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Abstract
Francis Bacon’s paintings of the immediate post-war period in Britain include several works that take as their subject the spaces and experiences of queer intimacy, prior to the partial-decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967. These works inevitably stray across the spheres that queer men occupied at this time, from the domestic interior to public spaces such as bars and hotels. Through an analysis of Two Figures, 1953, and the ‘Man in Blue’ series, 1954, in their wider social and cultural contexts, this article argues that Bacon’s works present visions of a broad, fluid, anxious sense of queer home in post-war London.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the organizers of the ‘Masculinity in The Metropolis’ conference at the University of Kent, UK, in April 2016 for the opportunity to present this research, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their helpful and incisive comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect, 82–3.
2 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, 31.
3 Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 124.
4 See Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, 72. Bacon is quoted in Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, 116.
5 Some more explicitly queer readings of Bacon have come from Ofield, ‘Comparative Strangers’, 64–73 and Chare, After Francis Bacon: Synaesthesia and Sex in Paint.
6 On sexual difference, categories of queer men, and anxiety about Britishness, see Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957, 221–41.
7 See Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect, 44–52 (on town planning) and 81–116 (on the homosexual in urban space).
8 Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect, 1.
9 Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution.
10 Houlbrook, Queer London, 254–61.
11 Houlbrook concludes with similar reflections on the implications of the Wolfenden Report, 256–61.
12 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, 67–70.
13 On Bacon, Lightfoot and Hall, see Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, 123–5.
14 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, 146.
15 Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, 120.
16 Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 122.
17 See O’Neill, ‘Available in an Array of Colours’, 271–91.
18 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait. Essays and Interviews, 97.
19 Lord Gowrie, ‘Obituary: Francis Bacon’, The Guardian, 29 April 1992.
20 The database of Bacon’s personal library at the time of his death is accessible at Bacon’s Books: Francis Bacon’s Library and its Role in his Art, http://www.tcd.ie/History_of_Art/research/centres/triarc/bacon.php
21 Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Part IV, Cities of The Plain, 1–16.
22 Proust, 23, and 17–38 in general on ‘inverts’.
23 Bacon’s use of past queer literary references in order to situate his contemporary homosexuality has parallels with David Hockney’s engagement with Walt Whitman – see Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London, 138–59.
24 See Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London, 43–67.
25 Bacon is quoted in Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait. Essays and Interviews, 181.
26 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 213–30.
27 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 240–46.
28 A broader reading like this is gestured to in Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 122.
29 On this, see Sinfield, Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain, 68–96.
30 See Matt Cook, Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth Century London, 143–90.
31 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait. Essays and Interviews, 31.
32 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in your Blood, 10–11.
33 Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, 76–9.
34 Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, 80–2.
35 Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, 17–23.
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Gregory Salter
Gregory Salter is a lecturer in history of art at the University of Birmingham. His research specialism is post-war British art and its intersections with home, gender, sexuality, and identity. He is currently developing a monograph entitled Reconstructing Home: Painting and Male Identity in Post-War Britain, based on his PhD, completed at the University of East Anglia in 2013 and his post-doctoral work at the Geffrye Museum of the Home in London.