All language subtitles for Francis Bacon A Brush with Violence

This programme contains
some strong language.

Three figures, phallic necks.

There's one with a sort of paw on
what looks like

a huge scrubbing brush,

which is snarling.

And they're baying their anger,
their pain, their distrust of life.

To the people who walked into the
Lefevre Gallery that day...

..that was a shock. I mean, they had
never really seen anything like it.

It was just after the war and people
didn't want to be disturbed.

They'd been deeply disturbed
already.

Something breaks in that painting,

in English culture.

It was as if art had become feral.

Those things are all in the
background, they all inform the
work.

But you make a mistake if you
explain the paintings

through the war. What Bacon did was
something different.

So many people of my generation,

that's where they first saw an image
by Francis Bacon.

But nobody knew who Francis Bacon
was.

Just after the war, my mother had a
house in South Kensington,

and I was always watching what was
going on outside.

And I remember seeing somebody who
was carrying a very large canvas.

And I don't know why I felt it -

"This guy has to be Francis Bacon."

And he went into a house opposite my
mother's house,

I was totally fascinated by him.

And we became friends.

He was like no-one else in the
world.

He lived in a very grand studio.

Everything was torn, everything was
dirty, everything was wonderful.

A lot of incredibly strong
cocktails,

so you got plastered pretty quick.

And then Nanny would appear from
time to time and say,

"Would anybody like something to,
you know, something to smoke?"

And this didn't mean, you know,
Player's cigarettes.

MATCH STRIKES AND FLARES

She was his childhood nanny.

I think he adored her.

She was like a mother to him.

Of course, the whole story is...
It's so comical, really.

She slept on the kitchen table.

She was totally blind.

How on earth she cooked and how she
knew what she was doing, I don't
know.

She organised the gambling parties
that he gave,

that's one of the ways he made
money.

After the war, the entire sort of
bohemian London

began to coalesce
around the Gargoyle and then,

of course, with the opening of The
Colony Room by Muriel Belcher,

that became the epicentre of the
lives of most of the painters and,

of course, Francis Bacon was part of
that.

I have no earthly idea when I first
encountered Francis.

I most remember him in The Colony,

and Muriel said that I was the only
person

who was allowed in from the age of
12.

Francis had an extraordinary
capacity to take advantage of any
situation

in which he found himself

and to turn it into something
wonderful

and magical.

And so you were immediately...

..enchanted by his presence.

He was like a piece of electricity
coming into the room.

I mean, charisma poured out of him,
you couldn't take your eyes off him,

you know, he darted around like a
bird, and these extraordinary eyes.

Muriel offered him a £10 retainer, a
week to bring in his friends,

which he proceeded to do.

TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:

Yes, this was the age of
existentialism,

this is the age when everybody
thought that this could be the last,

their last moments, so they were
living in a very edgy kind of
atmosphere.

We do with our life what we can and
then we die.

What else can you... What else is
there?

And if somebody is very aware of
that, perhaps...

Perhaps it comes out in their work.

I think he saw life as a risk.

It also amused him, I think,

the idea that chance played such a
big role in everything.

And he certainly applied that to
painting.

If anything ever does work, in my
case...

..well, chance and what I call
accident takes over.

Certainly, in his painting, I mean,
he would...

..gamble everything on the next
brush stroke.

That's always, always going to be
exciting, to see somebody in that

situation and, you know,

it's like watching somebody walking
the tightrope to see if they succeed
or fail.

For instance, that painting
in the Museum of Modern Art,

I first tried to do a gorilla in a
cornfield.

Then I tried to do a bird alighting.

And then, gradually, all the marks
I'd made suggested this other
image,

which is a totally accidental image.

I'd never thought of doing an image
like that ever in my life.

I can remember, you know,
really studying for a long time,

the umbrella in the sides of beef.

And I remember thinking, how's he
made that umbrella so terrifying?

It's just such an everyday object.

You know, you get guttural
feelings from paintings

and emotional paintings, and it's
just paint.

But it's like it doesn't feel like
paint, it feels much more violent.

You know, it taps into something in
your unconscious, which is dark and,

you know, exciting.

When I met him, I could not equate
just the general sort of drunken
foolery

that went on, which I found hugely
entertaining,

with these twisted horrors.

This is the great central enigma
about Bacon.

Where did the darkness come from?

You see, I was born in Ireland, and
I was brought up a rabid
Protestant...

..with no beliefs, of course!

Neither my mother or father were
Irish

but, nevertheless, I was brought up
in Kildare.

My father was a trainer of race
horses.

In the last interview that Bacon
ever did,

he spoke of his childhood and

said it was like something cold and
something hard, like a block of ice.

And he attributed that to his
shyness, which came from being
asthmatic,

that he could not interact in the
world in the same way that ordinary
boys could.

Imagine growing up in a particularly
horsey outdoorsy world,

and imagine that you have fragile
lungs that are pulverised by any
sort of dust

and you basically had to gasp
your way through life.

This had an enormous influence on
Bacon.

In the paintings, I believe it does
come across.

It's as though the air has been
pumped out, has been sucked out of
the space,

and the figures are there, up
against the glass,

almost grasping for breath.

He was growing up in Ireland. By the
age of 12,

what do you do when you've begun to
have homosexual instincts?

It was a deep-seated, deep-rooted
problem with his father.

Bacon's father, Eddie, was a very
difficult character.

Francis Bacon disappointed him in a
major way.

It was a fairly traumatic childhood.

His father got his stable boys to
whip him,

and I think that started one or two
things off.

He sometimes talked about it and he
said, he said it to me privately...

..that one of his...

..difficult dynamics in his life was
that he really rather hated his
father

but he found his father sexually
attractive.

Francis was a born masochist.

It wasn't something that he took up
later for kicks.

Francis was through and through a
masochist.

More interesting, of course, is that
he then went into the stables and

had sexual relations with the
grooms.

And I think the buggering in the
barn was a sort of important aspect

of his background.

It was a very odd sort of situation.

And the father couldn't deal with
it.

So he wanted him out of the house...

and try and get him straightened
out.

He went to...

..an older man whom his family, I
think, thought would be a good
companion for him

but who turned out to be bisexual.

TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:

He told it without any sense of hurt
but, in fact, I think he'd been
deeply,

deeply wounded by this,

by this rejection.

Berlin was huge to him,

as it became to a whole generation
of homosexuals around his age.

He liked the fascination, the
freedom, the absolute lack of...

..authority, in a way, which was
hugely influential on him.

Francis experienced Berlin whilst at
its most famously debauched...

..where there were these crazy bars
and sadism was the flavour of the
period.

People have attempted to explain
Francis Bacon as a revenge motif
against his father.

Once he left Berlin,
where was his natural proclivity?

It was France.

He saw this as the Olympus of the
art world, and Francis Bacon fell in

love with Paris and Parisian art
from his first trip there in 1928.

And that was a constant throughout
his entire life.

I stayed for a short time in Paris
and it was about that time,

at Rosenberg's, I saw an exhibition
of Picasso.

And I think, at that moment, I
thought, "Well, I will try and
paint, too."

Francis Bacon's first career is a
bit obscured because what he did in

Paris in his famous trip, once he
left Berlin, has been a subject of
much mystery.

He did have some connections into
the design world of Paris,

we know for sure.

By the time he came to London, a
little-known fact that we've
discovered,

he established himself in deepest
Chelsea and was, for three or four
years,

part of a very important design and
interior-decorating world.

He kept quiet about all that, he
never mentioned it.

Decoration was one of the foulest
words in his vocabulary after that.

Something that was decorative, you
know, particularly in art,

was like non-existent.

He sensed, quite early on, that he
wanted more than that.

Obviously, he had to make his way,
you know?

And of course, he made nothing from
the painting but the painting soon

became the obsessive thing.

You know, he's almost, like, egging
himself on to be confident enough to
paint.

And I love those early years'
paintings.

I have the 1933 early Crucifixion,
the one like the Picasso Bathers.

You know, I can't
believe that I own it now.

The first 15, 20 years of his life
and career,

so little of it survives.

I mean, the ratio's about one per
year.

Between 1936 and 1944, there's an
eight-year gap,

we have no works at all.

Now, he wasn't not painting.

But Roy De Maistre, an artist who
was extremely fond of Bacon,

he painted a corner of Bacon's
painting studio and you see
paintings

stacked up in the corner...the
corners of the room,

with their faces showing.

We can see what he was painting.

They were all destroyed,

all these things, we have these
tantalising glimpses
of in another artist's work.

There's the legend
that grew up around this,
that Bacon himself fostered,

was that he then just walked away
from the easel

and only to re-emerge, of course,
in the mid-40s with his great
Three Studies.

Um, this is not true.

One thing I feel certain about
is that he really, really
was painting all the time.

He desperately wanted to be,
by then, a great artist.

He didn't want to be mediocre.

There are many strains
in his earlier painting

that you can trace

in the development and evolution
of the look that appeared

in Three Studies.

About 1943-44, it was then
that I really started to paint.

When at Lefevre we had
that first exhibition

with Henry Moore,
Graham Sutherland,

and it was then
that I showed those

Three Studies For Figures
At The Base Of A Crucifixion,

which... People were very, very
violently against those things.

One of the usual bitchy critics,
to me, said,

"Why bother to do things like that
when it's already been done by
Picasso?"

It was Graham Sutherland, I think,
who recommended him
to Erica Brausen,

who was one of the brightest
contemporary art dealers of the
time,

and when she saw his work she saw
the point of it right away.

She sold his painting 1946 to MoMA

and that really was a very,
very signal moment for Francis.

He was always needing money to
waste, you know, to gamble away.

He was nothing but trouble to her.

She just tolerated it and helped him
as best she could.

She was nurturing,
she was devoted to him.

She was a woman
who really looked after him.

And he went to Monaco,

and it was the place where English
people of his kind went

and, if you wanted to gamble,
it was the most glamorous place
to go, still, to gamble.

You could gamble in London, for
goodness' sake, to some extent.

But this was much more glamorous
and much more congenial,

in many other ways.

I mean, it wasn't just Bacon
who went to Monaco,

there was this bizarre,
probably ghastly, old nanny,

but the one who he really loved.

TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH:

He was terrible
about getting paintings in on time.

Brausen was always writing Bacon
and saying, you know,

"Francis, please...

"We have a show planned
for next December. How's it going?"

And three months later, nothing.

And his typical pattern was that
he would destroy all his work

until pretty near to a show when he
would have to

produce some paintings, finally.

He was there most of the time
between 1946-49,
even into early 1950,

and produced almost nothing.

He'd been rethinking
what he must do in his art.

He knew he must say something.

It was no use being derivative
of Picasso.

And he knew, in fact, his subject
must be the human body

and that it must come from
his own life and his own experience.

Part of what he had to express
needed a new way of painting.

The heads are astonishing.

They're so close to the animal.

The animal in the man.

In those images that Bacon did,

it's as if you can
feel the breath of

the animal on your neck.

Or as if you're going into
some dark cave

and you smell the animal
before you see it.

I mean, it's so visceral.

The animal is so close.

The fact that Francis Bacon
had no formal training

probably freed him in a way that
other people were not as free.

He was not part of any movement.

Francis Bacon was an outlier
in a most interesting way.

I think he probably did go to one
or two classes and things like that.

He certainly never mentioned that
afterwards,

and he picked up quite a lot
from painter friends.

Denis and Francis Bacon
came from a similar background.

Both were untrained as artists.

So this was a link,
both were self-taught.

Francis Bacon was inevitably

the main event in Denis's life.

Dickie and Denis were the main event
in each other's lives.

Richard Chopping, known as Dickie,
was his partner.

Bacon could have actually been
a hell of a lot of trouble

to the relationship but he wasn't,

and Denis
would put up with anything.

Francis would equally put up with
anything that Denis threw at him.

And between them, this relationship
went like that for many, many years.

When they were partying and drinking
together in Soho,

they would come and drag me out,

with them usually six bottles
of champagne ahead of me.

And it would end up
with punching in the face,

noses being broken in galleries,

there were plates broken
on people's heads.

Turned out, banned from places, the
stories just go on and on and on.

Do you know, I don't care if I fuck
up the whole of the film,

but you can never say things
as clearly in French,

as you say it in English.
Yes, of course he can.
Of course you can't.

Go away, darling. Avec Rembrandt,
avec Michel-Ange.

You know,
you're going to be cheapened.

OK. Very. I'll be cheapened. Very.

There were a lot of things
that they were using

as common subject matter.

They both had boxing magazines.

They had magazines of runners.

They used Eadweard Muybridge's work.

Denis did introduce Francis
to Muybridge, arguably the most,
with Picasso,

the most important influence
on his work.

It's a very interesting work.

And the images were
tremendously suggestive to me
of ways I could use the human body.

Francis drew badly
and was very conscious of it.

And I think facing up to the fact
that he had never been taught
drawing...

And he used Muybridge's
amazing photographs of athletes
in weird positions

again and again,

because there the limbs were dead
accurate and he could use them,

as it were, as sketches
for a whole series of paintings...

though, above all,
the painting known as The Buggers.

I used to go and visit Lucien Freud
and Caroline Blackwood in their
house.

They had the painting which they
always called The Buggers,

which was, is, I think,
officially called The Wrestlers.

I just simply thought
it was a wonderful painting.

I think, that when you're very
young, you don't have preconceived

notions of what is shocking.

You just look at things
to see if they are beautiful.

There is no doubt that this is Bacon

and the most important lover
in his life.

This is their coupling.

This is their moment
of greatest intensity.

And this is the trigger, really,
of Bacon's greatest images.

It's where everything
comes together.

Francis's first major lover
was Peter Lacy.

He had been a Spitfire pilot.

Francis was wildly in love.

Bacon found him very charming.

He said he was... He was amusing.

And he played the piano.

He sang.

And Bacon saw him
as somebody quite extraordinary.

Other people didn't have this
very enamoured view of Peter Lacy.

I remember going to a gay bar,

one evening,
and Peter Lacy was there.

He was very, sort of, soberly
dressed, very straightforward.

But he turned out to be, in fact,
one of the most sadistic people...

..I've ever come across.

During the war, his nervous system
was...was, basically, shot

and he could become very violent.

Francis was landed with a...

..sadist

who was going to thrash him to bits

and he hadn't got Nanny
to fall back on.

When Nanny died - was it 1951? -
he was heartbroken.

She was his adviser,
she ran his life

and he had to depend on himself.

They had a turbulent relationship.

Lacy regularly beat Bacon up

and that was something that Bacon
actively encouraged and enjoyed.

Peter had a house in the country
and Francis went there
one weekend.

God knows what he'd done to him
already but Peter Lacy
simply threw him

through a plate-glass window

on the second floor, onto the garden
at the back of the house.

And Francis had terrible damage to
one eye and to his face and so on.

But this made him love Peter Lacy
more, I think.

And he turned these horrible,
terrible things into magic,

into great paintings.

Peter himself was very often the
subject of any male figure

in the painting. He's always there.

And I think he stirred the very
depths of Bacon's being.

He managed to create
these very strange, eerie images,

against a dark blue background.

Very ghostly.

Peter Lacy's...

..power over Francis,
sadistic power over Francis...

And I hope it won't shock people -
it was a very positive one.

It was regarded
as a rather dirty habit,

to go and look at the paintings
of Bacon,

because the whole fashion
was abstract expressionism

and everything American.

Here was this man actually painting
the human figure...

..in this quite shocking way,
at that time.

Bacon had
a slowly growing reputation,

but he was
an extremely difficult artist.

So it took a great deal of time

for Bacon's imagery
to become popular.

But bit by bit,
exhibition by exhibition,

collector by collector,

Bacon's reputation was being made.

Peter Lacy said
at this particular point,
"You can come and live with me."

And Bacon said, "Well, what does
living with you mean?"

And Lacy said, "Well, I could
chain you to the wall."

And Bacon said, "Well, the thing is,
I did terribly want to paint."

And so because of that, Lacy
started visiting Tangier.

By that time, the relationship
had broken down.

Bacon felt he needed
to go to another stage.

He wanted to go to the very top.

And there was a powerful
and relatively new gallery

called Marlborough Fine Art.

Bacon had been
considering leaving Erica and
the Hanover Gallery for some time.

Because he was quite overwhelmed
by debts.

The Marlborough Gallery,
for example, had deeper pockets,

could pay a kind of salary.

They were like a cash flow for him.

I remember going in with him to
pick up a wad of cash

so that he could go on, sort of,
inviting everybody in sight

to champagne and dinner afterwards
and then go and play the tables.

And the great attraction of the time
for the Marlborough was what?

Well, they've got,

as they have galleries
all over the world,

perhaps they thought
they could do something with me.

Frank Lloyd, the owner, partner
of Marlborough...

realised that, I think, that Francis
was going to be the golden goose,

if they...

..marketed properly.

He did need a lot of managing.

And the only release for the
paintings came through Valerie.

She was my direct boss.

Francis Bacon's life at Marlborough
revolved to a huge extent

around Valerie Beston,
or as he called her,

Valerie from the Gallery.

She was always there for him.

It was as if Bacon was the love
of her life.

And she was, you know,
completely 100% devoted,

in the same way that Erica Brausen
had been initially in his career.

I mean, they were saying to Bacon,

we will give you exhibitions
at the Tate,

and they absolutely delivered
on their promises.

You know, within three years he'd
got the first Tate retrospective.

There were many critics who still
did not like Bacon's work.

The Tate retrospective in 1962, I
think was very important for him.

At that stage Peter Lacy
was in Morocco.

A lot of people of that time
were saying that

he was just, like, this very sad
figure playing away at the piano,

almost like paying off
his alcoholic debts.

Francis writes to Denis, saying,

"I've heard that
he's falling to pieces.

"Can you find out for me?

"I really need to know,
I can't concentrate on anything."

Bacon is

feeling pity for Peter.

"I'm totally upset over Peter.

"I can't bear to see anyone suffer
because of me."

I think Bacon created best
when he was himself most disturbed,

most at sea.

Francis used to say,
"I've used everybody in my life."

He does go into a kind of crisis.

That may have been what was
happening with Bacon at that time.

I think that was to do with
his inner need to renew his art,

to not repeat himself, to stretch.

He did a painting right before
the 1962 Tate exhibition called,

I believe it was called
Three Studies for a Crucifixion.

It's an indication
of where he wants to go.

It's a blood-red and black triptych.

In the left-hand panel
there is a paternal figure,

more or less telling
a smaller figure to go.

I've always thought of that as Bacon
being thrown out of the house.

In the middle there is a scene,

a really bloody mangled scene
on a bed.

It's the most extreme expression of
the horror he felt about his life,

I think, and what it felt to be...

..Francis Bacon
and all the horrors he'd witnessed.

And he did describe
the central panel

as someone shot to pieces on a bed.

And that's not normal language,
not just from him,

but for a Bacon painting.

And in this case, well, it does look
like someone shot to pieces
on a bed.

It looks like a murder
has taken place.

He would almost empty himself
of his darkest,

bitterest thoughts on canvas
and be purified.

But of course he was Jekyll and Hyde

and so the two sides were there
in the man.

I remember going to the big '62
retrospective at the Tate...

..and I had a very nice girlfriend

who was vegetarian,
though she converted,

under my tutelage, to meat,
but she didn't convert to Bacon.

I think that was when he really
came out as a superstar,

in Britain anyway.

And I think he saw, this was a
perfect moment for him to shine and,

my God, shine he did.

But amongst the telegrams
of congratulation,

he got one from Tangier saying

that his great love, Peter Lacy,
had just died.

Bacon was convinced
it was a suicide.

He talked about it as a suicide.

And that Peter almost deliberately
aimed for it to happen

on the day his show opened.

The painting of where Peter Lacy
is buried was an enormously...

enormously powerful painting, full
of, you can't call it love exactly,

but full of...

..sort of, dark sexual obsession.

The violence in Bacon's pictures
calls forth equally violent
reactions.

David Sylvester
was one of the first critics

to recognise Bacon
as an important artist.

Actually in your work, as a whole,

there are relatively few paintings
that

have ostensible subjects
which might be called horrific.

And most of them are fairly
straight subjects,

figures seated in rooms and so on.

And yet, people have a sense that
your work as a whole is horrific.

David Sylvester
was enormously important

in that he was the PR man
for Francis.

And he did a damned good job.

Because he was widely listened to.

He was never off the BBC,
where he could,

he could hear the sound
of his own voice.

And he was...

..perfect for Francis.

I must have another drink.

We might rest for a minute.

Can we rest for a moment, or not,
or must it go on?

Bacon and Sylvester together
created a manifesto

of his inner life as an artist.

Those interviews
had a very big impact on many,

especially young artists.

When I was a student
I completely devoured
the David Sylvester interviews.

It's like I read that constantly,
over and over and over again.

I think that was one of the greatest
things about Bacon,

was those interviews. Because he...

It was just a new way
of being interviewed,

and it was kind of so fresh and
exciting and it was like,

you know, playful.

It was like, you know, in denial.

It just made you think differently
about the paintings.

He was nothing
if not totally controlling

of the people around him and the

way his work was perceived.

But I think Bacon the public persona

was, to some extent,
a way of shielding his images.

He was just, you know, finding
a way to sort of avoid the
questions,

to keep the painting fresh,
to keep you looking at the painting,

to never give you answers.

Francis attracted a certain amount
of awe.

He was quite a frightening fellow,
or had been in his prime.

And also a certain amount
of oiling up to.

So I think the cult, or the fame,
was built up in the '60s.

He's got his new studio
in Reece Mews,

I think it was very important
to him.

He felt he'd got his own space,

he could really get to work and do
what he wanted to say powerfully.

We are in a wonderful little
secret mews

just off of South Ken,
called Reece Mews.

I first came to know it when I met
Lionel Bart.

His neighbour turned out to be
Francis Bacon.

He was very funny.

He was very witty.
He was very clever.

But there was a kind of an
underlying kind of melancholy
about him.

But Lionel Bart told me that in his
kitchen there were loads of

photographs, and he'd noticed there
were rather a lot of me, you know.

And Lionel said to him,

"Oh, you think...
You know, you like Terence?"

And Francis said,

"God, the two most handsomest men
in the world

"are Terence Stamp
and Colonel Gaddafi!"

I thought, "Yeah, Colonel Gaddafi
would give him a good hiding,"
you know?

HE LAUGHS

I'd just knock on his door if I was
passing and if he would open the
door,

sometimes he'd invite me in,
sometimes he wouldn't.

And sometimes when he invited me in
I realised he was the middle of
something.

It struck me that it was a very
private thing that was happening.

And...he had to devote himself
completely to it.

As an artist, Bacon was always
trying to do it a bit better,
you know?

You know, you've never arrived,

there wouldn't be much point if
you'd arrived.

You know, he would have stopped
painting in 1962,

or something, if he was satisfied.

How are you going to trap reality?

How are you going to trap
appearance

without making an illustration
of it?

And that is one of the great fights
and one of the great excitements

of being, of being a figurative
artist today.

It was a moment that he was
beginning to look to

the people that he was
friends with,

beginning to think about
painting the people

he felt he knew inside out.

I mean, he had a great
love of people.

And a vulnerability to them.

The artist doesn't choose the
subject,

the subject chooses the artist.

But there was his subject.

I only am able to paint people or
portraits of people that I know
very well

and I've looked at a great deal.

And that I have analysed, and know
the structure of their face.

I find that the person there
inhibits me.

And then I use...
I look at photographs.

So the photographs and everything
get trodden on,

they get even changed into other
things.

And those often are in themselves
extremely interesting.

The presence of the person in a
portrait

is so fully there because he
managed to empty himself

of everything, so that that person
could come

through him and onto the canvas.

Of course men were a great subject
for him, and the male body.

Women were also extremely important
to Bacon,

both personally and in terms of
his art.

He had a need for family and he sort
of put a lot of women into that
role.

And he had a number of those
throughout his life.

IN FRENCH:

You look at the women he chose to
paint,

they have very strong
characteristics in common.

Muriel had a very strong visage

that was almost imperial,

and it was easy for him, in a sense,

to convey exactly that

strength of character that she had.

Isabel Rawsthrone was another,

a woman of almost staggering
physical presence.

And Henrietta Moraes,
who was curvaceous,

but she was also very, very strong.

I first met Henrietta Moraes
across a big lunch table

and it was like being
opposite a Bacon painting.

I mean, it was almost as if she
wasn't real

because of his portraits of
Henrietta.

Henrietta is one of the most
interesting of the Soho characters.

She, like many others,

could not wait to get away from her
convent past

and get into the life of Soho.

Hen? She was amazing,

she was one of the most wonderful
people I've ever known.

No wonder Francis adored her,
you know?

And Francis understood, you know.

He was Irish, he understood
how hard it is

if you've been through that terrible
sort of Catholicism thing.

How dreadfully hard it is to break
out of it and get free.

He was never burdened by that,
was he? He was never burdened by
that guilt?

Well, if he was, it was...
I think he was a bit.

Actually, I'm sorry,
but I think he was.

Henrietta always said to me,

"Ah, yes,
perhaps he doth protest too much."

I think he painted Henrietta
15 times.

I mean, his work can be seen as
a search for God.

Although he would probably
certainly deny it.

His sort of frustration, if you
like, with not finding God.

'When you paint anything, you ask
the same...'

You are also painting not only the
subject,

but you are painting yourself

as well as, as the object that
you're trying to record.

One time she didn't like,

was there was one of the pictures
where he had a hypodermic in her
arm.

It was a hypodermic syringe.
BACON: It was a hypodermic syringe.

But I wanted something to nail the
image, the figure, as it were,

to the...to the bed.

And it looked more logical with
a hypodermic syringe.

I couldn't put a nail through their
arm,

so it was much easier
to put a hypodermic syringe.

But it wasn't an attempt suggest
that the person was a drug addict?

I can see what Francis was
getting at,

but I can also see that Henrietta
didn't want that.

Henrietta herself later, looking
back at it said, you know, in
effect,

"Oh, my God, who could have known?
This is prescience,

"and it's foreshadowing what was
going to happen to my life that was
to come,"

which was indeed much more
druggy than, you know,

Francis Bacon could have anticipated
at the time he'd painted it.

You know, we weren't really in the
same crowd.

I was much younger.

And I was smoking hash and taking
LSD and Francis was a drinker.

But then, once I had left Mick and
my life kind of fell apart, really,

and I was living on a wall in St
Anne's Court, on heroin.

So I didn't feel the cold.

And I also had, but I didn't
know it, anorexia.

And I must have been on
Francis's route from the French

to Wheeler's or something like that.

And not all the time, but every now
and again

Francis would go past my wall and
sort of pick me up

and take me to Wheeler's
and feed me.

And the most wonderful thing about
it, apart from the food, of course,

was that he never commented or
judged

or said anything about
my strange life, you know?

Me, at 22, living on a wall
in Soho,

with the meths drinkers and all
that, you know?

He never made any judgment
or said a word.

We had a wonderful time, we talked
about absolutely everything.

And that's when I told him about my
great-great-uncle Leopold,

which, of course, he knew all about,

and we discussed de Sade and
masochism

and lots of very interesting things

that I didn't realise till much
later

how interesting they were
to Francis, of course.

But I guessed something was up.

He was obsessed by sex.

He was plugged into all sorts of
different things

that most people aren't aware of.

When we were out, at certain moments
he'd sort of almost

walk through a wall
into a different world.

And disappear.

And what happened then,
I don't know.

The next day he'd reappear in
a damaged state, you know,

barely able to walk or turn his
head.

And there was no point in sort of
saying, "Well, what happened,
Francis?"

Because he'd, at best, he'd just,
you know,

he'd just fix you with a sort of
basilisk stare and say,
"What do you mean?"

I was fast asleep one night when the
phone went and Valerie Beston said,

"Paul, quickly, quickly, you've got
to come to Reece Mews."

I've got there and he had

a huge injury, right the way across

from his left eye right the way
across,

right round the right eye.

All the skin had been broken and
he was in a terrible mess.

And I said, "Francis, you need a
plastic surgeon."

"No," he said, "you sew me up now."

I said, "I'll put some local
anaesthetic in."

He said, "No, I don't want
any local anaesthetic."

That's the only time I realised that
he quite enjoyed being hurt.

Francis liked the criminal side
of London, you know?

He liked the kind of...

sordidness of London,

all that kind of East End dross

and knowing all those kind of
people.

Or wanting to know all those
kind of people.

George Dyer came on the scene as
this

tough, well-built muscular
boxer-like East End thug.

And I think through George he,
you know, was able...

George and George's family,
through all that,

he got to know, you know, quite a
lot of bad boys,

including the Krays.

Who did come knocking on his door.
Cos they wanted a painting.

I like painting good-looking people.

Because I like their bone structure.

I loathe my own.

But little by little it became
apparent

that however sort of virile

and thug-like he looked, he was
actually a very nice, lost young
man.

George was obviously rather reticent
with the whip.

So, little by little,

Francis became disabused because
George had been, in that sense,
a disappointment.

He was a kind of very feeble
East End thug,

and he liked children and animals
and cuddling.

Bacon said, "Oh, I hate the billing
and cooing of sex. I just like the
sex."

And he wanted George to rape him
and George wanted to cuddle.

Francis confided just about
everything to do with his
relationship with George.

And it seemed that the sexual
relationship had a real downturn.

George was suffering from erectile
dysfunction.

It seems to me that Francis
had emasculated George,

he found what he saw as the typical
rough East Ender that he longed

to find, and then he did that job
of emasculating him.

Francis did his best to make
George Dyer

into something. And I think
he did that on canvas.

Bacon was violent in the way
he painted,

he was sadistic in the way he
took apart George

with missing ears and
missing jaws

and missing eyes,
missing everything, really.

George was a bit appalled by
the whole thing.

He saw all of these rich people
standing around sort of, you know,

in this smart gallery.

He said to me, you know, "I think
they're 'orrible.

"They're really 'orrible."

He said, "And he thinks
I look like that!"

George knew all the prices
for the pictures.

And he said, "And these people go
and pay fucking thousands of pounds
for 'em."

I mean, he portrays him as
a kind of idiot.

He has things with what looks almost
like

a nappy on his head or something.

And dressed as a baby.

I mean, need I say more?

There were certainly moments when
things were firing up between them.

They had lovers' tiffs.

The one time when Francis phoned me
and said, "You have to come round,

"you have to come round right away
because George has gone berserk

"and all my suits are in the bath
and he's poured paint all over them

"and he's trampling up and down."

And I went round.

And I couldn't get in because
the front door was barred.

So I had to back the vehicle up,

get up onto the roof and go through
the window where I was nearly

throttled by George until he
realised who it was.

And he had, in fact,

thrown two thirds of the furniture
down the staircase.

Dyer is fighting, in a way...

He's just going downhill, downhill,
downhill,

it must have been terrible to watch.

So it's almost like a desperate
attempt to get back in with Bacon

and show Bacon that he is
still a man.

Francis was painting fewer pictures
of George.

He was weary of him, I think.

Weary of his problems, of his
drinking, of his carousing,

of his unhappiness, perhaps.

His better judgment told him that he
needed to be shot of Dyer.

Bacon began moving away from George.

He looked more to Paris, at a time
when other British artists were

resolutely not looking to Paris.

I think Bacon's interest in France
goes all the way back to 1928,

on his first trip there.

IN FRENCH:

In 1971,
getting a show at the Grand Palais

was the great moment of his life.

It was the turning point.

Huge. The first English artist to be
offered the Grand Palais.

So, really, really big time.

It was very important this went
well.

I understand that the British
embassy were very worried in case

a typical Bacon scene erupted
and it was, you know,

something terrible happened there.

George, Francis, myself, Miss
Beston,

all had rooms in this
particular hotel.

Everybody else was saying, "Don't
bring George, he'll ruin
everything."

Dicky and Denis and some others with
Francis had gone out and they saw
the venue.

And there was a big red carpet and
there were the soldiers
standing there.

They all described to me these
leather boots up to the knees

and the red stripe up the soldiers'
tight trousers.

And they were fairly taken by this.

They said Francis was...

You could see him sort of swell
with pride at this.

And they went back to the hotel
thinking this was going to be a good
evening.

And Francis went up to his room.

There was a stink of drugs, unwashed
bodies, dirty sex, and the rent boy,

the very dirty rent boy, who was
in there with George.

And Francis was furious.

Dicky, Denis and Francis, they went
drinking, they went gambling.

They had a four, five, six-course
meal.

They hardly hurried home, knowing
that George was in such a bad state.

I can't remember, exactly, the time,
but it must have been sort of two
o'clock in the morning.

There was a knock at my door and
it was Francis.

And he said, could he come and
spend the night in my room

cos I had double... You know,
two beds.

Because George had brought home
an Arab with smelly feet.

And it was so disgusting he couldn't
stand it any longer.

And in the morning he said,

"Just go and see if George has
got rid of the Arab."

There was no evidence of
George being around, you know,

the bed was in a real state
of disarray.

And I then checked with Miss
Beston around the room,

and looked in the bathroom.

And George was on the toilet.

Apparently Miss Beston pushed him
out of the way, went in there,

and did pulses and things like this
and said, "No, he's dead."

I never even thought about it being
a suicide attempt.

It could well have been.

We thought brought about by him
being so drunk

and taking the wrong tablets.

And so she said, "Right, I'll take
care of this."

And Terry was pushed out of the way.

And down she went.

And Valerie did the fixing to then
make sure that

the death was found two days later.

I think it was a joint decision
between Francis,

Valerie and the hotel manager.

Why was that decision made?

It might have put the opening
in jeopardy.

It had to be sorted for Francis.

It was bizarre to think that,
you know,

this body was going to be left
in a hotel room overnight.

You know, it's a hell of a thing to
decide not to report a dead body.

Whether that was Bacon's idea,
you can't be sure.

You know? I mean,

it looks like maybe that's what
happened,

but it's still a hell of a thing.

I mean, that's a crime.

Once the Grand Palais retrospective
had opened,

the news began to sort of filter
out,

and of course it got round with all
the speed of bad news.

During the dinner, the whole room
knew that George had committed
suicide,

but up until then nobody had heard.

Francis himself was in the Grand
Palais.

I think, it was as though he wasn't
really there.

He seemed totally abstracted.
He was pale,

but he went through with the dinner
because he felt that it was better

to go through with it than to
cancel.

So, the stories about Francis being
told at the opening of his show and

him being so brave and going ahead
with the show,

despite having been given this
dramatic news, are absolute tosh.

He knew that two days before.
Someone may well have gone up to him

and told him the story, but that was
a bit of playacting.

There was a picture that the French
had bought, a big triptych,

which actually has George sitting on
a sort of beautifully painted

creamy white toilet.

And because the French state
had just bought it,

President Pompidou paused for a long
time in front of that image.

He had to stand there and talk about
this image,

knowing that George had recently
died in exactly that position.

IN FRENCH:

And it was all...

..awful and sad.

This tragic event...

..at the same time, gave him
perhaps the deepest

subject he was ever to have
in his life.

It seems a bit mad,

painting portraits of dead people.

After all,
if their flesh has rotted away...

..once they're dead,

you have your memory of them, but...

..you haven't got them.

He actually went back to Paris
to absorb the memories,

to relive the events.

And actually stayed
in the same hotel

where George had killed himself.

And from this sort of well of guilt
and grief he dredged up

these extraordinarily haunting
images that are some of, I think,

the most profound images
in painting.

When it came into the gallery...

..and I saw it for the first time...

..if Francis showed any emotion
to the death,

the emotion was in that painting.

Everything that he felt

about George was in those paintings.

Maybe it was just about getting it
out of his system.

So, paint them, get them out the
studio,

and then maybe I'll feel better.

It got him recognition far beyond
anything he'd ever had before.

It was the turning point in sales

and sort of international
reputation.

HE YELLS

He was very much collected by very
important film directors.

And influenced, of course, in the
actual films,

Pasolini and Bertolucci.

He was au courant, you know?

And the power of his paintings
fitted the period.

And he's a great inspiration.

'When I made Theorem with Pasolini,'

one day, he just showed up with this
book.

And it was a book of Francis's
paintings.

And he said, you know, "When you're
talking to the son,

"you can kind of be flicking through
this."

And I realised, "Oh, he knows about
Francis."

It becomes self-perpetuating.

Francis Bacon, who already at that
time, late '70s, was famous.

I was right next door.

And people would approach me

to try and get a painting
on the cheap

without going through
his gallery at Marlborough.

Or to be painted by him.

And I would fix little things for
him,

like a leaky pipe, electricity
problem.

Or I'd drive him somewhere.

We sort of fairly quickly got over
the homosexual vibes,

if I put it that way.

We got into that and I said,
I just do not fancy men.

BACON, IN FRENCH:

Bacon became a quite lonely man.

The ageing process is particularly
hard on homosexuals.

So, he was in a position of
diminished physical beauty,
as it were.

I went a few times with Francis
to the West End gay clubs.

Sometimes John Edwards was there,
sometimes not.

John was like a son he never had.

A friend.

He really, really cared for John.

John Edwards came into his life
in a curious fashion.

He ran, or helped to run, a pub
in the East End.

And Bacon had been there and said
he'd come back with some friends.

And asked John to stock in
some champagne.

And then Bacon didn't turn up.
John was mightily pissed off.

And at some point, in The Colony
Room, told him.

And this amused Bacon.

Within a short space of time,
they became inseparable.

They were...

They were a team,
like Laurel and Hardy.

They belonged together.

They just became a very unusual
loving relationship. But no sex.

The important thing about the
Edwards relationship was that it was

paternal, but it's not always clear
who is the father and who is the
son.

Oh, come in, John.

I'm glad you came down.

John, David is just asking me the
most difficult question.

The pictures of Edwards are often

quite eroticised and quite gentle,
you know.

Yes, he has pieces of him that
disappear,

yes, he might be leaking, his form

might be leaking onto the ground,

but not with the kind of violence or

brutality that you see in Bacon's
earlier paintings.

I often think of the Tempest in
Shakespeare,

that there's a sort of, almost an
eerie calm in Bacon's later work.

There's something rather beautiful
and simplified.

A new period, a third period of
Bacon's work, the late landscapes.

Bacon only did about ten of them
before he died,

but that's a discreet body of late
work which is absolutely great,

and some of his greatest work.

He desperately wanted to be
a great artist.

He destroyed, right up to the end
of his life,

and by then every time he took
a knife to a painting,

he'd just thrown away £1 million,

which is really admirable, I think.

By 1982, he was very famous and
he couldn't just...

crumple up the canvas and put it in
the dustbin outside 7 Reece Mews,

because people were constantly going
through his dustbin,

looking for Bacon scraps, OK?

So he wanted them absolutely
destroyed.

So he would phone me up and I would

go over right away and I would do
it.

And the only way to destroy them was
with a Stanley knife,

so you cut into it, cut strips.

Cut all the strips

and then put it in a rubbish bag

and then they were taken
over to the Chelsea dump.

And if you gave the man a fiver,
who ran the fire,

he would take the bag right in front
of your eyes and things would be
burnt there, OK?

And then I'd report back to
Francis that I did this.

What did it feel like, to destroy?
Terrible.

It's... Heart-wrenching,
gutting, terrible to destroy
a Francis Bacon painting.

And some of them, I obviously looked
at them, I thought, "Pretty good.

"I would like to have one."

I didn't, though. No.

Stupid!

IN FRENCH:

What's vultures in French?

Francis trusted John. He would
trust John with everything,

from the early point. I remember
John coming home and saying,

"Francis told me where he keeps his
money, where he keeps this,
where he keeps that."

It's quite understandable
that the circle would

look like this and say, "Who is he?
What's he want?

"Is he trying to take advantage?"

So, yes, there was definitely
suspicion.

I must have first met John Edwards
with Francis,

presumably in Muriel's.

He thought it was very funny
to handcuff me to the bar.

And he said he was going to
place a bet.

And I didn't have any appointment or
anything I was doing that day,

it was a free day,

so, I wasn't worried.

But it took him an hour and a half
or a little more

to place his bet, and so,
he eventually

did reappear, just when I was
wondering

what I would do if I was
going to be there for the night.

It was only one arm, so
my drinking arm was free,

and I was sitting drinking anyhow.

The most important thing for Francis
was that John had enough money to

last his life. He changed his will.

When you think of Francis and how
complicated his life was,

this will was one page long,
just one page.

And everything went to John Edwards
if he succeeded Francis by
three months.

Francis always made John aware that
he would inherit a lot of money.

Well, Bacon said he thought about
death every day of his life.

And as he aged, it must have become
more and more present to him, death,

and as his friends died,
others died...

The death of Muriel... I think the
fading of The Colony

must have been difficult for Bacon.

In the '80s, Soho really had ended.

It was pretty much running on fumes
and I think that that had, you know,

a very depressing influence on Bacon
on top of everything else.

You know, it's - what is it? -
40 years on or something,

and he would have been reminded
greatly about the passing of time.

Well, I'd seen Bacon around a lot,
but I'd never spoken to him

cos, I guess a kind of hero or
something and I was quite young,

but I used to see him in cafes in
Soho.

And if I'd been out late, I'd
end up going early morning into

a cafe, and sometimes he'd be
having breakfast.

So it was kind of odd to be in the
same room as him and not speak to
him

but then, I just thought, what the
hell would I say or whatever?

In his last years,
he looked very old and very tired

and he must have felt very pained

at that moment, you know, to see
the world flashing before his eyes.

John wasn't always there for him.

John was there to support him,
but he wasn't there 24/7.

From day one, John had his partner,
Philip.

They'd been together five or six
years before Francis came on the
scene.

And that was a no-go area.

That was John's life,

Francis was totally aware of that.

John Edwards was travelling a lot,
he didn't live in London, and again,

I was living 20 metres away from
him, so it deepened his trust in me.

The opportunity came up to
arrange a supper party at my place
for Francis Bacon.

So Frederick Ashton had already
committed to come,

who was the great
choreographer of the time.

I was left with an empty seat and I
thought, "Who can I invite?"

Jose Capelo was someone I
used to see at first at the
Royal Opera House.

He was interested in art.

And I phoned Jose and he leapt at
the chance.

And Ashton and Francis took
an immediate liking to him.

And Francis was rather famous,
of course,

for liking a certain amount
of roughish trade.

There was an element of relief with
Jose, because Jose was firmly

well-educated,
professional middle class,

and so was much easier
to talk to.

I think John would have been happy
for Francis.

There was no jealousy there between
them.

Nothing for John to worry about.

John had all the keys to all the
boxes.

Francis Bacon and Jose Capelo shared
a safety deposit box at Harrods.

They both had keys.

John wanted the key from Jose.

Jose was very difficult to read,
as far as what really drove him.

And I never went further.
He would clam up.

They were travelling together.
They would go to Venice, Madrid.

Francis would come back with a big
smile on his face.

He was a happy man. He was in love

and for Francis, that obviously
meant sexually it was going well.

Yes, in 1988, he's inspired.

He re-works, re-studies.

It is not brutish any longer.

It's as if the monsters have been
turned into silk,

and they no longer are going to jump
out of the frame and bite you.

There is something distant.

But that is kind of fascinating too,
you know?

I mean, to look at your earlier
work, and your earlier

juicy brutality, and then make it
more designed,

distant, behind glass -
it's another feeling.

HIRST: The Figure At The Base Of
A Crucifixion,

that's just an unbelievable
painting.

I mean, I made a couple of pieces
which were directly, you know,

taken from Bacon paintings.

Like I made a three-dimensional
triptych.

I saw these kind of terrifying
social spaces that Bacon was
painting.

I remember thinking, "I wonder if I
could actually make these spaces?"

I got a phone call from the Saatchi
Gallery and they said,

"Bacon was in today and he was stood
in front of your sculpture for an
hour."

I was like, "An hour? No, can't
be an hour."

Around September 1990, we went up to
Saatchi's -

the first time he saw Damien Hirst.

He liked one piece of Damien Hirst
and we came back and we were having
drinks.

After you've drunk a bottle of wine

you come to things that really
matter,

and it's not looking at
Damien Hirst, it's your love affair.

Jose had framed it like "Francis,
I want to stay your friend."

That means no more sexual
relationship.

And for Francis Bacon, he knew
exactly what it meant, and he
was devastated.

So Francis, in his cups...

..told me about the relationship and
those two years with Jose,

and the fact that he'd given Jose
four million US.

and two of his paintings.

I could read his pain, how
gutted he was, his anguish.

Well, I would say he slowly, slowly
deteriorated from 1990,

over the following two years,

and I took him to one specialist
after another

and none of them could help him.

He kept saying to me, "I've got
to go to Madrid cos I want
to see Jose".

IN FRENCH:

Finally, Francis Bacon,
one of the most highly acclaimed

British painters this century
has died.

The painter Francis Bacon has died
at the age of 82.

He collapsed while on holiday
in Spain.

It's thought he had a heart attack.

He kept saying to me, "I've got to
see Jose."

I said, "Francis, whatever you do,
don't go to Madrid,

"because you're not going to survive
if you do."

I was really destroyed when I heard
he had died.

It was really very, very sad.

But it was inevitable.

He was reckless about his own life
and other people's lives, I think.

What caused the heart attack?

Was it... Did Jose and Francis
have a huge row?

And Francis had the heart attack
and was whisked off to hospital.

Francis was in a Catholic hospital
being attended by Catholic nuns

and Jose was not there.

It's despicable.

I think that if Bacon is consistent,

he has to be prepared to die
at any time,

to be taken advantage of at any
time,

for things not to work out at
any time,

and I think he was.
He was a gambler.

He understood that gamblers
usually lose.

The Study Of A Bull,

the last painting Bacon completed,

is mostly raw canvas.

I don't think that's a question of
it

being unfinished in any sense.

He said what he wanted to say
in that top left corner of
the painting.

The bull seems to be shifting
between two spaces.

That seems like life and death.

And the fact that he used dust
as a medium,

this is the dust to which he will
return,

as indeed he did in Madrid
only a few months later.

Whatever it is, 50 years, 75 years
later,

they seem even more important,
more...

monumental in their effect.

He seems to have been perceived
now

almost as a kind of religious
painter,

as somebody who emanates out of

sort of 16th-century Italian
painting,

because it has that degree of
passion, martyrdom and torture,

which is what's so wonderful about
Francis's painting, to my mind.

There's a sort of sacred
quality to them.