Wrestling with Francis Bacon

Author(s): Simon Ofleld

Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2001), pp. 113-130
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600381
Accessed: 26-12-2021 13:04 UTC

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600381?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Oxford Art Journal

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
I*-

o
E

?i
sSo

-s.r:3
.Mtn

vi1
.:

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Wrestling with Francis Bacon

Simon Ofleld

Since Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was first put on
exhibition at the Lefebvre Gallery in London during 1945, Francis Bacon has
1. This understanding of Francis Bacon's received his fair share of attention, and a critical, biographical, and theoretical
paintings is prevalent in writings about his work
consensus now orders nearly all understandings of him and his paintings.
and life published since the 1950s. For a
sustained example that combines this
Francis Bacon, with the help of friends and admirers, built and managed to
understanding with the protocols of Post- maintain an interpretive frame around his work that promises to survive long
structuralist theory see E. Van Alphen, Francis
after the death of the artist. Through this frame Francis Bacon's paintings are
Bacon and the Loss of Self (Reaktion Books:
London, 1992). repeatedly understood as something to do with the deformation, dissolution,
2. For detailed discussion of the sexual scandals
disintegration, and deconstruction of the post-war world.'
of the early 1950s see Stephen Jeffrey-Poulter, This interpretive frame has remained largely intact in that small body of
Peers, Queers & Commons: The Struggle for Gay Law work located between the disciplines of Art History and Gay Studies that
Reformfrom 1950 to the Present (Routledge:
considers Francis Bacon's figure and figurations. Francis Bacon's paintings are
London and New York, 1991) and Patrick
Higgins, The Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male often identified as symbols, perhaps symptoms, of a time prior to the 1970s
Homosexuality in Post-War Britain (Fourth Estate: when homosexuality had not yet become a social, political, or public form.
London, 1996). The major British scandals of
The irresolutions and dissolutions of Francis Bacon's paintings are repeatedly
the early 1950s were Sir John Gielgud's arrest
in a public lavatory and subsequent conviction set up as precursors for the clarity and candour of subsequent 'gay artists',
for importuning in 1953, and the trial of Lord particularly David Hockney. And if we take a look at Francis Bacon's paintings
Montague of Beaulieu, Peter Wildeblood, and
in the early 1950s, perhaps Two Figures (Fig. 1) or Two Figures in the Grass, they
Michael Pitt-Rivers, and their conviction in
1954 for sexual offences with two servicemen. do indeed look like adequate illustrations of a time when anxiety over the
3. For example, Kenneth E. Silver, 'Master sexual order and disorder of the modem world, and the visibility of
Bedrooms, Master Narratives: Home, 'homosexuality', received a great deal of press attention.2
Homosexuality and Post-War Art', in
For many critics and historians the paintings of Francis Bacon and David
Christopher Reed (ed.), Not at Home: The
Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art & Hockney function as illustrations in a developmental narrative that runs from
Architecture (Thames and Hudson: London, post-war repression to gay liberation and beyond, a social and political
1996), pp. 206-21.
narrative that mirrors the personal 'coming-out' story. In these 'coming-out'
4. The predominant theoretical, political, and stories the figure and figurations of David Hockney are valued as the
personal protocols I am referring to are those
representatives of assured gay subjectivity and subject matter. More recently it
related to 1970s Gay Liberation and 1980s and
90s Queer Activism. has also proved possible to use the protocols of contemporary 'Queer Theory'
to value the irregularities and 'transgressions' of Francis Bacon over the clear
delineations and 'domesticity' of David Hockney.3 However, this change of
direction and revision of values changes little. The act of interpretation in both
approaches is based upon judging and valuing the degree to which the figure or
figurations are able to domply with well-established theoretical, political, and
personal protocols.4 Now, I certainly have no interest in questioning the
importance or efficacy of these protocols. Indeed, I believe I am more invested
in them than I know. And it is for this reason that I am seeking in this article to
adopt an approach to historical research that is not orchestrated according to
disciplinary procedures that may not have been available, or had popular
currency, during the period under investigation.
In this article Francis Bacon's 1953 painting Two Figures will be used as a site
from which to begin a consideration of connections between visual culture and
some of the practices and pleasures that in the early 1950s were being
popularly identified as 'homosexual'. Rather than deploying the protocols of
Gay Studies or Queer Theory, my approach is informed by the social and
sexual practices and pleasures that took place between men at this time,

( OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001 113-130

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Simon Ofield

practices and pleasures that can be described as 'cruising'. In this article

'cruising' is a mode of attention that organizes my approach towards, or
circulation around, Two Figures. I want to propose 'cruising' as an alternative- 5. See Patrick Higgins, The Heterosexual
albeit an implicated alternative - to the disciplinary procedures of identifying Dictatorship.

homosexual (or gay, or queer) subjects and subject matter. The importance of
'cruising' for this project is that it provides a way of engaging with Francis
Bacon's painting that mirrors the encounters that took place between many
men in and around 1950s London. These men may have engaged in particular
acts with one another, but may not have been able to identify them, or
themselves, as homosexual. Evidence from court records in the 1950s suggests
that many men at this time did not have access to the medical or other official
languages that could be used to make their everyday practices make sense.5
In short, I have attempted to work my way around a research archive in the
same way that some men may have worked their way around some physical

Fig. 1. Francis Bacon: Two Figures, 1953, oil on canvas, 152 x 116.8 cm. Private collection.
(Estate of Francis Bacon/ARS, New York and DACS, London 2000.)

116 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Wrestling with Francis Bacon

and textual environments in the 1950s: picking up clues, piecing together

information, and comprehending sexual practices without the, sometimes
6. It is well-documented that Muybridge's overwhelming, support of official forms of knowledge. My archival cruising
photographs of the human body in motion brings together a range of texts and contexts to create an environment in
became an influential resource for visual artists
which Two Figures may produce a particular kind of sense. Whilst these texts
from their first publication in America in the
1880s. For further information on the work of and contexts may have been the materials from which Francis Bacon produced
Eadweard Muybridge see Emmanuel Cooper, Two Figures, I am rather more interested in suggesting that in 1953 viewers
Fully Exposed: The Male Nude in Photography
could have made the painting make sense from somewhere within this
(Routledge: London and New York, 1990). For
the connections between Eadweard Muybridge
environment.
and Francis Bacon see John Russell, Francis Bacon As a form of practical and theoretical engagement cruising is at times
(Thames and Hudson: London, 1993); and
circuitous. The shifts of focus and attention can be a little disconcerting, and
Kenneth Silver, 'Master Bedrooms', pp. 209-
21.
induce a degree of anxiety, not the least of which is the possibility of losing
sight of the subject or object of interest. In this article Two Figures does at times
7. David Sylvester, Brutality of Fact: Interviews
with Francis Bacon (Thames and Hudson: London, seem to disappear from view. However, this is the necessary precondition for
1987), p. 114. the painting's reappearance and the possibility of catching sight of it in another
8. Russell, Francis Bacon, p. 96. location or from another position.
9. Sylvester, Brutality of Fact, p. 116. David Sylvester's book Interviews with Francis Bacon is well established as the
10. Sylvester, Brutality of Fact, p. 116. place from which to begin any serious engagement with this artist and his
work. In these interviews, Francis Bacon makes it clear that one of the sources
for his painting Two Figures was a series of sequential photographs that
Eadweard Muybridge took of two men wrestling (Fig. 2).6 During an
interview with Sylvester in 1974 Bacon mentioned that in some of his paintings
it was difficult for him to distinguish the influence of Eadweard Muybridge
from that of Michelangelo Buonarroti:

Actually, Michelangelo and Muybridge are mixed up in my mind together, and so I perhaps could
learn about positions from Muybridge and learn about the ampleness, the grandeur of form from
Michelangelo, and it would be very difficult for me to disentangle the influence of Muybridge and

the influence of Michelangelo. But, of course, as most of my figures are taken from the male
nude, I am sure that I have been influenced by the fact that Michelangelo made the most
voluptuous male nudes in the plastic arts.7

John Russell has suggested that Two Figures may also have something to do with
Gustave Courbet's Le Sommeil and a replica of a Greek third-century bronze
called The Wrestlers that can be found in the Uffizi in Florence, but which Bacon
apparently never saw.8 Each of these resources and suggested sources retains
and sustains Bacon's painting within the established canons and traditional
narratives of art history and criticism. They also offer the possibility of
connections and relationships with popular images, practices, and forms of
pleasure.
Whilst it is well-known that Bacon was committed to a number of artists
and art works he believed were great, he also consumed the visual products of
the everyday. The residue of this consumption could be found both on the
walls and floor of the studio where he worked and on the surface of his
paintings. In 1974 Bacon also said this to Sylvester:

But I don't only look at Muybridge photographs of the figure. I look all the time at photographs

in magazines of footballers, and boxers and all that kind of thing - especially boxers.9

And then when asked if the figures that he painted had anything to do with the
'appearance of specific people', he said:

Well, it's a complicated thing. I very often think of people's bodies that I've known, I think of the

contours of those bodies that have particularly affected me, but then they're grafted very often
onto Muybridge's bodies. I manipulate the Muybridge bodies into the form of the bodies I have
known.10

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001 117

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Simon Ofield

So, according to Francis Bacon the figures in his paintings have something to
do with the sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, the work of
Michelangelo Buonarroti, photographs found in magazines, and bodies of men
he knew. This bringing together of sources and resources suggests that Two
Figures can be viewed as a complex site where a number of popular and
esteemed, old and new forms coincide.
Certainly the early years of the 1950s were marked by coincidences of this
kind. The end of post-war austerity, the birth of a 'new Elizabethan age', and
the developing cultural influence of the USA all provided ample opportunity

i ..I .r
f. **. -?'T~-"
% %I- . . -.- " - 7

Fig. 2. Eadweard Muybridge: Two Men Wrestling, c.1885 (detail).

118 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Wrestling with Francis Bacon

for conflicts between old and new forms of practice and pleasure.l 1952 and
1953 were years when perceived or contrived differences between old and
11. The coronation of Elizabeth II took place
new forms of 'homosexuality' became a propellant of public anxiety, largely
on 2 June 1953 amid much press speculation generated by a series of scandals that were promoted by the popular press. 2
concerning the dawn of a 'new Elizabethan age'. The meeting between the past and present within the frame of Two Figures
It is perhaps the case that a general increase in
prosperity, the end of rationing, and the lowest
suggests that it could be approached through the changing representations of
crime figures in London since the war, all added what was only just becoming identified by national newspapers as
to a feeling of optimism, promoted in the
'homosexuality'.
popular press.
Just a quick comparison of Two Figures and the Muybridge photographs of
12. Sexual scandals, concerning practices that
two men wrestling is enough to notice a number of differences; not only the
were for the first time identified as
'homosexual' on the pages of newspapers, were different settings, and Bacon's inclusion of a bed, but differences in the form of
detailed in both the local and national press; the male figures. These differences suggest that this painting is the product of
both are discussed in Patrick Higgins, The
both new and well-established ways of representing the erotic male figure. The
Heterosexual Dictatorship.
photographic figures are smooth, in focus, perhaps a little bleached but clearly
13. Kenneth Silver, 'Master Bedrooms' p. 208.
'Once in the bedroom, physical exertion defined, whereas the painted figures are blurred, smeared, and smudged,
becomes sex; camaraderie, or rivalry is made comprised of different textures and are in places indistinct. The figures in the
passionate; and spectatorship, which is at least
photographs are clearly wrestling but it is a little difficult to discern what the
offered the excuse of scientific observation in
Muybridge, comes much closer to voyeurism.' painted figures are about. However, the interior setting, the bed, the swift,
14. John Lehmann, In the Purely Pagan Sense
perhaps passionate, application of paint, the merging of the men, and the
(GMP: London, 1985), p. 128. Michael suggestion of an erection almost at the centre of the painting seems to resolve
Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma any possible ambiguity.13 For the purposes of this article, I want us to notice
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London, 1996),
pp. 79-80. Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His
that the painted 'wrestlers' are also noticeably thicker, more solid, more
life and Violent Times (Sinclair-Stevenson: compact, rounder, perhaps fleshier, and also that they have short, dark,
London, 1993), p. 90. slicked-back hair.
We know that the differences between the photographs and the painting
could have been determined by the conjoined influence of Michelangelo,
images from popular magazines and Bacon's recollection of bodies he knew or
had known. These combined influences evoke a very particular geography of
practices, pleasures, and personas from which the painting may have been
produced, and within which it played a part. This environment can be used to
diffuse and rearrange the links between the painting, the Muybridge
photographs, popular images from magazines, and the work of Michelangelo.
It is important to note that I am not trying to remove Francis Bacon and his
paintings from the narratives and conventions of art history and criticism but
seeking to modify these knowledges by attaching them to popular texts and
practices current in the 1950s.
Like David Sylvester's Interviews, John Lehmann's 1976 autobiographical
fiction In the Purely Pagan Sense has become something of a convention in writings
about Francis Bacon. In his biography Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma,
Michael Peppiatt uses a quotation from John Lehmann's book to attach Francis
Bacon's paintings to his cruising of London's streets during the blackout:

I met several other guardsmen during that strange period when the bombing had not yet started
and the blackout heightened the sense of adventure as one slipped into pub after pub. My
sexual hunger was avid as it was with so many others at a time when death seemed to tease
us with forebodings of liquidation in terrors still undeclared. One curious manifestation of this

was the public urinals. As never before, and with the advantage of the blackout, a number of
these, scattered all over London, became notorious for homosexual activities. Heaving bodies
filled them, and it was often quite impossible for anyone who genuinely wanted to relieve
himself to get in. In the darkness, exposed cocks were gripped by unknown hands, and hard
erections thrust into others. Deep inside, trousers were forcibly - or rather tender-forcibly -
loosened and the impatient erections plunged into unknown bodies, or invisible waiting lips.14

Peppiatt uses this quotation to represent Francis Bacon as an artist committed

to extreme sensations, in life and in paint. However, Lehmann's fictionalized

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001 119

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Simon Ofield

autobiography can also be used to enter a geography in which two of the initial
co-ordinates are 'class' and 'German Modernism', which are subsumed after
the Second World War by sites of male encounter that could be found in and 15. Since the end of the nineteenth century the
between Soho and the East End of London. In this physical, social, sexual, and writings of Addington-Symonds, Carpenter, and
Wilde in their different fields, amongst the
textual geography Bacon found his regular pleasure, and his painting makes a
writings of many other including Walt
very particular kind of sense when it is encountered here. Whitman, provided the opportunity to exercise,
In the Purely Pagan Sense is about Jack Marlowe's social but mostly sexual but more importantly, to develop, an erotic and
emotional commitment to the forms,
encounters with young working-class men in Vienna, Berlin, and London. To
comportments, and characters of working-class
map the changing associations between visual culture and the economy of some men.
men's sexual practices and pleasures it is useful to return to the 1930s and 16. For a detailed consideration of the
leave Britain in the company of Jack Marlowe and those other young men who associations between homosexuality and

looked to Germany for political, aesthetic and sexual excitement. In the 1920s modernity see Henning Bech, Where Men Meet
(Polity Press: Cambridge, 1997).
and 1930s, Vienna, Hamburg, and Berlin in particular granted some men
17. Stephen Spender, The Temple (Faber and
license to experience the city as they knew it was meant to be: modern, alien,
Faber: London, 1989), p. 69.
and exciting. For John Lehmann, W.H. Auden, Christopher Ishwerwood,
18. Stephen Spender, World Within World
Stephen Spender, and others, their departure from Britain and arrival in (Hamish Hamilton: London, 1951), p. 109.
Germany in the 1930s enabled them to experience and write about the
19. For an account of Francis Bacon's time in
pleasures of unfamiliar cities and the excitements of encounters with young Germany see Peppiatt, Francis Bacon.

and foreign working-class men. For Lehmann and Spender the excitements of 20. The photographs of Francis Bacon's studio
foreign cities and sexual encounters with young men of different nationalities were published in The Studio in 1930.

and different classes were fused with one another. The 'alien' environments of
Vienna and Berlin enabled and encouraged erotic fantasies and realities that
were largely determined by class and nationality. These fantasies were
complexly invested in the realities of economic and social disparity, and had a
history and currency made available through the work of John Addington
Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, and others.15 This powerful
complex surrounded and invested the figures of young, working-class, and
foreign men with a particular kind of appeal.
In his published journals, diaries, and fictions, Spender firmly fuses
modernity and the forms of German Modernism with relationships between
young men.16 In The Temple he writes about a young man looking at the
modem photographs of a young German photographer (Fig. 3):

One in particular struck Paul. It was a bather standing naked at the reed-fringed edge of a lake.
The picture was taken slightly from below so that the torso, rising above the thighs, receded,
and the whole body was seen, layer on layer of hips and rib cage and shoulders, up to the
towering head, with dark hair helmeted against a dark sky. V. shaped shadows of willow leaves
fell like showers of arrows on San Sebastien, on the youth's sunlit breast and thighs.17

The fictional encounter in The Temple is based on the meeting between Spender
and the photographer Herbert List. In his autobiography World Within World,
published in 1951, Spender describes List's studio:

The room was L-shaped, so that one part of it could not be seen from the other. At each end
were beds which were mattresses, and bare modernist tables and chairs made of tubes of steel
and bent plywood. The main part of the room formed a large space which had been cleared for
dancing. The room was lit by lamps of tubular and rectangular ground glass.18

In 1928 Bacon spent two months in Berlin before moving on to Paris.19 And
interestingly, the description of List's studio could, with very few changes, be
applied to Bacon's own studio in the 1930s (Fig. 4).20 Whilst it is obviously
risky to make too much of a short sojourn in a foreign city, it is just possible
that the conjoining of sexual and aesthetic pleasures that some young men
found in Weimar Germany were influential. Perhaps Bacon, like Spender,
started to associate certain and uncertain acts between men with the pictorial

120 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Wrestling with Francis Bacon

and social practices and sexual pleasures O s tt

21. Stephen Spender's association of Modernism

between men in the 1930s seems to evoke the g *

Sinfield, 'Private Lives/Public Theatre: Noel .
figure and figurations of Noel Coward. See Alan

Coward and the Politics of Homosexual ;tt,e '

1991, pp. 43-63.i: : "

Representation', in Representation, vol. 36, Fall

22. Spender, World Within World, p. 110.

23. For an introduction to physique and body s e_
building photographs see Emmanuel Cooper, b
Fully Exposed.

Fig. 3. Herbert List: Franz Buechner on the Rhine, near Ruedesheim 1929. Herbert List Estate,
Hamburg.

forms, spatial arrangements, and designs of German Modernism. We do know

that when he returned to London Bacon became a furniture and interior
designer very much in debt to the Bauhaus. We also know that being modern
and interested in design had something of an affinity with being interested in
men during the 1930s.21 Certainly for Spender the visual and spatial languages
of Modernism were intimately associated with sexual pleasures between men,
and he explicitly attaches Joachim's modern photographs to the modern design
of his studio to a way of life, a 'design for living' in fact, that he found in
Germany at the beginning of the 1930s:

The photographs were like an enormous efforescence of Joachim's taste for 'living', a great
stream of magnificent young people, mostly young men, lying on the sand, standing with their
heads enshadowed and pressed back as though leaning against the sun, rising from bulrushes
and grasses, swimming in seas and rivers, laughing from verandas, embracing one another ...
About the appearance of them all and about the very technique of the photography, there was
the same glaze and gleam of the 'modem' as in the room itself and the people in it: something
making them seem released and uninhibited yet anonymous, as they asserted themselves by
the mere force of their undistinguishable instincts.22

However, rather than make too much of the two months that Bacon spent in
Berlin, I would like to propose a few possible connections between the forms
of German Modernism, Herbert List's photographs, and Francis Bacon's
paintings.
Herbert List's photographs, and Stephen Spender's descriptions of them,
evoke both the naturist and physical culture movements that became so
popular in Germany after the First World War, and are clearly related to the
physique and body-building photographs published in numerous books and
magazines around this time (Fig. 5).23 In these photographs, classical forms are
combined with an anthropometric interest in the modern male body. The
work of Muybridge, amongst many others, provided protocols for physique

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001 121

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Simon Ofield

and body-building photographs that repeatedly focused on the surfaces of male

bodies placed in studios or simple scenic locations. Herbert List's commitment
to the bodies of young men, combined with his explicit classical references, 24. Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon, p. 30, 47.
but most importantly his formal, simple and moder arrangements of pictorial
space (Fig. 3) could bring together physical culture photographs and Bacon's
Two Figures. It has been suggested that the spatial arrangements of Bacon's
paintings owe something to his time as a Bauhaus-inspired designer, and so the
formal similarities between his studio in the 1930s and his paintings, List's
studio and his photographs, seems enough to suggest a shared interest in the
sexual and aesthetic formalities of German Modernism.24
However, it is certainly possible that this trip to Germany is a diversion and
the connection between the visual vocabularies of physical culture photographs
and Two Figures is much more direct. It is not too important, as each of these
possibilities suggest associations between the pleasures of modernity,

Fig. 5. Physique postcard, Nat Thewlis, 'W.A.

Fig. 4. Furniture and rugs designed by Francis Bacon, published in Studio, vol. 100, 1930, p. 141. Pullum's Wonderful Pupil', c.1925.

122 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Wrestling with Francis Bacon

photography, modem visual vocabularies, and sexual encounters between men

of different ages, nationalities, and from different classes.
For Paul in The Temple, the affinity between paying to take the photograph
25. Lehmann, In the Purely Pagan Sense, p. 67.
of a young and foreign working-class man and paying him for sex, invested
26. Including a large number of popular novels
such as Mary Renault's The Charioteer and modern photographs with an erotic intensity. This affinity between the visual
Rodney Garland's The Heart in Exile, both vocabularies of modern photography and forms of sexual practice and pleasure
published in 1953.
available within the modern metropolis can be used to make sense of Two
27. Accounts of the attractions of male
Figures as a visual product attached to pleasures and practices that were largely
members of staff can be found in the work of
John Lehmann, J.R. Ackerley, and William
determined by class. Bacon's painting is perhaps part of a very long history of
Plomer. fantasies and realities between men of different classes and nationalities that
28. Spender, World Within World, p. 175. were certainly, but not simply, invested in social inequity and romantic
29. For a general discussion and impression of socialism.
Stephen Spender's disillusionment with It really would be pretty difficult to overestimate the importance of class
Communism and Germany see his
difference in the disposition of sexual encounters between men during the first
autobiography, World Within World.
fifty years of this century. Jack Marlowe travelled to Germany with well-
30. Walt Whitman (1819-1992), American
poet and prose writer, see Leaves of Grass
established protocols that precluded sexual encounters with men of his own
(1955), had a great influence on: Edward class:
Carpenter (1844-1929), English writer and
Utopian socialist; John Addington-Symonds I was obsessed by the desire to make love with boys of an entirely different class and
(1840-93), English writer, scholar, historian, background - that was the polarity that excited me, so much at that time and for many years to
poet, reviewer, essayist, and pioneer of
come.25
homosexual rights.

And whilst he may have felt more at liberty to practise these protocols in a
foreign city, he also returned home to exercise them in the physical and social
geographies of London. John Lehmann's fictional autobiography, and many
other texts produced before and after the Second World War,26 make it clear
that one of the most neglected erotic figures of this time is the male servant or
employee, whose eroticism depends on the social differences and economic
disparities between classes.
For example, on his return from Germany in 1932 it was possible for the by
no means wealthy Stephen Spender to consider advertising for a paid
companion and secretary:27

I did not want to live alone and I did not consider marrying. I was in the mood when people
advertise for a companion in the newspapers. I used to enquire of my friends of their friends in
case they knew anyone suitable. So when by chance I met a young man who was unemployed,
called Jimmy Younger, I asked him to live in my flat and work for me.28

According to Spender in 1951, it was the difference of class between him and
Jimmy Younger that provided the element of 'mystery' that corresponded to a
'difference of sex'. In World Within World Stephen Spender proposes that it was
not Jimmy's masculinity that attracted him but that he was in love 'with his
background, his soldiering, his working class home'.
Spender's attraction is, at least in part, formed from a complex of literary
texts and political philosophies that explicitly combined, or implicitly enabled,
the joining of political and erotic commitments to working-class men, and
charged class difference with a potent intensity.29 It is possible to consider
Bacon's painting from within this very particular social, sexual, and textual
tradition that by the beginning of the twentieth century was able to imbue any
image of two men wrestling with a powerful erotic charge. For some readers
of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, and John Addington Symonds it was
easy to mix Ancient Greek wrestling with forms of socialist and sexual politics
that found pleasure in male comradeship and glamour in the figures of
working-class men.30
Whilst for men like Stephen Spender, their socialism was an intimate part of

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001 123

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Simon Ofield

their sexual practice, for others the attractions of working-class men were not
determined by their social and political welfare. According to all of his
biographers, Francis Bacon was committed to the myths and realities 31. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon, p. 55.
surrounding the attractions of working-class men, but not the least interested
32. For a brief account of prosecutions brought
in any forms of socialist politics. against men for advertising in the classified

Throughout this century classified advertisements, in newspapers and adverts column of Picture Show in 1952 see
Patrick Higgins, The Heterosexual Dictatorship,
magazines, like the one Spender considered placing, have been important sites
pp. 188-9.
of male encounter, and according to Michael Peppiatt, Bacon knew and used
33. Rodney Garland, The Heart in Exile (W.H.
the columns in The Times to advertise himself for both money and excitement Allen: London, 1953), p. 179.
as a 'gentleman's companion'.31 This history of classified advertisements 34. Garland, The Heart in Exile, p. 136.
establishes the importance of class for the fantasies and practicalities of
relationships between men. Bacon's involvement as an almost aristocratic
Irishman on both sides of these exchanges offers the potential for
understanding the articulation of these exchanges as complex and perhaps
mutable, and indeed mutual, within a framework of real social and economic
disparity. It is important to have in mind that the advertisements for male
secretaries, valets, employees, and companions that appeared in The Times and
New Statesman during this period could have been as innocent as they
appeared, or were perhaps requests for sexual pleasures, practices, and
partners.3
Our approach toward, or circulation around, Two Figures can be continued
by meeting up with the character Dr Anthony Page, a psychoanalyst who turns
amateur detective, from Rodney Garland's novel The Heart in Exile, published
in the same year as Francis Bacon's painting was first exhibited. In this novel,
Dr Page works as an amateur detective to solve the mystery of a former lover's
recent suicide. The solution to the mystery hinges upon the identity of a young
working-class man whose photograph Dr Page finds pressed behind a framed
photograph of his one time lover's fiance. However, it is not the young man in
the photograph that we need to consider, but Terry, the young male nurse
employed by Dr Page as a receptionist and housekeeper. It serves our purpose
to imagine that Dr Page placed an advert for a receptionist/housekeeper in a
suitable publication, and that it caught Terry's eye.
Terry is an important figure who can stand beside Two Figures; conjoining
past and present, his attractions for Dr Page are somewhere between those of a
working-class male servant, and a homosexual subject and partner. Terry
swims and lifts weights three nights a week:

He was about five foot eight but his bones were large and constant exercise had brought out a
nice, harmonious muscle development on his body. I had a suspicion that sooner or later the
over-exercised muscles might attract fatty tissue. I dare say in ten or twenty years time he might

look bloated, but, at least when I saw his naked forearms, his impressive biceps and deltoids, I
was conscious of his potent attraction.33

Terry is the embodiment of the importing of modern masculine forms and

comportments from America into Britain during and after the Second World
War. One route for this influence was the availability in Britain of American
health, fitness, muscle, and physique magazines, and the publication in British
magazines of photographs from specialist American studios. These magazines
influenced both the presentation and pleasures of some men. According to Dr
Page:

A considerable proportion of young homosexuals regularly went to gymnasia and swimming

pools, not only to look at, or to try and establish contact with, attractive young men, but also to
improve their own physique, and thereby their chances of success.34

124 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Wrestling with Francis Bacon

Whilst gymnasiums and swimming pools are described in The Heart in Exile as
part of a 'new post-war trend', they have been important sites of male
35. Peter Wildeblood's 1955 book Against the
encounter and sexual production since the nineteenth century. Terry is not
Law, about his prosecution alongside Lord simply modern, an example of a 'new post-war trend', but a figure invested
Montague of Beaulieu in 1954 and subsequent
within well-established archetypes of working-class glamour, reformulated by
imprisonment, is perhaps the most sustained
attempt at creating an ethical and responsible
the changes of the post-war period. And it is this, and perhaps his slicked-back
homosexual subject. but 'rebellious' hair, that makes him so important when placed alongside Two
36. Rodney Garland, The Heart in Exile, p. 136. Figures.

37. For a fictional account of the attractions of Due to changing social and economic relationships, by the mid-1950s the
working-class gyms before the Second World attractions of male servants no longer made quite the same sense as they had
War see Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool
earlier in the century. At this time sexual acts between men of different classes
Library (Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1988).
Also for a brief reference see E.M. Forster, became attached to social anxieties about the order and disorder of the post-
Maurice (Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, war world. In an attempt to counter this anxiety a well-established romantic
1972).
and moral understanding of relationships between men of different classes was
38. This phrase is credited to Francis Bacon in instituted by social reformers as an inaugural, though not long-standing, part
Daniel Farson's biography, The Gilded Gutter Life
of Francis Bacon (Vintage: London, 1994).
of the process of creating an ethical and responsible homosexual subject, a
subject able to sustain the arguments for homosexual law reform.35 However,
in The Heart in Exile Rodney Garland does not, or perhaps in 1953 feels no
need to as yet, mitigate Dr Page's interest in Terry in quite this way. Dr Page
is very aware of the connections between Terry's 'physical attractiveness' and
his class:

I confess that the attraction was much stronger when I saw him doing the sort of work I would

never have dreamed of asking him to do. When my charwomen left, he insisted on scrubbing
the kitchen floor, kneeling on the rubber mat, bending over the mop in his singlet. One saw the
servant's humility in the attitude. But one also saw the broad shoulders, the arched back with
the freckled skin under the rebellious hair, and he would look up as I entered and give me a
beautiful smile of his brown dog eyes and white teeth.36

Terry is a figure where the past and the present coincide, not just a young and
attractive working-class man but not yet a homosexual subject or partner; and
so a model for making sense of Two Figures. I have already mentioned that gyms
and athletic clubs have been important sites of encounter since the nineteenth
century.37 And that in the 1950s these sites and the men who used them were
being reformed, at least in part, by the availability of American health, fitness,
muscle, and physique magazines. It seems possible to surmise that the gym
where Terry worked on his body was located somewhere in the East End of
London. Just the kind of East End gym, in fact, where George Dyer, Francis
Bacon's lover in the 1960s, may have been found during these years.
Bacon did not meet George Dyer until eleven years after he painted Two
Figures, but that does not preclude him from becoming part of the context for
making sense of the painting. An archetype that almost perfectly fitted Dyer
existed in Bacon's painting well before they met. I think it is possible to
propose that the influences that helped to form parts of Two Figures, Terry's
and Dyer's body and hairstyles were the same. Both George Dyer and Terry
may have taken an interest in, or at least a look at, some of the same British
and American health, fitness, muscle, and physique magazines that Bacon was
looking at, or walking on, when he painted Two Figures. On the pages of these
magazines, past and present forms of working-class masculinity coincide, and
many of the threads that have run through this article meet. It is also here that
Bacon's commitment to circuits of sexual pleasure in what he once called the
'sexual gymnasium of the city' makes a very particular kind of literal sense.38
If Two Figures is viewed from the pages of some British and American health,
fitness, muscle, and physique magazines the influences that Bacon discussed

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001 125

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Simon Ofield

with Sylvester in 1974 are no longer involved only in the narratives and
conventions of art history and criticism, but become involved in a popular and
banal visual economy. 39. Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant
By the early 1950s the visual language that Muybridge utilized in his (Jonathan Cape: London, 1968), pp. 130-1.

sequential photographs was an established element in the conventions of 40. Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant, p. 131.

muscle and physique photography. And the figure and figurations of 41. A. John Paington is the pseudonym for the
Michelangelo Buonarroti played an important part in forming the poses and artist John S. Barrington. For further
information see the recently published Rupert
rationales of muscle and physique photographs and magazines.
Smith, Physique: The Life of John S Barrington
In his autobiography, Quentin Crisp writes about his appreciation of (Serpent's Tail: London, 1998).
Michelangelo, his favourite artist: 42. MAN-ifique, July 1957.

Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the delights of touching or seeing a man but
the excitement of being man. Every stroke he made spoke of the pleasures of exerting,
restraining and putting to the utmost use the divine gravity-resisting machine.39

As in Bacon's interview with Sylvester, Quentin Crisp's appreciation of

Michelangelo sustains him as a serious artist. However, Crisp's ambition for
his own practice as an artist's model locates the figure and figurations of
Michelangelo in and around the popular and banal forms of visual
representation that could be found on and between the covers of muscle
and physique magazines in the 1950s. Like many male models, Crisp 'was
determined to be as Sistine as hell'.40
In the muscle and physique magazines of the 1950s the figure and figurations
of Michelangelo were an integral part of their social, sexual, and aesthetic
texture. Men who viewed these magazines were able to understand their
social, sexual, and aesthetic interest in themselves and other men through a
mediated connection to the texts and contexts of the Italian Renaissance and
Ancient Greece. In Britain throughout the 1950s John S. Barrington, working
under the pseudonym of John Paington, published a number of books and
magazines that established an association between fine art and physique
photography.41 In the July 1957 edition of his male art magazine MAN-ifique,
Paington published the following editorial:

Finally, we have 'elected' a spiritual Editorial Board comprising Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo,
Praxiteles, Polykleitos, Blake, Flandrin, Fuseli, Gamelin and Rodin: ONLY WHAT WOULD HAVE
BEEN GOOD ENOUGH FOR THOSE MASTERS IS NOW GOOD ENOUGH FOR US AND OUR
READERS!42

Whilst the direct influence of American physique magazines on the public

and private work of many artists is well known, very little attention has been
given to British publications. These magazines were important environments
where male figures made sense in the 1950s, but they were also, like East End
gyms, important sites of male encounter.
The British magazine Vigour, subtitled 'The Vitality Magazine', was first
published in 1946 and initially consisted of articles on health, fitness and
training, muscle and physique competition results, profiles of competition
participants, and a few British rather than American muscle and physique
photographs.
The photographs published in Vigour were usually of men who belonged to
gymnasiums or weight-training clubs that were often located in working-class
districts, often London's East End. That these photographs were captioned
with the name of the individual, their club, and its location may have been an
integral part of their appeal for men committed to the myths and realities that
surrounded and saturated the figures of working-class men:

126 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Wrestling with Francis Bacon

An unusual pose by Ron Saunders, a member of the Bethnal Green Weightlifting Club, of light,
but shapely build, Ron gains a Highly Commended Diploma in Britain's Perfect Man Contest.43

43. Vigour, May 1946. During Vigour's first year of publication photographs of men who belonged to
44. Vigour, July 1946. British gyms and clubs appeared alongside photographs from American
45. Vigour, October 1946 photographic studios that specialized in muscle and physique photography, and
46. Vigour, July 1947. the third issue of Vigour was published with a physique photograph on its
cover.
By the publication of the seventh magazine in July 1946 the pre-paid
advertisements column at the back of the magazine was being used by men to
make contact with other men who had similar interests:

Reader, keen on Boxing and Wrestling, would like to hear from others similarly interested -
Write: Box No 1003, Vigour Press, Ltd.44

During the first year of publication Vigour moved from looking like a general
fitness magazine to increasingly concentrating on physique competition results
and photographs. Alongside the results of physique posing competitions were
articles providing advice for participants. Each month Vigour held its own
physique competition, and the winning entry was published alongside a
detailed critique of both the photograph and pose. On the pages of Vigour
physical fitness and fine art were combined:

Reader with Athletic Figure. Would consider posing for Artist-Sculpturer. Box 1360.45

By 1947 the focus of the magazine was moving towards physique photography
and a number of advertisements began to appear for photographic studios
located in Britain and America that specialized in physique poses. In July 1947
the following pre-paid advertisement was published:

Young Ex Sailor, shortly departing to Singapore, would like to hear from same. Interests:
General PT, posing and sunbathing - write to Box 1981.46

By the end of 1947 the pre-paid advertisements column had become

established as a place where men could meet, and the number of personal
advertisements increased steadily from issue to issue. Like the advertisements
published in the classified columns of The Times or the New Statesman, the
advertisements in Vigour were ambiguous, and the very real possibility that
they mean just what they say should be kept in place. This reading coexists
with the possibility that they are advertisements for sexual encounters. Perhaps
like Two Figures, Vigour is not a magazine for men interested in men that
requires decoding to understand what it is about, but a text that should remain
somewhat irresolute.
Towards the end of 1947 the number of pre-paid adverts that included
interests beyond the focus of the magazine began to increase, and in July 1948
the following collection of pre-paids advertisements were published:

Male Reader would like to pose for amateur photographer or artists.

Reader keen on weight-lifting, posing, sunbathing, seeks companion for camping holiday in
South France, August.

Youth (20). Student desires employment during summer holidays. Anything considered.

Overseas Reader would like to correspond with male readers outside Great Britain. Interests:
Weights, Naturism, Physique Photography. Correspondence in English or French.

Amateur photographer wishes to contact posing enthusiasts in Aldershot and Guildford area.

Pose photographs of well-developed youths aged 15-20 years required.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001 127

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Simon Ofield

Wanted. Good pose photographs of youths and young men.

Gentleman offers holiday accommodation, Devonshire. Swimming, Naturism, Sunbathing,

Theatres, Cinemas. Coloured guests welcomed. 47. gour July 1948.
47. Vigour, July 1948.

Young Man, 29, starting physique course, anxious to contact other Londoners similar age, keen
on posing, art, disciplined training. Please send photograph and physique details. Reply
Guaranteed.

A few pose photographs for sale 1/6d. each. Parcels of assorted American magazines, 10/-
including postage.

WANTED PHYSIQUE PHOTOS. For anyone sending a clear physique photograph of himself and
his exact height and weight (both taken stripped) will, in exchange, compute and mail the
required body measurements for theoretically perfect proportions for the given weight and
height.

Chesty Young Man would like to meet another specialising in chest development living near
London or Harrow.47

From around the middle of 1949 the appearance of personal pre-paid

advertisements becomes somewhat irregular, but they continue to appear.
Finally, this advertisement for a wrestling partner appeared in Vigour's pre-paid
advertisements column in the same year that Francis Bacon painted Two Figures
1953:

Wrestling practice wanted by inexperienced ten-stone near York, Reply R.G. c/o Vigour
Magazine, Please State Fee.

Taken together this selection of advertisements from the pages of Vigour

between 1946 and 1953 provides a compelling context for making sense of
Two Figures, which places the painting within a tradition of popular
representations of men 'wrestling' (Fig. 6). Representations that may or
may not be sexual acts, and may or may not be art. On the pages of this
magazine references to Ancient Greece are combined with modem graphic
design, references to Michelangelo, naturism and physical culture, the physical

Fig. 6. Nude Wrestlers, Western Photography Studio.

128 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Wrestling with Francis Bacon

development and attractions of working-class men, weightlifting clubs and

gyms in the East End of London, and adverts requesting wrestling partners.
48. Mat, vol. 1, no. 2. It is possible simply to attach a narrative to Two Figures in which the couple
'wrestling' on the bed contact one another through a pre-paid advertisement
published in Vigour. A story of this kind would bring together the mediated
influence of established presentations of the male figure with one of the
twentieth century's important sites of male encounter. A viewer of Two Figures
who brought knowledge of the advertisements in Vigour, and other magazines,
to the first exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in 1953 could write this kind of
story and make this kind of sense of the painting. And perhaps, but not
necessarily, because of Francis Bacon's commitment to photographs in
magazines, the pages of Vigour may have littered the floor of his studio and
become part of the production of his painting.
That is enough, but there is another magazine that can suggest a very
particular context for Two Figures. As I have already mentioned, John Russell
has suggested that Francis Bacon's painting may have something to do with The
Wrestlers, a replica of a Greek third-century bronze that can be found in the
Uffizi in Florence. Russell adds that Bacon apparently never saw this sculpture.
Photographs of classical and famous sculptures often appeared in physique
magazines, including the Discobolus and Auguste Rodin's The Thinker, and a
photograph of The Wrestlers was published a number of times on the pages of
Mat magazine towards the end of the 1940s and at the beginning of the 1950s.
The photograph first appeared in the second issue of the magazine alongside
this text:

You are not expected to know the two protagonists. A model of two ancient Greek wrestlers. A
sculpture in the Uffizi, Florence.48

Issue number five of Mat had a photograph of The Wrestlers on its cover and the
'Two Unknown Greek Protagonists' appear again in issue number two of
volume three. Of course it is just possible that Bacon came across The Wrestlers
on the pages of Mat, pages where the past and the present were conjoined.
The visual rhetorics of wrestling photographs published in Mat are very
different from the conventional visual languages of physique photography.
Physique photographs are static, using classical and statuesque forms and
positions formulated for competitions, and are mostly set within studio
locations to enable lighting that can emphasize muscle definition. The
wrestling photographs in Mat are often action shots, blurred, grey, and
granular in texture (Fig. 7). The form of the wrestlers in these photographs is
also quite different to the figures of physique enthusiasts or weight lifters:
heavier, broader, and with less muscle definition.
The articulation of Francis Bacon's figures in Two Figures and other paintings
comes closer to the photographs of wrestlers that can be found on the pages of
Mat than the physique photographs in Vigour.
Mat was initially devoted to wrestling but at the end of the 1940s started to
include an increasing number of physique photographs. By the beginning of the
1950s Mat was publishing a high proportion of physique photographs and
profiling physique photographers like 'Vince of Manchester Street', 'Britain's
Greatest Physique Photographer'. For a number of issues at the beginning of
the 1950s Mat became a general interest men's magazine and included a
section on films and film gossip. The cover design moved away from classical
poses and the use of Ancient Greek references, and towards self-consciously
modem design and typography. At the same time articles on sexual health and

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001 129

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Simon Ofield

49. Mat, vol. 3, no. 12 and vol. 4, no. 4.

'Can the Habit of Masturbation be Cured?' .4 The shift of focus in Mat, and its
change in content and design, was an attempt to compete alongside a number
of new magazines, British and American imports, like Adonis, Body Beautiful,
and Male Classics, which at the beginning of the 1950s focused on the male
figure and were aimed at the burgeoning youth market.
Viewed from the pages of Vigour, Mat, and a number of other magazines,
Two Figures looks to have been produced at a moment of gradual transition; a
moment when the comportments of masculinity and the sites of representa-
tion, interpretation, and encounter had just begun to become identified with a
recognizable community of men with shared social, sexual, commercial, and
aesthetic interests. At this moment well-established forms of representation
were reformulated, and Bacon's painting seems to make a very particular kind
of sense around the beginning of this process of modernization through its re-
working of established conventions in a modern form. Perhaps the most
important comparison between Francis Bacon's painting and the photographs ' I, :_B
in Vigour or Mat is the combination of classical references within modern forms
(Fig. 8). Photographs on and between the covers of these magazines combined
classical iconography with modern photographic techniques alongside modern
typography and graphic design. In the early 1950s this combination was the
established formula for representing males forms, figures, and physiques.
However, soon after Francis Bacon painted Two Figures this conjoining of the
past and the present on the pages of physique magazines changed quite mI
considerably. It changed so much in fact that if the painting was viewed from
the pages of some British and American magazines published a few years later
it may not have looked quite so daring or potentially scandalous, not quite so
modern, and perhaps just a little out of date. However, that is not quite the
point. It would still have made sense as part of social and sexual economy that
was made up of connections between different kinds of written and visual I iI
texts, and everyday experience, through which many men cruised and created
their everyday pleasures.

Fig. 8. Tomorrow's Man, cover, January 1956.

130 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.1 2001

This content downloaded from 193.140.142.129 on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:04:49 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms