Content area
Full text
Against the tide of art history, Francis Bacon predominantly painted men. As theorist Ernst van Alphen points out, 'There are few painters in the modern period of Western art who have so dedicated themselves to representing the male body'. ' Bacon's paintings are also known for their painterly distortions and fragmentations of the body. They often depict men wrestling, struggling and grappling with one another. However they can have a paradoxically erotic dimension, as Bacon transmuted these wrestling figures into coupling men.
Given this emphasis on the male figure in Bacon's oeuvre, it may seem strange to consider his paintings of women. Yet Bacon had close friendships with a number of fascinating and unconventional women who became the subject of portraits and nude figure studies.
Among these, the beautiful Henrietta Moraes was a friend whom he painted nude on several occasions. His paintings of Moraes s naked body sprawled on a bed may be read as erotic. To me they raise fascinating questions about how Bacon, a homosexual man, engaged with and represented the sexuality of one of his close female friends who was not the object of his own sexual desire. I want to look further at Bacon's paintings of Moraes to find out what he was trying to convey about this particular person, and how this relates to the art historical tradition of the female nude. I will do this through the prism of one painting that is loosely modelled on nude photographs of Moraes -Lying Figure (1969).2
David Sylvester said that in Bacon's works 'the female bodies tend to be paradigmatically female: curvaceous and well fleshed . . . Bacon's lack of personal erotic interest in naked females did nothing to prevent these paintings from being as passionate as those of the male bodies that obsessed him.'3 In turn curator Chris Stephens said that some of Bacon's images of Moraes acknowledge the sitter's 'raw sexuality'4, and show her as 'sexually alluring but dangerously open. Though not exactly violated there is, nonetheless, something pathetic in her apparent sexual abandon.'5 He speculated that the sexual character of some of these images came partly from the photographs that informed them.6 These photos, commissioned by Bacon but taken by his friend John Deakin, show Moraes adopting...