Bacon and Eliot
Eumenides ‘visited him frequently’ in a letter to a friend. 31 This was also noted by Otto Dieger, the curator of the recent Centre Pompidou exhibition titled , ‘Bacon: Books and painting’ , who states that ‘Bacon felt guilty for the death of his partner and in his works this guilt repeatedly took the shape of these Eumenides. ’ 32 After Dyer’s death the poetry and play s of Eliot took on a whole new meaning, as Bacon struggled with guilt and depression. He returned to Eliot, specifically The Waste Land and its themes of death, brokenness and loss. He also returned to Eliot’s Eumenides , with them becoming a visual manifestation of his feelings of loss and guilt.
The recurring motif of the Eumenides
After the death of George Dyer and Bacon’s return to Eliot, The Family Reunion and the image of the Eumenides became a concrete visual motif, with a specific typology of the Eumenides appearing in ten of Bacon’s noted works after 1971 ( Triptych May-June 1973 , Seated Figure 1974, Three Figures and Portrait 1975, Triptych 1976, Figure in movement 1976, Study for the Eumenides 1982, Oedipus and the Sphinx After Ingres 1983, Painting March 1985 and Triptych 1987). 33 It appears the guilt and loss he had previous attributed to wider humanity in his 1944 triptych Three Figures at The Base of A Crucifixion had shifted in some sense to the painter himself as he dealt with Dyer ’ s death.
Seated Figure 1974 and the motif of the Eumenides [Illustration 5] SEATED FIGURE 1974 Oil and pastel on canvas 78 ⅛ x 58 in. (198.2 x 147.5 cm) https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/seated-figure-6
A significant occurrence of the Eumenides came in Seated Figure 1974, where Bacon depicts a figure sat with his head turned away and a flying figure referred to as a ‘Eumenides’ in a n interview with David Sylvester in 1975, 34 concretely establishing what the winged form before the seated figure is. The work is large, measuring nearly two meters tall, and features a seated figure contorted in a chair with his legs twisted together and treated like putty in a characteristic Bacon manner. His surroundings are blank, constructed using a monotone colour pallet of unmixed oil bought into three dimensions through the established angles of the window frame and floor. Perspective is distorted by the white panel which
31 Ottinger 2019: 21. 32 The Centre Pompidou, 2019. 33 Ottinger 2019: 20. 34 Sylvester and Bacon 2016: 156.
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