Bacon and Eliot
Introduction
This essay will discuss how Francis Bacon’s paintings drew influences from visual, thematic, and structural elements of T.S. Eliot’s writing. Francis Bacon was a painter born in Dublin in 1909. After travelling to Germany and France, Bacon settled in London and began a career as a self-taught artist. Most of his paintings depict the human figure in scenes that suggest alienation, violence and suffering. Bacon sought to create works that conjured ‘sensations’ and spoke to viewers’ ‘nervous system’ and to do this he formed his own brand of expressionism based on realism which went against the dominant abstract aesthetics at the time. T.S. Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri and was a poet and playwright. He is most notable for being at the forefront of the modernist movement. His fragmentary style, along with his experiments in diction, style, and versification arguably shattered old orthodoxies and established new ones. That said, in his later work, packed as it is with references to Christianity and ancient myths, he can be seen more as a traditionalist. If his earlier and later poetry share anything, it is an interest in the damaged psyche and anxieties about the modern world. In order to examine how Bacon has ‘ always felt that I've been influenced by Eliot ’, 1 I will be exploring Bacon’s consumption of literature and how it related to his process as a painter , as well as dealing with his anti-interpretation dogma which arises from his process. Examining Bacon’s chronological career allows us to look at how his influence from Eliot heavily relates to both the historical context and significant events in Bacon’s life. This will start in 1944 , exploring how his first painting as a mature artist ( Three Figures At The Base of a Crucifixion ) was in spired by T.S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion and The Waste Land. This will then progress to 1967 and looking at his triptych Sweeney Agonistes which is intrinsically linked to Eliot through being named after one of his plays and draws heavily on the imagery o f Eliot’s poem Sweeney Erect and play of the same name, Sweeney Agonistes . Finally, I will then look at the resurgence of Eliot’s influence on Francis Bacon in the 1970s following the death of his lover George Dyer and how Bacon used Eliot’s poetry and pla ywriting to channel grief in his work.
Bacon’s process and his anti -interpretation dogma
To explore how T.S. Eliot inspired Bacon it is important to establish Bacon’s process and the purpose literature served within that. Francis Bacon was drawn to books as a source of inspiration, calling poetry and literature his ‘ imagination material ’ in his final 1991 interview with French photographer Francis Giacobetti. He states in this interview that he ‘need[s] to visual ize things that lead me to other forms or subjects ’, and consume material that would, ‘influence my nervous system and transform the basic idea’ . 2 He described this process of consumption using the analogy of ‘an albatross,’ stating that he needs to ‘take in thousands of images like fish, then I spit them out on the canvas’ . 3 This illustrates just how writing and Eliot affected him, creating a compost of ideas that he could draw from. Bacon was obsessed with this idea of a ‘nervous system’ in both how his work was made and how it was perceived . He stated that he was ‘just trying to make images as accurately off my nervous system as I can’ . 4 He wanted to consume media that would affect his ‘nervous system’, and then project his ‘nervous system’
1 Sylvester and Bacon 2016: 170-4. 2 Giacobetti 2012. 3 Ibid. 4 Sylvester and Bacon 1987: 82.
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