English Abstraction & the Portrait: Wyndham Lewis to Francis Bacon
“The open mouth became central to Bacon’s iconography from very early on..By the early 1950s, however, it had become obsessive, dominating all other concerns.” Michael Peppiat.1
Returning to England we can see this fascination with the manipulation of form and colour used to express personality emerging through the abstract turn following Fry’s exhibitions. Initially sympathetic to Fry, Percy Wyndham Lewis eventually quarrelled with him and broke away to form his own avant-garde movement which was called Vorticism. Lewis painted a modernist portrait of the eccentric poetess Edith Sitwell which is an important avant-garde treatment of the English portrait. According to another artist William Rothenstein, Lewis said of this portrait “I go primarily for the pattern of the structure of the head and insinuate, rather than stress, the “psyche”” This clinical, detached, above all cerebral interpretation of the Sitwell milieu is not that of a participant of the charmed circle, but an intellectually detached observer with an ironic viewpoint. It is noticeable that Lewis was not really a physiological painter; he was more fascinated by the play of composition, line and colour which he could subject to deformation. Like Thomas Mann’s fictitious subcutaneous painter, Francis Bacon was fascinated by the body; but in his case, as underlined by the above comment, it was one specific part of the anatomy that fascinated him- the mouth which came about through studying a variety of sources: a book on diseases of the mouth; the harrowing face of the shot nurse in Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin; and the ashen face of the mother in Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents. Within the genre of portraiture the mouth had never been granted such prominence before, with to use the words of John Berger, “the necks ending in mouths.”2 But Bacon became aware of the dangers of turning his mouths into something aggressively abstract, so he modified his approach in the hope of doing for the mouth what Monet had done for sunsets, i.e make it beautiful.3 Eventually, other facial features like the eyes would be emphasised, though as Berger noted, these in portraits of Bacon’s friends like the artist Isabel Rawsthorne (above) imply the absence of “self-reflection” since they simply look out “dumbly” from their condition.4 This blank passivity captured in Bacon’s portraits may have been as a result of working from photographs of sitters rather the real person which happened in the 1950s. Like Kokoschka, Bacon was interested in distortion, but not to uncover the “inner life” but as a method of returning to the true image: “What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance.” Bacon’s art is not illustrative, narrative or even abstract because these styles “work on the brain and not the nervous system” which places Bacon closer to the anatomical painter Behrens- who lamented he had not painted his subject from memory, or with Bacon in mind, we might add from a photograph- than the expressionists, formalists,- generally, purveyors of avant-garde art who seemed to have craved distortion and abstraction for its own sake rather “than a recording of the image.”5
1Michael Peppiat, Francis Bacon in the 1950s (Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 2006), 24
2John Berger, “Francis Bacon and Walt Disney” in About Looking, (London, 1980), 111-118, 114.
3Quoted in ibid: “In fact, they were too abstract. They originally started through my having always been very moved by movements of the mouth and the shape of the mouth and the teeth. I like, you may say, the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth, and I’ve always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.”
4Ibid, 115.
5Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (Reaktion Books, 1998), 32.