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English
Version La
Rivista di engramma 38, December 2004-January 2005 |
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Essay
Nadia Mazzon
Identity and self-portraiture: the case of Francis Bacon
For Francis Bacon an image of himself is the result of a long,
complicated process, that before finally becoming a complete
and declared self-portrait goes through a phase in which the
artist’s features are not immediately recognisable.
Several paintings, produced between 1948 and 1965 represent
crucial moments of the journey that leads Bacon to his produce
images of himself: in these early works, the animal component,
represented by the image of a monkey, is fused with a human
component. In the repertory of traditional iconography, the
monkey represents the tension in man, particularly the artist,
in his yearning for creative skills, but it is also a symbol
of the instinctive dimension of his nature. In the very years
that Bacon paints his animal heads, Europe begins to receive
Jung’s psychoanalytic theories according to which, symbolically
and oneirically, the construction of personal identity passes
through a phase of self-representation with animal features.
Bacon’s early portraits can therefore be ascribed to an interior
process in which he clearly has an urgent need to acknowledge
his own identity, but also to transform the parts of his lived
experience that he found intolerable, at a time in his life
that was marked by the tragedy of World War II, as well as by
the climate of violence that permeated his family relationships.
The tensions lived by Bacon resulted in a serious conflict when
he decided to dedicate himself completely to art, and revealed
his homosexual inclinations. Bacon, in fact, finds authoritative
models as references in several self-portraits of great artists,
whose work, like his own, is marked by violent interior tension
- Rembrandt and Van Gogh. In the triptychs completed in the
Sixties, with the Crucifixion as theme, his self-portrait, in
completely human form, still appears allusive, and is depicted
as parts of butchered meat, bodies that are blown to pieces
by explosions and suspended carcasses.
The self-portrait that concludes Bacon’s quest for a definition
of his identity is that of 1970, completed during the preparations
for an important retrospective exhibition organised at the Grand
Palais in Paris that confirmed and celebrated his success
at international level.
If during the preceding years his self-portrait appears
to be the means
by which the artist examines himself in order to shape his
identity, in 1970, following the death of his partner, it
becomes one of Bacon’s principal subjects: what now guides
the artist’s hand is his wish to capture matter on the canvas
in the very process of transforming it, a process that in
the end becomes a race towards decomposition and dissolution
into nothingness. After 1970, the subject becomes a version
of the Vanitas theme of the C15th and the Baroque
the face in decay rather than a skull, and a clock as
a modern substitute for an hourglass. |
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Center http://www.stnicholascenter.org
(Lorenzo Bonoldi) |
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engramma
The Classical Tradition in Western Memory
