Body as Battleground
Francis Bacon at Gagosian, London
The human body is a crucial and constant symbol and theme throughout the art of Francis Bacon. Known for rendering existential angst, violence, and sexuality, the body was used as a loaded weapon by the British painter. At a new museum-worthy exhibition called Couplings at Gagosian Gallery in London, the richly painted canvases show paired bodies in a states of erotic fusion and destruction.
The main entry point for this exhibition is Bacon’s depiction of queer sexuality, specifically gay male sexuality. Bacon began painting this sort of subject matter in the early 1950s that show men having sex. This is notable since these works were created almost twenty years before the Stonewall riots, not to mention that same-sex activity was illegal in England until 1967. Although abstraction was used to distort and stylize Francis Bacon’s compositions and lend an animalistic, genderless rendering of the human body, this also conveniently obscured any acts that might be considered obscene. Bacon returned to this subject matter in 1967 after decriminalization with his painting Two Figures on a Couch. Again, this painting was a frank nod towards Bacon’s own sexuality and his milieu.
While bodies in this show interact in an erotic sense, there is also an inherent darkness in many of these works as well. It is often considered that many works mirror Bacon’s rocky, sometimes violent, relationships with men. Gagosian makes a point of name checking George Dyer and Peter Lacy in their press release, who were romantically and professionally connected to the artist (both relationships were extremely tumultuous.) Upon first glance, works like Two Figures in the Grass andThree Studies of Figures on Beds appear almost as wrestling matches or brawls before one realizes and senses the erotic nature of these paintings. This melding of sex and violence, life and death, shows a psychologically fraught interpretation of intimacy and the body.
Francis Bacon is arguably one of the most famous painters to ever come out of Britain, but his work has not been diluted because of his canonization. Although his vision of the world could often be ugly or even terrifying, Bacon spoke to primal human instincts, and as a result, these paintings retain a timeless, visceral power.
