Bacon photographed by Douglas Glass in his Battersea studio, late 1950s, © J. C. C. Glass
1949-1954 One painting stood apart from its monochrome companions in the 1949 exhibition. This was Head VI, 1949, with its sensuous purple cape. It was Bacon’s earliest variation on Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1650, a theme he mined with obsessive intensity throughout the following decade and intermittently in the 1960s and 70s. His experience of the Velázquez was entirely by way of reproductions, a dependency that, far from limiting the artist, encouraged him to take extravagant licence. Another of his primary sources was a still of the Screaming Nurse from Eisenstein’s film, Battleship Potemkin (1925). Bacon fused the scream and Pope to memorable effect in this and later works, but especially in an imposing canvas from the following year, Study after Velázquez, 1950. This was long presumed destroyed, but was recovered by the Estate of Francis Bacon nearly 50 years after it was painted.
In 1953 he rivaled this achievement with Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953 and devised a suite of eight Papal variations, Study for Portrait I-VIII, remarkable for its macabre invention and economy of means. Study for Portrait I grew out of a portrait of the critic David Sylvester who championed his work and became a valued friend of the artist.
Bacon tackled other subjects during this period. In 1950 and again in 1952 he sailed out to South Africa where his mother had moved after his father’s death. His sisters Ianthe and Winnie had settled in neighbouring Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe). During both visits, the artist was struck by the sight of wild animals moving through the long grass, a sensation he conjured up in several canvases of 1952, notably Study of a Figure in a Landscape, 1952. On his first voyage back in 1951, he stopped off for a couple of days in Cairo. He held ancient Egyptian art in enormous admiration and later asserted that its achievement had been unsurpassed. From 1953 to 1954, he painted four works based on the great Sphinx.
In those same two years Bacon depicted men in suits within dark, suggested surroundings. The series of seven paintings, Man in Blue I-VII, 1954 was his most reductive treatment of the subject and was inspired, in part, by a man who had modeled for the artist in the Imperial Hotel, Henley-on-Thames.
Bacon had also had begun to tackle the nude in a more forthright manner. He painted Two Figures, 1953 and in the following year Two Figures in the Grass, 1954. The coupled male nudes from both works are derived from Eadweard Muybridge’s, The Human Figure in Motion, 1901, a volume of sequential photographs of the body in action. The Human Figure in Motion became an indispensable visual dictionary for Bacon. Its companion volume, Animals in Motion, 1899 provided visual templates for his paintings of dogs, such as Dog, 1952.
In his paintings of Two Figures, the poses were based on Muybridge’s images of wrestlers, but manipulated to more personal and sexual ends. Bacon was aware of the ambiguity between the movements of wrestlers and lovers, acutely so since his own love life had recently taken an obsessive and masochistic turn.
By 1950, Eric Hall was no longer living with Bacon, though he had left his wife and children, and later bought and donated Dog, 1952 to the Tate. Bacon left Cromwell Gardens after the death of Nanny Lightfoot on the 30th April 1951, an event that traumatized him. Over the next ten years he moved from studio to studio, most of them borrowed or strictly temporary. Among those friends who obliged with a room were Peter Pollock and Paul Danquah who lived in Battersea. Sometime before 1952, Bacon became involved with the former fighter pilot and test pilot, Peter Lacy. Their relationship was a potent mixture of the compulsive and destructive, and Bacon remained in thrall to Lacy’s neurotic sadism for much of the decade.
