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Lot Essay
The second to last painting ever completed by Francis Bacon, and one of only four canvases he produced in 1991, Study from the Human Body is a rare work that represents a powerful culmination of his aesthetic values. Painted four months before his death, in a climactic flourish of daring invention, it is the last of three large-scale portraits depicting the young artist Anthony Zych – the second of which is held in the Scottish National Museum of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Unveiled at Documenta IX in 1992, it has been widely exhibited since, most recently featuring in the major retrospective Bacon en Toutes Lettres at the Centre Georges Pompidou between 2019 and 2020. Against a backdrop of stark chromatic planes and bare canvas, the artist captures Zych’s likeness with near-sculptural intensity, framing his head in the manner of his distinguished fourteen-by-twelve-inch portraits. Originally conceived in the form of a crucifixion – Bacon’s first and most significant subject – the work captures the extraordinary reductive clarity of the artist’s late oeuvre. Juxtaposing muscular figuration, erotic fantasy and formal abstraction, it represents a final ode to the visceral impulses of human flesh, distilled and illuminated against the void.
Zych was one of a number of young artists whom Bacon befriended and championed during his later years. The present work was based on a series of photographs that Zych commissioned from his friend John Ginone, who had filmed and photographed bodybuilders during the 1970s. ‘Bacon wouldn’t let me see it at all while he was painting it, except at the early stages’, he recalls. Upon encountering the finished work in the artist’s 1993 retrospective at the Museo d’Arte Moderna in Lugano, he was struck by what he described as its ‘passport-photo likeness’ (A. Zych, quoted in M. Harrison, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 4, London 2016, p. 1390). Against the work’s vacant background, the figure gleams like a beacon, shot through with the influence of Michelangelo, Rodin and the other great sculptors who had long guided Bacon’s depictions of the human form. Indeed, as Michael Peppiatt writes, it is ‘much less “distorted” than most of Bacon’s figures. In this image he gave, perhaps, the most conclusive example of the “realism” that he had discussed at such length throughout the previous decade’ (M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London 2008, p. 391).
Indeed, it was during the latter stages of Bacon’s oeuvre that his thoughts on ‘realism’ began to clarify. Since the earliest days of his practice, the artist believed that reality was best approximated through a wild combination of disparate sources. Merging photographs, film stills, medical journals, textbooks and reproductions of artworks, he produced convulsive, hybrid figures who were perpetually spliced between volatile states. During the 1980s, however, Bacon began to refine his sensibilities, dispensing with visual excess and seeking instead – as he put it – to ‘abbreviate to intensity’. Set against flat, empty backdrops, his figures were reduced to their most essential forms, progressively stripped of their former turbulence. Though the present work still draws upon secondary imagery – a photograph of the boxer Yvon Durelle from 1958, and an anatomical drawing from Bridgman’s Complete Guide to Drawing from Life (1959) – it is no longer a site of existential turmoil. The figure, in particular, is a masterpiece of crystalline poise, his flesh as smooth and luminous as a marble statue. It is an elegant summation of Bacon’s desire – expressed just a few years earlier – to produce ‘a concentration of reality and a shorthand of sensation’ (F. Bacon, quoted in M. Hinton (dir.), Francis Bacon: The Southbank Show, Illuminations Media 1985).
The latter concept – ‘a shorthand of sensation’ – is particularly pertinent here. The work’s sexual overtones are unmistakeable; Zych has suggested that the scene relates to a conversation he had with Bacon about an incident he witnessed at a gay club. In this regard, the work might be seen to relate to the artist’s other celebrated portraits of male couplings, including the landmark paintings Two Figures (1953) and Two Figures in the Grass (1954). The cubic cropping of the head, moreover – as if seen through a window – infuses the composition with a sense of voyeuristic unease: a quality frequently present in Bacon’s images of entwined nudes. At the same time, however, the work’s original conception as a crucifixion suggests a somewhat different reading of the figure. His body, stretched and contorted at a ninety degree angle, recalls the surreal posturing of the ‘furies’ in Bacon’s seminal 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (Tate, London) – the painting even shares its distinctive orange backdrop. The figure’s elongated leg, meanwhile, is framed in a manner that recalls Cimabue’s immortal depiction of Christ upon the cross. For Bacon, a devout atheist, the crucifixion was less a piece of religious iconography than a vehicle for exposing the human form: ‘a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation’ (F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, ibid., p. 49).
The last decade of Bacon’s practice is widely considered to represent one of his most richly fertile creative periods. ‘[O]ne is struck by how astonishingly inventive it is,’ writes Richard Calvocoressi, ‘as if the artist’s imagination, far from drying up, had been stimulated by create new and ever more intense combinations of colour, structure and form’ (R. Calvocoressi, quoted in Francis Bacon: Late Paintings, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, p. 9). Hues became brighter and settings more abstract, defined increasingly by their elemental rigour. Floating arrows, as in the present work, introduced a sense of diagrammatic purity. Textures, encompassing pastel, aerosol and bare linen, became lighter and more ethereal. Calvocoressi draws parallels with Colour Field painting, Pop Art collage and even the sparse lyricism of the great modern poets who Bacon read avidly throughout his lifetime. The figure, despite its newfound clarity, remained as vivid and potent as ever, uncompromising in its celebration of flesh. Nowhere is this more eloquently borne out than in the present work: as the backdrop fades into geometric silence, Bacon’s protagonist looms large in volumetric splendour. It is a fitting conclusion to a practice that sought to expose the beauty and brutality of the human condition, and to seal its raw impulses in paint.
Zych was one of a number of young artists whom Bacon befriended and championed during his later years. The present work was based on a series of photographs that Zych commissioned from his friend John Ginone, who had filmed and photographed bodybuilders during the 1970s. ‘Bacon wouldn’t let me see it at all while he was painting it, except at the early stages’, he recalls. Upon encountering the finished work in the artist’s 1993 retrospective at the Museo d’Arte Moderna in Lugano, he was struck by what he described as its ‘passport-photo likeness’ (A. Zych, quoted in M. Harrison, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 4, London 2016, p. 1390). Against the work’s vacant background, the figure gleams like a beacon, shot through with the influence of Michelangelo, Rodin and the other great sculptors who had long guided Bacon’s depictions of the human form. Indeed, as Michael Peppiatt writes, it is ‘much less “distorted” than most of Bacon’s figures. In this image he gave, perhaps, the most conclusive example of the “realism” that he had discussed at such length throughout the previous decade’ (M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London 2008, p. 391).
Indeed, it was during the latter stages of Bacon’s oeuvre that his thoughts on ‘realism’ began to clarify. Since the earliest days of his practice, the artist believed that reality was best approximated through a wild combination of disparate sources. Merging photographs, film stills, medical journals, textbooks and reproductions of artworks, he produced convulsive, hybrid figures who were perpetually spliced between volatile states. During the 1980s, however, Bacon began to refine his sensibilities, dispensing with visual excess and seeking instead – as he put it – to ‘abbreviate to intensity’. Set against flat, empty backdrops, his figures were reduced to their most essential forms, progressively stripped of their former turbulence. Though the present work still draws upon secondary imagery – a photograph of the boxer Yvon Durelle from 1958, and an anatomical drawing from Bridgman’s Complete Guide to Drawing from Life (1959) – it is no longer a site of existential turmoil. The figure, in particular, is a masterpiece of crystalline poise, his flesh as smooth and luminous as a marble statue. It is an elegant summation of Bacon’s desire – expressed just a few years earlier – to produce ‘a concentration of reality and a shorthand of sensation’ (F. Bacon, quoted in M. Hinton (dir.), Francis Bacon: The Southbank Show, Illuminations Media 1985).
The latter concept – ‘a shorthand of sensation’ – is particularly pertinent here. The work’s sexual overtones are unmistakeable; Zych has suggested that the scene relates to a conversation he had with Bacon about an incident he witnessed at a gay club. In this regard, the work might be seen to relate to the artist’s other celebrated portraits of male couplings, including the landmark paintings Two Figures (1953) and Two Figures in the Grass (1954). The cubic cropping of the head, moreover – as if seen through a window – infuses the composition with a sense of voyeuristic unease: a quality frequently present in Bacon’s images of entwined nudes. At the same time, however, the work’s original conception as a crucifixion suggests a somewhat different reading of the figure. His body, stretched and contorted at a ninety degree angle, recalls the surreal posturing of the ‘furies’ in Bacon’s seminal 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (Tate, London) – the painting even shares its distinctive orange backdrop. The figure’s elongated leg, meanwhile, is framed in a manner that recalls Cimabue’s immortal depiction of Christ upon the cross. For Bacon, a devout atheist, the crucifixion was less a piece of religious iconography than a vehicle for exposing the human form: ‘a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation’ (F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, ibid., p. 49).
The last decade of Bacon’s practice is widely considered to represent one of his most richly fertile creative periods. ‘[O]ne is struck by how astonishingly inventive it is,’ writes Richard Calvocoressi, ‘as if the artist’s imagination, far from drying up, had been stimulated by create new and ever more intense combinations of colour, structure and form’ (R. Calvocoressi, quoted in Francis Bacon: Late Paintings, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, p. 9). Hues became brighter and settings more abstract, defined increasingly by their elemental rigour. Floating arrows, as in the present work, introduced a sense of diagrammatic purity. Textures, encompassing pastel, aerosol and bare linen, became lighter and more ethereal. Calvocoressi draws parallels with Colour Field painting, Pop Art collage and even the sparse lyricism of the great modern poets who Bacon read avidly throughout his lifetime. The figure, despite its newfound clarity, remained as vivid and potent as ever, uncompromising in its celebration of flesh. Nowhere is this more eloquently borne out than in the present work: as the backdrop fades into geometric silence, Bacon’s protagonist looms large in volumetric splendour. It is a fitting conclusion to a practice that sought to expose the beauty and brutality of the human condition, and to seal its raw impulses in paint.