Bacon and Eliot
Bacon’s intent when consuming Eliot’s poetry as he states to David Sylvester regarding Eliot that he has, ‘hardly ever done things directly inspired by particular lines of poems . . . it’s the whole atmosphere that affects one’ 17 with this work being an obvious anomaly. In this painting Bacon draws on two works of Eliot, the 1933 play Sweeney Agonistes and his 1919 poem Sweeney Erect , both of which feature the character of Sweeney and take place in a brothel.
[ illustration 2] Sweeney Agonistes 1967 Oil on canvas Left panel 198.8 x 143.3 cm; right and central panels: 198 x 148 cm http://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190725124611-francis-bacon-triptych-1967.jpg
The painting is a very large oil on canvas in the format of a triptych. The panel on the left depicts two nude women on a bed facing a convex mirror who, judging by the energetic and loose paint strokes, are writhing. The room they occupy is disorienting in its forms with the circular band that runs around them juxtaposing the claustrophobic box which imprisons them and the harsh angular mattress they lay upon. The floor is textured in the style of a carpet and the convex mirror displays an uncomfortably shaped space with the contrasting curved walls and angles displayed in the mirror. The middle panel depicts a train carriage containing a bloody body presented simply as a slab of meat, a motif throughout Bacon’s work functioning as a reminder of death and man’s fragility. The train cabin itself i s presented as a series of voids with flat masses of monotone oil paint filling the flaws, walls and doors colligating against the mottled corpse that lies sprawled within the carriage. On the right-hand side panel, we are presented with the same surroundings as the left-most panel with a degree of ambiguity as to whether these are the same figures just in a different position. Again, the room is disorienting in its form, contrasting the claustrophobic box that traps the pair with the soft curves of the rest of the room. In this painting you can see that, once again, his treatment of flesh is what is so disturbing, not specifically the goriness of the central panel but the treatment of the flesh as like a liquid, or like putty, in the outer panels. A key difference in the right panel is that we can now see a figure watching these two bodies writhe with a phone up to his ear. This has been noted by Otto Dieger to be an image directly lifted from
17 Sylvester and Bacon 2016: 174.
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