Francis Bacon: A brush with Bacon

The first celebrated Francis Bacon was born in the Strand, during the reign of Elizabeth I. He was raised as an English gentleman, and wrote elegant essays upon morality, taste, public virtue and private manners. The second, a descendant of the first, was born in a nursing home in Dublin to English parents, and became a self-taught painter whose canvases, when they were first widely shown in the 1940s, provoked exclamations of disgust, horror and near-incredulity. Would the first have acknowledged the second socially? It seems rather unlikely.

I saw the second Bacon only once, in the middle of the 1980s, in London's Mayfair, near where Clifford Street meets the end of Cork Street, an entirely suitable point of encounter, as it happens, because Cork Street is where the poshest art galleries still tend to be – including the one that was Bacon's own until the end of his life, the Marlborough. Bacon would be dead fairly soon, but he did not seem to have reconciled himself to that possibility. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Yes, from the point of view of his character, or of his public sense of himself, he did not seem old at all. In fact, on that particular Saturday morning, he looked, with his well- oiled quiff, pinky flushed cheeks – I could almost swear they were rouged, as if he were some old-time vaudeville star – and dangerously beefy-looking black leather jacket, much like the roisterer and roustabout he had always been notorious for being. He was leaning heavily on a cane as he walked, lurching violently from side to side, like a man marooned on the raft of La Méduse, but that merely gave a pleasing extra raffishness to the man who seemed to have been unfairly robbed of all the wayward energies of his early manhood.

Bacon the image was wholly there in front of me, still, entirely at one with all that he had been – and with all he had been reputed to be, at the Colony Room Club in Soho, and, dingily, elsewhere. Why make such a point of this? Because with Bacon, the question of image-making was, and remains, very important. He created it. He nurtured it. It was at one with the paintings he made. And it was at one with the bleak, benighted spirit of the age through which he lived.

Though he was Dublin-born, Bacon's parents were both English – his father's family had a military background; his mother was of a well-to-do family of cutlery manufacturers from Sheffield – and Bacon himself had in fact left Dublin for England by the time he was in his middle teens. His restlessness soon took him on to Paris, and then Berlin, though by the end of the 1920s he had settled back in London again. He earnt a meagre living as an interior decorator for a time.

Though untrained, he had fierce ambitions to be a painter. For all that, his early paintings were little noticed. Like any young man's work, they were very derivative of the newest of the new. He was besotted with Surrealism, and then by Picasso, but it was not until 1945 that he came, suddenly, to public notice with his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The shock the public experienced when they stared at these canvases was summarised by the critic John Russell, who wrote an important early study of Bacon: "British art has never been the same since the day in April ... when three of the strangest pictures ever put on show in London were slipped without warning into an exhibition at the Lefebvre Gallery ... Visitors ... were brought up short by images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut with a snap at the sight of them."

As if all at once, Bacon was born into the painter he would remain throughout his life, give or take the refining skills of maturity. This triptych said it all. (The triptych form itself, which became a favourite of Bacon, served as a perpetually reflecting mirror.) Man was horribly trapped within his own flesh. Scratch the surface, and you would discover that man was on a level, if not at one with, the most feral of beasts. Yes, Bacon was a scratchily dissonant painter from first to last, a painter who set the teeth on edge, the painterly equivalent of the anonymous shriek in the night. He dealt in extremities – of pain, violence, nausea, self-laceration. He was besotted by the flesh, and he lived in fascinated, sadomasochistic horror of it and delight in it. He loved the disgusting, reeking pigsty of human life. And he became tremendously fashionable because those hothoused images he made of the human condition melded perfectly, seamlessly, with the age's philosophical temper.

In short, Bacon, from first to last, was the painter of Existentialism. Fortunately, you do not have to travel far to get to the heart of Existentialism. Just after the end of the Second World War, Jean-Paul Sartre gave a lecture that was then published as a book entitled L'Existentialisme est un humanisme. In it he tells us what exactly the term means, and he does it quite simply, with the following story:

A man gets up in the morning. He knows, without a second's moment of self-questioning, what he must do. He must take up the clothes that define his identity as a human being and put them on. He pulls on his black trousers, slaps the napkin across his forearm, adjusts the angle of his chin, and makes for the door. He is, in short, a waiter in a restaurant. That is his nature. That is his identity. That is his destiny.

Such a human being, Sartre points out, is guilty of mauvaise foi, or bad faith. That man is not a waiter at all, not fundamentally. He has chosen that identity for himself. V C The fact is that he is, at root, nothing. He lacks for an essence. He is only what he makes of himself. And, in fact, Sartre is telling us – and this is the baleful truth of the human condition – that there is nothing beyond what a man chooses to make of himself. There is no soul, and no god who looks out for that soul.

How bleak. How chillingly lonely. How atheistical. How Baconian.

Yes, this is also the message of Bacon the painter. It is a vision to which he was faithful from first to last. And this vision of the human condition as a pretty nasty, vomit-worthy spectacle has, for better or worse, helped to define the nature of modern art. Among contemporary British artists, it is a big part of Damien Hirst; it is in the weird, dangly legs of a Sarah Lucas. It is pretty much everywhere.

Fundamentally, man is alone with himself, and that self is not a pretty sight. We must never forget that there is a skull beneath the skin, and that the flesh – though capable of prettification – is, in the end, so much raw meat. What is more, we live in an ever-shifting world, a world of shifting values, a world – like Bacon's paintings – in which everything appears to be unstable, even the flesh that slathers across the face of the bony human skull.

It is the exact same vision that Sartre the novelist gives us through the character of Antoine Roquentin, the autodidact hero of La nausée (Bacon too was an autodidact). The world is viscous, disgustingly treacly in its perpetual instability, forever slipping away from us. The self, too, is disgustingly unstable, perpetually posed to be refashioned by a wholly unpredictable future.

Bacon's vision, as he summarised it in 1964, almost 30 years after the publication of Sartre's novel, is at one with this. "I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events as the snail leaves its slime," he said. Yuck.

Nevertheless, we do owe it to ourselves to explore and understand the nature of what we are. It is the one divine injunction, even though there is no divinity to enforce it. To do so is the final test of our authenticity as human beings, even if this act of exploration proves to be an affliction. Bacon's maturing vision saw him play many variants upon this favourite theme. He was a man in love with images of the past, and was especially besotted with the paintings of Rembrandt, Velazquez and Goya, and he eagerly, if not voraciously, borrowed from them. (If you're intent on borrowing, always borrow from the best.)

Bacon played, again and again, cunning games of appropriation. He made images of images – his studio floor was littered with scraps of paper, snatches of images, torn out of magazines and newspapers, mashed to a near pulp by his heels. He took those images and distorted them to suit his particular purposes. He took, for example, Velazquez's great portrait of Pope Innocent X, and twisted it hither and thither. He turned something that made reference to the sacred into the epitome of desolation.

Always there is entrapment, caging, in Bacon's paintings. Nothing is free to wander – except, perhaps, backwards, into eternal recession. There is no imaginable space beyond the space of the painting, no airiness, no lightness, no sense that there is a world out there to be conquered that is quite separate from this world of entrapment into which we are staring, helplessly. This is the real world, Bacon seems to be saying to us, and it is the pitiless world of human psychology. And this is as much as we ever need to know. In fact, as in a story by Edgar Allan Poe, the walls and the ceiling are usually closing in, very gradually. And when the paintings are not screaming outright, there is a terrible smeary muffling going on.

As Bacon's fame grew and grew, so more and more people wanted to know how he had made what he made, from what terrible depths these images had emerged, who exactly was the man behind some of the most baleful and cruel and hope-lacking images of the post-war era. And Bacon was happy to oblige those eager enquirers, though always on his own terms. There are those artists about whom we know a great deal, and there are those about whom we know next to nothing. Bernini's is one of the best documented of all the lives of the artists. Amanuenses hung on his every word. Biographers swarmed around him. Of Velasquez, his great contemporary, on the other hand, we know next to nothing. All we have are the great works, and they are inscrutable enough.

Bacon, by contrast, was born as if made for the insatiable appetite of the media age. He was interviewed again and again – there are several books of interviews with the late critic, David Sylvester, for example. And then there are other books, written with his co-operation, by his friend and biographer, Michael Peppiatt. The most recent, Francis Bacon in the 1950s (Yale University Press), was published at the end of last year. The title of Peppiatt's biography tells us all that we need to know about Bacon's approach to all of his questioners. It is called Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. That means: we will tell you all, and we will tell you nothing. And this is precisely what Bacon generally did when he was in conversation with his interlocutors. He told them a great deal, and it was extremely entertaining, thought-provoking and, often (especially in the case of Peppiatt), painfully honest about some of the brutalities and horrors of his private life as a homosexual man.

That life was often terrible and brutish – as in his relationship with the sadistic ex-RAF pilot Peter Lacy, for example, which continued throughout the 1950s. The life Bacon lived with Lacy in Tangier, from 1956 on, was particularly extreme in its numbing brutality. Quarrels raged between the two men about their serial infidelities – the local youths were plentifully obliging. Lacy, who was killing himself with alcohol abuse, would beat Bacon mercilessly. Badly bruised, Bacon would spend the night wandering the streets. The matter was reported to the chief of police, who replied laconically to a concerned British Consul: "Pardon, Monsieur le Consul Général, mais il n'y a rien à faire. Monsieur Bacon aime ça.'

This behaviour seems, somehow, entirely appropriate. Existentialism is all about human hazarding. Life is nothing but what you make of it. If you turn it into a terrible experiment at the expense of the self – if you allow yourself to be beaten almost senseless – who is to say that such a response is not entirely authentic?

But, finally, in his long books of interviews, Bacon told his interlocutors nothing that flung wide the door to the paintings. He took them to the very brink of the enigma of his paintings, but he never quite gave them the answers, because to give away the answers would be to take away a good reason for asking the next question. He talked endlessly around, but never quite about. And he talked with a kind of brilliant, and often slightly evasive, lucidity.

In this way, Bacon helped to foster, to nurture, to encourage the growth of the Baconian mystery. And it is the very fact that Bacon seems to fit so well into the story of our times – he seems to epitomise so well some bleakly appropriate response to all the senseless horrors of the 20th century – that we have often failed to understand quite how derivative he was of one artist in particular, and an artist, moreover, who had a thousand times more versatility and talent than Bacon himself, and at whose feet Bacon worshipped in the first decade of his career as a young painter.

If we go back to the paintings that Pablo Picasso made in the early 1930s – and especially to the farouche paintings of 1932-3 – we see immediately what it was that Bacon made his own, and then realised, so effectively, in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. He made no secret of the fact either – according to Picasso's great biographer, John Richardson, Bacon even mentioned it in a letter to his friend Lucian Freud. This body of paintings by Picasso, with their extraordinary distortions of the human body, and the way in which the limbs in them are twisted and wrenched about like pipe cleaners, "opened his eyes to the violence and sexuality of Picasso's work and jump-started his own sadomasochistic vision".

Those are Richardson's words, quoted from the third volume of his unending biography of Picasso, published late last year. "Jump-start" underplays the huge debt Bacon owed to Picasso, and the full extent of that debt, and the degree to which Bacon borrowed from the master, was not fully revealed until 2005, in an exhibition that paired Bacon and Picasso at the Musée Picasso in Paris.

Did the estate of Francis Bacon want these similarities to be talked about? Well, the fact is that they refused to allow the press to show particular images of works by Picasso beside particular images of works by Bacon. Why let the cat out of the bag at this late stage, when the prices for paintings by Bacon are rising and rising?

Francis Bacon opens at Tate Britain on 11 September, and runs to 4 January 2009