Hiding in Plain Sight 

Francis Bacon: Couplings
Gagosian, London
06.06.19 – 03.08.19

Judging the past through the values of the present happens a lot right now. The art of past decades is re-evaluated according to the changing morals and ethics of our moment. Arguments rage over whether we should continue to look at artworks after what we have discovered about their authors – about their private lives, their personal behaviour – things that were often known, but which no one dared to express in public. We question whether we should forbid ourselves to look. The opposite is also true. We forget what it was to look when a particular way of looking was forbidden.

Within a painting, the forms of what might be two men lie naked in a field of grass. One, face down, dark hair slicked back, is more visible, an accumulation of painted sweeps and smudges of grey-black and pink brushstrokes. We make out an elbow raised, shoulders leading to buttocks and an outstretched thigh, calf and heel. The other figure is little more than the blurred suggestion of an upturned head lying beneath the first body, cohered only by the highlight of an ear and a hinted eye socket and cheekbone, beside which the other figure hides his face. They’re in a field of grass – unkempt long grass, arcing stems of paint that leap and dance rhythmically. But this scene isn’t outdoors. This grass is constrained to a square of turf, contained in a volume of space that is more like a room, curtained in black.

This is Francis Bacon’s painting Two Figures in the Grass ( 1954 ). It is hanging in a show at Gagosian titled Couplings, which brings together paintings by Bacon ranging from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. There are four works that picture single figures, while the others present two or more figures. The show has been organised to coincide with this year’s Pride month, and Couplings frames the paintings in the historical context of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK. Like other gay men, Bacon lived under the shadow of a law that punished ‘gross indecency’ with imprisonment. With the passing of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, ‘homosexual acts’ were partially decriminalised – exempt if they took place between two consenting men, above the age of twenty-one, in private. Nine paintings here date from before 1967, four were painted after.

Couplings offers a historical perspective on an artist’s work through the lens of current social attitudes. In so doing, however, it provokes unlooked-for critical questions, not least because it encourages us to consider Bacon’s strange, yet by now widely known and celebrated, approach to figuration in unhabitual terms: in terms of what an artist could and could not reveal of bodies and of sex and desire, at a time when admitting such desire was to admit a crime, and when public images were subject, in Britain, to stringent laws on obscenity and moral transgression.

Bacon’s paintings of naked male bodies play a game of concealment and revelation. They veil and offer glimpses. They are not pornography. They are public paintings, but ones made for a public for whom some things cannot be spoken about openly, painted on the verge of what can be said and seen. In a room to itself, the famous Two Figures ( 1953 ) transforms a photographic image of two grappling male wrestlers into that of two men in violent embrace on the white sheets of a bed. The wan light that falls on these figures seems to dissolve their faces, obscuring them in a vertical blur – a weird, clandestine anonymity. It is a sort of visual innuendo, which provokes the viewer’s recognition of something that can’t quite be made visible, but which is still happening in plain sight. Innuendo is what you know, without it being said. ( That innuendo was still too strong for Bacon’s dealer, Erica Brausen, who sold it privately. One of what Brausen would call Bacon’s ‘filthy paintings’, it disappeared into the possession of Lucian Freud, remaining unseen for many years. )

Yet, today, in a culture in which sexuality is no longer so policed, it is hard to look at these paintings and experience the tension of their original context: a time when to show such a painting was to take a genuine risk, if one believes the account of two visitors to Bacon’s 1955 show at the ICA who reported Two Figures in the Grass to the police.

The year that Bacon was painting Two Figures in the Grass, the pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing committed suicide. The man who had cracked the Nazis’ Enigma code during the war had been convicted, in 1952, of gross indecency, having admitted sexual relations with another man – a consenting act, in the privacy of Turing’s own house. Rather than go to prison, Turing submitted to the alternative, a course of chemical castration. Under the law of the time, a verbal admission was sufficient evidence for conviction.

Turing’s ‘crime’ was one committed in private, unseen behind closed doors, but admitted in word. The world of Bacon’s paintings is one of a constant ambiguity about the exterior and the interior, a continuous transgression of the line between the public and the private realm, the inside and the outside. In the oldest painting here ( Painting, 1950 ), two bands of black on either side frame a view of a naked standing figure, its arm raised and folded over its head, as if it were scrubbing the back of its neck. Beyond it is a rectangle of vertical coloured stripes, within which ( or behind which ) a silhouette of a dome-headed male figure looms. It is a dandyish play on then-current painterly questions – about depth and flatness, transparency and opacity, with wry allusions to older modernist painters, from Matisse to Mondrian – which serves to dissimulate a spectacle of receding, recursive moments of eroticised voyeurism.

These three paintings are rare instances in which bodies are found as couples in Bacon’s work. But following decriminalisation, a different tone takes hold of the paintings of the following years. In 1967, Bacon painted Two Figures on a Couch. That painting is a vortex of swirling flesh-toned gestures, in which the two bodies might not be distinguishable if it weren’t for the two evident human heads, pressed tightly together. From Two Figures on a Couch the show moves, chronologically, to Two Men Working in a Field ( 1972 ). Its two almost-identical figures, crouched over the border of a field of earth, till it with long rakes. As they lean against each other, under a sky-blue background, it’s impossible not to note the handles of the rakes they wield, nor the attention Bacon gives to their hands, which grip these phallic shafts. It’s a comic moment, a conspiratorial wink of a barely dissimulated meaning to the viewer.

In the same year, Bacon painted the extraordinary triptych Three Studies of Figures on Beds ( 1972 ). Here, three striped mattresses are the pedestals on which fleshy bodies writhe and contort. These figures are set up in a peculiarly exposed outdoor – or perhaps they are indoors behind windows, looking out towards what might be buildings on a street, or a beach, set against a dull bluish sky. Here, the sex has become close to explicit: an erect penis is painted unambiguously between the convulsing, intermingling figures of the central panel, humping on the bare mattress. Above, electric light bulbs burn inexplicably in daylight. And, reprising a gesture he had used in Two Figures on a Couch, Bacon has flicked a streak of white paint across the lower area of the canvas – a caricature of ejaculation. In the left panel, a mass of fleshy form, which might be one or two bodies, is wrapped up in its own introspective convulsions. In the opposite panel, the figure is of a male torso and head: cut off below the eyes by the circle Bacon has superimposed on it, it is turned towards what is happening in the central panel, as if watching, its own act of looking concealed.

The law, of course, had not changed that much. The Act of 1967 stipulates that a homosexual act was still a crime ‘when more than two persons take part or are present’. Two, three – numbers matter; and Three Studies of Figures on Beds might be seen as a mischievous reflection, on Bacon’s part, of the question of what the law still prohibited. Here, it’s not two people in private, but three ( or more ), in a space that oscillates continuously between the outside and the inside, between open air and interior, and between intimacy and surveillance.

Decades later, Bacon’s paintings remain disconcerting, consummate games with what is visible and what can be revealed, with the nature of publicness and privacy, underpinned by the social repression of individual desire. Couplings, a view of Bacon’s work meant to celebrate our progress as a society, provokes a more complex reflection about how an artwork bears the stigma of the culture in which it was first seen; a culture in which the law circumscribed what could be shown and what could be said – and written – about it. After all, of all Bacon’s supportive critics during the 1950s and 60s, it is hard to find one who dared write the truth of what they saw in front of them.

Outlasting that silence, Bacon’s paintings bear witness to the violence of admitting desire in visual form, in the shadow of censorship and punishment, to create images in which disavowal and recognition flicker and merge.