Before David Lynch, there was Francis Bacon

Washington Post

06-02-2025

Great Works, In Focus
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#186 Before David Lynch, there was Francis Bacon
The painter, like the filmmaker, created images that resonated with a specifically modern sense of horror.
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Column by Sebastian Smee
February 6, 2025 at 11:14 a.m. EST
4 minutes ago
3 min
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Some images recur. They're spectral. They come out of the darkness — out of somewhere far away and half-forgotten — and there they are. Again and again.
Since David Lynch's death, everyone has been telling nice stories about the legendary filmmaker: His old-fashioned good humor, his belief in Transcendental Meditation, his kindness to his favorite actors. Okay. But let's not kid ourselves. Lynch was dark. What he was mostly concerned with was how images can haunt us.
In this he was a lot like the painter Francis Bacon, who died in 1992, the year that Lynch's 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me' was released.
In my experience, people who like Lynch's films also love Bacon's paintings. It would be too simple — too antiseptic — to say that both artists exposed the dark underbelly of society or reveled in the unconscious. Lynch wasn't interested in giving us generic spooky images. He cultivated very exact nightmare visions. Think, for instance, of the encounter he contrived in 2001's 'Mulholland Drive' — the one that took place in a parking lot at the back of Winkie's diner ('This Winkie's'). The actual figure of horror was almost absurd: a person with matted hair and a filthy face. But the context was perfectly calibrated. Lynch wanted it to be terrifying to this very particular, almost intolerable degree.
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Bacon was similar. He didn't paint many images like this one, a 1953 painting at the National Gallery of Art called 'Study of a Dog.' But the loping, blurry, foreshortened dog emerging from darkness along a deep perspective line was clearly an image that had a grip on him. Why is almost beside the point.
1953 was the year Joseph Stalin died and Queen Elizabeth II was coronated. It was also the year that Bacon, at a time when homosexual acts were still outlawed in Britain, painted two men having sex. He based his blurry, spectral composition, the forms dissolving with uncanny precision, on a sequence of photographs of men wrestling by Eadweard Muybridge, whose stop-motion photographs led into cinema.
Bacon liked both photographs and movies. He thought hard about them, both as an art form and as propaganda. He had lived through World War II and was keen to grapple with what the critic David Sylvester called 'a mythology of terror.'
He presented his horrifying phantasms (screaming popes, hanging carcasses, deformed faces and bodies) in the same disquieting, matter-of-fact way that a camera might show a 'film star getting into her aeroplane' or a 'goalkeeper failing to make a save,' wrote Sylvester.
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Two years after 'Study of a Dog,' the artist Max Clarac-Sérou said that Bacon's work reminded him of a famous engraving by Albrecht Dürer showing 'a horseman … unaware of the presence of Death, following, step by step, behind him.' Bacon's merit, Clarac-Sérou said, was that he had put himself in the place of the horseman and dared to turn around.
Unlike Dürer, a virtuosic master of proliferating detail, Bacon used very pared-down means to convey his very modern sense of horror. You can walk past his paintings and feel unmoved. Or you can turn around. If you do, they may provoke an almost physical nausea — a feeling that may go away but might yet always be there waiting for you, emerging from darkness, or from behind the wall in the parking lot at the back of the diner.