The following work is Copyright © 2008 Mitul Mistry.
"Most of the time, when one talks about painting, one says nothing interesting. It's always rather superficial. What can one say? Basically, I believe that you simply cannot talk about painting, it just isn't possible."
- Francis Bacon
Human beings have always struggled to survive, and suffered as a result of their efforts. There have always been powerful forces acting upon humans, forcing them to either cope or be crushed. At first, these pressures were generally physiological in nature. People sought food, water, and shelter, the very keystones to prolonging one's life by one more day. But as time progressed, and as primordial man became a society of man, became a civilization of mankind, things changed. Physiological pressures, though obviously still present, gave way to societal pressures. No longer was survival simply a matter of hunting down one's next meal. In the 20th century especially, survival became about coping with the masses of humanity teeming the city streets. It became about living in a nuclear family, making a place for oneself as yet another mouth to feed in a rapidly overcrowding world. As humanity progressed, external pressures mounted, coming from every street corner, every newspaper, every direction. And, at a certain point, what direction was there left for an individual to go but inward? For artists, this was a realm of great possibilities, but also of great terrors, and nowhere can this be more evident than in Edvard Munch's The Scream, a Symbolist and Expressionist work of 1893, and in Francis Bacon's Painting, a post-war European work of 1946. Both works stand on their own, but when viewed in context of one another, they become powerful explorations of modern psychological anxiety and tension.
Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893
Edvard Munch's The Scream is a truthful, even archetypal reflection of such human anxieties in the modern world, conveying a deep sense of existential terror. The sky glowers menacingly, flowing bloodily across the horizon. A blackish river parts the pale lands into masses. Traversing through this barren wasteland of a landscape, a bridge spans diagonally across the picture plane. The skewed perspective has a disconcerting effect on the viewer, destabilizing the very ground of the piece. Off in the distance, two anonymous figures walk, featureless, nothing more than shadows wading through the unearthly atmosphere. Yet within all of this, a singular, pale faced figure stares out, screaming out a cry of absolute terror. This is a piece that has captivated audiences for decades, not simply because of its compositional command, but because it speaks to modern human beings, many of whom would like nothing better than to scream out in reciprocation at the same pressures they themselves feel as well.
Francis Bacon, Painting, 1946
While The Scream is a desperate emotional release, under such modern pressures, it represents only one psychological point of view. Munch looks inward and cries out against the terror, but what if an artist were to look inward solely to experience that very terror? In Painting, Francis Bacon explores something even darker. With all of its disparate elements, it seems almost a compositing of images, twisted into something both arresting and shocking. When approaching such a piece, one is at a loss as to where to first plunge into its confusion. Resting atop a rug-like plane, a circular structure wraps around the base of the painting, chunks of meat seemingly impaled upon its vertical shafts. From out of this structure appears the shadowy visage of a gruesome being, a well dressed monster peering out from under the shadow of an umbrella, only his maw and his bloody mustache visible. Atop it all tower two animal carcasses, hanging like pillars, the legs jutting out into space, strange hangings arched above them, with an eye-straining pink, planar background filling much of the negative space of the canvas. When confronting such a nightmare vision, it is painful to even contemplate the dark recesses from whence it originated, and when viewed next to Munch's The Scream, Bacon's Painting strikes an alarming contrast. But as one views both pieces in context of one another, a certain condition of the human mind becomes apparent. It is a condition not simply of terror, but of an approach to terror, a terror and a psychological anxiety that is distinctly of the modern era. This is what makes the pieces together so evocative, and it is this very psychological tension and the exploration thereof that speaks to human beings.
In order to truly appreciate the work of an artist, it is important to remember that the artist is a human being, not simply an anonymous constructor, and one can easily do this by considering some of this human being's biographical narrative. Edvard Munch lived a traumatic early life, witnessing the death of his mother at the age of five, the death of his older sister, Sophie, nine years later at the age of fourteen, both having succumbed to Tuberculosis. Afterwards, as Vernon and Baughman write, "His father, a deranged physician, then made a practice of taking young Edvard on his house calls where the youth saw more of the sick, aged, and dying.” All of this left Munch isolated and deeply troubled by persisting ideas of death, sickness and mortality. In fact, one of his paintings, The Sick Child, is directly based on the death of his sister, and the idea of death recurs throughout many of his works. What's more, the force of his father further drove him into himself; as he himself stated, “When he punished us . . . he could be almost insane in his violence. . . . Disease and insanity were the black angels on guard at my cradle.” By considering some of Munch's personal narrative, some of the major forces acting upon him become apparent, invoking anxiety and driving him inward, leaving him to suffer isolated in the confines of his own mind.
The personal narrative of Francis Bacon, while not as explicitly traumatic as that of Munch's, is equally as marked by anxiety, isolation, and uncertainty. As Peppiatt writes,
“Even though he did not often mention his childhood, Francis Bacon acknowledged that it had been central to his whole development. 'I think artists stay much closer to their childhood than other people... They remain far more constant to those early sensations. Other people change completely, but artists tend to stay the way they have been from the beginning.'”
The personal history of the human being is a powerful formative force, and for Francis Bacon, this would be no different, as he himself observed. Bacon was English, but a native of Ireland. When conversing with friends, he was generally aloof concerning his formative years and his family, but what usually came through was the lack of affection his parents had for him, as well as his personal “waywardness.” His early life was not one of the exaggerated horror that one might expect it to be composed of after viewing his work, but such subtler, yet persistent forces can still powerfully influence the formation of an individual, and certainly that of an artist. As Peppiatt further describes,
“...a distinct underlying bitterness could be heard at times with resentment welling up at particular memories. The dominant impression Bacon conveyed was that he had been ill-starred from the start by being born into a family which took no interest in him, and a social class in which he felt himself to be an outsider.”
Social and familial forces played their part upon Bacon. However, Bacon was also living amidst a charged political atmosphere, with a movement for Irish independence away from British rule represented by the violent Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Army (IRA); in fact, the large, isolated estate of Bacon's family would have been under increasing threat of attack by “rebels.” And as these forces began to press upon Bacon from multiple directions, a volatile mixture began to brew within the mind of an impressionable young man. According to Peppiatt,
“The atmosphere of threat and violence, the fear of the sniper in the woods and the hidden bomb, made an indelible impression on Francis and shaped his early awareness of the outside world: later in life, when asked about the violence in his paintings, he would often recall the tensions that had plagued Ireland throughout his childhood.”
It is easy to examine the form and structure of an artistic work by simply looking at it carefully, but in order to truly understand the psychological essence or fully appreciate the emotive power and richness of such complex works as Painting or The Scream, one must at least briefly consider the biographical narratives of their creators, for they are inherently woven into the very fabric of their canvases.
Munch's The Scream is derived from a generally well known incident involving a moment of psychological terror. As Munch described,
“I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red.
I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired. And I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city.
My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.”
Upon first consideration, this is a rather odd story. It is easy to passively gloss over such an incident as simply a strange moment, or nothing more than the characteristic melodrama of an artist. Yet there is something deeply profound about this experience, profound enough to drive Munch to capture it on canvas. By looking at The Scream, this experience of alienation is conveyed through the distance and ambiguity of the secondary figures, reflective of Munch's own sense of isolation as his friends “walked on,” oblivious of his own psychological state. But where does this psychological state come from? Is this “scream piercing nature” a result of social constructs? While social and societal forces undoubtedly acted upon Munch throughout his life, Lund states that “Munch makes no attempt to draw moral conclusions or to make any social protest, for his pictures are only many-sided reflections of his own conscience.” Munch is not attempting to advocate a point of view or lament about the human condition; indeed, he is attempting to take the psychological and emotional charge of his own experience, a result of his personal journey inward, and relate it to others in a way that cannot be dismissed as easily as his words.
Bacon's Painting similarly avoids direct or allegorical interpretation. It is not a socially didactic work, for his own views on social or societal construct were dismissive. As Bacon remarked, “...all life is artificial: social justice makes it more pointlessly artificial.” This is not a work about external human construct, for when one looks into the darkness of the image, one is instead gazing deeply into the modern human mind. In an interview, Bacon describes his initial approach to the painting:
“I was attempting to make a bird alighting on a field. And it may have been bound up in some way with the three forms that had gone before, but suddenly the lines that I'd drawn suggested something totally different, and out of this suggestion arose this picture. I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another.”
Rather than approaching the canvas with a specific end result in mind, Bacon allowed the image to formulate itself, coming into existence spontaneously. By using this methodology, he activates his own psychological state, allowing all of his anxiety and morbidity to surface naturally. Bacon further described his beliefs, saying that “...there's always an element of control and an element of surprise, and that distinction perhaps comes back to what psychoanalysis has defined as the conscious and the unconscious.” Much of the human being's darkest, most torrential emotions are often born and gestate in the deepest recesses of the human mind, and Bacon attempts to free them by letting them, of their own volition, flow naturally out of his brush. For when looking at Painting, it is a discordant experience, the jarring imagery clashing together in such a way as to defy reality. Indeed, the hunks of meat, the linear structure of the base, the shadowy figure: all serve to express an emotive quality only found in the depths of the human mind.
Yet the same could be said of the warped landscape of The Scream. While taking the overall form of an environment drawn more recognizably from reality, the distorted perspective, the unearthly sky and the unreal treatment of space all lend the piece the feeling of a nightmare, a psychological manifestation of deeper emotions. As Munch develops this sensation throughout the work, he similarly explores the tensions residing in the unconscious mind. Wight writes that “The inner fear... is more dreadful than the fear of reality. The bridge itself is a symbol destined to persist; it carries over, one suspects, from the unconscious to the conscious, into the present out of the past.” Herein lies The Scream's power, for it reaches into the viewer's mind and evokes its emotive charge directly.
The psychological charge of the two images is obvious, but what purpose does it serve? Though a certain mood is evoked in the viewer when viewing Bacon's Painting, one is still left wondering what would drive an artist to explore such madness. Concerning Bacon's usage of meat imagery, he states that,
“I've always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion. There've been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death. We don't know, of course, but it appears by these photographs that they're so aware of what is going to happen to them, they do everything to attempt to escape.”
Viewed in this context, Painting takes on an added dimension. The carcasses hanging from the top of the image, seemingly crucified, form a central column to the image. But this is not a theological crucifixion. These carcasses were once living creatures, killed, and now nothing more than dead flesh intended for consumption, chilling proof of the futility of struggle against the inevitable. Yet it is this very struggle that strikes at the heart, for flesh is flesh, and human struggle may not be so different than that of the animal. When confronted with the ruthless forces of the modern world, taking the form of a smartly dressed, blood-lipped shadow, one can struggle, but what can one truly do in the face of such mercilessness? This is not merely psychological terror, but a profound and haunting pathos reflected in the eyes of the calf before it is culled, in the eyes of the Screamer, and, indeed, in the eyes of the modern man and woman as well.
While this notion of human struggle and its psychological effects form a core part of these works, when viewed in context with present day perspectives, the works become something even more compelling. For Francis Bacon, as Soby aptly describes, “His was and remains an iconography primarily concerned with the torments and hysteria of contemporary existence.” Yet, upon further exploration, Bacon's obsession with the grotesque and the unresolved seem to be reflections of not only his views, but his personal narrative as well, for Zervigón writes that,
“The private significance of Bacon's iconography now surfaces in greater detail: the artist's sexual life, his relationship with his parents and friends, and the vibrant subculture in which he thrived; all of these are reflected in his painting... Indeed... such personal biographical material... forms... the only clear linkage between painting widely perceived as violent and a century commonly accepted as brutal.”
Society is often times viewed as a singular, homogeneous force, an embodiment of the idea of a mass of humanity, of human flesh. Yet it is often forgotten that society is composed of many individuals. Perhaps the violence of modern culture is not simply something contrived by a greater force, but a reflection of the personal narratives of many, many individuals living together in close proximity. Yet considering Bacon holistically, it becomes apparent that, as Zervigón writes,
“By making human anguish dramatically significant to our generation... Bacon's work communicates a message that goes beyond the specificity of the scenes depicted. This interpretation... dissolves the... brutality of Bacon's images into 'universal reflections' of our century's suffering.”
This idea of human suffering, of pathos, is something that seems to flow in the undercurrents of all modern humanity. Yet many of us ignore it, or remain blind to it. By exposing these undercurrents, grappling with them, and perhaps even understanding them, we can better deal with them. For the pressures are always mounting, and the human mind can only take so much before being forced to release, and the alternative is a release in the vein of The Scream. In describing Munch, Lund writes that, “His visions, expressed with a violence and extravagance quite inconceivable, achieved the final expression of the distressed spirit of our century.” Perhaps this is the final expression, this seemingly inevitable, cathartic, yet violent release that is so powerful that it warps our own realities, so powerful that it isolates us even more and destroys any sense of hope we could possibly have had in the process.
So what is one supposed to do with all of this? Can people continue living like this?. Yet what is one supposed to do? How is one supposed to resolve this raging conflict? How does one cope with this kind of a reality, with this kind of a modern existence built upon suffering, upon the driving need to survive? These paintings give us a visualization of such smoky, nebulous ideas. They take these intangible undercurrents and present them in a way that we cannot, in good conscience, readily dismiss. For Bacon and Munch have articulated the questions. It is up to us to find our own answers.
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