Francis Bacon

Hanover Gallery, London
F. J. Anscombe, Cambridge
Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London
Private Collection, Belgium
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in the 1980s

London, Hanover Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1951-52
London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Francis Bacon, 1955, no. 4
Porto, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Francis Bacon: Caged Uncaged, p. 119, illustrated in colour Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia; Milwaukee, Art Museum; Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, 2006-7, no. 10, illustrated in colour

Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, no. 30, illustrated 
Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Francis Bacon, 1996, p. 244, illustrated

Colour:The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original.Condition:This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"This key notion in Bacon's art, that man is an animal, was explored in numerous paintings throughout the 1950s in which humans and monkeys are depicted as interchangeable, if not almost indistinguishable: both imprisoned in dark cages with their mouths opened in screams" (Michael Peppiat in: Exhibition Catalogue, Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, and travelling, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, 2006, p. 24) 

 

Throughout the extraordinary oeuvre of Francis Bacon, the human figure is incessantly undone and brutally laid bare: reformed and transposed into primeval animalism, man and beast habitually appear as indistinguishable, if not entirely interchangeable. This impetus to confront the bestial reality of the human form lies at the very centre of the remarkable early painting, Figure with Monkey. Executed in 1951, this work heralds an incipient moment in Bacon's career. Following a stay in Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, during 1951 alongside numerous visits to South Africa throughout the 1950s, Bacon produced a cycle of wildlife landscapes and animal paintings, including a small series of encaged screaming monkeys. Comprising four remarkable paintings in total, three of which prestigiously reside in the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Figure with Monkey stands as the very first from this extraordinary corpus. The sheer force of Bacon's painterly invention here commands a magnificent coalition of the artist's unbridled fascination with wild animals with his inimitable impulse to expose the primal nature of man. Dramatically fixed around the open mouthed bestial scream – the quintessential Baconian leitmotif – Figure with Monkey represents a unique and pioneering articulation of the dialectical "zone of indiscernibility" between man and animal vitally intrinsic to Bacon's astounding artistic legacy (Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London 2003, p. 16). Scarcely reproduced and rarely exhibited since its creation, the re-emergence of this significant early work marks a moment of art historical importance for Francis Bacon scholarship.

 

Despite fiercely avoiding contact with domestic pets owing to severe asthma, Bacon remained strongly captivated by wild animals. Littering the floor of his infamously chaotic studio, a vast and disparate matrix of visual and photographic resources provided an instant well-spring of creative inspiration. Among the various books, magazines and photographs at his disposal, Eadweard Muybridge's paradigmatic Animal Locomotion and Marius Maxwell's Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa published in 1925 have been cited as distinctly influential, while smudged, paint smeared and oil stained depictions of monkeys on torn pages from Life History of Orang-Outan and Hutchinson's Animals of All Countries contribute to the broad array of visual stimuli called forth and transmogrified into Bacon's inimitable canon. Nonetheless the desire to see for himself and photograph such wildlife in situ, most notably at Kruger National Park, was a major driving force behind the several trips Bacon made to see his mother in her new South African surroundings throughout the 1950s. Upon his return Bacon declared: "I felt mesmerized by the excitement of seeing animals move through the long grass"; an enthusiasm that translated to a memorable body of work including the magnificent Elephant Fording a River from 1952 (Michael Peppiat in: Exhibition Catalogue, Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, and travelling, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, 2006, p. 26). For Bacon, it was the thrill of witnessing and perceiving the instinctual impulses shared with human beings that held the most fascination. Undisguised by "the veneers of civilisation" untamed animals embodied an emotive vehicle for transmitting the elemental and unalterable facts of existence (Ibid.). Very much aligned with this experiential enthusiasm and no doubt inspired by his stays in Africa, Bacon's series of monkey paintings are however starkly differentiated from the safari styled telephoto-reportage of Elephant Fording a River. Snarling, writhing and contorted, these encaged beasts bear a more immediate affinity with Bacon's treatment of the human subject.

 

Bacon outlined his interested in monkeys as stemming "from the fact that like humans they are fascinated with their own image, and that their interest in themselves is displayed with an abandon and relish rarely equalled by men" (the artist cited in: Martin Harrison, In Camera Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, London 2005, p. 200). This 'abandon' is expertly deployed in Figure with Monkey via the focal lure of the monkey's glinting-jawed shriek. Bacon depicts a moment of volatile release; frightening, spontaneous and primal, the scream is the epicentre of drama and the point at which both animal and man converge. Barely discernable as ape or monkey, the hulking and formidable dark silhouette of the encaged screaming beast is tentatively reached for by a faceless suited man. Here, Bacon imparts a projection of the elemental nature residing behind Man's veil of appearance. Nominally segregated by the field of criss-cross fencing, the visual connection between man and monkey nonetheless incites a reading of Bacon's assertion that "we nearly always live through screens – a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, and travelling, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, 2006, p. 26).

 

In this regard, Figure with Monkey bestows an illuminating and apposite visual expression to Gilles Deleuze's crucially groundbreaking philosophical elaboration on Francis Bacon. As propounded by Deleuze, "Sometimes an animal" in Bacon's work "is treated as the shadow of its master, or conversely, the man's shadow itself assumes an autonomous and indeterminate animal existence. The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we have been sheltering. In place of formal correspondences, what Bacon's painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility or undecideability between man and animal" (Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London 2003, p. 16). Distended and intimidating, the incomprehensible monkey appears as pure shadow out of which the dramatic locus of the painting emerges: the monkey's terrifying scream. Articulated in a conflation of energetic brushstrokes, the spontaneous flurry of paint betrays the influence of Muybridge's photography for Bacon's obsession with depicting motion. Simultaneously shrinking away, the figure of the suited man tentatively extends his grasp towards the unnaturally contorted gape of looming razor-sharp teeth; here the monkey gives violent expression to the faceless and mute primal shadow of Man. In other works in the later 1950s rather than depict the bipartite relationship between man and monkey, ape-like forms are carried over to many of the hulking male nudes, choosing to favour the prehensile crouch of the primate for an evocation of primordial physicality.

 

The aggressive and contained animality of Figure with Monkey formatively underlines an obsessive preoccupation with the mouth as bestial centre and agent of the primal scream – a motif that would later find its ultimate manifestation in the career defining series of Popes after Velazquez's 1650 masterpiece Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Belonging to the very earliest paintings centred on the locus of the animalistic existential scream, Figure with Monkey marks the inauguration of Bacon's major subject matter. Immediately presaging the very first Pope paintings produced that same year, this work emerged at the outset of a pivotal period which was to define Bacon as a major artist. In leading the viewer's eye to the shrieking animal by means of an outstretched human arm, this work explicitly draws a relationship between archetypal man and beast, a disturbing parity that would later characterise his work from this period: to quote Michael Peppiat, "by focussing on what was most animal in man – the primal scream – Bacon had found the single image which was to define his vision" (Michael Peppiat, Op. Cit., p.24). Indeed, the 1950s denote a period of developmental experimentation in Bacon's career through which thematic aspects would later filter into Bacon's masterpieces from the Men in Blue series articulated within foreshortened spatial interiors and contained within a delineated scaffold. Figure with Monkey represents an innovative disclosure of Bacon's interest in such framing devices: engulfed by an encompassing field of criss-cross fencing, this work delivers an early intimation of Bacon's employment of 'space-frames' – the term coined by David Sylvester to denote the  structural and psychological framing device compellingly used to convey the haunting spectacle of man's alienation and defamation.

 

Bacon first came to prominence in the late 1940s against the austerity of post-World War II Britain, and it was in this climate that the artist unleashed his acute sense for the violence, suffering and existential isolation at the core of post-war humanity. The first unequivocal expression of this brutal aesthetic can be traced to the seminal 1944 painting, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. First exhibited at the very end of the war in 1945, the menacing, tooth-baring and sightless mythological creatures of Bacon's triptych shocked contemporary audiences. Imbued with the same nightmarish shriek of the Eumenides in Bacon's seminal work, the animal screams of Bacon's 1950s production illustrates a shift away from mythological beasts to distinctly earth-bound ones. Pioneeringly indicating this transferal, Figure with Monkey exists today as one the earliest and most remarkable examples of Bacon's explicit and nightmarish articulation of the interchangability of man and primate, as means to de-evolve and apprehend the human race as inherently savage. At once, the artist's pronounced engagement with primates is presciently brought to the fore, whilst a lifelong dialogue with scaffold-like enclosures and screaming subjectivity coalesces to powerfully communicate that which Deleuze imperatively recognised in Bacon's painting: "Man becomes animal" (Gilles Deleuze, op. cit., p. 16).