Deleuze’s Bacon
Art & Language and Tom Baldwin

Francis Bacon’s public career as a painter began in the 1940s and was more or less established by the 1950s. But it received its first guiding impulse from a convulsion in the British art establishment of the late 1930s. This convulsion was provoked by the increasing prominence of a cosmopolitanized, professionalized abstract art – the relatively powerful instrument of an emerging class, a new cultural bourgeoisie. The prospect that a professionalized abstract art would take hold in Britain was threatening to an older class of literati and dilettanti for whom art was a ‘civilizing’ rather than a ‘professional’ tendency. It had become apparent that the rising cultural bourgeoisie perceived modernist abstract art as autonomous, driven by the dialectic of its own technicality. The technicality of its action enabled it to assume a practical (and a moral) legitimacy which devalued the authority of the older civilizing class. Cosmopolitan modernism accounted for its practice in terms of coherent ideology. To its opponents, the increasingly specialized vocabularies that accompanied it seemed menacing and aggressive.

In the 1930s the lead in the reactionary fight against this professionalism was taken by Kenneth Clark. A ‘humanistic’ vocabulary of aesthetic grandeur was developed and refined, and recalcitrant abstract artists were effectively marginalized. By the end of World War II, British art had been re-established as a civilizing discourse, predicated on the interesting eccentricities of individuals, that remained in thrall to a patronage of gentlemanly amateurs. Civilization was assisted by many ‘personalities’, artists and literati. Some of these were to be the art arbiters of the future: the wartime personnel of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts grew up into the Arts Council; some of the loftier minds became voices on the BBC, and so on. In Britain at least art would be, one way or another, in the grand manner. Henry Moore became the great British sculptor and Graham Sutherland the great British painter. The canonical discourse of the authentically human opposed, and seemed to defeat, the outlandish vocabularies used by the foreign-seeming intellectuals of international abstract art. While surrealism recognizable as such was rejected for its unsightly political ramifications, in so far as its mannerisms were adaptable they were domesticated as picturesque detail. Acceptable deformations entailed the reinvocation of a form of romanticism: depoliticized, de-psychologized, British, and all right.

Though some early work of Bacon’s was shown alongside the surrealists in London in the 1930s, he emerged in the 1940s as a rather shady figure at the edge of a bohemian circle consisting of Sutherland, Minton, Craxton, Melville, Vaughan, Lucien Freud and others. One of the perceived tendencies of professionalized modernism was pedagogic. It seemed that its ideological and technical metiers could be taught. By contrast, resistance to socialization or to the distribution of power through teaching was a marked aspect of the bohemian authenticism of the 1940s and 1950s. Tradesmen’s sons and daughters, unless suitably marked and transfigured by an appropriate authenticity, must not be allowed to pollute the rare mountain air. Such sentiments are significant among the enabling ideological conditions of Bacon’s eminence.

Picasso seemed to bestride both modernist professionalism and British figuration. Some – Minton, Sutherland, Craxton – identified the source and clung on. Bacon ‘acknowledges’ the influence of Picasso’s techniques. But of course. What else, who else? Decoding, we might say that Bacon, like the others, borrowed and adapted and diluted the formalistic and expressionist threads of Picasso into an occasionally seamy, but essentially genteel figuration. This figuration, which shunned or sought seriously to restrict the ‘narrative’, compromised the painterly. But abstract art compromised or seemed to compromise a variety of ideological canons. It was therefore to be represented as trivial, empty, as incapable of bearing the weight of a necessary aestheticism. A middle, one might say quietly, British category emerged as a consequence: the figural. Historicistically tractable and located, vaguely continuous and discursively passive; neither one thing nor the other; neither ‘illustrative’, nor ‘narrative’, nor ‘abstract’. Bacon as authentic is the prisoner of a trope, a comical spectacle. In the hands of an authentic the fractious materiality of modern art is a picturesque shadow. The disciplines imposed by vertiginous materials, the blindness of the ironies which, contra Barthes, do not merely constitute a superiority of one voice over another, are denied in the culture of anecdote and nostalgic order.

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