Francis Bacon

Estate of the artist
Faggionato Fine Arts, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Pope and Chimpanzee, from 1962, displays a number of Bacon’s celebrated motifs, channeling their concomitant tributaries of thought onto the same canvas. This complex, deeply intelligent canvas continues Francis Bacon’s impassioned and celebrated exploration of the Pope and, specifically, his reaction to reproductions of Diego Velazquez’s masterpiece, Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650, Rome, Galleria Dora Pamphili). For nearly twenty years, Bacon filled his canvases with bold, searching swathes of oil paint in an effort to render, both physically and psychically, the most senior and powerful figure in the Catholic Church. One finds in this ‘series’ of ‘portraits’ brushstrokes that engender an unerring sense of presence, giving the viewer the overriding sensation of the fullness of life sweeping through these paintings. Such drama is born from Bacon’s obsession with the Velazquez painting, placing this Pope into his own cast of isolated, existential figures who all appear to live at the very edge of life. Accompanying this papal figure is another of Bacon’s familiar motifs: that of the monkey. Here, a chimpanzee bursts out of the pictorial space, aggressively confronting both the Pope and the viewer; its active, almost cruciform pose is in stark contrast to the more static, regal pose of the Pope. Like the Pope, the monkey provided Bacon with a subject that allowed him to explore a series of emotions. Bacon famously painted Study of a Baboon (1953, New York, The Museum of Modern Art), focusing on the arched head of the isolated animal, clearly depicting it screaming. Its fanged mouth is found in earlier works such as Head II (1949, Belfast, Ulster Museum), and all relate to another of Bacon’s obsessions: the scream, and, in particular, the filmic rendition one finds in Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and the shrieking, wounded character of the nursemaid. A silhouette of a walking figure, delineated in lilac paint, is curiously layered over the chimpanzee figure, as if to further connect these two motifs, as well as linking the veiled spatial device below the two motifs with both the throne and the figure of the Pope.

Francis Bacon famously turned down the opportunity to go and see the Velazquez portrait of Innocent X. He was in Rome in 1954 and had the chance to see the painting, but he turned it down, worrying how he might react to the original. Bacon was enamored with the grand portrayal of the Pope that he saw in reproduction. As the present work clearly exemplifies, Bacon’s task was not one of representing the image, but rather re-presenting the Indices of meaning inherent to the portrait: stature, presence, role, and the very mechanics of being. In essence, Bacon gets under the skin, goes beyond the surface of the representation, and engages us with a series of emotions that lie at the heart of existence. Here, the papal figure is seated in a traditional ‘three-quarter’ pose, set against the bright red background of the throne, configured here as a three-dimensional rectangular block of unadulterated color from which the figure seems to step out and into the composition. The light blue veil below can be seen to represent the Pope’s dress, yet is delineated architectonically, providing a space for the chimpanzee; its cubistic construction in contrast with the more curvilinear marks setting out the neutral amphitheatre of the background. Such an intricate composition reveals Bacon’s interest in stretching the boundaries of painterly tradition as well as the confines of this traditional subject. Here, he reverses the expectation of religious obedience by vexing the figure; setting him (and his viewer) in a state of flux. Paternal serenity is now replaced with an itchy agitation of self and status. Discussing the status of the ‘figure’ in the post-war canon, Bacon’s Popes straddle both the abstract and the figurative, depicting the extreme forms of human experience.

The chimpanzee appears as if it is about to pounce on the papal figure; its action in stark contrast with the more hieratic pose of the Pope. For Bacon, this animal was the embodiment of chaos. Like many of his human subjects, Bacon’s animals are generally shown in tortured states, where they shriek and twist in physical contortions. The chimpanzee is depicted with an almost violent attack of the brush, causing the blurring of the image, reflecting Bacon’s interest in frozen motion and the effects of photography and film, and making it difficult to interpret the pose or expression. In composition and treatment it is close to paintings of simians executed in the fifties by Graham Sutherland, with whom Bacon became friendly in 1946. The faint, schematic framing enables Bacon to unleash the action of the chimpanzee better, while the monochrome red background of the papal throne provides a starkly contrasting field that helps to define its form. The violence of the chimpanzee must be linked to that of Bacon’s own technique. Bacon augmented his firsthand experience of animals by referring to the photographic plates of Marius Maxwell’s Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (1924). As Davies and Yard note, “In pursuit of his dangerous subjects, Maxwell had been forced to act quickly, and many of the resultant images have a blurred, dreamlike insubstantiality that must have appealed to Bacon.” (Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon, New York 1986, p. 32). Indeed, the figure of the chimpanzee is so blurred here as to take on a phantasmagorical, rather than a physical presence, presented as a charged sweep of pigment across the Pope. Compositionally, this adds an electric charge to the landscape of the painting. Layered on top of the chimpanzee figure is a plain silhouette of a figure. Like a negative shadow, this simple delineation seems to conjoin the two motifs; man and beast becoming one and the same.

Both motifs sit neatly together on the canvas, in unison becoming the architecture of the painting itself. The closed, claustrophobic interior, often delineated as a cage-like construction within the composition, is crucial to Bacon’s art. They provide theatre spaces in which the existential drama takes place, enacted by his cast of players. Here, that space seems almost fused with the figures. The throne becomes the Pope; his dress becomes a smaller stage for the chimp. The background, sliced with a couple of simple curved lines, is rendered in exactly the same way as the dress. The interior architecture of self now becomes the exterior environment of the theatre of existence. Indeed, the extraordinary compression of the images, blurred to a point where they become meaty passages of pure pigment, together with the scumbled burgundy background heightens the drama of the scene before us. Bacon draws broad sweeps of his paint-filled brush as if trying to mimic the psychological conflict into physical action. Incorporating a rich array of colors, techniques and textures the image brings the paint to life. The alliance of the weave together with the scumbling and meandering areas of thick and thin paint, creates a living, breathing action that is nothing short of mesmerizing.