Masterpieces
Lying Figure in Mirror
Bacon, Francis
Dublin, 28/10/1909-Madrid, 28//04/1992
Oil on canvas
198,5 x 147,5 cm
Francis Bacon (on the reverse)
1971
20th century. Third quarter
82/215
Acquired in 1982
Lying figure in Mirror was one of the paintings Bacon made specifically for his retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1971. It is linked with two others, Triptych-Studies of the Human Body (1970) and Two Men Working in a Field (1971) by iconography and purpose. Inspired by myths associated with art and creation, and previous artists' interpretations of them, Bacon reimagined the paintings, relocating them in a contemporary cultural context.
Reflected in a large mirror within a curved space, a contorted, sinuous and fleshy form, comprising two intertwined bodies, slips between two levels. Although Bacon frequently employed mirrors and reflections, this is the unique example in which the scene itself was painted as a reflection. A displayed sculpture has come to life, with bird and human features merging: a nipple serves as an eye, an armpit becomes an anus, arched wings replicate limbs. Bacon was not, as has been claimed, against narrative, but he sought fiercely to avoid an obvious story. What, then, might this coolly rendered, mysterious and disconcerting scene signify? It is Bacon's deconstruction of Leda and the Swan.
Bacon cited Michelangelo's art as one of his foremost inspirations, and in Lying Figure in Mirror he took Michelangelo's Leda e il cigno (Leda and the Swan) (c. 1530) as a departure point. The mythological narrative of Queen Leda's impregnation by Zeus, king of the gods, in the guise of a swan (the initial event that culminated in the Trojan war) had symbolic significance for Michelangelo. As an intellectual and follower of Neoplatonism he would have understood it as an expression of the mystical combining of masculine and feminine principles and also of divine, revelatory inspiration infusing the endeavours of artists and poets. Michelangelo's architectural and sculptural scheme in the Medici chapel, (1521--24), thought to be based on Renaissance Neoplatonic principles, was designed almost contemporaneously with his painting of Leda and the Swan; the sculpture of Night, with its lowered eyelids, recumbent pose, symbolic bird and relaxed left arm, closely resembles his painting, which is now known only from copies and original sketches of details.
Once owned by François Ier, Michelangelo's tempera painting of Leda was destroyed during the Counter-Reformation; Leonardo da Vinci's and Correggio's versions of the subject were similarly attacked--all three were regarded as lascivious and carnal. This destruction is likely to have been another factor that resonated with Bacon, who in the 1950s had painted a series of variations on the destroyed The Painter on the Road to Tarasçon by Van Gogh.
Poetry was a paramount catalyst for Bacon's imagery. In Lying Figure in Mirror he elides the Anglo-Irish poet W. B. Yeats's powerfully stark sonnet, Leda and the Swan (1923), with elements derived from Michelangelo's painting. Yeats was influenced by esoteric texts, occult studies, and diverse philosophies, including those of Nietzsche and Neoplatonism. He employed Leda and Zeus's union as an instance of a pivotal event in history, the advent of a period of cultural progression that contained, in its initiation, its demise. He understood the act as a sacred marriage, yet nonetheless related it as a rape. The immediacy of emotional, biological and animal stimuli, generated by fear and ecstasy, described in the poem are sensations that Bacon, too, sought to evoke.
Several of Bacon's contemporaries appreciated the myth's power. From 1958 Sidney Nolan, also inspired by Yeats's poem, created many pictures on the theme; Cy Twombly made a series of works in 1962, perhaps encouraged by Joseph Beuys's Pregnant Woman with Swan (1959, Tate/National Galleries of Scotland). Henry Moore's sculpture, particularly his recumbent figures, Bird Form (1955), (County Museum of Art, Los Angeles) and Bird (1959), (Tate), presaged the ambiguity of Bacon's "sculptural" lying figure. Among other potential visual stimuli, Bacon would have known since his teenage years the Leda attributed to Poussin, at Musée Condé, Chantilly; myriad other examples include Max Ernst's bird paintings, as reproduced in Amédée Ozenfant's Art, 1928, a book to which Bacon frequently turned for imagery.
By presenting a perturbing configuration of a contorted human body of indeterminate sexuality engaged in a sexual act, Bacon was challenging the limits of permissible subject-matter. Combining Yeats's violent, and Michelangelo's serene, depictions of Leda and Zeus's liaison, he simultaneously distances the scene through a mirror reflection and the sculptural form. The discordant palette and pitiless glare of Lying Figure in Mirror are disquieting: yet if we are puzzled, repelled and attracted in equal measure, our attention is held. Funereal black blinds that intensify the claustrophobic space echo the atmosphere of the Medici chapel -we are seduced even before the subject is revealed. Significantly, the swan embodies a divine, supreme, masculine authority with ultimate power- the human form becomes both an irresistible attraction and victim. And this, perhaps, is how Bacon wished to see himself. [Amanda Harrison]
Selected bibliography
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