The inaugural edition of Bacon Review begins with a detailed exposition of the artist’s fascination with Ancient Egyptian culture and art. Gilles Deleuze went as far as to state, ‘Bacon first of all seems to be an Egyptian. This is his first stopping point’.
Dr Yvonne Scott, Fellow Emerita at Trinity College Dublin, carefully details Bacon’s relationship with Egypt. This includes both direct encounters, from his stop-off in Cairo in 1951 on his way back from South Africa, and indirectly from visits to the British Museum and Louvre, connections with Egyptologists, and a collection of more than 40 books on the subject.
Dr Scott goes on to catalogue a wide variety of Egyptian iconography as potential sources for Bacon paintings. Her essay begins with his series of four Sphinxes in 1953-4, linking them with specific images in The Art of Ancient Egypt, 1936. She also explores how this book could also be a source for Bacon’s Man in Blue series, which he started painting around the same time.
Dr. Scott details the reasons the artist may have chosen this emblem to work with:
“As well as the ideas of the riddle/enigma, and entrapment and seduction, the iconography of the Sphinx is associated with time, via the associations with the ages of man, and therefore mortality, which were also within the framework of Bacon’s interests.”
She finishes this section of her essay, however, by admitting that:
“Bacon’s varied representations of the Sphinx reflect a complex layering and recognition of anomalies and ambiguities that deny a singular, linear reading.”
Perhaps this complexity is one reason so many people are drawn to the artist and his work.
