Art as Uncontrollable Strength: Interpreting Violence in Francis Bacon’s Art Through the Gaze of Contemporary Disciplines

8 CHAPTER 1 Bacon and the Sartre: art for the 20th Century embittered man FB: I am always surprised when I wake up in the morning. DS: Doesn’t that belie that you’re essentially an optimistic person? FB: Ah well, you can be optimistic and totally without hope. 1 In a single exchange, this dialogue between the art critic David Sylvester and the painter Francis Bacon encapsulates the core of the latter’s conception of life. Bacon’s work has been interpreted by academics primarily in terms of the artist’s relationship to Existentialism. This first chapter explores scholarship that has studied Bacon’s art purely from an existentialist perspective in order to discuss whether the artist is consistent or inconsistent with the features of this existentialist allocation. Gilles Deleuze and Martin Hammer are only two of the numerous writers who have identified Bacon as part of the existentialist movement, despite the fact that their view is based entirely on a visual description of Bacon’s works. 2,3 On the other hand, Rina Arya, one of the academics who has made important contributions to the enrichment of Bacon’s research, defines Bacon as an existentialist when considering his life and therefore the complete character that formed the artist. She analysed this issue in her text ‘The Existentialist Dimension of Bacon’s Art,’ which will serve as the foundation for the arguments that will be advanced. This discussion will be followed by an in-depth examination of the Sartrean principles that characterised Bacon’s interpretation of the existentialist philosophical current, and I will demonstrate how these principles were applied to Bacon’s art, in particular to Study of a Nude (1952-1953, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich) [Fig. 1]. Using the painting as a point of reference, I will add more points – beyond those already raised by Arya – which are relevant to Bacon’s position among the adherents of the existentialist current. The forerunners of twentieth-century Existentialism were Arthur Schopenhauer, Soren Kierkegaard, Fedor Dostoevsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche, among many others. 4 However, it was Sartre’s atheistic Existentialism, which is the philosophy Bacon proved his adherence to, that drew the most attention from 1944-1945. Many classical philosophical principles, such as the 1 Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, p. 78. 2 Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. (London: Bloomsbury, 2003.) 3 Martin Hammer, ‘Contradiction and Continuity in the art of Francis Bacon,’ Francis Bacon: Critical and Theoretical Perspectives. Edited by Rina Arya. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012.) 4 Gordon Marino. Basic Writings of Existentialism. (Modern Library, 2004, p. IX, 3)