Bacon and Eliot
It’s imagery which Bacon seems particularly drawn to, as he refers to it in an interview with Sylvester. 42 Through illustrating this, Bacon draws on the imagery of The Waste Land and its themes of loss and entrapment to help articulate his own loss and guilt after the death of George Dyer.
Conclusion
My research was carved out with the intention of exploring specifically how Francis Bacon was inspired by the writing of T.S. Eliot and how this manifested itself in his paintings. To do this, I started by scrutinizi ng Bacon’s process to discover how literature and writing formed a part of his creative process and was a source for inspiration. Having established this, I then went through his work chronologically exploring specific instances where the writing of T.S. Eliot manifested itself in Bacon’s painting , discovering this through interviews, academic sources and my own exploration of Bacon’s work and Eliot’s poetry. It emerged that Eliot’s inspir ed Bacon both conceptually (in Study for Three Figures at the base of a Crucifixion [ Illustration 1 ]) and in relation to imagery (in Sweeney Agonistes [ Illustration 2 ]). In my initial exploration of Bacon and Eliot, I was not aware of how much the inspiration derived from Eliot was intertwined with Bacon’s personal experience. When looking at Bacon’s ‘Black triptychs’ and the years following George Dyer’s death (in the sec tion above titled Bacon’s later career and a return to Eliot, The Family Reunion and The Waste Land ), I explored Bacon’s return to Eliot in this pensive period. I discovered that Eliot and his poetic imagery provided a means for articulating Bacon’s loss a nd grief on canvas following the death of Dyer. I have discovered that Francis Bacon was inspired by Eliot far more than I previously thought, partially due to Bacon’s process of taking images into his ‘nervous system’ (as discussed in the second part of my introduction). This means that the inspiration he does take is engrained into him and his ‘nervous system’ as if in a biological process and remains with him throughout his career. In Bacon’s work there is not a painting that is solely inspired by Eliot or any done with this intention. Instead, due to Bacon’s process of drawing from his ‘nervous system’ and his ‘compost of ideas’ , he took aspects from T.S. Eliot’s poetry and play s, such as imagery and themes, which had affected his ‘nervous system’ and tr anslated them onto his canvas to create visual manifestations of Eliot’s writing.
42 Sylvester and Bacon 2016: 156.
242
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator