Visible Bacon

Elizabeth Grosz writes in her book Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth about art’s relationship to “chaos” and “the cosmos” as a kind of rendering of the uncontrollable, invisible, and insensible forces of the world into sensible creations. Grosz details how this harnessing of chaos is accomplished through framing or demarcation of territory and cites how architecture, even in a non-artistic sense, is the foundation of art as an attempt to frame the chaos of the world.  When she begins discussing the visual arts, Grosz describes the work of Francis Bacon and his ability to produce “meat-sensations” in his paintings. Sensations are a pivotal part of Grosz theory about art. She describes their relationship to the visual arts writing, “they [the visual arts] extract something imperceptible from the cosmos and dress it in the sensible materials that the cosmos provides in order to create sensations”.

                                           Painting. (1946)

So, in this piece by Bacon, what is the part of the imperceptible, chaotic world that has been rendered accessible through our visual encounter with it? The figure in black underneath the umbrella is generally understood to represent Neville Chamberlain, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom  who sought a peace agreement with Hitler in the years leading up to WWII. The slaughterhouse carcasses that reside around this figure calls forth sensations of the carnality and butchery of bodies that one normally associates with the atrocities of WWII. What interests me about this piece and its “production of meat-sensations”, as Grosz describes them, is its ability not to create simply a representation of the horrors of war, but an image that calls to mind sensations found in the world, found in the chaos of retrospectively conceiving of pre-WWII politics with the knowledge that mass genocide is occurring simultaneously.

The thing that makes this image powerful for me is the face of the figure under the umbrella. Ignoring the fact that many critics believe this to represent Chamberlain and his iconic black umbrella, it seems that Bacon, who could have easily just painted Chamberlains face on this figure, is trying to convey something more than just a single person. I believe the figure is effective because it displays the controversy and feelings surrounding Chamberlain and the manifold factors leading up to the Munich Agreement between the UK and Germany. Although many people wanted to blame Chamberlain in the aftermath of the war, it would be inaccurate to say that his decision to “appease” Hitler was entirely his own. Thus the abstraction of this piece, random pieces of meat, the umbrella, and the intentionally darkened and indiscernible face of the figure all help to transform the imperceptible and chaotic sensations of pre-WWII Europe into a “sensible” format. The invisible is made visible.