FRANCIS BACON'S GENDER TROUBLE

I want to break humanity in two
and live in the empty middle I
No woman no man
- Heiner Müller
 

Against the tide of art history, Francis Bacon predominantly painted men. As theorist Ernst van Alphen points out ‘There are few painters in the modern period of Western art who have so dedicated themselves to representing the male body.’ (van Alphen, 1992: 168) Bacon's paintings are known for their distortions and fragmentations of the body. They often depict men wrestling, struggling and grappling with one another. Bacon transmuted these wrestling figures into coupling men and painted the male body with tactile sumptuousness that arguably has an erotic dimension. The homoerotic themes in Bacon’s work have been widely discussed in recent scholarship. However his focus on the male figure has largely eclipsed the gender politics of his much rarer paintings of nude women. 

Yet Bacon had close friendships with a number of fascinating and unconventional women who became the subject of a number of portraits. Among these subjects Henrietta Moraes was a friend whom he painted nude on several occasions. His images of her naked body may be read as erotic. To me they raise fascinating questions about how Bacon, a homosexual man, engaged with and represented the body of a woman who was clearly not the object of his own sexual desire.

While they are a small part of his work overall, I believe that these few paintings of Henrietta Moraes embody a greater truth about gender and sexuality in Bacon’s work, namely that gender is not clear-cut. In a way, Bacon’s paintings of this nude woman give us great insight into how he understood gender, sexuality and homosexuality.

In this paper I will explore Bacon’s treatment of gender through the prism of two paintings: Lying figure 1969 and Studies from the human body 1975. The first shows Henrietta Moraes lying on a bed with a single lightbulb suspended above her, while the second is a more complex multi-figure composition, with a similar lying figure at its centre. I will examine the ways in which gender is subtly confused in each work. Drawing in feminist discussions of the male gaze in art history and applying it to these images, I’ll analyse the ‘crossing’ of genders in Bacon’s work. Far more than Bacon ever admitted, these paintings unsettle the binaries of feminine/masculine and queer/straight.

On the question of what Bacon would or would not have admitted to, I want to briefly comment on using his biography to interpret his paintings. Bacon resisted the tendency to read his work through his life. Yet we cannot ignore certain aspects of his life and sexual practices, beginning with the story of his father kicking him out of home after catching him wearing his mother’s underwear. These biographical anecdotes inevitably hover in the background and support a cross-gender reading of his work. At the same time we have to be careful: Bacon’s understanding of this territory is difficult to analyse.  While flagrantly homosexual, he rarely discussed this in interviews and avoided the activist politics that emerged during his lifetime, though it came to dominate the art world in the latter part of the 20th century.

David Sylvester said that in Bacon's works 'the female bodies tend to be paradigmatically female: curvaceous and well fleshed… Bacon's lack of personal erotic interest in naked females did nothing to prevent these paintings from being as passionate as those of the male bodies that obsessed him.' (Sylvester, 2000: 224). In turn curator Chris Stephens said that some of Bacon's images of Moraes acknowledge the sitter's 'raw sexuality' (Stephens, 2008: 181) and show her as 'sexually alluring but dangerously open. Though not exactly violated there is, nonetheless, something pathetic in her apparent sexual abandon.' (Stephens, 2008: 182) He speculated that this came partly from the photographs that informed the paintings (Stephens, 2008: 181-182) These photographs were commissioned by Bacon, but taken by his friend John Deakin. They show Moraes adopting revealing, even pornographic, poses. 

But they are not the only influence on Bacon’s paintings, which have often been linked to art-historical images from the odalisques of French neo-classicist Ingres to Degas’ After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself c.1890–5 and Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907. We can’t talk about these paintings from art history without talking about the history of the female nude, and the argument that many art historical paintings put women on display for the benefit of male viewers. John Berger famously asserts that in visual culture women have learned to see themselves from the outside, as objects for erotic possession. In the tradition of the nude, the subject’s ‘…own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.’ (Berger, 1972: 46)

In her book Vision and Difference Griselda Pollock argues ‘Femininity is not the natural condition of female persons. It is a historically variable ideological construction of meanings for a sign W*O*M*A*N which is produced by and for another social group which derives its identity and imagined superiority by manufacturing the spectre of this fantastic Other.’ (Pollock, 1988:71) Our understanding of femininity has been constructed by and perpetuated through representations of the female nude.

I am asking how, given Bacon's relationship to some key paintings from art history, we should interpret his paintings of nude women. Ernst van Alphen suggests one possible answer to this, taking up the feminist critique of female nudes when writing about masculinity in Bacon’s paintings. Like Griselda Pollock he suggests that male painters have understood their own gender through their representation of women. Following John Berger, van Alphen describes the female nude in art history as ‘completely subjugated to the male gaze by the erasure of any threatening sign of the woman's desiring subjectivity.’ (van Alphen, 1992: 169) Bacon's paintings of the female nude, he suggests, avoid this subjugation by presenting the woman as absorbed in her own sexual being (van Alphen, 1992: 172). Van Alphen holds that such images turn the tables on the relationship of viewer and object: ‘The viewer’s only function here is to be voyeuristic object.’ (van Alphen, 1992: 174)  

Yet I do not believe that it is as simple as that. As he also says, ‘one cannot simply break away from existing discourses’. (van Alphen, 1992: 169) Bacon’s paintings, which are full of traces of art history, cinema and popular culture, both perpetuate and trouble such discourses.

The painting Lying figure 1969 shows Moraes’ naked foreshortened body sprawled on a stripy mattress in a bare and squalid room. Though distorted, this figure is clearly female: her legs are apart, and her voluptuous flesh is painted in yellow and two-toned pink that gives the appearance of blushing skin. Her upside-down body is a tumble of curves exposed on the circular bed.

The single light bulb, surrounded by an orb of yellow light, directs our gaze to her open legs. A hypodermic syringe pierces her arm and there are cigarette butts stubbed out on the floor. Yet Bacon denied that this image had anything to do with addiction, saying that he used the syringe as a way of ‘nailing the image more strongly into reality or appearance’. (Stephens, 2008: 181)

The syringe could also be read as a medical implement – since Bacon frequently drew on medical images as a source for his paintings. With its harsh light and bare surrounds, this painting has a clinical quality that may derive from the medical textbooks that he accumulated in his studio.

The figure’s eyes are closed and her face is distorted and stylized. Arcs of thick white paint trace her nose and cheek, dividing her face in half and lending it a mask-like quality (which recalls Picasso’s distortions in Demoiselles d’Avignon among other influences). Simply by showing a nude woman lying on a bed, Lying figure evokes the tradition of the female nude that Picasso’s painting is a part of. In many paintings throughout history, the nude woman has been cast as a possession of the viewer. In Bacon’s painting Moraes lies on a bed that doubles as a stage. With her arms above her head above her unfolding breasts, belly and thighs, she could easily be read as a subject of the viewer’s voyeuristic enjoyment.

But like all of Bacon's paintings, Lying figure is ambiguous and resists conclusive readings. We cannot rely solely on references to art history here. While it inherits much from its art historical precedents – perhaps more so than many other paintings of the time – Lying Figure is an also exception to the art historical norm. It is a painting of a specific person rather than a merely titillating image. Bacon painted many portraits of his close friends and lovers and although Lying figure does not name Henrietta Moraes in its title, this painting is surely informed by Bacon’s personal knowledge of her.

It is distorted rather than naturalistic, yet it conveys something profoundly personal about its subject: a full and frank sense of embodiment. Moraes inhabits her body unselfconsciously in this painting and this is one of the ways in which it diverges from many paintings of nude women throughout history. Moraes’ upside-down position – with her head towards the viewer and her foreshortened body tapering away – is quite different from the usual format of the reclining nude. We see her face at the front of the painting. While her legs are tantalisingly open, her body faces away from us. This posture does not necessarily cast her as an object of sexual desire: by positioning the figure in this way, Bacon cuts off the implicit invitation to the viewer that paintings of the female nude have often presupposed. The painting depicts Moraes as a sexual being; the image is not sexless, but neither does it suggest that we might possess her.

The posture is not incidental. Bacon commissioned John Deakin to take the series of photographs upon which this painting was modelled (though as with all Bacon’s work, other influences have been folded in). According to Moraes, when Deakin first shot them he adopted the opposite angle, showing her lying with her feet towards the camera. Far more sexually explicit, this vantage point allowed Deakin to focus his lens on Henrietta’s parted legs. Bacon had Deakin reshoot these photographs as originally specified, and made several paintings showing this unorthodox posture. (Cappock, 2005: 47) This colourful anecdote shows that Bacon’s selection of this pose was deliberate (though he would subsequently exploit the incident and base other paintings on the first series of images).

It is not only what this painting depicts but also the way in which it is painted that differentiates Lying figure from conventional images of the female nude. Moraes is painted with slashes of white breaking up the unity of her body, particularly in her head and arms. The sweeping flicks and curves give a sense of turbulence and fracture. Van Alphen has said that the physical distortion of the figure in Bacon’s paintings disrupts the wholeness of the female body. They remain active and resist becoming a commodity. (van Alphen, 1992: 174) Though lying down, Moraes is not passive as the nudes of art history often are.

In After Francis Bacon: synaesthesia and sex in paint scholar Nicholas Chare suggests that Bacon’s application of paint blends together two different types of mark-making. He assigns the qualities of masculine and feminine to these types of marks; Bacon’s portraits of women ‘include expanses of fierce brushwork. This brushwork is, however, offset by expanses of more tender paint application …’ (Nicholas Chare, 2012: 83) Chare suggests that in Bacon’s paintings ‘there seem to be two different registers of handling at work. The touches that involve the use of fabric can be gendered as feminine. The impasto, however, denotes masculinity.’ (Nicholas Chare, 2012: 83) Whether this gendering is inherent or enculterated is a matter for debate.

Bacon used a yellow base for the body in Lying Figure 1969, which he painted over in fleshy pink. These two layers were painted rapidly with a broad brush. They form the overall shape of the body and bleed into the turbulence of the figure’s head and arms. In the final layer Bacon has pressed fabric loaded with vermillion red paint down the centre of the figure’s body. To me this registers as a deep blush – a rush of blood to prickling skin. It implies a sense that the figure is self-conscious – aware of being looked at. It also concentrates our eye on the figure, packing all the energy of the painting into its fleshy surface.

Amid the brush marks and splatters of paint that make up this painting there is something that complicates our understanding of Henrietta’s gender: she seems to have a penis. When I first looked at this work I found myself putting this aspect of it into the ‘too hard basket’. I wrote about the subjectivity of the figure and her sense of embodiment, yet I couldn’t make sense of this ambiguous gesture. After all it occupies a liminal position in the painting and is not as resolved or as solid as much of the rest of the image. There are many marks on this canvas that serve a formal purpose and are not meant to read as anything in particular. This mark could likewise be taken for the splashes and swipes of paint that accrued through Bacon’s painting process.

But Bacon’s claim that his works came into being through accident and chance was always a little overstated: as Anthony Bond has pointed out in his catalogue essay for Francis Bacon: five decades it is arguable that Bacon knew exactly what he was doing, and that ‘a good drunk, like a cat, knows exactly how to land.’ (Bond, 2012: 18) Bacon may have utilised chance as a strategy, but we cannot dismiss the marks comprising his paintings as simply formalist and unsignifying. This mark in particular is just too provocatively placed to be read as incidental.

While this painting seems at first glance to show a naked woman, it really shows a figure that has both male and female aspects.  More than anything else, this is how Bacon subverts, while still drawing upon, the lexicon of the art historical female nude – by introducing an element that completely unsettles our understanding of her as the very embodiment of femininity. This raises questions about how Bacon saw the division between genders, and whether indeed he saw himself, to some extent, in the female nude.

In a later painting, Studies from the human body 1975, this confusion of genders happens in reverse. Bacon has painted a body that appears to be male, but which is based on a photograph of a woman. In this painting the male figure lying on the left of the image adopts the same pose at Henrietta Moraes does in Lying Figure 1969. Since Bacon’s painting of Moraes antedates Studies from the human body, and was itself based on photographs commissioned by Bacon, this male figure likely derives from a photograph of a nude woman. 

In fact this slippage of gender occurs in many of Bacon’s paintings and this is not the only instance where a woman’s body becomes the basis of a man’s body. In paintings such as Triptych 1970 the two flanking figures in the left and right panels of the image have been adapted from a series of photographs, taken by Eadweard Muybridge, showing a naked woman getting into a hammock. As with all of Bacon’s paintings, this figure is not precisely modelled on the photograph that it derives from. These are are evolutions from, rather than replicas of, other images. 

Studies from the human body 1975 shows three figures. While the figure on the left is barely a shadow – an indistinct reflection of someone with his or her back turned, the figure on the right is shown in profile facing towards a central, lying figure. In my reading of Lying Figure1969 I interpreted Henrietta’s body as at once offered up to the viewer and inaccessible. In Studies from the human body 1975 the implications of the figure’s posture change because its gender has changed. Like Lying figure 1969 its upside-down face is thrust toward the viewer. As with the earlier painting of Henrietta, this body is not passive but turbulent and distorted. I have suggested that in Lying Figure 1969 Henrietta Moraes has a phantom penis. In this painting the penis is an undeniable, though not overstated, part of the body: it is not a shadow, or a gestalt, or an afterthought. But while legible as a male, this figure is not an idealised masculine form. He does not have the Michelangelo-inspired muscularity of many of Bacon’s other male figures. 

Neither does he have the sexual allure of paintings such as Study from the human body 1949 in which the man passing through a curtain into a darkened space is painted with soft caressing brushstrokes. This figure is more ethereal and translucent. His face is the most heavily worked part of the body, and is dominated by a set of snarling or grimacing teeth, with only the hint of an eye under layers of paint. The characteristic coif of hair that often appears in Bacon’s self-portraits falls from the top of the figure’s head, resting on a crumpled heap of newspaper made using Letraset.

Striations of white and orange paint overlay the face. Bacon created these marks by pressing corduroy or some other fabric into wet paint and then onto the canvas. This is the same process that he used in painting Henrietta Moraes, but with a different kind of fabric. The stripes over the eye almost give the impression of an animal looking through the bars of a cage at us. It is difficult to read the figure’s mood from its face. With Bacon’s typical ambiguity it could be laughing maniacally, or wincing in pain. In line with Bacon’s sadomasochistic tendencies, the boundaries between pleasure and pain have been blurred. The corduroy impressions are not limited to the face: they extend across the figure’s arm and upper thigh, and are particularly apparent on the penis. This layering of orange not only gives the painting texture and density, but also the subtle colouration of skin. While the use of darker blue tones hint at bruised flesh, this part of the body is layered with warm colour.

While faintly painted, an area of dark grey shadow underlines the penis, which in effect calls attention to it and gives it weight. In addition to the shadow, there is also a series of white dots emanating from the organ in a line that might be read as sperm. Many scholars have drawn analogies between paint and sperm in Bacon’s work, most often in relation to the flick of white paint that he would sometimes hurl at a canvas once it was completed, introducing an element of chance that risked destroying the finished painting. But here this white mark is more controlled.

Arguably, though not obviously, the adjacent body in the composition also enacts a kind of gender crossing. With its exposed breasts, this figure initially appears to be a woman standing adjacent to a reclining male nude. Apart from the eerie reflection in the far left of the canvas, these two figures seem to fit a fairly hetero-normative structure of male and female bodies set in relation to one another.

However, closer inspection reveals that the figure’s head, enclosed in a circle of blue and white with only a protruding ear, has a distinctly masculine quality. This is heightened by a mark across the throat that may be read as a shirt collar. This was not the only time that Bacon portrayed a naked body with a collar – in Three figures and a portrait 1975 his lover George Dyer’s near skinless torso is capped with a shirt collar and his head is likewise enclosed in a circle.

Bacon’s lover in the previous decade, Dyer was the subject of memorial paintings throughout the 1970s and many of Bacon’s paintings contain an echo of one particular photograph of Dyer. This painting is no exception. While there is no smoking gun to suggest that Bacon intentionally painted this alarmingly pointy-breasted body as a portrait of his deceased lover, the likeness between the profile of this figure and George Dyer comes back to haunt me.

Whether Bacon intended this to be a provocatively gender-bending portrait or not, the shadow of George throws the gender of Bacon’s bodies into doubt. A body that seems female has a male head; a body that is male is based on a female model. This implies the possibility of crossing socially enforced boundaries between male and female bodies. It raises the inevitable question – which has underpinned this whole paper – of whether Bacon identified with the feminine.

It is tempting to read the transformation of Henrietta’s body in Studies from the human body 1975 as evidence of identification – a kind of gender colonisation where the male seeks to inhabit the position of the female body. But such a reading would not account for the differences between Bacon’s renditions of these two bodies. Neither painting can be seen as simply a projection of the male onto the female or vice versa, because both present figures in flux – a space between genders, a shift from one to the other that is arrested in paint and made permanently incomplete. Each has an identifiable gender, yet each is also infused with doubt – with something that cuts against a straightforward reading of the body’s gender, whether it is a phantom penis or a masculine jawline resting atop a female torso. 

I want to carefully distinguish the ‘gender crossings’ that occurs in Bacon’s work, from gender swapping. Bacon’s bodies are between genders. This in-between-ness is important because, as Judith Butler phrased it 20 years ago, there are ‘tacit cruelties that sustain coherent identity […] the abasement through which coherence is fictively produced and sustained. Something on this order is at work most obviously in the production of coherent heterosexuality, but also in the production of coherent lesbian identity, coherent gay identity, and within those worlds, the coherent butch, the coherent femme.’ (Judith Butler, 1993: 77) These two paintings by Bacon slip across this division and avoid becoming entrenched in such coherent identities. Rather, they enact an exchange that goes in both directions. This is never complete: it does not end with a man becoming a woman, or a woman becoming a man. The gender of these bodies is undecidable.

While Bacon would never have considered himself a queer artist, and resisted politicising his homosexuality, his work fulfils a certain unconscious politics. He unravels the neat division between genders, and in so doing, thoroughly undermines the art historical tradition of the female nude. Bacon’s paintings manifest an incoherence of sexual identity. As Butler has suggested, we need to move away from simplistic binaries of gender, and instead embrace ‘complex crossings of identification and desire which might exceed and contest the binary frame…’ (Judith Butler, 1993: 67) Perhaps without intending it, that is precisely what Bacon’s paintings do.

Bibliography

Berger, John Ways of Seeing, London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin books, 1972

Bond, Anthony Francis Bacon: five decades, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales and London: Thames and Hudson, 2012

Butler, Judith Bodies that matter New York: Routledge 1993

Cappock, Margarita Francis Bacon's Studio, London: Merrel Publishers Limited, 2005 

Chare, Nicholas After Francis Bacon: synaesthesia and sex in paint, Surrey England: Ashgate 2012

Daniels, Rebecca ‘Francis Bacon and Walter Sickert: “images which unlock other images”’ in Centenary Essays, ed. Martin Harrison, 57 – 86, Gottingen: Steidl 2009

Müller, Heiner Despoiled shore Medea-material Landscape with Argonauts, trans. Dennis Redmond 2002, members.efn.org/~dredmond/despoiled.txt np

Pollock, Griselda Vision and difference: femininity, feminism and the histories of art, London: Routledge, 1988

Stephens, Chris 'Portrait' in Francis Bacon ed Gale and Stephens, London: Tate, 2008

Sylvester, David Looking back at Francis Bacon London: Thames and Hudson, 2000

van Alphen, Ernst Francis Bacon and the loss of self, London: Reaktion Books Limited, 1992

Delivered as a lecture at Francis Bacon Symposium: Bacon's Bodies, 9 February 2013, in association with the exhibition Francis Bacon: Five Decades at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchase the exhibition catalogue here.