Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Man in Blue VI

oil on canvas. 60 1/8 x 46in. (152.7 x 116.8cm.). Painted in 1954. Estimate £4,000,000 - £6,000,000 ($5,884,000 - $8,826,000)

Provenance: Hanover Gallery, London.
Luca Scacchi Gracco, Milan.
Brook Street Gallery, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in November 1971.

Literature: R. Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, no. 86 (illustrated, unpaged).

Exhibited: London, Hanover Gallery, Francis Bacon, June-July 1954.
Milan, Luca Scacchi Gracco, Dali, de Chirico, Dubuffet, Fontana, Magritte, Matta, Poliakoff, Moore, 1962, no. 4 (illustrated).
London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, May-July 1962, no. 36. This exhibition later travelled to Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, September-October 1962; Zurich, Kunsthaus, October-November 1962 and Amsterdam, Stedelijk Musuem, January-February 1963.
Naples, Galleria Il Centro, Bacon-Sutherland, March-April 1963.
London, Barbican Art Gallery, Capital Painting, April-June 1984 (illustrated in colour, on the cover).
Lugano, Museo d'Arte Moderna, Francis Bacon, March-May 1993, no. 21 (illustrated, p. 49).
Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, September-December 2006, no. 17 (illustrated in colour, p. 89). This exhibition later travelled to Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum, January-April 2007 and Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, May-July 2007.
Milan, Palazzo Reale, BACON, March-June 2008, no. 16 (illustrated in colour, p. 103).

Notes: 'I've always hoped to put over things as directly and rawly as I possibly can...if you say something very directly to somebody, they're sometimes offended, although it is a fact. Because people tend to be offended by facts, or what used to be called the truth.' (Francis Bacon cited in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p. 48)

Man in Blue VI is one of a series of seven major paintings that Bacon made in the spring of 1954 and later exhibited at the Hanover Gallery in London in June of the same year. Consisting solely of a lone male figure dressed in a suit and seated at a bar-like desk in an open or transparent cage-like structure amidst a seemingly infinite expanse of deep-blue, each of these works is a stark, intense and electrifying portrait of an unknown man that Bacon had met while living in the Imperial Hotel in Henley-on-Thames.

Among the finest of Bacon's creations from this period, this series of paintings was made at the height of an extremely intense and difficult period for the artist when he was living a ramshackle and unsettled life in the wake of the first flush of his romance with Peter Lacy. Lacy, a tough ex-Spitfire pilot with sado-masochistic tendencies was the first, and Bacon was later to say only, great love of the artist's life. He was a complicated and deeply troubled man whom Bacon had first met at the Colony Room in London in 1953 and with whom, instantaneously, he had fallen helplessly in love. Indeed, the main reason that Bacon was living in a hotel in Henley in early 1954 was in order to be near Lacy with whom he had previously shared a cottage in the nearby village of Hurst. The obsessive, divisive, and often violent nature of their mutually destructive relationship, however, was never to allow such proximity to last for very long and, after moving away to lick his wounds and a brief period of wandering, Bacon found the Imperial Hotel the temporary solution to his emotional troubles. 'It was like the song.' Bacon once said, 'I couldn't live with him and a I couldn't live without him...Being in love that way, being absolutely physically obsessed by someone, is like an illness, it's like a disease, a disease so ghastly I wouldn't wish it on my own worst enemy.' (Francis Bacon cited in Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, London, 2006, pp. 40 and 42)

During this period Bacon found it incredibly difficult to work. The unsettled and problematic nature of his relationship with Lacy, which would often culminate in a bout of violence visited upon Bacon and any of his canvases that Lacy could find, combined with the almost nomadic lifestyle that Bacon was now living, meant that the artist finished relatively few works at this time. It is however now evident that many of the works that he did manage to produce, such as the Popes, the Sphinxes, Two Figures Wrestling or Figure with Meat, for example, were extraordinary paintings that were scaling new heights and ranked among his very best work.

Bacon himself may have been aware of this, even writing to Erica Brausen at the Hanover Gallery, from the Imperial Hotel, apologizing for his lack of production but asking her not to mount an exhibition using earlier paintings already in the gallery but to wait for new ones that he hoped to provide her with by the end of the year. The seven Man in Blue paintings, all of which, with the exception of Man in Blue VII were shown at the Hanover Gallery alongside one Sphinx painting in June 1954, were produced in a sudden burst of activity that appears to have followed soon after this undated letter. All portraits of the unknown man Bacon had recently met, and probably seduced, at the hotel in Henley, these paintings are powerful studies in isolation that build on the recent developments of the artist's Popes and Head Studies of 1953.

In this series of paintings Bacon has pared down the screaming agony of the heads and popes of the previous year into a sequence of portraits of an ordinary figure pulsating with life and apparent inner turmoil isolated at the centre of a dark void. The cage-like structure - a prophetic anticipation of the glass-box used at Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem - and the striated 'shuttering' strips of paint suggesting curtains and continued into the disturbing blurred features of the man's face in several works have here been carried forward from the screaming pope pictures into the bleak and sterile environment of a modern office. The extremely daring minimalist form and stark two-tone colour of the suit and the office-box in these works, appear to imprison the evidently animated flesh or meat of the figure which, in this work (Man in Blue IV) in particular, shimmers with an almost electric energy.

Although ostensibly a portrait of the man Bacon had met in Henley, the nervous intensity that Bacon bestows upon this figure is also reflective of the tremulous states of mind shared by Bacon and Lacy at this time. It has been a common feature of much writing on Bacon to point out how the powerful presence of Lacy's features and neurotic personality haunts and even underpins much of the artist's work, from the Popes and anonymous Heads to portraits of other known figures even those that Bacon made from the life mask of William Blake. Bacon himself addressed this feature of his work when answering a question put to him about such paintings as the Man in Blue series. When asked if he was aware that his pictures of men alone in rooms conveyed to him the sense of claustrophobia or unease that they produced for many people, Bacon replied that he was not aware of it but pointed out, in what David Sylvester interpreted as a 'tacit reference to Peter Lacy', that 'most of those pictures were done of somebody who was always in a state of unease, and whether that has been conveyed through these pictures I don't know. But I suppose, in attempting to trap this image, that, as this man was very neurotic and almost hysterical, this may possibly have come across in the paintings.' (Francis Bacon cited in David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon London, 2000, p. 70) This statement may also, it seems, have referred to the unknown 'man in blue'.

The Man in Blue series marked a rare departure for Bacon being one that, in part at least, he appears to have painted from life in the Imperial Hotel rather than, as was more usually his practice, to use photographic imagery as a prompt that enabled him to 'drift' more 'freely' through the image. Each of the paintings is a variation on the theme of a lone figure, lost or trapped in a dark void. As well as being daringly minimalist with its bleak empty expanse of monochrome painted canvas and its severe modern geometric grid, there is, in the manner of much of Alberto Giacometti's work, something deeply existential about the way Bacon has depicted this small isolated but intensely animate and vital figure against such a vast and bleak background. In Man In Blue IV in particular, the almost miraculously painted face of the man, betrays a terrifying sense of the sitter's inner life - an intensely animated force - that contrasts dramatically with the overt nothingness of his surroundings, establishing a visual echo of Bacon's own darkly existential view of life: 'here you are, existing for a second, then brushed off like flies on the wall.'

It is in the extraordinary magic of the face of this figure, one that with its striated 'shuttering' and sensual but grimacing mouth echoes those of the screaming popes and the agonized Studies for a Human Head, that what Bacon often referred to as the 'raw' and 'offensive' truth of his work lies. The means by which this 'magic', this 'life', was attained came through the unique manner in which Bacon painted, through a combination of the plastic medium of paint with the raw and vital element of 'chance'. It derived from a suspension of the painter's will and an allowing of his painterly instincts - what Bacon described as the impulses of his own nervous system - to commune with this vital and external element of chance in the way in which the fall and flow of the paint landed on the canvas. Hopefully, and by no means always, through a combination of craft and happy circumstance, a resultant image would appear with the freshness, vitality and shock of reality. 'Painting' Bacon wrote in an introduction to the work of Mathew Smith in 1953, 'tends towards a complete interlocking of image and paint, so that the image is the paint and vice versa. Here the brushstroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in. Consequently every movement of the brush on the canvas alters the shape and implications of the image. That is why real painting is a mysterious and continuous struggle with chance - mysterious because the very substance of the paint, when used in this way, can make such a direct assault upon the nervous system; continuous because the medium is so fluid and subtle that every change that is made loses what is already there in the hope of making a fresh gain.' (Francis Bacon, 'Statement on Mathew Smith', Tate Gallery, 1953 cited in Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon, Anatomy of an Engima, London, 2008, p. 182)

For Bacon, painting was simply a means of making images 'off his nervous system' as accurately as he could. He talked of attempting to capture all the 'pulsations' of a person, their presence, movement, mannerisms, and even their 'emanations', but is was primarily only with the reality of appearance, with the 'brutality of fact' that he was concerned. The haunting existential power of his work that has shocked and offended so many, and is appreciated and admired by so many other viewers of his work, was Bacon often insisted, largely unintentional. David Sylvester, once pushed him on this point, asking, 'perhaps you'd tell me what you feel your painting is concerned with besides appearance?' Bacon replied, 'It's concerned with my kind of psyche, it's concerned with my kind of - I'm putting it in a very pleasant way - exhilarated despair.' (Francis Bacon cited in David Sylvester The Brutality of Fact... op cit, p.83)

Christie's. Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale. 11 February 2009. London, King Street. Image Christie's LTD 2009. www.chrisrie's.com