Francis Bacon and Neville Heath - Harvest from the Bone Orchard

Where there is no imagination, there is no horror. – Arthur Conan Doyle

The real reason for my conviction is that there comes a time in the life of every criminal when he can go no further, and this spiritual collapse is what I experienced. – Peter Kürten, the vampire of Düsseldorf

Francis Bacon’s prodigious drinking, gambling, and pursuit of extremes in his life have inevitably transmuted into his art. His straightforward avowal that we are merely part of the animal kingdom, seem to me to be a statement of plain fact. When interviewed by David Sylvester for Interviews with Francis Bacon, the artist said, ‘Well, of course, we are meat. We are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop, I always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal.’

He has sometimes been accused of glorifying the horror in his work for its own sake. This view is hard to comprehend because it makes little sense. Subject-wise, Bacon steered his work along a fairly narrow course, but there is little doubt that it runs deeper than a mere titillation of a jaded palate, for the obvious fact of its single-mindedness.

His output invariably concerns human beings in the terror of isolation, or in the paroxysm of violent suffering. Offal, blood, mangled flesh and bone, are the features of some of his most remarkable paintings. Bacon travelled through his life rejecting polite society. Absolutely unconcerned with the trappings of fame and the wealth he gained from his work, his priorities were with his own naked, existential view of the world.  It may be argued that an artist is primarily concerned with re-creating the world in order to make sense of it. In Bacon’s paintings, the obsessive pursuit of his subject points to a wish to come to terms with death and mortality.

Abattoir Sensibilities

A handful of Bacon's paintings show figures locked in sexual congress. They are not tender images. For Bacon, sexuality is merely the fact of one person dominating another. As Bacon was a confirmed masochist this may not strike one as surprising. It is known that sadism is a trait often also found within the masochist. This was certainly to be found in ample proportions in Bacon.

Though Francis was a masochist physically, he was a sadist mentally, and had no time for the weak.

So writes Bacon's friend and biographer, Daniel Farson, in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. He goes on to quote the British critic Giles Auty, in conversation with Bacon:

On one occasion when I had a long afternoon talk with Frances, and we were drinking whiskey sent by Marlborough [Gallery] for Christmas, the discussion was interrupted by the return of Ron (Bacon’s boyfriend at the time) who fingered his belt and enquired, ‘Are you ready for a thrashin’ yet, Francis?

Farson examines Bacon's relationship with Peter Lacey, a sadistic but charming, alcoholic, citing acquaintances who were shown the welts on Bacon's back, the results of a savage lashing.

Bacon’s own incipient criminality was kindled by his friendship with the British gangster twins, Ronnie and Reggie Kray. Always enjoying his forays into criminal elements, Bacon became infatuated with the mentally unstable Ronnie, claiming he had the most frightening head he had ever seen – for Bacon, an admission of his sexual attraction to the thuggish, violent criminal. On one occasion, when the twins had liberated Frank ‘The Mad Axeman’ Mitchell from Dartmoor Prison, Bacon had agreed to harbour him in a retreat in Morocco, because, as he told friends, ‘he is a really handsome east-end thug, and he likes giving the whip.’

As a companion Bacon was erudite and generous. But his sadistic side could be lethal. Friends and foes alike could be cut down with witheringly acute cruelty. This was Bacon being honest: imposing a ruthless dissection of protocol and manners. In a real sense his abilities as an artist had given him licence to behave in this way. We see in Bacon someone whose whole perspective of the world is slanted by his perception of dominance and submission – a dog-eat-dog world where the strongest (or most brutal) comes out on top. Bacon always claimed not to like his work. At other times he said he wanted to leave traces on his figures as if a snail had slithered over them. Through his great sensitivity to the disaster waiting around the next corner, Bacon lived his life on the knife-edge of chance, and his work reveals his abattoir sensibilities.

Neville Heath

Silent Screams

Given Bacon's infatuation with the idea of handsome, brutal thugs, it comes as little surprise that one of his crushes was the debonair, sadistic psychopath Neville Heath, who, in 1946, murdered Doreen Marshall and Marjorie Gardner. In the former murder, Heath attacked the body in a frenzy, ripping open the abdomen, and biting off one of her nipples. In the latter murder, he lashed Gardner’s body with a metal-tipped riding crop, before tearing off her breasts and suffocating her. Farson claims Bacon always carried a torch for this psychopathic sex murderer. The sense of power, the use of the whip, and the outlaw status of the killer, all proving too attractive a cocktail to the artist.

It particularly piqued his interest that the murderer had said in court, “I got excited, and I went too far.” Francis’ own art was the art of going too far. (Farson)

Bacon was fully aware of his own outlaw status – in his early life, of course, he was criminalised as a homosexual. He always looked back on this period wistfully, stating that part of the thrill was the fact that it was illegal. Even in later life, he never lost the desire for transgressive sexual encounters - once loudly announcing in a crowded restaurant, “Do you know, I think I'd really like to be fucked by Colonel Gaddafi!” The well-known images of Bacon’s screaming heads are given a new fillip when considered against his personal predilection for sexualised suffering.

 

The Carcass on the Chaise

There is a more fundamental bond between Bacon and Heath, however, which needs examining. The method by which Heath dispatched his victims closely resembles some of the obliterated human corpses painted by Bacon. The German social psychologist, Erich Fromm wrote about the ‘necrophilous’ personality – this is someone with a morbid attraction to death and decay, disease, and suffering. Naturally, we see this strongly in serial killers, who may even revisit the bodies of their victims weeks, or months, after dispatching them. Along with a number of artists and writers, Francis Bacon certainly fits this description. He was at one time fascinated with a book with colour plates of images of diseases of the mouth; he was obsessed with his memory of passing a terrible car accident, and the smashed glass that sparkled in the blood on the road; he had plans to paint empty rooms where a murder had just been committed. He also seems to come under Fromm’s description of the necrophilous person’s interest in dismemberment. Even a cursory glance at Bacon's output will reveal innumerable examples of butchered human bodies, carcasses on couches, ‘nailed’ to beds by syringes, or draped over furniture, etc. Even the head studies he painted of friends seem to have been turned inside out, as if their very personalities have disintegrated beneath the effect of crushed or deformed bone. It is a well-known attribute of the serial killer that a large part of their destruction of the victim's face and body is in order to dehumanise them - to make them less than human, so that guilt is expunged more readily. There is something of this attitude in Bacon, who often said that he prefers to work in private, because it is easier to visit violent distortions on his subjects.

The Smell of Death

I've always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat. There have been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered, and the smell of death.

In this quote, we see Bacon's imagination at work, and his total absorption in his fantasy. It is obvious that he is imagining the smell of death, as no photograph can possibly give this sort of information. He aspires to take the image further by engaging more senses, in order to establish the reality of the scene more powerfully, more violently.

Perhaps there is a correlation in this and the serial killer’s ‘escalation effect’ whereby more and more violence is manifest with each subsequent victim, as the murderer seeks to regain the vividness of the first killing. We see this in Heath, and, most significantly, in the unknown serial killer Jack the Ripper, whose ultimate victim hardly resembles a human being at all. It is useful here to compare a photograph of this victim - Mary Kelly - with an image from the central panel of Bacon’s triptych ‘Three Studies for a Crucifixion’ (1962).

Police photograph of the corpse of Mary Kelly, 1888.

 

 

Central panel from ‘Three Studies for a Crucifixion’ (1962)

 

The similarities are striking. It may be that Bacon was familiar with the Victorian photograph, but, even if not, he has tapped into a universal image of the mutilation and disintegration of a human being. With slashing swipes of paint, it is as if he was painting with a razor in flesh. In both images there is an overwhelming sense of the power of one person over another; a total negation of life, and a sense of the perpetrator not being content until he reached the bitter end - urging himself on, until sated with the utter carnage.

Bacon's interest in death extended to his own. He was aware of the death-in-life which always follows us. In another example of his projecting his visual morbidity, he conjured a vividly sordid image when he stated, “When I'm dead, put me in a plastic bag and throw me in the gutter.” This statement is surely the apotheosis of the necrophilous personality.