Francis Bacon: lost and found: Martin Harrison analyses the information that has recently come to light about paintings that Bacon destroyed, mutilated or radically altered. What do such incidents reveal about Bacon's attitude to his art?

When Francis Bacon died, in 1992, the floor of his studio in Reece Mews, South Kensington, was left in the state that had already become sedimented in the Bacon mythology, strewn with tattered magazines and books, and creased, torn and paint-spattered photographs (Fig. 1). Painstakingly excavated and transferred in its entirety in 1998 to the Hugh Lane Gallery in the city of Bacon's birth, Dublin, the studio is now preserved for study, and the cataloguing of its contents is enabling some of the obfuscation surrounding the relationship between Bacon's source material and his painting procedures to be penetrated.

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Elsewhere, further previously unidentified artefacts continue to emerge. Among these documents is a handful of photographs that recorded, sometimes incidentally, paintings that Bacon subsequently either altered or destroyed: these, too, are proving to be invaluable in illuminating certain unresearched aspects of Bacon's practice.

Six months after Bacon's death, his paintings were hung together with Picasso's Crucifixion (1930), and some of the Crucifixion drawings Picasso made in Boisgeloup in 1932, in the exhibition 'The Body on the Cross' at the Muse Picasso, Paris. Intrigued and delighted at the prospect of sharing a space with the artist who, more than sixty years earlier, had inspired him to take up painting, Bacon agreed to be interviewed by Jean Clair for the catalogue of the exhibition. He told Clair of the profound impression made on him in 1971 when Valerie Eliot published her late husband's The Waste Land alongside the extensive corrections and deletions made by Ezra Pound to the original text. Although Bacon remained staunchly independent of any established literary or artistic circles, next to Picasso the poetry of Aeschylus and of T.S. Eliot inspired more of his paintings than the work of any artist. 'Pound made it ten times better', (1) commented Bacon on the excisions and alterations to Eliot's poem; he frequently reiterated his regret at not having a comparable guru figure to tell him what to discard, although he admitted that: 'Of course, it's true there are a very, very few people who could help me by their criticism'. (2)

It is hard to imagine Bacon being even remotely receptive to such trenchant advice, however distinguished its author. On the other hand, he was a ruthless self-editor, at least as hard on his own efforts as on those of his contemporaries. He was as scathing in condemnation of his widely-admired 'Popes', for example, as he was about the paintings of Jackson Pollock ('that dribbling of paint all over the canvas just looked like old lace') or Mark Rothko ('rather dismal variations on colour'); (3) even when praising the masters he most admired--Velazquez, Rembrandt, Seurat--he seldom omitted to qualify his approbation.

Dissatisfaction with his own paintings usually resulted in their destruction. Indeed, he was so ruthless that from the first fifteen years of his career, between 1929 and 1944, only fourteen paintings and drawings survive. Subsequently, as Bacon came under increased pressure from his dealers to fulfil scheduled exhibition dates, it is probable that he jettisoned proportionately less of his work, but even towards the end of his life either he, or more usually a friend, maintained the ritual slashing with a knife-blade of rejected canvases.

Today, notwithstanding these depredations, Bacon's oeuvre comprises nearly six hundred paintings--sufficient, it might be thought, to represent a great artist. How, then, could the urge be justified to resurrect works that Bacon presumably wished to remain buried? Firstly, Bacon, unlike most artists, did not make preliminary drawings, although, consistent with the stimulation he found in literature, he frequently compiled hand-written lists of ideas for paintings. Apart from his mass-media source imagery and a handful of vigorous but fairly schematic compositional sketches dating from around 1960, (4) there is scant surviving material that might elucidate the evolution of his paintings. Secondly, even Bacon himself regretted having destroyed certain paintings, in particular one of his earliest 'Popes', Study after Velazquez (1950). He had intended to send the painting to the Festival of Britain exhibition '60 Paintings for 51', but withdrew it and--or so he misremembered later--destroyed it. Included in John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley's 1964 catalogue raisonne of Bacon as a 'destroyed picture', it was in fact removed from its stretcher and stored away at the Chelsea artists' suppliers Bacon used. It was not until 1996 that it was rediscovered.

David Sylvester both confirmed the genuineness of Bacon's expressions of regret at losing the painting, and gave his own opinion that it was the 'finest "Pope" ever', (5) Bacon's dealers, Hanover Gallery and Marlborough Fine Art, arranged as a matter of course for his completed paintings to be photographed, but those he abandoned were, understandably, seldom recorded. Study after Velazquez was an exception, no doubt reflecting Bacon's ambivalence about the painting. But fortunately, a few of the definitely lost works were captured, partly fortuitously, by the camera, and in somewhat different circumstances.

In 1962, the first of two Tate retrospectives held in Bacon's lifetime substantially raised his public profile. Gregarious as a mainly nocturnal drinker and gambler, by day he was reclusive and solitary as a painter. There was an increasing demand for him to be photographed and filmed in his studio, but he always took the precaution of turning the painted side of his canvases away from the lens. Among his circle of friends, however, were several accomplished photographers, notably his fellow Soho-ites Dan Farson and John Deakin. After 1962 Bacon rarely painted from life. Instead he commissioned John Deakin to document the friends who became the models for many of his portraits during the next two decades--Lucian Freud, George Dyer, Henrietta Moraes and Isabel Rawsthorne. Probably operating under Bacon's direction, Deakin used a Rolleiflex rollfilm camera attached to a tripod. Other photographers had evolved a modus operandi with hand-held 35mm cameras that was more rapid, informal and relatively non-intrusive: having been photographed by the doyen of this technique, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and photojournalists such as Larry Burrows, Bacon was accustomed to the quick fire of the miniature format camera shutter. The wildlife photographer Peter Beard, whom Bacon met in 1966, became a close friend and the subject of more than twenty of Bacon's paintings between 1975 and 1980. He provided most of the self-portrait photographs of his head from which Bacon painted his portraits, and he in turn photographed Bacon constantly.

On his frequent visits to London, Beard's diaristic camera became a natural accompaniment to their socialising, and evidently Bacon was relaxed enough to allow Beard to continue photographing while his paintings remained visible. At least two of the paintings that can be observed in the backgrounds of Beard's photographs were, it transpired, eventually destroyed by Bacon. Beard's black and white images are, therefore, the sole visual evidence of two compelling, but in several respects atypical, paintings.

The first of these paintings, George Dyer with camera, is visible in Figure 5. Painted c. 1969, it depicts Dyer, Bacon's lover and muse, apparently metamorphosing into an organic version of a bulky, primitive, large-format bellows camera which is supported by a rather perfunctory tripod. This early example of Bacon's referencing of photographic equipment was an overt indication that photography was, by this time, established at the core of his practice; in the right-hand panel of the triptych Studies from the human body (1970), Bacon depicted himself as the voyeuristic operator of elaborate photographic paraphernalia. The attitude of the squatting figure in George Dyer with camera was almost certainly developed from the conflation of two (or more) of John Deakin's photographs of George Dyer: a profile head-shot taken in Soho (Fig. 3) and a seated, cross-legged semi-nude done in the Reece Mews studio (Fig. 4). A striking variant of this pose can be seen in the left-hand panel of Two figures lying on a bed with attendants (1968), the painting recently acquired by Tate Britain on extended loan from Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Bacon continued to explore this configuration until at least 1988, latterly transposing John Edwards's head for Dyer's, with Edwards's portrait identified as the nominal subject. In most of the paintings in which Dyer's identity is reliably established he is represented as naked, child-like and vulnerable; yet despite him wearing a collar and tie in George Dyer with camera (a typically Baconic 'reversal' tactic) the treatment was, on this occasion, among the most visceral and animalistic of the series based on this pose, and the paint is applied with a bravura violence and spontaneity in slashing, sweeping brushstrokes.

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Since Bacon is unlikely to have been dissatisfied with the dynamic painting of the figure in George Dyer with camera, it could, therefore, be conjectured that there was a formal aspect of the painting that, in his judgment, had failed to coalesce. Given that the painting appears to have been conceived in his standard 78 x 58 inches (198.1 x 142.3 cm) format, and considering the shape and position of the arcing 'board' device on which the figure was supported, it is likely to have been intended as the left-hand panel of a planned triptych; it is comparable with the two outer wings of Triptych in memory of George Dyer (1971), which develops similar imagery and may represent the further development of a related composition, or alternatively Bacon's resolution of the original idea of 1969.

By comparison, The last man on earth (c. 1974), a painting recorded in several of Peter Beard's photographs of Bacon moving around the studio (Fig. 6), appears to have been both formally and conceptually completely resolved. The lone figure is loosely based on Eadweard Muybridge's serial photographs of a man throwing a discus, although Bacon's quoting of pictorial sources was seldom straightforward and he may also have had in mind a classical discobolus (he would have known the copies in the British Museum and the Terme Museum, Rome) and Rodin's bronze La grande ombre. Since the man's pose resembles that of the figure in the centre panel of Triptych March 1974, the painting may be another instance of a panel that was ultimately rejected from a triptych.

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Another factor in Bacon's rejection of The last man on earth may have been that he considered the depiction of existential isolation, of Nietzschean solipsism, too literal in its poignancy. Apparently the painting (was this also an instance of the older pictorial sources having been conflated with a modern image of a cricketer about to field the ball?) evoked for observers either the Apollo space mission's moon landing, or a scene from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which case it would have approached dangerously closely to what Bacon professed was his greatest aversion, to illustration. He often demeaned paintings that illustrated a passage from a literary text, citing, for example, Fuseli's scenes from Shakespeare's plays. Bacon strove to avoid the kind of excessive pictorial data that threatened to impose a linear narrative on his paintings, although the extent to which he achieved the elimination of narrativity has recently become a matter of debate among art historians. (6) Nevertheless, his optical blurring, his strategies of spatial and temporal disjunction, tended to represent an action that was out of time, that had no before and no after.

The painting now known as Portrait of a dwarf (1975, private collection, Australia) is, uniquely, in a narrow upright format, the result of Bacon having eliminated two-thirds of the original canvas (Figs. 7 and 8). Formerly, the dwarf occupied the role of what Bacon called an 'attendant'; these attendants were either voyeuristic, or paradoxically disengaged, witnesses of a horrifying spectacle, or of sexual intercourse. In Portrait of a dwarf, the homunculus stares back implacably at the viewer, returning our gaze while apparently indifferent to the upturned, writhing nude male in a glass cage to his left.

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It is interesting to speculate on Bacon's motives for excising the caged figure. He could have envisaged the achondroplastic man as representing Pygmalion and the convulsive figure as (an albeit distinctively Baconic) Galatea: if so, again he possibly considered the allusion to the Greek myth as too specific, too illustrational. He had notoriously inverted Cimabue's Crucifixion, and may have been performing a similar rotation in a regendering of the figure of Galatea in Jean-Leon Gerome's Pygmalion and Galatea (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, c. 1890). The dwarf's seated, cross-legged pose recalls both Velazquez's A dwarf sitting on the floor (c. 1645, Prado Museum, Madrid) (Fig. 9) and the ancient Egyptian statue of Seneb, the chief of the palace dwarves, in the National Museum, Cairo; Bacon, who considered Egyptian art to have been mankind's highest cultural achievement, had visited Cairo in 1951 and is likely to have seen the figure.

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Bacon's cavalier cropping of canvases is evidence of his uninhibited attitude towards the picture field, another aspect of his technique that is paralleled in photography, in the facile enframings associated with the camera and with the darkroom. When questioned about his ubiquitous 'cages', the internal frameworks he placed around many of his figures, Bacon liked to pass them off simply as devices for seeing 'the image' more clearly. Critics have essayed more profound interpretations, but they bear a close resemblance to the Chinagraph markings that photographers employ on their contact prints to indicate the precise area of the negative that requires enlargement. On a visit to Bacon's studio in 1955, his patrons Robert and Lisa Sainsbury found him about to destroy a 'Pope' painting with which he was dissatisfied: when they remonstrated he produced a razor blade, cut out the central portion of the canvas (evidently he thought the head not unsuccessful), and presented it to them; as Study (Imaginary portrait of Pope Pius XII), 1955, it is now in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.

A neccesarily approximate demarcation can be imposed in Bacon's oeuvre around 1968, after which date he sought to pare down his paintings, rationalising their spatial organisation and working with a more concise vocabulary of forms. It is probably not coincidental that this transition occurred at a time when Minimalism occupied a central position in art practice and critical theory; the acceptance at face value of Bacon's protestations of cultural isolation has belatedly come under question, and rightly so, since at no time were his paintings created in an ahistorical vacuum. The broadly applied and thickly impasted paint of his 'Van Gogh' homages in the 1950s invite comparison with the bold painterliness of his friend Karel Appel (and another contemporary, Asger Jorn) as much as that of Chaim Soutine, whose techniques Bacon is known to have revered. Similarly, in the 1970s, the densely absorbent black grounds he adopted for his posthumous tributes to George Dyer may well have been indebted to the looming negative swathes of paint in Robert Motherwell's Spanish elegies.

When Bacon embarked on a new painting, he generally had a rough idea of its overall structure in mind: his method was to paint the 'image' first--that is, the human form(s)--and the ground afterwards. While the success of the 'image' depended, for him, primarily on chance elements related to the application of paint, the flat backgrounds, ostensibly at least, presented less of a challenge. Bacon's deprecation of abstract art lends support to this, yet there is abundant evidence that he regarded the symbiosis of image and ground as important, and devoted considerable attention to the problem: he needed his 'chaos' to be 'deeply ordered'. Among the ceaseless modifying and perfecting of these 'abstract' backgrounds, a typical example is the small triptych Three studies of George Dyer (1969, private collection), the grounds of which were yellow in their first state but were altered soon after to dark blue, before Bacon finally rendered them in their present mauve-pink.

Bacon's elimination of superfluous pictorial elements can be observed in the history of a triptych he painted in 1974, its panoramic sweep and high horizon line inspired by Degas's Beach scene (?c. 1876, National Gallery, London). In the first version of the centre panel of the triptych, Bacon incorporated an unsettling, confrontational figure that peered back imperiously at the viewer through schematic binoculars. This image again reversed the role of his attendants or witnesses; each of the three panels represents a back view of the naked George Dyer, Bacon's then recently deceased lover, and the viewer's gaze was implicated in the act of voyeurism. Whether Bacon regarded the figure with binoculars as triggering an unwanted narrative, or as formally extraneous, after pondering the question for three years he recalled the central panel to his studio and painted out the figure, leaving uninterrupted the 'abstract' foreground across all three panels. Completed as Triptych 1974-77, the painting has remained in this simplified form (Figs. 10 and 11).

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The figure eventually painted out from Triptych 1974-77 was probably based on Eadweard Muybridge's photographs Man falling prone and aiming rifle; considering Bacon's interest in avifauna, especially birds of prey, an image of a stalking birdwatcher may also have been in play. Manifestly, Bacon's intervention into the Degas painting transcends its sources, but typically, besides the borrowing from Degas, the triptych also referenced images he had kept in his archive--possibly since the 1930s--from Amedee Ozenfant's Foundations of Modern Art and Baron von Schrenck Notzings's Phenomena of Materialization. In Schrenck Notzing's book, the spectral images of seances that fascinated him are comparable with the vaporous effects present in many of Bacon's paintings, and of the traces of figures in movement through space and time. In the photographic darkroom, one can imagine he was intrigued (he would have been familiar with this process, if not at first hand then from its popular appropriation in movies) by the gradual revelation of the latent image in the developing tray. In a sense, he brought about a reversal of this process when he trapped the likeness of a 'sitter', only to deface it by smearing off the paint he had applied. Appearances are established then denied: Bacon the atheist was not about to offer either hope or closure.

One way in which Bacon demonstrated his receptiveness to the operation of chance was by his alertness to the way photographs would emerge from the chaotic piles of studio detritus, like organisms with an independent existence. An habitual gambler, no doubt he appreciated the way in which these suggestively accreted documents would reappear, transformed and reordered like a shuffled pack of playing-cards. In the background of the left-hand panel of Three portraits: Posthumous portrait of George Dyer; Self-portrait; Portrait of Lucian Freud (1973) he painted, as though it were pinned to the wall, a tightly cropped black and white photograph of his own head. The source photograph he used (Fig. 12) was only rediscovered recently, complete with pinholes and random flecks of paint, in colours corresponding exactly to the palette of the 1973 triptych. Fifteen years later, in Study from the human body and portrait (1988) (Fig. 13), Bacon reused this photo-portrait of himself, and on this occasion embraced the accidental marks that he had made on the original source photograph. Thus the studio floor is revealed as his personal genizah, an archive of talismanic images that on the one hand he allowed (or encouraged) to become worn and distressed, while on the other he preserved as bearers of the marks of time.

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Bacon's synthesising of 'lens-based' imagery has been public knowledge for more than fifty years. It is important to recognise, however, that throughout the first half of his career (that is, until 1962) the images that suggested ideas for paintings were seldom 'original' photographic prints but almost invariably mechanical reproductions he encountered in books or magazines. Long before photography's acceptance as an art form, and its penetration of Britain's museums and art galleries, Bacon acknowledged that photographs (including photographic reproductions of works of art) had informed some of his decisive paintings. He came to regret this openness, however, believing it had caused his aims to be misapprehended. His cautiousness was not without justification: only six years ago, when the Barbican Arts Centre staged 'Picasso and Photography', the survey was greeted by sensational headlines such as 'Picasso Exposed', (7) as though a fraud had been uncovered.

Like Picasso, Bacon sought neither photorealism nor photographic verisimilitude, nor were his paintings merely the sum of their sources. Latterly, therefore, he ensured that a much tighter control was kept over the identity of the stimuli he was prepared to divulge. Since he also disliked appending fanciful titles to his paintings, most were kept deliberately vague and non-specific; a rare exception was Triptych inspired by T.S. Eliot's poem 'Sweeney Agonistes' (1967, Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC), but despite the fact that the scenes in the outer panels clearly refer to the poem, Bacon insisted that the title was imposed by the Marlborough Gallery and pretended there was no connection with Eliot's text. He effectively censured, too, the iconological study of his paintings, initially by denying their iconographies. Most critics acquiesced in this denial of content, and those who transgressed risked his non-cooperation regarding reproduction rights; their enforced collaboration in this information clamp-down helped to ensure that Bacon's paintings, and his procedures, were investigated and understood largely on the terms he dictated, or of which he approved.

Bacon described his paintings of the human body as a balance of order and chaos, of preconception and chance. Yet his unique path through figuration in the twentieth century failed to resonate with the guru of American Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg, who perceived it as embodying 'an affliction of the English ... the Grand Manner'. (8) Greenberg appears to have wilfully misread the interventions onto works by Michelangelo, Caravaggio or Ingres, as though Bacon had slavishly emulated these masters. On the contrary, Bacon's view of the hopelessness of the human condition precluded the aspiration to anything as uncomplicatedly elevated or ennobling as grandeur. He aimed to subvert as much as to celebrate art-historical traditions, and sought to redefine issues of representation of the human form. Although the specifics of his image sources are ultimately secondary to the syntheses Bacon performed on them, and should not be over-stressed, the essential modernity and rich complexity of his figurative idiom depended to a considerable extent on its mutable dialogue with photography's engagement with transience, mortality and memory.

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(1) Jean Clair, 'Pathos and Death', in G.Regnier et al. (ed.), The Body on the Cross, exh. cat., Musee Picasso, Paris, 1992, p. 136.

(2) David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 1997, p. 20.

(3) David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 246.

(4) Most of the surviving sketches are in Tate; see: Matthew Gale, Francis Bacon: Working on Paper, London, 1999.

(5) Sylvester, op. cit. in note 3 above, p. 44.

(6) See especially Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, London, 1998.

(7) The Sunday Times: Culture, 7 February 1999 (front cover).

(8) Clement Greenberg, 'Autonomies of Art', in The Edmonton Contemporary Artists Society Newsletter, vol. III, issue 2, 1996.

Martin Harrison is the author of In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, published by Thames and Hudson this month.

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