The World of Myth Magazine

Even though Halloween is over, the nights are getting darker. What better time to sit around a computer screen and talk about some nightmarish paintings?

Unfortunately, the world is not always beautiful or peaceful, and since art is influenced by the world it will not always be pretty either. In the past, especially during the renaissance, art was often made because it was commissioned. Aristocrats and the clergy would ask an artist to create something, often to flatter the buyer or to present a message to the viewer: either a visitor to their estate or themselves alone. In the modern world we do not have this dynamic anymore, or anywhere near as much. When an artist creates something it is because they want to make it, to capture a part of their world. Not everyone lives very happy lives.

Francis Bacon is one artist whose work revolves around darkness, nightmarish images and the macabre. Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1909 but living in England for most of his life, Bacon first gained some attention in the 1930s and 40s, but he did not really become well known until the 1960s when he was for some reason put together with Pop Art. Pop Art being a Postmodern movement with leaders like Andy Warhol and focused on art based around low culture: advertisements and comic books. How this happened is a bit of a strange mystery, Francis Bacon's work is very Modernist, and on the surface also not unlike H.R. Giger. His work has been considered a reflection on the horror and violence of the 20th century. He himself said he wanted to render the 'brutality of fact' in his art, quite an Italian Futurist attitude.

Influenced by the fragmentation of Picasso, by icons and altarpieces, and by his own personal life, his work is full of both religious iconography and themes of struggle, violence, torture and quite often vaguely sexual imagery. Bacon was homosexual, and had troubled relationships with people, which influenced his work greatly. Living in the time he did, he was often an outsider – condemned for his urges by society, and being a sensitive man, he developed a bleak, existentialist outlook on life.

Although he never had a university education, he was extremely intelligent and a very wide and keen reader. During his teens he became familiar with the writings of Friedrick Nietzsche, who wrote a lot about self-mastery against the suffering of life, and at some point Bacon must have read The Oresteia by the Ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus. We have talked about The Oresteia before in these reviews, some critics and authors consider it to be one the greatest trilogies in literary history, and it inspired this 1944 triptych work, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.

The Oresteia is a series of plays about murder and betrayal, but ultimately peace and equilibrium, but Bacon's work is more interested in the violence and horror than on the more glorious ending of that story. These three figures are said to be modern reinterpretations of the three Furies, who chase the hero Orestes from his home in a blind fury late in the story, although here they are once again monsters, and interpreted through a nightmare.

Considering the violence of the inspiration, making this a triptych work was a very interesting choice. A triptych is basically a form of composition where three very closely related paintings would be together in a sequence, and this form was historically reserved for religious alters – showing devotional or strictly Christian imagery. However, even though the furies are not a Christian thing at all, this work has a Christian influence to it – but one that has been twisted. The radiant red background alludes to the red in background of many depictions of the crucifixion, like for example in the Flemish Renaissance painter Rogier Van der Weyden:

The effect is almost to suggest that the crucifixion of Christ, what was to set mankind free of its sins, has either failed or become distorted on some fundamental level. Bacon also admitted a fascination with meat and the butchers' shop, having spoken about how hanging carcasses looking like the image of the crucified Christ. As can be seen above, the Furies from the Greek legend do look like slabs of some kind of strange animal hanging in a butchers' shop.

This mixing of Classical influences with the use of a traditionally religious form is striking. It's shocking, even terrifying, and that is intentional. Perhaps this work is to suggest that the violence that strange creatures like the Furies (their name 'fury' being intentionally played with here) has almost become like a religion for the modern world that is so full of nightmares. This work was completed in 1944, toward the end of WW2, and it was widely feared by then that a third world war between the communist east and capitalist west was just on the horizon, across the already battered and blown up European continent. Violence has, in a sense, became what Christ was in earlier ages, and the emancipation of the Furies from the Aeschylus work is nowhere to be seen.

Bacon's work is not 'pretty' but in a sense they are beautiful – showing a beauty of violence and horror. This is not the beauty of grand pastoral landscapes or ancient temples. This is the beauty of suffering, like watching Schindler's List. It is a beautiful film, but it is certainly not a 'feel good' film.

There is room for this other kind of beauty in art if art is to reflect the artist's world. Sometimes art is simply an expression, rather than something really profound. If an artist sees a world of darkness, suffering and violence, their work is going to reflect that. While it might be wrong to say artists like Bacon are always pessimistically showing the darkness of the world, how we feel about the darkness in the world will reflect our reaction to representations of it like this. It may be shocking, it may be scary, but it is also beautiful in a way – and while not everyone will like it, there will be some people who cannot turn their eyes away from it either.