Woven under Glass: Francis Bacon’s Linen and the Queerness of His Materials

Abstract

Though often mentioned only in passing, the linen fabric Francis Bacon used as a ground for his paintings from 1948 until his death in 1992 (technically the unprimed side of commercially primed canvas), is a determinant factor in the perception of his paintings. The rough linen strongly impacts the distribution of paint and thus the perception of Bacon’s “touche” as scattered, as well as—by extension—its perception as violent or deforming. In addition to choosing a raw ground, Bacon at times physically raised the fibers of the linen to awaken the nubuck of the canvas and included weave pressings over previously applied paint. This paper discusses the presence of raw canvas and weave in Francis Bacon’s paint(ings). It will first outline some of the fundamental ways in which Bacon relies on the canvas in portrait paintings, addressing the relationship between canvas fabric and skin, between paint and (wiped?) makeup, through a close-up analysis of some of his early and mid-career portraits. Then, it will examine the consequences of Bacon’s preference for a systematic presentation of his unprimed canvas behind reflective glass. My conclusion is that, once his paintings are under glass, Bacon retains an imprint or image of the woven structure of the canvas.

Keywords:

• Francis Bacon
• oil and acrylic painting techniques
• unprimed ground
• canvas
• fiber
• portraits
• make-up
• reflective glass frames

Acknowledgements

I thank the editors for their prompt and precise work.

Notes

1 Sources vary between 1947 (Farson 1993) and 1948 (Cappock 2005, 225–226, note 106); Head II of 1949 is cited as the first surviving work to use the unprimed side of the canvas (Russell 2010, 107, 168). However, earlier Bacon used “an absorbent wood-fiber board called Sundlea, recommended by Roy de Maistre and Graham Sutherland,” according to Farson (1993). Sutherland used unprimed canvas, too, as a support for his portraits, for example. He drew a graphite grid on his canvas before painting thinly with oil.

2 Bacon answered “Yes,” when David Sylvester asked him if, starting in the late 1940s, he had continued working on unprimed canvas “always with the other side primed?” Bacon insisted, “[a]nd since then I have always worked on the unprimed side of the canvas.” (Sylvester 1993, 195–196). See also Russell (2010). After examining 21 paintings and 17 additional destroyed paintings by Bacon, Russell concluded: “All but three of the works examined were painted on the reverse side of a commercially-primed canvas. Two early works were painted on a soft fiberboard.” (Russell 2010, 139).

3 The canvas always appears to be linen, with plain-weave pattern. The weave density varies, at times with a rather coarse canvas (Russell 2010, 142).

4 Barring small drops, stains, and very dilute paint soaked into the canvas for dark backgrounds, most of Bacon’s paint is oily but rather dry/undiluted.

5 In physics, to “adsorb” (of a solid) means to hold molecules (of a gas or liquid or solute) as a thin film on the outside surface. Absorption on the contrary involves the whole volume of the material. Adsorption is a surface phenomenon and thus a superficial form of absorption. The term “sorption” encompasses both processes (Oxford University Press 1989, s.v. “adsorb” and “sorption”).

6 Bacon about oil pastel (Farson 1993).

7 When someone told him paint on unprimed canvas would “rot it,” Bacon shrugged and said: “Degas did it.” (Peppiatt 2006, 64). On Francis Bacon’s artistic dialogue with Edgar Degas, see Hammer (2012).

8 Spray paints are apparent on paintings from the late 1970s up to the final Triptych of 1991 (Russell 2010, 122).

9 La touche in French refers to the quality of the stroke of a brush: it is the way a painter applies paint; one can speak of a painter’s touch in English.

10 Bacon adapted the Old Master’s device to isolate and distance the sitter from the viewer (van Alphen 1992, 108). The painter had begun his career as an interior decorator and designer of furniture and rugs in the mid-1930s, and later said that he liked “rooms hung all round with just curtains hung in even folds” (Russell 1971, 35). Veils or curtains appear in Bacon’s earliest works, always in portraits and always in front of, rather than behind, the figure (Zweite and Müller 2006, 208).

11 On conveying the violence of reality in paint, see Bacon with Sylvester (Sylvester 1993, 81–82). Book titles alone reflect the omnipresent notion of violence in the interpretations of Bacon’s works, think The Violence of the Real; Francis Bacon: a Terrible Beauty; Francis Bacon: his Life and Violent Times, …

12 It is likely that Bacon worked with rulers. Several were found in his studio after his death (Russell 2010, 173).

13 There were corduroy imprints on the door (Dawson and Cappock 2001, 55; Cappock 2005, 208).

14 Bacon used corduroy “to impose a cross-hatching impression by pressing it against a face on the canvas” (Domino 1997, 107).

15 “In many cases the canvas surface appears to have been roughened before painting commenced” (Russell 2010, 139).

16 It seems Bacon still used oil paint for the backgrounds in the dark ground paintings of the 1950s; Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, he used acrylic and house paints in the “backgrounds” yet continued to use oil for the rest (mainly the figures) (Russell 2010, 175).

17 Linda Nochlin on Francis Bacon and Abstract Expressionism, which “Bacon ostensibly hated, [but which] obviously exerted a certain seductive power on his formal language” (Nochlin 2008).

18 In a statement from a tribute to the painter Matthew Smith, Bacon said, “the image is the paint and vice versa” (Peppiatt 2006, 65). For more on flesh in Bacon’s paintings, see Gilles Deleuze’s La Logique de la Sensation [The Logic of Sensation] (Deleuze 1981; Deleuze 2002).

19 Natural ageing of the painting constituents and conservation-restoration practices like cleaning and lining the canvas have often caused the weave to pierce through paint layers even when this was not the initial state of the canvas or the intention of the artist. Revolute lining techniques requiring heat and pressure to be applied on the back of the canvas (to glue an additional canvas lining to their backs) have pressed the fibers and the weave into the paint layer, at times producing an imprint of the structure of the weave (Kirsh and Levenson 2000, 33–38).

20 Robert Melville wrote about Head I, it has the “color of wet, black snakes lightly powdered with dust” (Met Museum 2020).

21 John Richardson made the comparison between the linen side of the canvas and the stubble on Francis’ face (Richardson 2009).

22 Photographs show Muybridge’s images hanging in Bacon’s studio, next to reproductions of his own paintings.

23 Richardson watched Bacon apply make-up to his face: “[t]he makeup adhered to the stubble much as [sic] the paint would adhere to the unprimed verso of the canvas that he used in preference to the smooth, white-primed recto” (Richardson 2009).

24 An Australian exhibition of 2012 showed a couple of paintings without glass. The bare paintings are filmed up-close and presented by the curator of the exhibition in an online video presentation (Art Gallery of NSW 2012).

25 Sections of the catalogue raisonné are available in online form, on the official Francis Bacon website (francis-bacon.com).

26 Peggy Guggenheim bought Bacon’s Study for Chimpanzee the year it was made, in 1957 and hung it above her bed where it remained until she died (Dearborn 2004, 283–284). Guggenheim purchased many paintings on unprimed canvas during that period; in addition to the chimpanzee painting, she bought several Jackson Pollocks including Enchanted Forest and Mark Rothko’s Untitled (red) of 1949 on raw canvas.

27 Because of its irregular surface, light hits unprimed canvas in a different manner, physically. The small indentations of the weave reflect light diffusely; the canvas’s “natural texture” tends to reflect light from individual fibers, in accordance with its woven structure (Komatsu and Goda 2018). Diffuse reflection means that reflection occurs in all directions and signifies a more matte and textured perception of the surface. Primed canvas on the contrary is more closely associated to specular reflection. Specular reflection means that light is mainly reflected in one direction and much less absorbed by the surface then when diffuse (Crowell 2004, 15–23), which enhances perception of brightness, sheen and opaqueness of primed paintings.

28 The glass blurring of the all-over presence of the weave heightens possible confusion between the various weaves: that of the linen (coming through or left blank), that of other cloth imprints, and other grid-like patterns like comb streaks, all more easily identified on the bare surface.

29 Bacon’s statement to David Sylvester about waiting for adequate non-reflective glass has to be relativized. Anti-reflective glass only works properly when placed completely against the surface it covers. Given the relief of his paint matter on his canvases, such placement would have been in most cases impossible to approach. If a space is left between glass and surface, this tends to dull the perception of the surface, and would thus do away with the grain of the canvas either way. Additionally, to this day, it appears that the Estate of Francis Bacon has chosen to keep the paintings under reflective glass and to exhibit them this way.

30 Besides protecting, a layer of varnish when the painting is almost complete unifies the painting and saturates the colors. (Dunkerton 2020).

31 Discussion with Arie Wallert at The Skin of Things symposium, Rijksmuseum, November 2018.

32 In “The Textility of Making,” Tim Ingold puts forward the notion of “textility” to shed light on processes of making. Textility refers to making in general as a practice of weaving together materials through thinking and doing. He compares making to the “slicing and binding together of fibrous material.” (Ingold 2010, 92).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique (FRS-FNRS) under the “Research-Fellow” grant or “Aspirante” (Grant nos. ASP 22341054 and ASP-REN 28064083).

Notes on contributors

Hannah De Corte

As an artist and as a scholar, Hannah De Corte seeks to understand Western painting techniques, particularly the fabric nature of canvas paintings and its effects. To do so, she looks at encounters between paint and canvas and how painters have organized them. This includes the study of absorption and adsorption processes, for instance, that occur when canvas is used without coating—a minority in Western art history and the subject of her doctoral dissertation.

She has recently published on David Hockney’s hybrid canvas preparation technique in Art & Perception, and on painting without stretcher after 1945 in The Image. She has given conferences at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York (US), at the INHA in Paris (FR), at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (NL), at STUK Museum in Leuven (BE) and has exhibited recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art (OGR) in Turin (IT), the Abbaye Saint André-Center d’art contemporain CAC in Meymac (FR), and at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Museum of Costume and Lace and the Patinoire Royale in Brussels (BE). hannahdecorte.com, [email protected]