Francis Bacon\'s Seated Figure (1961)

Francis Bacon's Seated Figure (1961)

Seated Figure (1961)

A self-taught painter, Francis Bacon (1909 -- 1992) found it difficult to express himself verbally when it came to his art form -- what inspired him, how he created what he created, etc. (Archimbaud 1994); yet it can be argued that there is no other artist in the twentieth century who "expressed in painting the tragedy of existence more realistically than Francis Bacon" (Ficacci 2003). This doesn't refer to the "dramatic force of an abstract condition of human life or the representation of something that might accidentally happen in one's personal life, but the inner and unrepresentable sense of individual and intimate existence" (2003). Bacon had a special talent for marrying tradition with modernity. Yet, more than anything, Bacon had a special way of creating figures and faces that depicted a certain remoteness (Galerie Cartazini 2003). Bacon's Seated Figure (1961) is one painting that does just that. Moreover, this painting is the quintessential example of the artist's personal style that evolved during the 1950s and 1960s.

Francis Bacon, Seated Figure, 1961, oil on canvas, 1853mm x 1627mm

x 90mm. Estate of Francis Bacon.

By the 1950s, Bacon had already developed his unique style as a figure painter, "depicting distorted human forms screaming in physical and psychic pain within stark spaces, bedrooms, bathrooms, and cages" (HH Fine Art 2010). He uses the human figure as his chief iconographic device and works to emotionalize the objects and scenes of the visible world (Chipp, Selz & Taylor 1984). His themes are drawn from such painters as Velasquez and Van Gogh, however, the attitude he takes when approaching these themes are more conditioned by a disillusioned, violent, and usually frightening sense of man's experience and his inner anguish (1984). "He expresses the spiritual crisis of contemporary urban life in his comments upon the brutalizing impact of common objects and particularly of popular culture upon man's sensibilities" (1984).

Seated Figure (1961) depicts a man with a distorted face, heavily worked with brushstrokes, while the man's body and surroundings are both painted quite thinly with more rapid brushstrokes (Tate 2007). Bacon often depicted figures in more extreme situations, however, Seated Figure shows a person in a much more domestic setting, what appears to be a drawing room or a living room. Though the environment is quite domestic, there is still something rather unsettling about the painting. There is a definite sense of both isolation and routine that comes from the image, and it is quite clear that the man is uncomfortable with both the former and the latter.

Bacon most often depicted sort of nightmares in his work and this is the same case with Seated Figure (1961). The human scream was something that Bacon put on his figures whether they were clergy members, businessmen or politicians. Sylvester (2001) notes that the horror often exists in situations where there is no such extreme or intense situation presented. Seated Figure (1961), like so many of Bacon's other works of art, contorts the face and figure of the seated man, twisting the form and face completely out of a realistic shape, "taking reality to the brink of unreality, to heighten our awareness of it" (2001). This is so exemplified in Bacon's Seated Figure (1961) as the man's body is twisted in a way that appears to be contorted into an unrealistic shape, causing the viewer to cringe at the man's seemingly uncomfortable and unnatural position. The man's face is so heavily worked that it appears as if the man's face is blurred, as if he has just used his hand to rub his face hard enough to try to rub away the anguish that he feels in his particular situation. By merely using heavy brushstrokes and layers of paint, Bacon is able to convey a sense of tragedy that directly affects the viewers nerves and there is no need for further explanation as to what the man is going through (2001).

In his book Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, Alphen (1993) writes,

Seeing a work by Francis Bacon hurts. It causes pain. The first time I saw a painting by Bacon, I was literally left speechless. I was touched so profoundly because the experience was one of total engagement, of being dragged along by the work. I was perplexed about the level on which these paintings touched me: I could not formulate what the paintings were about, still less what aspect of them hurt me so deeply (Alphen 1993).

Bacon's Seated Figure (1961) appears to be about the loss of the self, as Alphen (1993) notes in his book. The painting also appears to be about torment and fragmentation as the face of the man looks tormented and there is a definite fragmentation when considering the difference between the face, body and environment in the painting.

The seated man in the painting is wearing a dress shirt with a suit and pants. His left leg looks uncomfortably crossed over his right. His hands come together in front of his stomach. The entire environment, including the man's body, is quite clean and is not, as aforementioned, as overworked as the man's face, which is thick with heavy and deliberate brush strokes, giving the look of agony or torment. The face looks as if the paint was scraped on, layer over layer; this is what evokes a feeling of terror or fright. It is as if some violence is occurring that we the viewer cannot see but we know that it is happening to the man. The seated man is defined by his activity, which is not sitting, but rather, the activity is a process of self-actualization. We, the viewer, are taking part in this man's process of self-actualization by simply looking at the painting, which is what is so horrifying about Bacon's work. The seated man is not moving, he is seated, but there is a definite sense of movement about the painting. As before noted, it is almost like something has occurred or is occurring that is causing the man to twist and contort, his face blurred and tormented by the violence going on around him. Bacon has the ability to both realistically represent and then destroy the represented acts in his paintings.

In their forward to the exhibition catalogue at the Tate, Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, and Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum, wrote that Bacon "is intentionally recognized as the most powerful painter of the figure in the second half of the twentieth century," continuing that "His images of straining bodies that leave 'a trail of the human presence' (as Bacon expressed in 1955) are replete with a physical and psychological tension" (Horsley 2009). In the year 1955 Bacon said,

I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime. I think the whole process of this sort of elliptical form is dependent on the execution of detail and how shapes are remade or put slightly out of focus to bring in their memory traces (Chipp & Selz 1982).

The environment depicted in the painting is not the usual sort of environment that Bacon depicted in his earlier works, but the mundane environment became associated with Bacon later on and is represented in Seated Figure (1961). One would think that a painting with such a domestic setting would not have the intensity as placing figures in more frightening environments, so what is curious about Seated Figure (1961) is the notion that this seated man is so isolated and tormented in a domestic setting, one replete with a sofa and a comfortable looking chair. Yet, when we consider some of Bacon's views on life, the terror of the domestic setting is not so perplexing. Bacon, an atheist, often tried to express through his art what it was like to live in a world without God, "a state of existence that was merely transitory, without reason or afterlife" (Horsley 2009). Also, as a painter, he tried to address the issue of how to express the state of existence after photography had taken precedence over representing the perceived world (2009).

Seated Figure (1961) forces the viewer to look at the man and take part in his actualization. This does not mean that the viewer has to feel any kind of sympathy for the man or actually engage with the subject, but it means that the viewer is able to understand the man's actualization by looking at the juxtaposition between the man's domestic surroundings and his intense physical expressions. The seated man in the painting appears to be quite frightened and in fact hurt or tormented by what is happening to him in the situation. Though he portends to give off a casual feeling of simply sitting, we can see through the uncomfortable position of his hands and the twisting of his body as well as his blurred face, that what he portends and what is actually happening are two distinct things. It is through the presentation of pain and suffering that the viewer is forced to identify with them.

Bacon is not just showing us violence so that we may associate it with the process of self-actualization, however. Amidst pain and suffering, Bacon's painting forces us to ask if there is anything that can transcend the violence and the suffering. There is a certain ethical dimension to violence and suffering that Bacon is showing and this is what is so offensive (Dyer 2003).

The mere play of opposing physical forces is not suffering, because for there to be suffering there must be something over and above physical interaction. The struggle presented in Bacon's images is not the physical attraction and repulsion of forces, but the opposition between the physical and that which opposes it: the non-physical, the dimension of freedom that transcends the physical. Violence and suffering in the proper meaning of those terms are nothing other than the struggle of the physical and the non-physical which, as presented in the serial structure of Bacon's paintings and the viewer's response that they demands, is the struggle of embodied freedom (Dyer 2003).

Francis Bacon was one of the most controversial artists of his day and he still remains one of the most important modern artists of all time. Nightmarish horror is chiefly depicted in his art, whether the subject is places in an intense or more domesticated situation. He is known for the human scream, painting his subject's mouths agape, evoking an unpleasant if not terrifying feeling within the viewer.

Bacon was inspired by great masters such as Velazquez, Rembrandt and Van Gogh as well as by films such as Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (Sylvester 2001). There is no other painter as great as Bacon who has owed so much to photography (2001). Other painters, like Degas, used photographs to learn about the human form and composition, but Sylvester (2001) argues that while painters like Degas looked through the photograph, Bacon looked at the photograph "inasmuch as he has tried to find a painterly equivalent for its actual physical attributes and its manner of presenting the image. He likes the sense of immediacy which it gives, and its implication of transience" (2001).