Ah, excuse me. I hope I’m not intruding at such a busy hour. Please, don’t look so guarded. I simply felt the urge, under this dull May sky, to speak a little about a certain “monster.” Yes, the man who smeared twentieth-century England in colors so violent they seem to writhe on the canvas—the painter Francis Bacon.
Human beings, you see, rarely look into a mirror when they are happy. But the moment they are cast into the depths of misfortune, for some reason, they find themselves staring at their own reflection as if looking at a mysterious, unrecognizable hunk of meat. Bacon was a man who, throughout his life, continued to paint “man as meat.” You ask me to speak of him using exactly four thousand characters—or perhaps words, in this tongue? Oh my, that is a cruel request for a man like me, who finds even the simple act of breathing to be quite a chore. But very well, let us try.
First, one cannot speak of him without mentioning that scream. You’ve seen it, haven’t you? Pope Innocent X—or some such grand priest—sitting in a chair, mouth agape, crying out: Ah, ah, ah. It’s eerie, isn’t it? Terrifying, even. But that was precisely what he wanted to say was the true form of humanity. Humans, once you peel back the skin, are nothing more than meat. What is the difference, really, between a cow’s carcass hanging in a butcher shop and a noble soul sitting in a velvet chair? He believed this with all his heart.
Bacon’s lineage… he claimed to be a direct descendant of that famous philosopher Francis Bacon, the one who said “knowledge is power,” but who knows if that’s true? Well, truth or lie, it hardly matters now. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and raised by a strict father to love horses. However, he was drawn to something far more precarious than horses. He was asthmatic and, moreover, a homosexual. There was no way he could get along with a father who was the very incarnation of machismo. As expected, he was kicked out of the house at a young age and began wandering through Berlin and Paris.
In Paris, he encountered Picasso. Seeing Picasso’s work, he shouted, “This is it!” Well, I don’t know if he actually shouted, but in his heart, a scream much like that of his Pope paintings must have echoed. From then on, he began to paint, entirely self-taught. He never went to art school. If he had, his “wild meat” would have surely been processed into a well-mannered, tasteless ham.
His method of creation was also quite striking. A studio like a rubbish heap. Paint splattered on the walls, floors littered with photograph clippings and torn magazine pages. He plucked his images from that chaos. He believed in photographs with a feverish intensity. Not beautiful landscapes, mind you. Photos of boxers’ faces at the moment they distort from a blow, medical diagrams of mouth diseases, or Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photographs. He believed that truth resides in the moment movement stops and form collapses.
The faces Bacon painted are all twisted and warped. It looks as if someone took their fingers and forcibly dragged them through wet paint on the canvas. He was trying to catch “chance.” No sketches, no drafts. He would strike the canvas all at once, like a gamble. He was a gambler who loved casinos, so perhaps painting for him was another form of roulette, where he bet his entire soul on a single spin.
Now, I suppose I should say something educational here. Why was he so obsessed with “meat”? He once said, “I’m always surprised that it’s not us hanging in the butcher shop.” We spend our days wearing clothes, wielding language, and pretending to live “cultured” lives, but in reality, we live every second with the possibility of turning into a mere lump of flesh. Death is always sitting right next to us, grinning. Bacon stared at that cruel truth without blinking.
The reason his paintings differ from mere horror movie posters is that they possess an overwhelming “beauty.” Vibrant oranges and pinks in the background, compositions calculated to the millimeter. Something hideous is arranged with supreme elegance or cold precision. To paint hell with the colors of heaven—that was Bacon’s alchemy.
Shall we talk of his lovers? There was George Dyer. He was a thief. One night, Dyer broke into Bacon’s studio to rob him, but instead of calling the police, Bacon told him, “Sit there. Be my model.” It sounds like a lie, but it’s the truth. Their relationship was passionate and destructive. Dyer committed suicide in a hotel toilet the night before Bacon’s retrospective opened. Even as he grieved deeply, Bacon could not help but paint his dying lover. Do you think he was heartless? No, that is simply the inescapable “karma” of a painter, of an artist.
Bacon liked to put his paintings in glass cases. And not just any glass—heavy, highly reflective glass. Why, you ask? So that the viewer would be reflected in the painting. You, who are supposed to be looking at a distorted lump of meat, find your own face overlapping with it. In that moment, you realize: “Ah, the one screaming inside this canvas is me.”
He drank like a fish, wandering through high-society parties and back-alley bars night after night. He would down champagne in the morning and devour steaks at midnight. But when dawn came, he would lock himself in that hellish studio and grip his brush with stoic discipline. This duality—decadence and discipline. His art existed on that precarious balance.
In his later years, he became one of the most highly acclaimed painters in the world, but his lifestyle never changed. Wealth and fame were, to him, perhaps nothing more than spices to add color to the process of meat rotting away. When he died in Madrid in 1992, an unfinished painting remained in his studio. It was, as always, a human figure—twisted to the extreme, yet closer to the truth than anything else.
Now, I wonder if I’ve reached the required length. If you say it isn’t enough, I could write out the emptiness inside my own chest, but that would be far more tedious than a Bacon painting, so I shall refrain. Finally, if you ever feel despair in life, or if your own face seems terribly ugly to you, try opening a book of Bacon’s art. There, you will find “meat” that is living far more wretchedly, yet far more powerfully, than you. Looking at it might bring you a small sense of peace. You might realize that you still have a throat capable of screaming.
Man is but meat. However, that meat can scream. And it can turn that scream into beauty. The monster named Francis Bacon taught us that.
Ah, my throat is dry. Won’t you treat me to a glass of champagne somewhere? Of course, in this very moment, before you turn into a lump of meat yourself.
(Let us dive a little deeper from here. His paintings often used the format of the triptych—three panels. He used a form usually reserved for medieval altarpieces, but instead of saints, he depicted a man on a toilet or bodies entangling on a bed. In a world where God is dead, what should we worship? Bacon placed the naked human being on that empty altar.
He was a genius of color. That blood-like red. The black that suggests death. And that unnervingly bright yellow. Color was not a tool to explain emotion, but a weapon to directly attack the nervous system. Standing before his work, we are forced to “feel” before we “think.” You might feel sick to your stomach or a chill down your spine. That is because his brush pierces the canvas and touches your very entrails.
His depiction of “shadows” was also unique. Shadows detached from the figure, writhing like independent living things. What is a shadow? It is our past, our sins, or death itself. In Bacon’s world, the shadow speaks of a person’s loneliness more eloquently than their actual body.
The twentieth century was an era where, through two great wars, humans were transformed into machines for mass slaughter. Someone once said that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, but Bacon understood the barbarity—and the necessity—of continuing to paint humans after Auschwitz. He did not deny human “violence.” Rather, he affirmed it as the fundamental energy of life.
It is easy to dismiss his paintings as “grotesque.” But please, do not miss the tenderness beneath. While he painted humans as meat, he loved the “weight of existence” that meat possessed more than anyone. The stark fact that, no matter how distorted or broken, a human being is there. In that one point, he was surely connected to the masters of the past, like Leonardo and Michelangelo.
Well, it is truly time to part. Look out the window. People are walking by, aren’t they? Every one of them, once peeled, is a model for Bacon. Doesn’t the world look a bit more amusing when you think of it that way? No? That’s a shame. But that’s fine. Art isn’t a medicine to save everyone. It’s just something like a friend who screams beside you on those nights when you simply cannot fall asleep.
Farewell, then. Let us meet again someday at the edge of some hell. When we do, I hope we’ve both become even more magnificent “meat.”)