"Bacon’s scream is the operation through which the entire body escapes through the mouth." -- Gilles Deleuze
Between 1949 and 1964 Francis Bacon created a series of some forty five paintings that remixed and versioned Velasquez's
Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Of these many variations on a theme, 1953's
Study after Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X is perhaps my personal favorite. It sits early enough in the series to channel the power of Velasquez's portrait yet far enough along to have as much connection with Bacon's earlier versions (
Head VI in partuicular) as with the original.
Bacon claimed never to have seen the Velasquez in person and judging by the books in print at the time it is assumed that he may only have seen the painting in mono-types (supposedly this is how he mistakenly used purple for the pope's robes). As common practice Bacon would take photos or prints that he used as reference and tear, cut and paint on them. He used these modified copies as a more traditional artist would use preliminary sketches.
In electronic music a good remix is one that takes a small sound or moment of the original, a drum fill or synth hook, and draws it out, expanding it into a entirely new piece of music while often re-editing or dubbing out those features of the original that are most prominent. In
Study after Velasquez Bacon takes some of the original paintings traits, most prominently the geometric composition of the chair, the sitting pope's posture and the remarkable use of light. He then blurs and removes, dubs out, the figure's engaging if cool gaze and expressively clenched hands. Even to a viewer who has never seen the Velasquez these omissions draw immediate attention. Traditional portraits not only have eyes and hands but they are normally the vehicle through which the painter presents the inner life of the subject. Here they are erased and the viewer is instead presented with a jarringly expressive mouth in full shriek.
This leads us to the often cited Deleuze quote above. What happens when a screaming mouth repalces the eyes as the entrance to intimate knowledge of a subject? (As an interesting aside the scream here is understood to be referenced from the nurse's primal scream in the film Battleship Potemkin an recurring image used by Bacon.) This replacement of organs results in a type of inversion to how the work is viewed. Through the eyes a viewer can glimpse the intellectual life of Velasquez's pope. She can see
the wheels turning in his head as the cliche goes. This interacation draws the viewer in to the image, engages her. In Bacon's painting the eyes are blurred beyond recognition and instead the viewer is challenged by the bared teeth and impenetrable emptiness of the screaming mouth. Instead of being drawn in we are repulsed. Instead pondering the intellectual intricacies of the pope's conscious mind we are attacked by the primal nature of an extreme physicality. The eyes are instruments of removed perception, they do not physically effect the outside world. The mouth however is an instrument of consumption that can have a destructive effect on the world outside the body.
Through his act of erasure and reconstruction, Bacon takes the intellectual piety found in Valesquez's original and replaces it with a much more animalistic view of human nature. That the pope remains dressed in all his regalia makes this contrast all the more immediate. He further tranforms the orginal image by flattening the scene down in to only two dimensions. Where in the Velasquez the precision of perspective highlights the otherness of the subject, in Bacon's version all perspective is flattened and compressed. The background curtain, the foreground chair and the pope himself exist on the same plane. The hierarchy that places man above his surroundings, let alone pope above his subjects, is destroyed. Instead all things are portrayed as interconnected equals.
To return to my example of the remix in music, in dub reggae it is a common technique of the producer to load several distinct parts of a song on to a single channel on the mixing desk. The lead guitar, keyboard, bass, etc. are no longer kept separate in the mixdown. The result is an over-saturation of the sound. Paradoxically this technique does not leave the arrangement sounding crowded but instead opens up space within the song giving it extra dimension. In Bacon's
Study after Velasquez, he takes the background and foreground components and compresses them on to a simgle plain. Instead of giving the painting a cluttered or crowded composition the technique opens up a dark void within the painting that is nowhere in Valsqeuz's original. In
Study after Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent Bacon fills this viod with an arresting primal scream.
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