All Alone Within A Room Poem by gershon hepner

Men and women all alone within a room,
are the subjects whom painter Francis Bacon
portrays in spaces he’s transformed from womb to tomb,
isolated, and disturbed, alone, forsaken.

Some of them are lovers, some are popes, but meat
replaces them when he has lost his primal wish
to deconstruct them in a way he’d call discreet,
displaying them instead as butchered on a dish.

Unforsaken, in a room I sit and write,
but isolated, feel that I’m alone. Disturbed.
perhaps, are pictures that I draw, as I invite
the question: should my appetite for them be curbed?

Transformed from womb to tomb, our lives are works of art
from which, once we become dead meat, we have to part.

Inspired by an article by Alan Jenkins in the TLS, December 5,2008 (“Human Meat”) . He writes:

When Francis Bacon said “The only really interesting thing is what happens between two people in a room”, he did not mean what happens between an artist and his model – or if so, only indirectly. Bacon’s portraits of himself, his friends and (male) lovers are among the most enthusiastically acclaimed of all his pictures, but they were done almost without exception from photographs and memory, not from life. From a handful of paintings, early and late, it is clear that for Bacon some of the most interesting things happened before, during or after copulation – “or buggery, however you want to put it”, as he himself put it in the late 1960s, with an insouciance that could have been dangerous at any time before then.
Yet, as John Russell pointed out nearly thirty years ago, “perhaps the most persistent of Bacon’s preoccupations is the problem of what a man is to do when he is alone in a room”, and with only a very few exceptions, his pictures until the later 1960s more often than not featured single figures: human males, animals, especially apes, heads or heads-and-shoulders, isolated in indeterminate spaces, framed or confined in a kind of geometric canopy or glass box, seen through strips of (shower?) curtain, paint cascading down the interiors or, in the few landscapes, deft strokes rendering wild grasses with Oriental precision. True, it is not always clear from its posture and mass whether the pictured form is human or ape; nor if in fact there is more than one of them pictured. Bacon would sometimes, to achieve the desired “thickness”, model his single figure on a sequence of photographs from Eadweard Muybridge’s The Human Body in Motion that showed two men wrestling – though at a glance, they could be having sex. (“I very often think of people’s bodies that I’ve known, the contours of those bodies that have particularly affected me, but then they’re grafted on to Muybridge bodies”, Bacon explained.) Then, once he had begun to show two or more people, the coupling – as in those earlier exceptions – becomes explicit. And, in his later vision, coupling is murder. In panel after panel of the large-scale triptychs which were Bacon’s preferred format from the 1960s on, the human carcass – mangled, butchered and bloodied, studded with entry- and exit-wounds, spilling muscle tissue and entrails, or intact but warped into terrible knots of tension, straining in climax or death agony – is pinioned on carpets or sprawled on stained mattress-ticking, like a police photograph at the scene of a sex crime. And indeed other panels actually show spectators or recorders – one holds a cinecamera – of the main event, be it coupling or crucifixion, which has left its protagonist eviscerated. Bacon disavowed any moral or philosophical intention behind these images of human suffering and detachment, and still more emphatically denied trying to make a historical point – notwithstanding his brief flirtation with the idea of publishing a pictorial “History of Europe in [his] lifetime” (he was born in 1909) . One of the most articulate of painters, with a strong sense both for drama and self-presentation, from the moment he became a succès de scandale Bacon was a tireless subject of interviews (with Russell and David Sylvester, preeminently) : occasions he seized to rehearse a repertoire of anecdotes and apophthegms, some haughty and whimsical, some purposefully discomfiting in their frankness, but almost all prompted by the contradictory urges to elevate his calling to a higher mystery or deflate its pretensions with a rude reminder of fleshly limitation.



12/8/08