A Natural Seducer

...It is especially thorough on the artist's long relationship with his two galleries and with the Tate...

...on the growth of Bacon's reputation in France, where the author lives...

...Back in London in the '30s, Bacon underwent a slow, hidden transformation from designer to painter, in the end destroying most of his canvases from the decade 1933-43...

...The obvious challenge for a biographer is to resist exploiting this long enough to analyze the relationship between the two...

...We are told about Bacon's love of gambling and Monte Carlo, about the importance he placed on chance in his thinking concerning art, and about his shuttlings between the intellectual world and the criminal fringe (George Dyer, a longtime lover, was a petty thief, and for a time Bacon knew the infamous Kray brothers...

...Worse, Peppiatt's commentary misses the crucial intersection between the art and the life lived...

...and on the critical reception of the paintings...

...Many of Peppiatt's decisions about what to exclude and what to stress left me baffled (why at every turn we need to know what Bacon ate or drank, I have no idea...

...In such cases the life frequently seems as wild and compelling as the work...

...his favorite artists, Velazquez, Ingres, Degas, and Picasso, were among the greatest draftsmen in the history of art...

...One of the stranger myths Bacon sought to propagate was that he never drew...

...This is not what you would expect from someone secure in his métier, yet the biographer fails to explain that it comes from a man who saw life as a spin of the roulette wheel...

...Since he had no formal training as a painter, he approached art from a sensual, primarily esthetic position, rather than from an analytic one, like the Cubist-era Picasso, or from an ideological one, like the Surrealists...

...The astonished, rather louche cherub staring out from John Deakin's photographs of him reveals neither his sordid private life nor his glamorous public one—and that is exactly the way he wanted it...

...More than any other artist, Bacon understood how to estheticize ugliness...

...Influenced at the start by Picasso and the Surrealists, Bacon's work bears only a superficial resemblance to these models...

...Sadly, few biographers have this talent...

...Wearing makeup and, under well-tailored clothes, fishnet stockings, he cruised the clubs and East End bars, drinking enormously and indulging in sadomasochistic sex...

...From there he went to Paris and, using his extraordinary esthetic sense, set up as a furniture designer...

...He does not, for instance, take notice of the fact that Bacon habitually employed conservative compositional arrangements, for this would reveal the decorative quality of the work...

...Peppiatt does present proof to the contrary, but then dutifully plays down the evidence...

...The more difficult task, however, is to distinguish the enduring elements of the art from the passionate intensity that is its initial attraction...

...Peppiatt appears not to want to disturb any of his friend's pronouncements...

...Peppiatt emphasizes the artist's brinksmanship, the shock value of his pictures...

...But Francis Bacon does give a full account of the artist's life...

...For years the family shuttled between England and Ireland, reinforcing young Francis' rootlessness, the sense of estrangement that eventually allowed him to break free of the parochial English art world and embrace European cosmopolitanism...

...His father, a retired Army captain, was a distant figure who, according to rumor, had his grooms horsewhip his son...

...The contrast of Bacon's social worlds also finds a direct reflection in his work, particularly in its fusion of decorative settings and deformed figures...

...A natural seducer, he knew how to pique curiosity and how to keep people coming back...

...At its worst, it obscures Bacon's achievement by turning his overheated impulses into a sideshow...

...A master colorist, he used the rectangular color fields and chic minimalist furniture in his paintings as stagelike platforms, offsetting the grotesque figures that populate them...

...Born in 1909 to wealthy English parents living in Dublin, Bacon witnessed the violence of the Irish civil wars from the wrong side...

...Even the chance elements, the paint drippings and distortions, were only allowed to remain if they produced an attractive effect...

...If you manage to do something following your instinct as closely as possible, then you have succeeded," he said in a late interview...

...In his portraits Bacon tried to give us all the "pulsations" of a person...

...During this period Graham Sutherland and Roy de Maistre became his artistic mentors...

...In the final decade of his life Bacon was frequently lauded as the greatest living painter...

...He also gained demimondaine notoriety...

...His homosexuality manifested itself at a relatively early age, so at 16, having been expelled from school, he was back with his family...

...By the time he finished Painting 1946, two of his three major motifs were established: the biomorphic furies of his triptychs, and such extreme imagery as slabs of meat or rows of bared teeth...

...Drifting, instinct, chance—these became his touchstones...

...When his father found him trying on his mother's underwear he was expelled from home, too...

...Finally, at the age of 35, he achieved a succès de scandale with his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion...

...After his initial triumph, Bacon painted consistently (although he continued to destroy many works) and his career ascended at a steep angle that never really leveled off...

...He repeatedly underscored the tension between his harrowing creatures and his comely, static backdrops to challenge stilted preconceptions of horror and beauty...

...The acceptance of his work, though, owes a great deal to its ornamental beauty...

...Most disappointing to me, however, is Peppiatt's abbreviated treatment of the friendship between Bacon and the painter Lucian Freud, about which neither ever said much...

...An autodidact, Bacon learned mainly by looking at past masters...

...Francis Bacon's career as a peintre maudit and all-around bad boy makes for a wonderfully gossip-filled tale...

...Bacon hinted that earning money from art was a kind of con, at most an absurd gamble...

...But now, after the retrospective of Freud's work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the dual Bacon-Freud exhibition at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, a consideration of their mutual influences seems crucial...

...This and other subjects would seem to merit some discussion both in terms of the practice of his contemporaries and in the context of the artist's often vexed attitudes about the future...

...Missing as well is an explication of the artist-as-hustler...

...Reviewed by Daniel Kunitz Managing editor, "Paris Review" Like the poems of Sylvia Plath, the canvases of Egon Schiele or any other works fired in the kiln of an extreme sensibility, the paintings of Francis Bacon tend to arouse fierce adolescent admiration followed by a cooling and reappraisal...

...Bacon, for example, thought of himself as a realist, an ironic self-description, since virtually the only encomium not attached to his name was "greatest realist painter"—that title went to Freud...

...Only 13 years later Bacon was given an exhibition at Britain's renowned Tate Gallery...

...Perhaps because he was unschooled, Bacon did not have sufficient confidence in his drawings to want to compete in this arena...

...But no attempt is made to connect any of this to the work...

...Portraits, the third motif, appeared in the Head series of 1949, the year of his first major show...

...He distrusted success to such a degree that, in the 1970s, already wealthy and enormously popular, he would say that if his pictures stopped selling he could always "go back to being someone's manservant...

...At its best, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma is—to paraphrase a common Bacon title—a useful Study for a Portrait...

...Michael Peppiatt, a journalist who became friendly with the artist in the 1960s, is not one of them...

...For me realism is an attempt to capture appearance with all the sensations which that particular appearance has suggested to me," he once remarked...

...Almost 20 years later he told an interviewer, "I think that I'll always get by...

...Francis left Dublin for London, where he lived off odd jobs and older men until one of the latter took him to the decadent precincts of Berlin...

...Early on he recognized that the less known about him the more rumor would fuel others' interest...

...Peppiatt's attempts at art criticism, though, range from workmanlike descriptions to mundane aperçus: "However much he distorted a sitter's appearance, Bacon's ability to capture a likeness grew more impressive as he became more technically skillful later in his career...

...Mimicking avant-garde pieties, Bacon railed all his life against the decorative...

...In his biography, what Peppiatt gives us is a rough outline waiting to be filled in...