‘There are an awful lot of my paintings I don’t like,’ admitted Francis Bacon

In 1959, Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ was hanging above the bed where Francis Bacon nursed a fractured skull after falling downstairs drunk at his framer Alfred Hecht’s house on the King’s Road. It was there to be re-framed – a circumstantial detail Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan report neutrally, en passant, in their 2021 biography Francis Bacon: Revelations. An inadvertent cry, nay a scream, for attention? Or a frame-up? It was a decade after Bacon painted his first screaming pope, a palimpsest obviously based on Velázquez but equally in hock to Munch.

Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait in Words is an annotated compilation by Michael Peppiatt of statements, letters, studio notes and selected interviews. You might think that the project is sabotaged by the artist himself on page 58: ‘One can’t really talk about painting, only around it. After all, if you could explain it, why would you bother to do it?’ It’s a decrepit truism which has been doing the rounds since the invention of the easel. On the same page, another ancient saccharine cliché: ‘I think one thing about artists – there are very few real artists, of course – is that they remain much more constant to their childhood situations.’ Picasso, typically intelligent and subversive, injected some counter-intuitive mischief into the tired idea that the artist uniquely remains in touch with his young self. As a child, Picasso said, he drew like Raphael, and it took him a lifetime to learn to draw like children. Compare this with Bacon’s fatigued evocation of childhood, hoarse with repetition, a whisper expiring as it is enunciated.

And then you remember his childhood situation. Caught wearing his mother’s underwear, Bacon was handed over by his father to the grooms, who took him to the stables where he was beaten and sodomised.