Francis Bacon

I was in a London club once when Charlton Heston walked in and ordered a drink from the bar. There was a gaggle of aging queens in the club that day, wiling away there afternoon playing snooker (badly) and drinking large amounts of Guinness and scotch. I was in a London club once when Charlton Heston walked in and ordered a drink from the bar. There was a gaggle of aging queens in the club that day, wiling away there afternoon playing snooker (badly) and drinking large amounts of Guinness and scotch. They went into a collective swoon when Chuck, who was in London doing A Man For All Seasons, looked over in their direction. When he walked over to a discreet corner table with a cautious half pint of shandy he might as well have been wearing a toga and moving in slow motion; the old queens were gasping with excitement. Chuck's appearance in their midst triggered a conversation about Hollywood idols and fantasy lays. Each of the queens offered up his ultimate fantasy fuck. All of the offerings were fairly obvious: Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor and so on, until finally the last of them, under duress, confessed that he had always rather fancied Colonel Ghaddafi. That refined fantasy belonged to Francis Bacon, who was in the club that day getting typically drunk after an afternoon flinging money down the train at the bookies. His day often consisted of a cab ride to his gallery, Marlborough in Cork Street, where he would be given a huge wad of fifty pound notes. From there he would go straight to the bookies where he would bet on whichever horse race was running that day. Once he had satisfied his compulsion to lose a lot of money he moved on to one club or another, usually The Colony in Soho, but occasionally The Chelsea Arts Club, which was a little closer to his home in Reece Mews and which also had a garden and a snooker table. On this day particular day it also had Charlton Heston.

I already loved Francis Bacon when I watched this hilarious moment unfold. FIgures at the Base of the Crucifixion at Tate Britain is still the scariest image ever created by a human being. The response elicited by the howling, blindfolded thing in the centre of the triptych is the essence of Bacon's genius. The figure is tragic and terrifying at the same time. The emotions it triggers are infinitely complex, at once you want to put the thing out of it's misery with a gunshot and incineration while simultaneously feeling a prick of compassion that makes you want to cradle the intensely suffering being to some kind of spiritual ER where Buddhas and Angels can chant over it and bathe it in holy water and make it well. But then something else happens that marks it as a true masterpiece. It initiates all these wildly disturbing and proliferating interpretations that start to rumble the core of human history. I had one version of its meaning in which the image was a portrait of Christ's soul howling in anguish at what the crucifixion would wrought on man. The blindfold of denial was to shut out the torment of all the death, mutilation and genocide that would be done in its name. That version then split into sub-versions that then split again until I had to just walk off into another part of the gallery and look at a painting of some flowers. My brain enacted a self-preservation maneuver against a swelling tide of associations that were getting out of hand. I felt dizzy, all this power in a single, modestly sized painting!

The same kind of thing happens in many of his other paintings. The huge paintings of his lover George Dyer cast the same spell but in the realm of the personal and psychological as opposed to the universal and mythic. Dyer was the illiterate, alcoholic, wounded thug who killed himself on the night of Bacon's opening at The Grand Palais in Paris. While Bacon was triumphing, Dyer was back in London eating rat poison. He was found dead in the bathroom. He had been wretching blood into the toilet bowl, but it was too late.

The Bacon show that is about to open at the Met this Summer will be a blockbuster. His audience is so huge because, despite the isolation and torture that exist in his so much of his work, so too does compassion. As time passes, it's the compassion in his paintings that people will acknowledge more and more. That awareness is there, under the surface, but with time it will be become more and more conscious.