Auguste Rodin, Francis Bacon and the Passion and Anguish of Bodies

O n a bright sunny day in 1986, Francis Bacon visited Musée Rodin at Villa des Brillants in Meudon, Hauts-de-Seine, on the southern fringes of Paris. Paying homage to the French master, Bacon wandered the light-filled halls full of colossal sculptures on plinths with two friends, the French art historians Eddy Batache and Reinhard Hassert. The trio captured the day out in an intriguing series of snapshots.

With his carrier bag and summer-weight jacket, Bacon looks like a tourist emerging from the duty-free shop. But the pictures are art-historically telling. They show Bacon walking amongst – made miniscule even – by Auguste Rodin’s monumental figures and his gallery of Roman and Greek statues. Here is an artist, a luminary of the art world at the time, still seeking shoulders on which to stand.

This era-bridging connection can be seen in a group of masterpieces presented at The London Sales this October: two paintings by Bacon and two bronzes by Rodin, which together allow the distinct and different virtuosities of both artists to collide in a shared fascination for tormented physicality.

The two Rodin casts are of figures from his great work Les Bourgeois de Calais, which was commissioned by the city of Calais in 1884 to commemorate the sacrifice of six citizens during the Hundred Years’ War. The master sculptor’s interpretation was profoundly modern, breaking with the tradition of mythic idealization normally depicted in this type of public commission. Rodin emphasised the figures’ humanity, capturing their distress and internal conflict. Pierre de Wiessant, one of the six burghers, is portrayed with his head bowed and his right arm raised in a gesture that suggests both surrender and defiance. Similarly, Jean de Fiennes, whose twisted pose and supplicant arms convey a profound emotional charge, reflects Rodin’s relentless pursuit of psychological depth through physical expression.

Portrait of a Dwarf depicts a figure with contorted facial features and a fragmented form. Like the Rodin figures, it emerged from a larger whole: originally part of a wider canvas, Bacon viewed this figure as the entirety of his finished composition, preserving this segment as the complete whole. With the compact figure profoundly uncomfortable in its twisted position. It’s a portrait of compression.

Eddy Batache, a scholar, art historian and close friend of Bacon, recounts the creation of The Dwarf:

“The Dwarf is a very exceptional item in Francis’ work. He never did that format before. The reason is that it was part of a bigger panel. Francis said [to Reinhard Hassert]: ‘I’m a bit uneasy about that composition; it doesn’t seem to work altogether’; to which Reinhard responded: ‘Well, there’s one thing which is absolutely wonderful: it’s that right part with the dwarf on it.’

“Francis said: ‘Yes, I agree with you. That works very well. But it doesn’t work with the other half’; to which Reinhard replied: ‘Look for God’s sake whatever you do, save the dwarf.’ Francis responded: ‘I’m going to cut off that painting and throw out the part which is on the left.’ We were convinced that the left part had been destroyed. … After he died we saw the left part of the painting in an exhibition in Düsseldorf. No signature on the back. Francis wanted to have The Dwarf on its own and he disregarded the other half.”

Batache reiterates this story in the recently published Francis Bacon: Interwoven Lives: “It is true that the composition as a whole as inharmonious and the left side was unconvincing. The figure of the dwarf, however, was particularly striking and well painted. Francis decided to have his London gallery destroy two-thirds of the painting and leave only the right side. We were able to admire it in his 1977 Paris exhibition at the Galerie Claude Bernard.”

In Study for Self-Portrait, that painterly distortion is enacted upon the artist’s own face; a soft, atmospheric blue haze occludes his visage, depicted in younger years, giving visible form to the memories of emotion it depicts. The visceral surfaces of both Study for Self-Portrait and Portrait of a Dwarf echo the tactile irregularities of Rodin’s bronzes.

These two seemingly dissimilar artists – Bacon the gay scion of wealthy British industrialists who liked to slum it; Rodin the working-class heterosexual Parisian with an eye for the market – were, oddly, of a piece in many ways. Both had complicated relationships with religion, distanced from faith but intrigued by the iconography of the church. And both had somewhat complicated love lives. Bacon enjoyed animalistic, masochistic relations with men who’d more than likely rough him up. While Rodin, as Philip Hook notes in Art of the Extreme, was an incorrigible Don Juan with a fondness for “problematic sexual entanglements” – a characteristic to which both Camille Claudel and Gwen John could attest.

And both loved the others’ country. Rodin was a frequent visitor to Britain, especially towards the end of his life (three years before his death in 1917, he gifted 18 of his sculptures to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London). And Bacon was an ardent Francophile, who leased a studio-apartment at 14 rue de Birague in the historic Marais district of Paris from 1974 to 1987.

But, most importantly, the two artists were bound by a shared attitude to the human form. Although separated by nearly a century, the pair had a mutual fascination with the extremity of human emotion as displayed in contorted flesh, anguished expressions and aberrant positions. “The human body is first and foremost a mirror to the soul,” observed Rodin. While, in his last interview, Bacon noted that “flesh and meat are life.”

“The profound influence that Rodin’s interpretation of the human body had on Bacon is keenly felt in their shared emphasis on fragmented forms, exaggerated limbs, textured surfaces and the illusive articulation of movement,” notes Sotheby’s Chairman and Head of Modern and Contemporary Art in Europe, Alex Branczik. “Rodin’s evocative martyrs and Bacon’s existentially charged figures capture a century of modern angst and artistic innovation.”

“We saw The Dwarf by itself hanging on the wall and absolutely taking all the attention because it had such a presence,” said Batache. “It was unlike anything else he had done. The Dwarf is remarkably present. You can’t escape it. It just attracts your sight and you see only this when you have it with other paintings.”

Bacon’s adaptation and interpretation of other artists’ work was that of a magpie peering through a shattered lens. He drew on a huge array of source material, from news cuttings and photographs of friends to the works of the Old Masters, allusions that were largely oblique. His interests were always fragmented, collaged and reconsidered. And his time in France was a period in which his paintings were imbued with the essence of great historical precedent, not least that of the hand of Rodin.

In one of the photographs of Bacon visiting the museum at Meudon, we see the painter peering into the cavernous hole of a headless figure of a man, one of Rodin’s vast collection of antiquities. Bacon is engrossed in the void, just as one can imagine Rodin would been surveying that same cavity in his fin-de-siecle days. Two artists, two visions, but with the shared aim of capturing the “brutality of fact” and looking to the past for inspiration.

The London Sales