Into the inferno of the art of Francis Bacon

FAR too much art has been hawked to jaded audiences, in recent decades of promoblather, as confronting or shocking.

Francis Bacon

FAR too much art has been hawked to jaded audiences, in recent decades of promoblather, as confronting or shocking; a kind of prurient curiosity is excited in viewers, inevitably disappointed by work that is repetitious, ideological and moralistic.

But there is something about the paintings of Francis Bacon that really is emotionally affecting after more than a half-century. You are aware of it not only while in their presence, but especially in the after-effect that persists as you leave the gallery. It's like the sober, grey, bleak mood that follows a funeral, when for a time the colours of life are shadowed by a cold sense of mortality.

This not something you are likely to experience from encountering a single work in a modern art gallery, where the very diversity of styles militates against the kind of overall or collective impression one often has among works of earlier periods. This disparity is only aggravated by the curatorial instinct to collect one example of each style or movement, which tend to cancel each other out in general blandness.

The Francis Bacon exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, the last big project by Tony Bond and the first show of the artist's work in this country, is an opportunity to immerse oneself in Bacon's imaginative world; more than that, it compels the viewer to inhabit that vision; the artist's focus is exclusively and even obsessively on what seems to him to matter. There is nothing else, no incidentals, no pleasure in nature or the human environment, nowhere the viewer might escape into his own reveries in the margins of the work.

And what is actually shocking about these pictures - much more so than any political or moralistic declamation - is their vision of irredeemable unhappiness. Happiness is not something frivolous; it is not about fun, much less about temporary states of excitement and distraction. In the end, happiness is life itself. The insight is a profoundly classical one, vibrantly tangible in early poets such as Pindar, theorised in Aristotle, but still present within the Christian heirs to the classical tradition; thus in Dante we find that acedia, the vice of sloth, consists of refusing to take joy in the world that God has made for us - and that it is a sin worse than lust, gluttony and avarice.

Bacon's joyless vision can be understood partly as an expression of his historical circumstances, growing up between the wars, beginning to paint seriously in the years of the Depression and the rise of fascism leading up to World War II and achieving fame and success in the still grim post-war years, shadowed by Cold War anxieties, even as rationing and privation gave way to the permissiveness of the 1960s.

But this is only the background; at the heart of it, the unhappiness is intimate and personal, beginning with an atrocious childhood. Biography, which has a limited value in illuminating the work of more impersonal artists, is unavoidable in Bacon's case.

He was distantly descended from his namesake, the great Elizabethan statesman, scientist and essayist, and his family had money and connections. Eddy Bacon, his father, was a retired officer and horse trainer. His mother seems to have been remote, and he was closest to his nanny, who continued to live with him in adult life and until her death in 1951.

Bacon's effeminate behaviour as a child, including dressing in his mother's clothes, enraged his domineering father, who tried to make a man of him by forcing him go out riding horses, although this only provoked desperate asthma attacks, and is supposed to have had him whipped by the grooms, with whom the boy was also having sexual relations. Despite, or because of, his overbearing and sadistic behaviour, Bacon later claimed to have been sexually attracted to his own father, and seemed to pursue a series of cruel father-substitute lovers for the rest of his life, of whom Peter Lacy was the most unhinged.

All of these stories, however elaborated in the artist's free and even exhibitionist retelling in the course of subsequent decades, speak of a profoundly tortured relationship to sexuality.

There is no romantic vision of homosexual love here - nothing like the poignant romantic friendship, perhaps tipping into erotic transgression, of Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's contemporary novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) - only the painful realities of rough trade and buggery at the hands of brutes and illiterate young thugs.

Such an encounter is evoked here in Triptych (1970), where the left and right panels of the triptych depict, respectively, a man in a suit and a naked youth, the one mounting the other in the central image.

In the early work, the figure is much less explicit. Often it is shown as confined in a kind of cage, truncated and vague, even disembodied, as though less real than the structures and bounds that constrain it. Complementary to the theme of confinement are the desperation and hysteria evoked by Bacon's best-known motif, the mouth open in a scream of pain, or possibly, as has been more recently suggested, gasping for air like the asthmatic in panic at his inward suffocation. The two interpretations are quite compatible, for both are responses to fear and enclosure.

Bacon was impressed by the cry of pain in Poussin's early painting of The Massacre of the Innocents (1627-28) at Chantilly, and most famously transferred the motif of the scream to Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, a picture which the artist - although he spoke of having a crush on the painting - may have known only from reproductions. In transforming the image of an extremely powerful, self-possessed man into a screaming hysteric, it is hard not to think that Bacon is reflecting on the sense of vulnerability and oppression that could be experienced even by a dominant figure such as his father.

Without narrative context, and therefore without specific motivation, the theme of the open mouth becomes even more disturbing and acquires a more generic existential connotation. In two of the most unpleasantly memorable instances, Head I and Head II (1947-48), truncated heads, partly or wholly deprived of their cranium and thus of consciousness, are reduced to amorphous masses of flesh in which the orifice of the mouth opens to display aggressive, ape-like teeth. The open mouth, always expressing surprise, pain, grief or anger, is inherently incompatible with self-possession or the poise of identity.

But he goes much further than the gaping mouth in attacking the image of the face, the form to whose integrity, composure, beauty and their opposites - we are naturally more acutely sensitive than any other.

One of the most striking works in the exhibition is a triptych, Studies for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, who was a frequent model. The pictures consciously recall Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and they remind us, if we needed reminding, that it is with this modernist primitivism, evoking the primal and the animalistic dimensions of human experience, that Bacon has affinities, not with the intellectualising style of analytical cubism that followed.

The images of Moraes, however - described by one former acquaintance as "a drunken Soho groupie" - are far more consciously violent than the Demoiselles. Her features are not only brutally distorted, recalling perhaps the story that Bacon had all his front teeth knocked out by abusive lovers, but actually evoke those medieval memento mori or dance of death images in which the decaying flesh is painted, with gruesome care, as it falls away from the bones of the skull.

Even this is not as far as he goes. Moraes appears here also as the model of a couple of full-length nudes (1965 and 1969) in which her body is turned into shapeless masses of flesh and, more appallingly, her face is completely unrecognisable, hacked and smashed as though by a psychopathic killer driven by uncontainable rage.

To pass over the intensity of emotional charge in such works, and indeed their ugliness, or the degradation, guilt and loathing that they represent, is to miss their point altogether.

Yet this painful material is, as in all serious art, subordinated to the pictorial language that gives it form and makes it communicable. Bacon's characteristic themes are expressed with great control and focus, with a mastery of composition and brushwork, an economy of motif and a willingness to eliminate all irrelevant motifs, that make his work singularly memorable.

But it is a delicate balancing act; a little too much aestheticising and the anguish can become repetitious, vacuous posturing. One senses this emptiness most conspicuously in the big triptych Studies of the Human Body (1970), in which motifs that are at once clumsy and facile are isolated in a large empty field of decorative monochrome; by then Bacon had achieved commercial and critical success, regularly cited as the greatest living painter in England even as his work grew more indulgent.

He seems to have been given a new lease of life by the death of his lover George Dyer when the two were in Paris for his retrospective in 1971. This youngish cockney thief, whom Bacon claimed he had met while he was attempting to burgle his flat, became the subject of a series of memorial pictures during the next few years.

In one of the most impressive, another triptych, we see Dyer three times, in each image contorted into the impossible twistings familiar in Bacon's work and that ultimately derive from Michelangelo's ignudi in the Sistine ceiling. The figures are truncated, limbs simply missing, while pools of flesh-coloured matter form at their feet as though they were melting away.

Among all these works, and as with many artists, there are moments when the authenticity of insight is convincing and others where routines and repetitious formulas are more apparent than anything else.

In the best pictures it is the handling of the paint itself, like the prose of an author, that convinces us of the quality of the artistic mind. A particularly fine example is the triple self-portrait (1979-80) in which Bacon has resisted the temptation of histrionics and allowed himself to examine his own features with greater equanimity than elsewhere and consequently with more real depth.

Bacon's vision of the world is limited and flawed; his emotional range is stunted and it would be fallacious to argue that this simplistically and unrelievedly dark view of life is an adequate account of human experience. At the same time, one can recall what TS Eliot wrote of Baudelaire in what remains one of the greatest essays on the poet. The author of Les Fleurs du Mal, he said in effect, lacks the universality of Dante: he cannot understand the joy of Paradise; but he can reveal to us something of the Inferno of our own time.

Francis Bacon: Five Decades, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, to February 24.