Francis Bacon by Michael Peppiatt — portrait of an elusive and enigmatic genius

Great artists have a lot in common with criminals. They exist outside the norms of polite society, where large sums of money change hands in opaque circumstances, and there’s the delirious prospect of getting away with it — of pulling off a stroke that makes them untouchable. Crime is a gamy ingredient in the story of Francis Bacon, the Irish-born British figurative painter who was best known for his writhing portraits and screaming popes.

Like a mafia don, Bacon never wrote anything down. Or hardly anything. We have the notebooks of Leonardo and the letters of Van Gogh, but the most celebrated trove in the Bacon archive to date may be the so-called “Robertson Collection”, named for an electrician, Mac Robertson, who discovered a haul of items in a skip outside Bacon’s studio in 1980. Among other items, it included cheque-book stubs of payments to Annabel’s club and Wheeler’s restaurant — upmarket haunts popular with London’s posh and raffish crowd.

Bacon’s former amanuensis, the tireless art writer Michael Peppiatt, has stepped forward to reassemble his fragmentary literary estate, all brought together in the book Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait in Words. The letters, interviews and studio notes of this elusive Mr Big of the art racket will be pored over for leads, clues to the meaning of his often violent and bloody canvases. Bacon, who died in 1992, applied himself with a fierce work ethic, but chucked out ones that displeased him and simply forgot about others.

The art historian Martin Harrison, researching the painter’s catalogue raisonné, had to fossick for “lost Bacons” among lock-ups and attics. But there’s no doubt about the art market’s interest. For a time, Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud”, a 1969 triptych of his fellow artist and sometime friend that fetched $142.4mn in 2013, was the most expensive artwork sold at auction.

We may have crime to thank for introducing Bacon to his lover and muse, George Dyer. In a meet-cute undreamt of in the realm of romcoms and dating apps, Dyer was a burglar who broke into Bacon’s studio, or so the story goes. The artist is supposed to have offered him a simple choice: go to bed with me or I go to the police. It wasn’t the first surprise that poor Dyer would have encountered that day. Letting himself into Bacon’s famously dishevelled premises in Reece Mews, South Kensington, with its “compost” of rags, spilled paint and torn newspapers, he could have been forgiven for thinking another thief had beaten him to it.

Peppiatt has unearthed no billets-doux from the painter to his boyfriend. But he found thank-you notes to friends who helped him after a jealous Dyer had planted cannabis at the studio and turned the tables on Bacon by calling the police.

In these bread-and-butter letters, the old rogue is kind, even courtly, in keeping with his upper-class origins. He might not have bequeathed us a great store of words but the ones we have are moreishly quotable: “Morality is a luxury that has come on me with age”; “The other day someone called me ‘the greatest living painter’. That’s very flattering, of course. But there’s not much competition, is there?”

Discussing his work appeared to bore him and he claimed to be indifferent to what posterity would make of it. In conversation with the photographer Peter Beard, published in 1975, Bacon said: “The most interesting things that are kept are things like diaries and police records.”

The only diaries that Bacon scribbled in were free ones given away to punters at casinos, and he abandoned those well before January 31 each year. But if we’re talking about police records, Francis Bacon reads a lot like one. It’s an elegant and luxuriously illustrated book, but carries a whiff of the cells all the same. Bacon’s short, sometimes repetitive, often evasive remarks could almost be the transcript of an interview under caution: you half expect him to reply “No comment” to his more dogged questioners.

It’s taken a gumshoe of rare indefatigability to dig out the evidence gathered by Peppiatt

Elsewhere, expressing his reservations about abstract art and pop art, he says, “There is nothing between the police record and real art which . . . can unlock and deepen the channels of intuition and sensation.” Bacon’s references to police files made me think of the line from The Waste Land, “He do the police in different voices” (TS Eliot’s original title for his masterpiece) which is thought to refer to the innovation of multiple points of view in the poem.

Bacon, who was very influenced by Eliot, was similarly concerned with perspective. One thing that’s abundantly clear from his otherwise sketchy paperwork is that he was searching for a new way of looking at the human form — the human condition — at a time when photography seemed to have had the last word on portraiture (and his figurative art was out of style). He returns again and again to the challenge of surprising himself, and — very much as an afterthought — the spectator. He hopes to bypass a conventional response to art by delivering a jolt to the nervous system instead.

Many biographical sleuths have tried to get the cuffs on Bacon. But he is the art world’s answer to the Keyser Söze character in the film The Usual Suspects, a master of deception and invention able to spin an entire story about himself from the notices on the walls of a police interview room. Bacon went one better: he left us scrambling to make up our own stories about him by leaving behind as few words as possible. It’s taken a gumshoe of rare indefatigability to dig out the evidence gathered in these pages.

Despite that, I seem to hear the artist’s ghostly laughter as I close the book — and a haunting cry that sounds like “You’ll never take me alive, critic!” Bacon remains tantalisingly out of reach, between the police record and real art.

Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait in Words by Michael Peppiatt Thames & Hudson £40, 480 pages

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