Two Figures was a portrayal of Lacy and Bacon having sex. The two male figures’ faces are blurred, evoking movement and a psychic urgency heightened by the bared teeth of the lower figure. Both faces are marked by the vertical lines that also divide the dark background, so that they evoke both prison bars and rows of searchlights pointing skyward. At a time when homosexuality was still very much illegal, and almost never depicted in art, it was an astonishingly raw, honest, and electrifying image. For many years, it was considered too confronting to display in public.
“The creative process is a little like the act of making love,” said Bacon. “It can be as violent as fucking, like an orgasm or an ejaculation. The result is often disappointing, but the process is highly exciting.”
Two Figures was first shown in an upstairs room at the Hanover Gallery, and sold to Freud for £100. It was a painting he kept with him until his death. It hung upstairs in Freud’s Notting Hill home alongside paintings by Frank Auerbach, and in the same room as a sculpture of a dancer splaying her legs by Degas. Many requests came from museums to borrow it for exhibitions. Freud agreed to lend it to the Tate’s 1962 retrospective, but never lent it out after that, and it wasn’t seen in public again.
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BLACKWOOD WAS FOND OF BACON. She was beguiled by homosexuality in general, and also, of course, by the very particular instance of it that he represented. What’s more, their backgrounds had a surprising amount in common. They had both had a horsey, Anglo-Irish childhood and detested fox hunting. They were extremely well read. And they both, in their different ways, had a nose for the abyss—a self-destructive streak.
Blackwood remembered Bacon arriving one lunch at Wheeler’s straight from the doctor’s: “He came rolling in with the confident walk of a pirate making adjustments to the slope of the wind-tilted deck,” she wrote.
“He said that his doctor had just told him that his heart was in tatters. Not a ventricle was functioning. His doctor had rarely seen such a hopeless and diseased organ. Francis had been warned that if he had one more drink or even allowed himself to become excited, his useless heart would fail and he would die.
“Having told us the bad news he waved to the waiter and ordered a bottle of champagne, and once we had finished it he went to order a succession of new bottles. He was ebullient throughout the evening but Lucian and I went home feeling very depressed. He seemed doomed. We were convinced he was going to die, aged forty. We took the doctor’s diagnosis seriously. No one was ever going to stop him from drinking. No one would ever prevent him from becoming excited. We even wondered that night if we would ever see him again. But he lived to be eighty-two.”
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IN 1954, FREUD AND BLACKWOOD were again in Paris. They had been married less than a year, but something was going wrong. Freud was beginning to sense that Blackwood, for all her brilliance and beauty and wildness, might prove more than he could handle. “The thing is,” observed Ross, the editor and poet who later became Blackwood’s lover, “you had to be very loving to get the best out of her. I think otherwise you might find yourself in all sorts of chaos.”
“It was the coldest winter in history,” remembered Dunn. “Caroline was frozen, and depressed by then. She knew her marriage was starting to get unfixed at that time.”
A Freud painting from 1954, Hotel Bedroom, suggests, if nothing else, the gravity of the young couple’s predicament. Blackwood is shown in the foreground, lying in bed, enfolded in white, only her left hand emerging to press long, white fingers to her lips and sallow cheek. (Her whole body’s pose eerily foreshadows Freud’s much later series portraying his depressed, bed-bound, and freshly widowed mother.) The stalking, anxious figure in the background, backlit by diffuse sunlight coming in through a large window, is Freud himself. Hands sunk in pockets, he looks haunted, at a loss.
Blackwood was prone to depression, and an incipient alcoholic. Her drinking, which blighted her entire adult life, began in earnest during these years with Freud, and especially in Soho—at the Colony Room, at Wheeler’s, and at the Gargoyle. “She was very silent until drinking suddenly switched her on,” claimed Ross, “and then she was very dramatic and over-elaborate in her conversation. But very funny.”
Freud himself was never a serious, self-destructive drinker; remaining in control mattered too much to him. It was Bacon who led this dance—Bacon with his epic benders, his charisma, his compulsive generosity, all of which Blackwood found terribly seductive.
Neither husband nor wife had been faithful, although Freud’s straying was, as usual, more egregious than hers. The collapse of a marriage—especially a marriage between two volatile personalities—is never straightforward. And yet Freud later said, in a typically sly construction, that “if there’s such a thing as fault, putting it mildly it was completely my fault.” Blackwood herself claimed that the main reason for the collapse of the marriage was Freud’s gambling. It was an obsession that lasted decades. Freud was in thrall to it. Breaking even was the one thing he detested.
Even if Blackwood’s claim is only partially true, it’s certainly the case that Freud’s whole mentality through these years was infected by Bacon’s devotion to leading a life of chance. When Daniel Farson, who was part of the Soho circle, asked Blackwood why her marriage to Freud had ended, she asked, “Have you ever driven with him?”
“Yes,” he replied, “I was so terrified that when he stopped at a red light, for once, I threw myself out.”
“Exactly,” came Blackwood’s reply. “That’s what being married to him was like.”
—
IT WAS BLACKWOOD WHO left Freud, rather than the other way around. She left their home one night and checked into a hotel. Freud was derailed. Nothing like this—nothing so painful—had happened to him before.
Freud responded over the next few years by gambling more than ever, getting into fights, and saying cruel things to Blackwood. Bacon was concerned for his welfare. He asked Charlie Lumley, a young, Cockney neighbor from Paddington, to watch him. He was afraid Freud would jump off the roof. “And so I had to sort of babysit him for a while,” said Lumley.
Blackwood later married the Polish American composer Israel Citkowitz and then the poet Robert Lowell, with whom she had a famously tumultuous relationship. Lowell died—the story is often told—in a taxicab in New York in 1977. He was returning to his home after a final failed attempt to repair his relationship with Blackwood. When the driver arrived at his home on 67th Street, he couldn’t be roused. A doorman summoned Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer whom Lowell had left for Blackwood many years earlier, but who lived in the same building. She found him slumped in the car, dead, but still clutching to his body Freud’s portrait of her, Girl in Bed.
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FOR BACON, THE YEARS between 1952 and 1956 were, according to his biographer, “four years of continuous horror, with nothing but violent rows.” Bacon’s whole relationship with Lacy, he said, “was the most total disaster from the start. Being in love with someone in that extreme way—being totally, physically obsessed by someone—is like having some dreadful disease. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”And yet in many ways Bacon’s creativity was stimulated by the unfolding debacle. Despite the turmoil, and the constant moving from house to house and studio to studio, these were the years that saw him truly come into his own as an artist.
He painted around forty pictures in 1952 and ’53. Many more were destroyed, either by Lacy or by Bacon himself. He worked, as often as not, in series, painting sets of images that riffed on sphinxes, life masks of William Blake, and screaming heads, often set within transparent boxes and set off by Bacon’s signature vertically striated backgrounds. The most celebrated of the series, the set of eight paintings of a pope, inspired by Velázquez, grew out of four abandoned attempts to paint from the critic David Sylvester. The series itself he painted in two weeks. With each picture, the pope’s face grows less composed, more contorted with rage and despair. To some extent, it’s clear, these ar
e portraits of Lacy.
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BACON WAS GAINING IN notoriety. He had his first New York shows in 1953. He wrote his first “manifesto,” of sorts—an appreciation of the painter Matthew Smith that articulated many of his own deeply felt convictions about art. Critics such as John Russell and Sylvester were beginning to write about his work. And collectors were buying it.
Bacon later claimed that Lacy hated his painting from the beginning. His vicious, obliterating tantrums were violent in ways that Bacon could neither anticipate nor steer. But this was precisely why he was so drawn to them. Whatever the reason—his sadistic father; his self-loathing; the simple, desperate need for a transporting loss of self—he yearned for humiliation, and for a total loss of control. It was only Lacy who could convincingly deliver all this.
It was never going to last forever. But Bacon was willing to sustain a huge amount of damage—including to his friendship with Freud—before it became untenable.
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FREUD STRUGGLED FROM THE beginning to come to grips with Bacon’s new relationship with Lacy. The more deranged and violent Lacy became, the more Bacon seemed to love him. It was a situation that confused and upset Freud. He wanted to understand. Ultimately, however, he couldn’t.
On one occasion in 1952, Lacy, in one of his monstrous rages, threw Bacon through a window. Both men were drunk at the time, which may have saved Bacon: He fell fifteen feet and survived, but his face, especially around one eye, was badly damaged. The incident precipitated a quarrel between Bacon and Freud that Freud never forgot.
“When I saw Francis,” he told me, still appalled by the memory half a century later, “one of his eyes was hanging out and he was covered in scars. I didn’t really understand the relationship—after all, you don’t. But I was so upset seeing him like this that I got hold of [Lacy’s] collar and twisted it around.”
Freud wanted a fight, but Lacy didn’t defend himself, and the challenge fizzled out. “He would never have hit me because he was a ‘gentleman,’ ” said Freud—“he would never get into a fight. The violence between them was a sexual thing. I didn’t really understand all this.” But the upshot was that Freud, at least as he remembered it, didn’t really talk to Bacon for about three or four years after that. “The truth is,” he said, “Francis really minded about this man more than anyone.”
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BACON CONTINUED TO PAINT Lacy well after the incident that caused Freud to intervene. In a sense, all his pictures of the later 1950s were attempts to come to grips with him. Their relationship continued even after 1956, when Lacy moved to Tangier and found work playing the piano in Dean’s Bar, the establishment opened in 1937 by “Joseph Dean” (formerly a cross-dressing rent-boy, hustler, and drug supplier called Don Kimfull). Tangier was an international haven, commodious to poets, painters, drug takers, criminals, spies, and novelists. When Bacon visited in 1956 and again the following year, he got to know William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, as well as Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles. He took to going around town with the gangster Ronnie Kray, a paranoid schizophrenic who, with his brother Reggie, masterminded protection rackets and other criminal activities, including murder. Ronnie, wrote Peppiatt, “had taken a distinct liking to the ease of homosexual relations in the Arab port.”
Bowles remembered Bacon at the time as “a man about to burst from internal pressures.” Lacy, meanwhile, had entered into a fatal pact with the sinister Mr. Dean: To pay off his bar bill, he was to play the piano until closing each night. For an alcoholic—and particularly for one with Lacy’s prodigious capacity for self-destruction—this was surefire suicide. The longer he played, the more he ran up his bill, scuttling whatever hope he harbored of paying it off. By the time Bacon arrived for his first visit in 1956, wrote Peppiatt, “Lacy was already indentured to Dean’s.”
By 1958, Lacy’s affair with Bacon was essentially over. But even as both men made full use of the availability in Tangier of other sexual partners, they were still emotionally, psychologically, and sexually intertwined, and the violence between them did not abate. More than once, Bacon was seen wandering the streets at night, badly beaten. At one point, the British consul was moved to intervene, notifying the police chief in Tangier of his concerns. After investigating the matter, the police chief reported back: “Sorry, Monsieur le Consul-General, but there’s nothing to be done. Monsieur Bacon likes it.”
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IN 1954, FREUD AND Bacon were both chosen—along with a third artist, the abstract painter Ben Nicholson—to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, then as now the world’s most prestigious and closely watched international showcase for contemporary art. It was a coup for both artists. The man responsible was the pavilion’s commissioner, Herbert Read. Nicholson, who was in his late fifties, might have expected to attract the lion’s share of esteem and attention, but he was relegated to a smaller, side gallery. Read, justifying the decision, claimed that Bacon’s “immense and gloomy” work required the large gallery’s “cruel light.” Even though his works were smaller and much less dramatic, Freud, strangely, exhibited in the same grand gallery alongside Bacon—although, at thirty-three, he was very much the junior partner. But the paintings he exhibited had their own strange force, and they were in many ways a distillation of the last three years of his life. Among them were two portraits of Kitty (Girl with a Kitten and Girl with a White Dog); one of Caroline and himself in Paris (Hotel Bedroom); a painting of a banana tree in Jamaica; Interior in Paddington; and the small, subsequently stolen portrait of Bacon.
For the occasion, Freud produced a written manifesto, titled Some Thoughts on Painting. It is the only statement of its kind in Freud’s entire career. It was a young man’s gambit (in his maturity Freud had little time for earnest public utterances)—but also, you suspect, a necessary and vital shoring up. At a moment when his own art was in a state of maximum flux, and most heavily under the sway of Bacon, he was choosing to set down in writing his deepest convictions. They doubled as ambitions, statements of intent.
Prepared initially for a BBC radio interview, and edited by David Sylvester, Freud’s words were subsequently published in the July issue of Stephen Spender’s magazine Encounter. They begin with the statement that his aim as an artist was to produce an intensification of reality. Something that was more than just “realistic,” in other words. Everything Freud went on to write in this carefully constructed, highly self-conscious statement—which had none of Bacon’s lightning wit or camp bravado—stressed heightened feeling, intimacy, the making known of secrets, and the primacy of truth-to-life over aesthetics.
Many of the statements echo Bacon: the idea, for instance, of giving “a completely free rein to any feelings or sensations.” Or the linked notion that art will degenerate if it is not an unimpeded vehicle of the artist’s “sensation.” And just as Bacon defined art as “obsession with life,” so Freud wrote: “A painter’s tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what is suitable for him to do in art.”
And yet, you also feel Freud fighting hard to etch out crucial differences. He insists, for instance, on keeping his subjects “under closest observation: if this is done, day and night, the subject—he, she, or it—will eventually reveal the all without which selection itself is not possible.”
He also emphasizes the importance of putting himself “at a certain emotional distance from the subject in order to allow it to speak.” In the wake of his long sessions with Caroline Blackwood in Paris, Freud was especially alive to the danger of letting his “passion for the subject overwhelm him while he is in the act of painting.”
Bacon painted his portraits from photographs and from memory—the distance, the “slight remove,” were crucial for him. Freud, by contrast, was and remained dependent on his models’ presence over long periods of time. “The effect that they make in space,” he said, “is as bound up with them as might be their color or smell…Therefore the painter must be as concerned
with the air surrounding his subject as with that subject itself.”
But, as if defending himself against the latent charge that his pictures were merely records of his intimate relationships, and that their appeal, as a result, was largely sentimental, Freud also stressed the importance of the autonomy of the finished work of art—its ability to take on a life of its own. “A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure. The artist who serves nature is only an executive artist. And since the model he so faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model. Whether it will convince or not, depends entirely on what it is in itself, what is there to be seen. The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement.”
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BEFORE HE MET BACON, Freud was talented, but in his art—as perhaps in his life—still prone to sentimentality and a kind of adolescent wish fulfillment. In the cauldron of his relationship with Blackwood, which ended in bitter disappointment, and of his relationship with Bacon, then embroiled in an amorous relationship so extreme that it burned away any vestige of romantic sentimentality, he learned the appeal of extremity, obsession, and ruthlessness.
Freud later claimed that his early “method was so arduous that there was no room for influence.” But that had changed when Bacon came on the scene.
Bacon’s influence touched everything. If his company triggered many changes in Freud’s life, it also triggered a veritable, if slow-burning, crisis in his art. It affected not just Freud’s method but also his feeling about subject matter and his fundamental sense of what, for him, was possible.
Since before Kitty, Freud’s goal in portraiture had been to convey intimacy and attachment. That never changed. But his way of conveying it did. Early on, he had figured that a uniform and painstaking fidelity to appearances could be enough to convey utmost absorption in his subjects. Now he was not so sure. Swayed in part by Bacon, he began to pay more and more attention to his sitters’ three-dimensional presence. He seemed especially interested in volumetric idiosyncrasies: bunches of muscle, pouches of fat, light-reflecting oils on the skin—all those qualities that give such uncanny life to his painted portrait of Bacon. A new sense of amplitude now entered into his pictures. The viewer’s consciousness of an overweening, romantic, and somewhat boyish “style” disappeared.
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