Visual Culture in Britain

ISSN: 1471-4787 (Print) 1941-8361 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rvcb20

Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World by Rina

Arya
Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2012, pp. 176

Nicholas Chare

To cite this article: Nicholas Chare (2013) Francis�Bacon:�Painting�in�a�Godless�World by Rina

Arya, Visual Culture in Britain, 14:1, 122-124, DOI: 10.1080/14714787.2013.750979

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2013.750979

Published online: 24 Jan 2013.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 156

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rvcb20
Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World by Rina Arya,
Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2012, pp. 176

The cover image for Rina Arya’s lavishly illustrated and beautifully
produced monograph on Francis Bacon is a black and white photograph
of the artist in his Reece Mews studio apartment. Bacon stands at the top
of the steep staircase to his lodgings. Jorge Lewinski, the photographer,
has paused midway up the stairs to take his picture. Lewinski looks
heavenward, his gaze met by Bacon’s shadowy poker-face. The artist is
raised up, venerated. The composition of this photograph appears
indebted to the myth of the ‘Artist-God’.1 It shows Bacon as artist-genius,
guarding the entry to his studio where the paintings that bear his name
are putatively manufactured. Images of this kind, portraits of the modern
artist, are informed by the humanist idea that artistic creation is the
product of a subject in control of their own actions, a self-expressive
individual. In this context, Arya’s book can be read as blasphemous. It
studiously questions Bacon’s position as the locus of meaning for the
works that bear his name.
Arya looks beyond the artist and situates his works in a broader social
and historical context, focusing on their relation to what she perceives to be
the godless world of modern times. Her path-breaking interpretation moves
beyond the limiting insights about Bacon’s art that he provided in the
celebrated interviews with David Sylvester. Instead, Arya draws on cultural
history as a means of identifying and tracking the relationship of Bacon’s
paintings to the modern condition. Ideas from existentialism, phenomenol-
ogy and theology are employed as a means of understanding the enduring
significance of religion in Bacon’s corpus. The book begins by analysing
works that possess an explicitly religious theme, such as Bacon’s crucifix-
ions and Popes, before moving on to consider paintings that adopt a
typically religious form, the triptychs, even if their content is not obviously
spiritual. Subsequently there is a chapter on the body, which traces how
Bacon’s exploration of the human form is additionally a meditation on the
human condition and argues for the artist’s Catholic sensibility (p.141). The
final chapter provides a consideration of the relationship between the
sacred and the profane throughout Bacon’s work.
For Arya, Bacon’s paintings all reflect the spiritual vacuum that char-
acterizes modern times. The absence of God, of a transcendental signified,
in modernity has led both artists and the public to seek spiritual solace, to
find existential significance, in ‘the unremitting materiality of the body’
(p.15). Arya suggests that, for an atheist, the belief in the materiality of the
body is one of the few certainties in life (p.119). Faith is now found in the
feel of all flesh. For an artist such as Bacon, this faith in the flesh is
indivisible from his artistic materials. The connection between paint and
flesh in his work is a theme which runs throughout the book. Bacon’s
techniques, the way he manipulates pigments, form continual, repeated
efforts to assert the corporeal, to render paint flesh, to transubstantiate it.
T. J. Clark has written of technique in modernism as a kind of shame. He

Visual Culture in Britain, 2013

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2013.750979
 reviews 123

suggests that it is ‘something that asserts itself as the truth of picturing, but
always against picturing’s best and most desperate efforts’.2 Technique,
the means by which the truth in painting should be arrived at, ends up
being truthful only to the artwork’s failure to instantiate its subject. This
reading of modernist art practice, one which foregrounds paint’s perpe-
tually botched symbolizations, resonates strongly with Arya’s recognition
that doubt is what is central to Bacon’s style.
The doubt in Bacon’s technique manifests itself through the repeated blurs
and smears of pigment that give rise to the illusion of motion, to a loss of
fixity. Arya reads Bacon’s mutable, amorphous bodies as standing for the
endless deferral of revelation regarding their significance. The screaming
Popes are perceived in these terms, conveying ‘the death of the transcen-
dental signified’ (p.97). The triptychs are also understood in this way, form-
ing ‘a meditation on the absence of overarching meaning’ (p.117). The
religious content is revealed to be without substance, empty. The Popes are
husks and the triptych form is an anachronism. For Arya, doubt in the divine
within society, as reflected by the paintings, has led to a broader doubt in any
and all meaning including that of representational practice. Even those
efforts to arrest the free play of meaning that characterizes a godless world
by way of the matter of human flesh are ultimately, as Bacon’s uncertain
facture alludes to, bound to fail. The lack of faith that characterizes Bacon’s
vision is linked by Arya to the Holocaust (p.14). Her work therefore forms
part of a growing, highly significant, body of literature that seeks to position
Bacon as a history painter exploring the aftermath of European fascism.3
A note of caution is, however, necessary in relation to such endeavours,
given that Bacon’s political sympathies are subject to debate.
There are some aspects of Arya’s argument that are open to question. The
claim that Bacon is primarily a literary artist, for instance, does not ring true
(p.157). His sincere and studied absorption of Picasso’s achievements
demonstrates that Bacon was a painter’s painter even if his later efforts to
engage with the New York School, culminating in the Van Gogh portraits,
were gauche, if not ghastly. Arya might also have made more of the con-
nection between Bacon’s sexuality and the religious aspects of his works.
Sadomasochism, for example, can be conceived of as a spiritual practice.4
Bacon’s use of paint as an instrument of torture in the Papal images, as
suggested by Arya, invites a consideration of the artist’s exploration of the
relationship between eroticism and religious suffering (p.85). Francis Bacon:
Painting in a Godless World nevertheless forms a crucial intervention in
contemporary debates about the continuing significance of Bacon’s oeuvre.
Arya’s arguments are frequently made by way of a refreshingly close
attention to style and composition that stands against the disheartening
trend in Bacon studies to focus on source materials and the master’s voice,
treating paint on canvas as mere afterthought.
Nicholas Chare
University of Melbourne
# Nicholas Chare, 2013
124 reviews

Notes
1 See R. Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. S. Heath (London: Fontana,
1977), 146.
2 T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1999), 48.
3 See, for example, M. Hammer and C. Stephens, ‘‘‘Seeing the Story of One’s Time’’: Appropriations
from Nazi Photography in the Work of Francis Bacon’, Visual Culture in Britain, 10, no. 3 (2009): 315–51.
4 A. Beckmann, The Social Construction of Sexuality and Perversion: Deconstructing Sadomasochism
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 175–227.