.” These were the places where men and women would drink, gossip, and dance, in between sessions of poker or roulette. Painting was not often discussed.

  Freud would often leave these venues in the early evening and go back to his studio to work from a prearranged sitter—he liked to work through the night. Bacon would stay on, sometimes until morning. His binge-like work habits were less structured than Freud’s.

  Freud marveled at how Bacon gathered people around, deploying his charm, which seemed to have something volcanic and indiscriminate about it. No matter whose company he found himself in, remembered Freud, Bacon “would get them to talk in the most amazing way. He’d go up to strangers—a businessman in a City suit, for instance—and say, ‘It’s pointless being so quiet a
nd pompous. After all, we only live once and we should be able to discuss everything. Tell me, what are your sexual preferences?’ Quite often in such cases, the man would join us for lunch, and Francis would absolutely charm him and make him drunk, and somehow just change his life a bit. Of course, you can’t bring things out in people that aren’t there—but I was amazed at what there was!” Freud’s social manner was different. He had a gift for intimate conversation, and for surprising acts. But he was much less extroverted than Bacon. There was something secretive about him.

  Freud was attracted, too, to Bacon’s derision, his fearless and often hilarious expressions of scorn and contempt. He would later call Bacon “the wisest and wildest person” he ever knew. Both adjectives were carefully chosen, and express utmost admiration. But they were uttered decades later, when Bacon was long gone. In this early period of their acquaintance, Freud’s admiration was not distantly reverent but intimate, alive, and responsive. It was complicated.

  Inevitably, their friendship aroused jealousy in Eric Hall, who came to loathe Freud—probably, Freud told me, “because he thought, wrongly, that Francis had some kind of relationship with me.”

  Anne Dunn would later claim that Freud “had a kind of hero-worshipping crush on Bacon, though I don’t think it was ever consummated.” What seems undeniable is that the relationship was not only intense but asymmetrical. Bacon was attracted to Freud, who had a way of talking about art that the older man found immensely compelling and tried to emulate. Insecure about his own lack of facility as a draftsman, Bacon was also eager to learn what he could from his younger friend. Freud was “funnier and more intelligent than Bacon’s average acolytes,” according to Feaver. But Bacon was indifferent (or so Freud believed) to his work. (When asked if his own interest in Bacon’s work was reciprocated by the older man, Freud replied: “I’d have thought he was completely uninterested. But I don’t know.”) Freud, on the other hand, for one of the only times in his life, was truly in thrall to another person.