After seeing the Francis Bacon: Man and Beast exhibition, I was impressed by two things in his paintings.
The first is his portrayal of the oral cavity. Even before reading his biography, I noticed his emphasis on the mouth. This started with the first painting ‘Head I’ as we entered the gallery. and then the creature ‘Fury’, as well as his copies of Eric Hosking and Cyril Newberry’s ‘Bird in Action’, he made the mouth the focus.
Once, in a bookshop in Paris, he found an old medical treatise on diseases of the oral cavity. The book had beautiful hand-colored plates, showing what Bacon called the “glitter and color” of the inside of the mouth, the glistening membranes. He bought the book and cherished it all his life. He said that he always hoped he could paint the mouth as Monet had painted sunsets.
The moment that the mouth showed its insides most unashamedly, Bacon realized, was when it screamed. In his studio, he kept a still of the Odessa Steps massacre from Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”: an old woman, gashed in the face by one of the imperial soldiers, screams violently, her shattered pince-nez hanging from her eyes and blood coursing down her cheek.
Right: Study for the Nurse (detail), Francis Bacon, 1957
Francis Bacon draws attention to his violent aesthetic through the focus on the mouth, which is exposed during the scream.This is an interesting and sensible point.