Bacon and Eliot
over the epileptic lady on the bed and, ‘Tests the razor on his leg / Waiting until the shriek subsides’, 26 creating an image devoid of empathy.
The circular forms on the mattresses which the writhing bodies lie on and the central canvas which appears to depict the carriage of a train allude to a line from T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes :
Birth, copulation and death That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks. 27
It is as if the fundamental contents and ideas of Bacon’s Sweeney Agonistes have sprung forth from this line with Bacon likely being drawn to it due to his deep-seated existential ism and belief that man ‘is an accident . . . a completely futile being’ . 28 T he ‘copulating’ forms manifest on the outer panels in the putty-like figures on the bed and through this copulation there is the implication of birth . Death is emphasized in the middle panel, through the bloody form lying in the train carriage drenched in blood presented simply as a slab of meat. Sl abs of meat that are a motif throughout Bacon’s work , functioning as a reminder of death and man’s fragility. Bacon delves into bricolage, constructing a canvas by pulling together different aspects of Eliot’s narrative and imagery, which take on new meaning when displayed in conjunction with each other. Bacon combines Sweeney Agonistes ’ comment on the meaninglessness and brutality of contemporary life with Sweeney Erect ’ s themes of violence, sexuality, desire and animality ( which convey Eliot’s view of the plights of modern man and the aimless conditions of the contemporary world) . Bacon’s symbiosis of the play and poem within his work was prominently done through translating Eliot’s imagery into paint but he also sticks to his original tenet of depicting the atmosphere 29 of a poem and the sensations works of literature created inside him.
Bacon’s later career and a return to Eliot, The Family Reunion and The Waste Land.
As Bacon’s career entered the 1960s his work moved from the extreme subject matter of his early paintings to portraits of friends, distancing himself from the brutality of his earlier work while still maintaining the same themes. A significant factor in his later work was his relationship with George Dyer, whom he met in 1963 when Dyer was 30. Bacon’s relationship with Dyer was fraught with conflict, charged with love, and in its later stages defined by turmoil. 30 Dyer became a dominant presence in Bacon’s work and was the subject of ma ny portraits, both before and after his death. The evening before Bacon’s pinnacle 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris , Dyer tragically committed suicide. From this point, death haunted Bacon’s life and work. Though outwardly stoic al at the time, he was inwardly broken. He did not express his feelings to critics, but later admitted that the
26 Eliot 1963: 44. 27 Ibid.: 131. 28 Sylvester and Bacon 2016: 34. 29 Ibid.: 174.
30 Sotheby's. n.d. Consumed by his own Effigy: George Dyer’s Relationship with Francis Bacon . [online] Available at: <https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/consumed-by-his-own-effigy-george-dyers-relationship-with-francis- bacon>.
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