Free London Calling by Barry Miles Page B

for the occasion and tinted his face a delicate shade of pink. Wishart invited 200 guests and provided 200 bottles
     of Bollinger but Ian Board had to quickly bring more supplies from the Colony Room. Anne’s roommate Sod was maid of honour.
     Sod, known during the war as ‘the bugger’s Vera Lynn’ for her drinking club catering to gay servicemen, liked to lie on the
     divan naked, sleeping off hermorning intake of gin while Anne’s Australian fruit bat hung upside down above her, squirting everything with jets of diarrhoea. 15 Muriel Belcher, Graham Sutherland and others were all guests and the party continued for two days and three nights. Francis
     gave the couple 100 Waterford glasses as a wedding present. David Tennant described it as ‘the first real party since the
     war’.
    Bacon’s father was a horse breeder and loved to hunt and was consequently very disappointed in young Bacon’s aversion to horses
     and the countryside in general. He never seems to have made the connection between his son’s asthma attacks and the presence
     of dogs and horses. According to Lady Caroline Blackwood, a homosexual friend of hers told her that Bacon had revealed that
     his father had arranged for his son ‘to be systematically and viciously horsewhipped by his Irish grooms’. Bacon told Dan
     Farson that he had been ‘broken in’ by ‘several’ of his father’s grooms and stable lads when he was about fifteen. 16 He hated Ireland and developed a neurotic asthma attack whenever he boarded a plane to go there even though he was able to
     fly anywhere else. Perhaps not surprisingly, given his upbringing, Bacon was a masochist. He enjoyed being whipped but the
     S&M sessions, fuelled by alcohol, not infrequently got out of hand and it was not unusual for him to show up at the Colony
     covered in cuts and bruises which he explained away as a slip on the bathroom floor.
    Bacon belongs with the greats of the School of Paris: Picasso’s
Desmoiselles
d
’
Avignon
, Soutine’s carcasses, Modigliani, Degas, whose late pastels he particularly admired. There is a formal beauty in his canvases
     that is in tension with the convulsions of the images within so that no matter how grotesque, how distorted or abbreviated
     the subject matter, the sheer painterly qualities of its execution seduces the eye. He is a master painter, true to oils,
     no plastic for him. His manipulation of the picture plane is unerring. He is a gorgeous colourist in the manner of Matisse,
     his translucent flesh tones are as good as Ingres and there is a sensual quality to his brushstrokes – the tonking and scrubbing
     – that brings to mind De Kooning, Bonnard and the reds of Courbet.
    Bacon’s
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
was exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery on New Bond Street in the first week of April 1945, four weeks before the defeat of
     Germany, as part of a group show which included Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and Matthew Smith. The public reaction was
     one of shock and horror: the screaming nameless creatures, one of which had soiled bandages wrapped around its blinded eyes
     but which had turned to face the viewer, caused the utmost consternation. The full facts of the Nazihorror, the concentration camps, the mass hangings of Russian peasants, the rape and torture were just beginning to emerge.
     It was clear that nothing was ever going to be the same again: Europe had changed irreversibly.
    The human condition was Bacon’s subject matter:
    It’s something that lies long and far below what is called coherence and consciousness, and one hopes the greatest art is
     a kind of valve in which very many hidden things of human feeling and destiny are trapped – something that can’t be definitely
     and directly said… the whole coagulation of pain, despair. 17
    He believed that ‘There is an area of the nervous system to which the texture of paint communicates more violently than anything
     else.’ 18 He thought