University of Birmingham Francis Bacon and Queer Intimacy in Post

University of Birmingham Francis Bacon and Queer Intimacy in Post-War London Salter, Gregory DOI: 10.1080/14714787.2017.1302817 License: None: All rights reserved Document Version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (Harvard): Salter, G 2017, 'Francis Bacon and Queer Intimacy in Post-War London', Visual Culture in Britain, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 84-99 . https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2017.1302817 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal Publisher Rights Statement: This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in [insert journal title] following peer review. The version of record [insert complete citation information here] is available online at: xxxxxxx [insert URL and DOI of the article on the OUP website]. Checked 20/12/2016 General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. 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Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive. If you believe that this is the case for this document, please contact [email protected] providing details and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate. Download date: 26. Sep. 2021 Francis Bacon and Queer Intimacy in Post-War London Gregory Salter, Birkbeck, University of London, and CAPA Gregory Salter Francis Bacon and Queer Intimacy in Post-War London Abstract: Francis Bacon’s paintings of the immediate post-war period in Britain include several works that take as their subject the spaces and experiences of queer intimacy, prior to the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967. These works inevitably stray across the spheres that queer men occupied at this time, from the domestic interior to public spaces like bars and hotels. Through an analysis of Two Figures, 1953, and the Man In Blue series, 1954 in their wider social and cultural contexts, this essay argues that Bacon’s works present visions of a broad, fluid, anxious sense of queer home in post-war London. Keywords: Francis Bacon; homosexuality; queer; home; Marcel Proust; James Baldwin; post-war London In Francis Bacon’s 1953 painting Two Figures (Figure 1), two men are having sex on a bed in a dark room. They lie on a bed that stretches horizontally across the canvas like a platform or a stage. There is a headboard on the left side of the bed with a mangled, misshapen pillow alongside it. The crumpled pillow and the folds, ripples, and creases of the bed sheets are formed out of thick smears of white paint, and the two men are positioned in the centre of the bed, on its edge. Their bodies are broadly modelled in fluid strokes of white, pink, blue, and lilac, though there are areas where the paint appears to have been rubbed away or dark paint rubbed on to create shadows or definition on their bodies, or where paint has been applied more carefully to begin to pick out their faces. These bodies are in motion in a moment of intimacy, with their faces bearing ambiguous expressions of exertion and submission, lust and tenderness. This ambiguity is heightened by the thin streaks of watery paint that descend from the top of the canvas, passing over the bodies of the two men, distorting and smearing their faces slightly, before curving gently at the base of the canvas, like a translucent curtain hitting the floor. This is a room, although it is a very basic one – windowless and featureless, apart from the bed at its centre. It is delineated with very thin lines of white paint, and we seem to stand just within it or on its threshold, intruding or about to intrude on this moment between the two men. That thin curtain attests to this feeling of being within but also just outside this space and moment at the same time. The bodies of the two men occupy a threshold too: they are seen and exposed – a private moment made public – but they are caught up in this moment of sexual intimacy, seemingly unknowing or uncaring of the audience that watches. This sense of an invasion of privacy is all the more palpable with the knowledge that in 1953 the witnessing of a sexual act like this between two men would have resulted in them being arrested. Two Figures was first exhibited in a show of Bacon’s works at the Hanover Gallery in the early 1950s, where his dealer and gallery owner Erica Brausen 2 hung the work in the upper part of the gallery, half hidden from visitors who would have had to actively seek out the work in order to see it.1 With homosexuality illegal – legalisation did not occur in England until 1967 – Brausen was concerned that the graphic nature of Bacon’s painting would provoke a police raid. The transgression that Two Figures represented – the way it made an illicit, private act public – was risky and potentially controversial, and Brausen’s choice of hang restored a little of the boundaries that Bacon had wilfully ignored. Since this first exhibition, Two Figures has continued to live a semi-public, semi-private existence. It has not been exhibited publicly for several decades, though it remains widely reproduced in Bacon literature.2 Critics have also closely tied the painting to Edward Muybridge: the pose and positions of the two men in the painting clearly derive from his photographs of wrestlers taken in 1887. Bacon’s interest in Muybridge’s photography and his intensely personal use of these images as sources for his work has not gone without comment. Critic David Sylvester viewed Two Figures as “a conflation of autobiography and photography” and saw Bacon and his then partner Peter Lacy’s features in the faces of the two men on the bed. Years after the work was produced, Bacon himself admitted, “I manipulate the Muybridge bodies into the forms of bodies I have known”.3 There has, however, been a tendency to follow the lead of Bacon and his interviewer Sylvester and focus on Muybridge at the expense of other elements of Two Figures. The constant reference to Bacon’s use of his sources when discussing works like this in effect gives it a more palatable public face, something Bacon and Sylvester may well have been inclined to do (understandably, given their age and the period in which Bacon was working). But continuing to invoke Muybridge in front of Two Figures is akin to Erica Brausen moving the painting half out of sight in 1953. It is this tension between public and private – the sense that there existed strict boundaries around what could and could not be expressed about queer sexuality in post-war Britain alongside the sense that queer experience meant that these boundaries were inevitably going to be transgressed – that is a key element of Francis Bacon’s art in the 1940s and 1950s. It’s also a balancing act that Bacon himself performed: his interviews with Sylvester and other public statements on his art avoided explicit references to his sexuality outside of a few biographical details, though he never sought to hide or disguise his homosexuality from friends and sections of the art world. This reticence helped to shape the scholarship and discussion around his art and continues to hold some influence, even today.4 It’s easy to see how this was the case as the majority of Bacon’s experiences occured prior to legalisation (he would have been approaching 60 in 1967): he was banished by his father from his family home after being caught wearing his mother’s underwear, lived and explored in interwar Paris and Berlin, and produced Two Figures at a time when to be found to be homosexual, even to exhibit what were interpreted as signs of homosexuality (like wearing make-up, as Bacon did) was to risk arrest. Bacon’s forays into homosexual subject matter or references in the early part of his career toe this saying/not- saying line. They are occasionally explicit, as in Two Figures, but are couched in other, queer-but-less-explicitly-queer terms (e.g. Muybridge); elsewhere, they are more discreet or coded, as in his Man In Blue series from 1954. 3 The uneasy relationship between public and private seems to have been a distinct aspect of queer male experience in Britain in the post-war period prior to legalisation. This is linked to the way in which queerness was conceived by queer men themselves, as well as by the popular press, the government, and the public at large. Vital, influential studies by historians Matt Houlbrook and Richard Hornsey have highlighted the intense unease surrounding homosexuality by the British establishment after the Second World War, with queer men becoming symbols of the decline of the British empire, the feminising effects of consumerism, and the wartime breakdown of the family unit.

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