beckett

bacon

a juxtaposition
 I want to thank
my professor Elisa Bertuzzo
for following me in this journey
and investing her energy
that puts things forward.

I want to thank
all the people
that are part of my life
and shape me
and my aspirations,
and my dreams,
and my worries.

Without them
the present work would not
have been possible.
Léllé Demertzi

Beckett | Bacon : A Juxtaposition

Thesis for the Master Programm Raumstrategien

of Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee.

Supervisor Elisa Bertuzzo.

July 2019.

2 3
 P R E FA C E 7

THE LIFE 11

T H E S PA C E 33

THE BODY 53

THE TIME 79

T H E FA C T 89

THE SELF 103

THE END 115

BIBLIOGRAPHY 123

4 5
 PREFACE

Before we go any further, I regard it as necessary, as

fundamental to get something straight: why I decided
to work on the common space between Samuel Beckett
and Francis Bacon. I am an artist, not an art historian or a
dramatologist. However, I find the need in me to always be
aware of what has happened, what has been exchanged
already, what is all in all the artistic discourse before me.
This awareness is a precondition for me in order to find
my place and contribute to the discourse. When the eye
is critical, it can connect the dots, it can fill in the gaps or
make new cracks in the surface of things. So I stick with the
masters, whoever one regards a master for themself and
try to stay inspired, to stay faithful, to borrow frequencies,
tools, techniques, strategies.

Friends and people who know me are aware of the

deep impact that Beckett’s work has had throughout my
formation, first as a person and then as an artist. Beckett
has triggered and tickled my thought, my emotions, my
aesthetics for as long as I can remember. But Bacon? Why
Bacon in particular and not any other? Well, on the one
hand, this is why the present book is all about, but on the
other hand, I had also a selfish reason. While working on
the thesis, there were many fellow artists and students
that would ask me with a hint of suspicion in the corner
of their eyes But do you like Bacon? and then I would
respond Do I have to?.

6 7
 That’s the entire point of it: there is the art you “like” and the I think I said enough.
art that you don’t quite. But for me, the art that I can relate to,
the art that fills my senses or addresses to my intellect, it is
an exhaustible art. I can “like” it, I can admire it, I can look up
at it and not stop talking about it. But it is somehow passive.
Best case scenario I can be inspired and steal from it, and I
will always deeply know where my inspiration draws from.
In other words, the art I like does not interest me in the end.
What interests me though, is the time I will invest in trying
to approach the art that I don’t instantly like. I may never
come to like it. And it’s irrelevant. Because in the process,
I will evolve and extend my depository of images, my pool
of thinking in order to create space to fit this art, this art that
I don’t like. The art that I don’t like is the art that moves me
further, deeper, wider. This art, it is what it is and it is me
that changes to approach it, to reach it. I am the one who is
shifting, I am the one who discovers new directions. And if
it is not about further, deeper, wider, then I don’t know what
it is about.

Maybe it is also about time. To accelerate and to decelerate. Little is left to tell, anyway.
In these terms, yes, the art that I “like”, is the art that accelerates
me, that makes my heart beat faster and my eyes glow, that
decorates my studio wall in photographs and interviews. It
is my company, my ally, my coach that pushes me to keep
trying. It shows me the tip of my arrow. But the art that I don’t
like is the art that encourages me to take a step back, to
slow down and think for a second, to be more patient with
what I have in front of me and eventually with myself. For
Milan Kundera, who will reappear here later on, “slowness is
a demand of beauty and memory”. It is the art that demands
slowness for me, to be memorized, to be found beautiful, it
is the art that makes me critical, conscious for what I aspire
and what I do not. It is the art that makes me ask questions.

8 9
 CHAPTER 1 THE LIFE

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin on a Good Friday,

the 13th April 1906, second son to William Frank Beckett
and Maria Jones Roe. His early childhood years at the
countryside of Leopardstown south of Dublin, the railway
station of Foxrock, the Harcourt Street Station and his
house with garden often recur in his later proses and plays.
Between 1923 and 1927 Beckett studied French, Italian
and English at the Trinity College Dublin.1 In 1926 he was
elected Scholar for Modern Languages and began his
academic career by teaching briefly at Campbell College
in Belfast2 and then at the École Normale Supérieure in
Paris, between 1928 and 1930.

In Paris he was introduced to James Joyce, a fellow Irish,

with whom he established a close friendship and worked
together on research to what would then become the
Finnegans Wake (1939) by Joyce and the first work of
Beckett, a critical essay entitled ‘Dante.. Bruno. Vico..
Joyce’ (1929). The essay was published in the collective
volume Our Exagmination Round His Factification for
Incamination of Work in Progress, besides William Carlos
Williams, Eugene Jolas and Robert McAlmon.

1 Knowlson 2001, 17-100.

2 Knowlson 2001 101-122.
10 11
 Between 1930 and 1931 Beckett returned to Dublin and
worked as a lecturer at Trinity College. The next year Beckett
travelled in the UK and Europe3 and published a critical
essay Proust (1931), which he had already been working
on and where he explored themes that would accompany
him for the rest of his work, and namely the perception of
time, memory and language. In 1932 he wrote his first novel
Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which would be rejected
by so many publisher that he finally gave up on it. The book
would only be published first in 1992, after his death.4
1935 would turn out to be a better year for Beckett’s
creativity (after a long period of self-turbulence due to his
father’s death, a long-distance relationship, psychoanalysis
and minor essays on his contemporary Irish poets)5, when
he published two collections of poems Echo’s bones and
Other precipitates and worked on his first long-length
book, Murphy.6 The same year Beckett established a
vigorous interest in painting, film and cinematography and
even wrote personally to Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod
Pudovkin to become their apprentice.7 Even if this attempt
was fruitless, Beckett’s interest in script writing did not
cease and led him to a great part of his later literary work
for film, television and radio. The next year Beckett finished
Murphy and mostly travelled to pre-war, though Nazi-rising
Germany, and namely Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden.8
3 Knowlson 2001 162-191.
4 Knowlson 2001 192-225.
5 Knowlson 2001 226-259.
6 Knowlson 2001 260-298.
7 Knowlson, Haynes 2003, 119, Knowlson 2001, 670.
8 Knowlson 2001 299-336.
12
In 1938 he settled permanently in Paris, a prominent year
marking the opening of a new chapter in Beckett’s life,
not only since he translated Murphy himself, that would
only be a first of his bilingual writing (most of his proses
and plays Beckett would insist on translating them himself
either from english to french or vice versa)9, but also as a
point of departure for many of his long-lasting friendships
with Joyce again, Alberto Giacometti, Marcel Duchamp
and Peggy Guggenheim as a proud usual of the cafés at The cover of the first
rive gauche, and for his life partnership with the pianist french edition of
Murphy
Suzanne Décheveux-Dumesnil.
The period of prosperity would not last long though,
since the following year the WWII started and France was
under the german occupation. Beckett would engage
with the french resistance, first by serving as a courier that
got almost caught by Gestapo10 and had to move with
Suzanne south to Provence-Alps-Côtes d’Azur, and then
by assisting the guerilla rural sabotagers Maquisards.11 His
wartime activities surprisingly did not leave a distinct mark
on Beckett’s writing unlike many of his contemporaries, Beckett,
the Maquisards
which he would regard as “boy scout stuff”.12 and the Red Cross
9 Knowlson 2001, 372-379.
10 Knowlson 2001, 380-405.
11 Knowlson 2001, 406-429.
12 Knowlson 2001,
13
 However, it would be naive to consider that Beckett was
not influenced by the war. The influence is evident on his
second novel, Watt, which he started to compose while in
his atypical exile, and where he took a distance not only from
his previous writings, but also from his predecessor Joyce,
by establishing themes that would become pivotal in his
discourse. Beckett for years somewhat lived in the fear that
he would not overcome Joyce as his Irish-writer-living-in-
Paris counterpart. He was afraid, as every artist that respects
and is honest to themself, that all is already discovered,
all is already said and that there is nothing to be added.
Indeed Beckett had nothing to add to the literary spectrum:
he had to subtract. Starting with Watt, Beckett refused the
Joycean principle that more and deeper knowledge is a
way of better understanding and handling the world, and
proposed impoverishment, lack of knowledge, acceptance
of failure and loss. Unlike Ulysses, Beckett’s characters are
non-knowers, non-can-ers.
In post-war 1945 Beckett visited Dublin and his mother’s
house, only to return to Paris and start his most productive
period, described by his biographer as ‘writing mania
between 1946 and 1953’.13 In 1946 Jean-Paul Sartre
published Beckett’s short story Suite (later known as La
Fin) at his magazine Les temps modernes, though their
collaboration would not go any further. 1947-1948 Beckett
focused on his novel Mercier et Camier, his first originally
written in French text, that would not be finished and
published until 1970, but which played a nourishing role for
Waiting for Godot (1948-49), Beckett’s first two-act play, also
in French.14 The play premiered only in 1953, after multiple
13 Knowlson 2001, 430-449.
14 Knowlson 2001, 450-461, 477-489.
14
rejections, at Théâtre de Babylone and it’s english
version in 1955 at the Royal National Theatre in London.
Beckett insisted on writing in French, since it was not his
mother language and he could avoid “a style”.15 Which
guaranteed him also a long-term collaboration with Les
Éditions de Minuit and his editor Jérôme Lindon, who
would publish the following years his first trilogy, Molloy
(1951), Malon Dies (1958) and The Unnamable (1960).16
17
Godot’s critical and controversial reception in both
capitals did not prevent Beckett on continuing in theatre
with full-length pieces, such as the Endgame (1957) and
Oh! The Happy Days (1961) and one-act monologues
such as Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), Not I (1972), Footfalls
(1976) and Ohio Impromptu (1981), only to name a few.
The late 1950s and the decade of 1960s was a period of
constant movement and creativity for Samuel Beckett. Not
only did he start to write for the radio and the television,
starting with the piece All that Fall (1956), but also with
commissions by the BBC Third Program to direct his
own pieces. He spent most of his time abroad between
London, Paris, New York, even Berlin. Counterweight
to his spirals across Europe and beyond, was his little
cottage shortly outside Paris, his retreat and creative
shelter, not only for him and his wife Suzanne, but also
for his life-long lover Barbara Bray. They met as soon as
the late fifties and would establish a strong professional
and personal understanding. In 1963 Beckett meets
Billie Whitelaw in London, who would become his muse
15 Dowd 2007, 26, 31.
16 Molloy (1951), Malon meurt (1951) and L’innomable
(1953) their french originals, respectively.
17 Knowlson 2001, 462-476.2
15
 and close collaborator until the end of his life. Most of his
experimental theater pieces would be inspired by her and
written for her to enact.18
Texts for Nothing (1967) a collection of short stories, The
Lost Ones (1971) and of course, as mentioned, Mercier
et Camier. In the meantime, and due to his international
acceptance, Beckett had started to write in English again.
His research on minimalism and towards abstraction was
now better served by the rhythm of his mother language,
rather than the fluidity of French.20 Not until 1979 would
Beckett invest deeply in prose again. His short story
Company (1979) was the first of his late trilogy Nohow
On, followed by Ill seen Ill said (1982) and Worstward Ho
(1983).21

Samuel Beckett died at his nursing home from natural

causes on the 22nd December 1989, following his wife
Billie Whitelaw and who passed away only five months earlier. They are both
Beckett
interred in the graveyard of Montparnasse in Paris.22

In 1961 Beckett won the International Publishers’ Formentor

Prize, shared with Jorge Luis Borges and in 1969 the Nobel
Prize for Literature. The news reached him as he was in a
much needed due to his health vacation with Suzanne in
Tunis. Suzanne called it a ‘catastrophe’, since Beckett was
trying his very best to keep away from the mumble of fame
and his contemporary literary and critics’ circles.19

The global recognition did not disorientate Beckett away

from his research in theatre and film, although his prose and
poem writing retreated around that period and until the late
70s. It was mainly short pieces that Beckett had written earlier
that were now published, such as The First Love (highly
autobiographical, written in 1946 and published in 1970),

20 Knowlson 2001, 720-794.

18 Knowlson 2001, 527-641. 21 Knowlson 2001, 824-853.
19 Knowlson 2001, 715-719. 22 Knowlson 2001, 854-879.
16 17
 Francis Bacon was born on the 28th October 1909 in
Dublin, fourth child out of five of Eddy Bacon and Winnie
Firth. Protestant family. Young Francis was mainly raised
by his nanny Jessie Lightfoot, with whom he kept close
contact until her death. Francis would be more than once
punished by his father for ‘deviant’ behaviour, and namely
his effeminate delicate manners, his introversion and his
tendency to dress femininely and make up.23 An incident in
1926 where Bacon was found by his father, dressed in his
mother’s underwear in front of the mirror, was decisive for
his expel from the family home24. The rest of 1926 Bacon
spent it in London studying Nietzsche25, engaging in petty
theft and discovering the underground homosexual scene.
A small part of 1927, Bacon spent it in Berlin as someone’s
protegé and he had the chance to see landmark films like
Fritz’s Lang Metropolis and Sergei’s Eisenstein Battleship
Potemkin. The rest of the year he moved to Paris, where he
got acquainted to the city galleries and Yvonne Bocquentin,
a pianist and intellectual woman, who invited Bacon to her
family house in Chantilly. He stayed for three months, before
the winter of 1928/29 that he moved back to London for
good.26 Bacon’s family had changed residencies multiple
times along the Irish countryside during his childhood years,
which on the one hand became a pattern that Bacon would
repeat himself, and on the other side it created for him a
constant sense of displacement and a need for roots.27
23 Brighton 2013, 11-15.
24 Peppiatt 2000, 17.
25 Brighton 2013, 9, 16.
26 Brighton 2013, 16-20.
27 Sylvester 1987, 184-186.
18
In London Bacon would work as an interior designer,
without any formal art training, but thanks to his always fine
taste and would live with his nanny Lightfoot and Eric Adler
-the first to collect his art later. He met then the Australian
painter Roy de Maistre, with whom he engaged in a subtle
romantic relationship, since Roy with the catholic roots
would never be open about his sexuality, not until his
death. De Maistre would teach Bacon technical qualities Portrait of Eric Hall
Roy de Maistre
in painting, and he would trust his intuitive opinion about (ca. 1936)
his work. His work at the time is not extremely productive
and his style somehow atmospheric and sensitive, flirting
with chiaroscuro and fading forms.28 Along his fashionable
and socialite lifestyle, he encountered Eric Hall who
would become his lover and patron in a rather turbulent
and abusive relationship. Bacon would often move in and
out of studios and find himself in a state of non-belonging
and non-dwelling.
Not until 1933 did Bacon have something considerable
to propose. But the painting of the Crucifixion inspired
by The Three Dancers (1925) by Picasso was not only
ground-breaking, not only did it establish the themes that
would occupy Bacon’s work throughout his life (he would
paint numerous Crucifixions between 1933 and 1965)29,
it did not only lead to the milestone Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), but it was also
so extremely bad received,30 that Bacon got frustrated
and prevented from touching a canvas in any significant
28 Brighton 2013, 21-30.
29 Brighton 2013, 63-74.
30 Sylvester 1998, 95. When Bacon applied for the
International Surrealist Exhibition in London in the summer of
1936, he was rejected as ‘not surreal enough’.
19
 or worth-mentioning way for almost the next decade.31 I
read the Crucifixion as a birth in Bacon’s work: miraculous,
painful, leading the way to what is to come, but also an event
from which the body takes a long time to recover.

Three Dancers
Pablo Picasso
(1925)

Crucifixion
(1933)
31 Brighton 2013, 30-33 and Peppiatt 2000, 67-90.
20 21
 Bacon’s life around the time used to consist mainly of parties,
working in the call center of a club, minor contact with the
art world, visits to Paris and a lot of moving besides Eric Hall
during the entire period of the Blitz. In 1943 Bacon and Hall
rented a house and studio at 7 Cromwell Place, where he
with his nanny Lightfoot organised an illegal roulette for him
and his friends, for their proper financial benefit. Was it the
parties, was it the end of the war, was it the distance that
one needs to take from their work sometimes, but Bacon
interrupted his hiatus and returned to painting with the Three
Studies for the Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. When
exhibited, one could not but acknowledge its existence. It
was a painting that could not be undone nor ignored in the
history of painting and Bacon’s career. It introduced all the
pivotal points of Bacon’s art: the form of the triptych, the
open mouth, the grass, the furniture, the vast surfaces of
colour, the dismembered bodies etc.
During a successful group exhibition in Musée d’art moderne
in Paris in 1946, Bacon met Isabel Rawsthorne, with whom
he established a lifelong friendship and who introduced him
to Alberto Giacometti and to the existentialist discourses of
rive gauche. Bacon then moved to Monte Carlo spending
entire days in the casino, which naturally would impede his
painting. Not being able to afford new canvases, he would
start to paint the backsides of his finished works.
In 1949 the Hanover Gallery in London was the first to trust
Bacon with a solo exhibition. The day after the opening,
Bacon became one of the founding members of The Colony
Room, a private drinking club in Soho, with the regular
regulars like Lucian Freud, John Deakin, Frank Auerbach
and last but not least -at least in Bacon’s legacy- the art critic
David Sylvester. Bacon had attracted Sylvester’s interest
and admiration since 1948 already, and this year would be
22
only the first of a strong, trustful friendship. In this period
Bacon will engage with portraiture (especially of his social
circle) and work on his infamous Popes. 32
The 1950s were for Bacon the decade in which he
established his distinctive technique, he worked devoutly
in series and participated in numerous group shows. He
travelled to Tangier, Cairo, Marseille and gambled in Nice,
when he was informed on the death of his nanny and
beloved companion. In 1952 he first met Peter Lacy, the
Peter Lacy
relationship with whom, after Eric Hall, would continue by John Deakin
to drift in the abusive, sadomasochist direction. Drunk
Lacy would beat Bacon and leave him half-conscious
on the street, he would tear his paintings apart and then
pose for him. In 1958 Bacon signed a contract with the
Marlborough Fine Art gallery that would remain his sole
representative throughout his life.33 The relationship
seemed to have no-way out, not until Lacy’s death in 1962,
for which Bacon got notice by telegram on the eve of his
first retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery.34
In 1963, shortly after Lacy’s death, Francis Bacon met
George Dyer. George was distinctively younger than
Bacon and a first. The first time that Bacon was not
involved as the protegé of an older, richer, more powerful
man. Rumor has it that they met while Dyer was amidst
burgling Bacon’s apartment. Chain-smoker, borderline
alcoholic like Bacon himself, pale and fashionable Dyer
would move Bacon as deeply as no one before him, as
it is evident through the massive amount of portraits and
32 Brighton 2013, 35-44.
33 Brighton 2013, 44-65.
34 Documentary form excess
23
 triptychs that Bacon painted on him. Dyer was dominant
in every aspect of Bacon’s being. Despite the philological
interest through the paintings, Dyer never managed to
obtain any respect among Bacon’s circles, he would feel
invisible, he would become bitter, and the gap between
him and him as the subject of the paintings would only get
narrower and narrower. Bacon and Dyer had nothing in
common but each other, until they did not have each other,
either.

In 1971 Dyer accompanied Bacon in Paris for the opening

of his solo exhibition at the Grand Palais. It was the first time
that Paris would host a retrospective for a British artist since
William Turner. The morning after the opening Dyer was
found dead, sitting on the toilet. Overdose of barbiturates.
Bacon returned to London where he experienced to the bone
an emotional and physical breakdown for years. He would
work on self portraits, he would paint and repaint versions
of the Black Triptychs, he was obsessed in capturing Dyer’s
essence even after his death, he was haunted by Aeschylus’
Eumenides, the greek furies of guilt, loss and death. Bacon Portrait of George Dyer Talking
(1966)
and his work were haunted by death. 35 and photograph
by John Deakin
Then, nothing more. Little is left to say.36 Bacon was visiting
Madrid in 1992 when he was admitted in a clinic with a
deteriorating asthma condition. On 28th April 1992 he had
a heart-attack and died.37

35 Brighton 2013, 75-82.

36 Part of this ‘little’ should be an honorable mention to John
Edwards, whom Bacon met in 1974 at Colony Club and who
accompanied him as a close and trusting friend until Bacon’s
death. Edwards was also the trustee of his studio and his whole
estate. Despite the -justified- rumors on a romantic relationship
between them, nothing can testify on this premise.
37 Brighton 2013, 89-91.
24 25
 Photographs
by John Deakin

26 27
 By examining the biographies of both artists, it is possible to Meyers, the editor of Film.40
establish some initial common places between them: both
The fact that despite Bacon’s and Beckett’s common
Irish, they spent the year 1928 in Paris, were frequenting the
whereabouts, they never actually met -or at least there is
same cafés and had common friends (Alberto Giacometti
no evidence of such an encounter- could be attributed to
to name the least). It is established that Bacon had seen
their opposing personalities. Beckett avoided publicity,
Beckett’s performances in London, and responding to
avoided interviews, it was painful for him to speak about
the connection of his art to Beckett’s, he would admit to
his work, he would often retreat back to his country-house
Archimbaud to having seen Waiting for Godot “which I
for quiet and silence. He was a person that wanted stability,
didn’t by the way find interesting. Some of his shorter plays,
accuracy, continuity. Bacon was the opposite extreme: A
where in my opinion much better. [...] Τhere was a very good
man of the world, a socialite, an autodidact painter that
actress here in London who performed in them. Beckett often
found equal satisfaction in painting and gambling, in his
used to write for her. Unfortunately, I no longer remember
studio and in bars. He died giving interviews to friends,
her name. They were very short pieces, not more than half
sometimes even misleading and disorientating ones. He
an hour long, barely twenty minutes, and they weren’t bad
wouldn’t travel for work and productions, he would travel
at all.”38 Bacon of course is referring to Billie Whitelaw and
to find his lover in Tangier or Madrid or to give his warm
one-act pieces like Not I, Footfalls, Play and Rockaby. It is
salutations to a roulette. He was living and burning from
obvious that Bacon rejected any relation of comparison or
the inside out.
influence between him and Beckett, but this is something
that could highly be attributed to his idiosyncratic nature.

Beckett’s awareness of Bacon’s work is more difficult to

establish and thus speculative. Considering Bacon’s Parisian
presence, with multiple exhibitions at Gallery Rive Droite,
Gallery Lelong, Gallery Maeght and of course the Grand
Palais in 1971, it is quite improbable for Beckett not to have
attended any of them, despite his exhausting traveling at
the time.39 It is also possible that he may have seen some
Bacon’s show in London or Germany. What could be said
with certainty though, is that Beckett did encounter Bacon’s
Painting 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
when he was visiting in 1964 with the company of Sidney
Painting
(1946)

38 Archimbaud 1993, 117.

39 Fifield 2009, 62. 40 Knowlson 2001, 659-670.
28 29
 Is a thorough investigation of Beckett’s and Bacon’s life so
necessary to put the one next to the other, though? Had they
not been Irish, had they not had mutual friends, even if they
had met and sat down and drunk together? It does not really
matter. The sole purpose of diving in the lives of both is to
subtract, maybe, and if one is lucky, something about how
they were dealing with daily things. What made Bacon to
stop painting after the Crucifixion in 1933? How did Beckett
feel when rejected from Éditions Gallimard? Walking down
Boulevard Saint Germain, repeating in his head “No one will
ever publish you, no serious editor”? How did he feel? How
did Bacon feel while balancing between the recognition
of his artistic practice and the failure of his personal life?
Did Bacon even see ‘artistic practice’ and ‘personal life’
as separate? Was Bacon guilty while gambling and not
spending time in the studio? Was Beckett ever bored while
translating his own texts from one language to the other?
The answers are personal, as are the questions, and most
probably projections on how one meditates upon their own
self/art. Beckett, Bacon, they are the impulse.

Walking Man I
Alberto Giacometti
(1960)

30 31
WHERE NOW ?
C H A P T E R 2 T H E S PA C E

Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett. A circle of interpretation

of their formal elements will try to provide deeper insight
on this unusual equation between a writer and a painter.
The space, the body, the time. Three elements, three
characters so strongly present in the work of both, and
dealt under the same principles.

Francis Bacon investigates in his paintings a paradoxical

challenge: how can one be precise, ordered, disciplined
and nevertheless embody spontaneity and chance?
It is as if one walks at once in two opposing directions:
Towards simplicity and towards complexity. This exact
movement generates tension. He creates a rather
elementary background, singled down to its absolutely
necessary properties to still consist a space (structure)
and an artificial armature, a frame, distinctive in the entire
span of his paintings (contour).1 “The frame is artificial
and that’s precisely why it’s there. To reinforce the artificial
nature of the painting. The more the artificiality of the
painting is apparent, the better”, Bacon argues, “and the
more chance the painting has of working or of showing
something. That might seem paradoxical, but it makes
perfect sense in art: one achieves one’s goal by using

1 I use the Deleuzian terms ‘structure’ , ‘contour’ , ‘figure’ in

Deleuze 2004.
32 33
 the maximum of artificial means, and one succeeds much or toward the purely figural, through extraction and
more in doing something authentic when the artificiality isolation.6 The figure becomes pure form, a-formal, in the
is perfectly obvious”.2 The structure is either the interior of sense that it no longer represents, it no longer narrates
a room, or a ring, a round area, reminiscent of an arena - anything. It is an a-signifier: unlike abstraction, it is not
a circus – an amphitheater, or as subtle as the difference that Bacon’s art does not mean anything, it is precisely
between hued colour fields. This oval, this half circle area, that it means nothing.
which especially in the triptychs is changing perspective and
end points, reminds me of Bacon’s palette itself. A palette-
stage where the figure emerge and dwell. Its circularity
enhances the entrapment. The contour on the other hand,
is a piece of furniture, a metal cube or parallelepiped, a
glass prism, a mirror, anything that can ‘trap’ the figure
inside it. The needle that pins the figure down on the bed,
it is an element of the contour.3 The stylised arrows, that are
very common in mature Bacon, should also be identified
as part of the contour. These rudimentary gestures serve
a very precise role: they are not there to constraint the
figure to immobility, but, on the contrary, they function as Three Studies of Lucian Freud
(1967)
an operative field, leading the eye and creating a certain
movement/progression towards the figure.4 They create an
interpolation, a crack, they magnify the distance between
the subject and the onlooker.5

By isolating the figure from its background, Bacon minimises

the narrative relations that the subconscious eye builds for
itself. There are two ways of escaping the figurative, the
illustrative, the narrative of painting: either toward pure
form through abstraction, which Bacon regarded as hollow
and trendy (in the post-modern painting) and despised,

2      Hammer 2013, 9. Sylvester 1987, 148-149.

3 Sylvester 1987, 78.
4 Sütter 1999, 24-26.
5 Sylvester 1987, 86-87. 6 Deleuze 2004, 5-9.
34 35
 Consequently the contour by freeing the figure from its The tension between the figure and the contour is two-
narrative weight, permit me to use the term ‘modern’ directional.9 First tension: The contour isolates and
weight,7 renders the figure into an Icon, and links Bacon to sometimes oppresses the figure in a closed world.
a pantheon of eras of painting that proceed and exceed Second tension: The figure is contracted, dilated, it tries
modern painting. Antique sculptures are objects in space, to escape, to return and reunite with the field of colour.
they do not have their own background, but instead The figure attempts to rise beyond the contour, which is
parasite in the background of the space where they are not a deformer, but a veil, a curtain, a screen, a transparent
installed. Bacon’s figures unavoidably obtain this particular and perforated membrane, through which the figure can
‘sculpturness’ in the sense that they strike out from the shade off to infinity.
illustrative space of the painting, as if ready to escape the
canvas itself.8 But they cannot. They shall not. Isolated in
space, the figure (either alone or in a complex of two) also
resembles to iconic forms of the Byzantine painting: it is
relieved of its representative role and enters into a direct
relation with an order of transcendental sensations. It is
purified and thus, sanctified.

Lying Figure
with Hypodermic Syringe
(1968)

7 Deleuze 2004, 10-12. Sütter 1999, 31. The two directions The Black Triptychs
of post-modern painting, abstraction on the one hand, and the (1972-74)
more direct, more sensible way of Bacon both intend to purify
modern art from its highly figurative role. The tendencies appear
both as a reaction to what role painting used to serve until then:
a documentary, illustrative one. Even with photography, the
pictorial element of modern art did not manage to defeat its
figurative nature.
8 Sylvester 1987, 74-76, 108-116. 9 Deleuze 2004, 29.
36 37
 One can extract a similar treatment of space in the case of
Samuel Beckett, taking into considerations, of course, the
limitations of spacial organisation on a theatrical stage,
which unlike the painterly and literary spaces of Bacon
and Beckett, this is an actual space to be inhabited by real
people. So a distinction between the prose and the theatrical
pieces of Beckett should be made. As for the later, one can
with easiness trace the similarities. Bacon’s hemispherical
contours like arenas or circuses are nothing but the stage
itself. They are the inescapable intrinsic environment. By
default. And then there are the Figures: The play’s characters.
Always one, sometimes two. Crawling, contracting, waiting
and suffering inside a frame that does not belong to them.
They are watched, observed meticulously, they amuse
someone else’s eye.
Samuel Beckett creates suppressing contours for his
figures exactly like Bacon, in an attempt to underline their
incompleteness, their vulnerability, their un-ability, their fault
by default.10 He buries them up the neck in mud as in The
Happy Days, or in dustbins as in the Endgame, or in funerary
urns as in the Play, or in closely-confined spaces as in Nacht
und Träume, he mirrors them as in Ohio Impromptu, he ‘ties’
them around a tree as in Waiting for Godot or in Act without
Words I, he pins them in a rocking chair as in Rockaby (how
can Bacon’s Popes not be reflected?), he measures them
in steps across an axe as in Footfalls or across a square
as in Quad. By constraining, delimiting and containing
his creatures Beckett unavoidably raises the question “Do
they want to be there?”. Is the space their home or their
entrapment? Beckett’s characters seem homeless, unable
to decide whether they are living or leaving. They do not
10 Osborne 2002, 77.
38
have an option, exactly like Bacon’s figures. Exactly like
everyone sharing the inevitability of the human condition.
A juxtaposition of two examples, and namely Pope
Innocent Χ (1953) and The Happy Days (1961) is necessary
in order to provide more clarity on this premise. The
pope, part of a long research of Bacon on Velasquez11, is
sitting on an episcopal seat, completely trapped within a
metal structure resembling a boxing ring. His hands are
glued on the chair, reminding numerous famous Picasso
portraits of women, and his clothes seem to restrict
him as much. A veil, a draped screen with its distinctive
perpendicular lines, balancing between pleats and
beams of light, erases almost all that is left of the figure.12
Similarly in the beginning of Act I of The Happy Days, the
character is buried up her waist on low mound. “Expanse
of scorched grass rising centre to low mound. Gentle
slopes down to front and either sides of stage. Back an
abrupter fall to stage level. Maximum of simplicity and
symmetry. Blazing light. Very pompier trompe-l‘oeil
backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding
to meet in far distance. Imbedded up to above her waist in
exact centre of mound, WINNIE.”13 No reference is made
on how Winnie got there, how she ended up trapped in
this seaside landscape, calling for Willie. She lives for an
uncountable amount of time under an unbearable bright
and constant light that she cannot escape. Even when she
takes out her umbrella, she cannot be protected. Another
study by Bacon on the same theme may correspond even
more fiercely to Winnie’s mood, namely Pope with Owls
11 Sylvester 1987, 20-26.
12 Sütter 1999, 43-44, 49.
13 Beckett, Happy days
39
 (c. 1958). In this case the pope’s elbows are glued to the
chair while his hands raise in what looks less like a praying
position but rather like a welcoming salutation. His face is
deformed in a big obscure smile. The tension builds up
through the ominous outburst of happiness and superficial
suavity, exactly like Winnie’s narrations of memories and her
delicate and coquette taking care of herself. In Act II, Winnie
is embedded in mud up her neck and she is reaching out
for Willie who does not respond anymore. Winnie knows he
is there, but cannot see him. The Pope X’s open mouth is an
instance of Winnie’s crying out for Willie. Beckett wanted the
stage design to be as simple and symmetrical as can be. On
the background a cloth represents unbroken terrain and sky
receding to meet in far distance. This is Bacon’s structure,
the meeting of two flat surfaces of colour. “What should
characterise the whole scene, sky and earth”, Beckett wrote,
“is a pathetic unsuccessful realism, the kind of tawdriness Study after Velazquez’s
you get in a 3rd rate musical or pantomime, that quality of Portrait of Pope Innocent X
(1952)
pompier, laughably earnest bad imitation.”14 These notes
along with the form of the umbrella remind aesthetically the
two side parts of Bacon’s Triptych May-June (1973). Beckett
seems to treat his scenic space as an obviously fake plastic
environment where his characters develop in the memory
of their (happier) past and in the hope of a (happier) future
elsewhere.

The Happy Days

14 Harmon 1998, 94. Bob Wilson
40 41
 This investigation of Beckett and Bacon next to each
other proposes a rather clear connection on their formal
aspects. But Beckett and Bacon have more to share as far
as their spatiality is concerned, in a space that inhabits,
but also exceeds the form of their works. Bacon’s and
Beckett’s works are representations of immediate
perceptions, valid only in and for themselves, with no
further justification than the very fact that they are alive.
The immediacy and directness of their content is striking,
it becomes spatial, insofar that it meditates upon a state
common to all, and thus shared by all. The spatiality of
Bacon, the spatiality of Beckett is the vast area of in-der-
Portrait of Welt-sein.
Pope Innocent X
Diego Velazquez
(ca. 1650) From Beckett’s prose, rather than theater, one can extract
deeper information on his aspirations towards his art and
particularly this inner space of in-der-Welt-sein. What it
means to be, to feel human. Because prose unlike theater,
which cannot escape the real, the dwelled space, it can
propose new spatialities that represent a state of mind,
an internal landscape, rather than actual spaces. And if
photography liberated painting from its documentary,
reportorial role, then cinema worked to the same direction
for writing.15 Examining the short stories of Beckett,
one can detect one-to-one connections with Bacon. In
Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) Beckett describes “an
unbroken surface all the way round and up to the ceiling.
And yet its upper half is riddled with niches.”, where each
body lies within each own warped semi-sphere, namely a
semi-circle on the horizontal plane and semi-ovoid on the
vertical one. In Ohio Impromptu (1980) the main character
“in a last attempt to obtain relief he moved from where

Dora Mar au Chat

Pablo Picasso
(1941) 15      Hale 1993, 96.
42 43
 he had been so long together to a single room on the far “the stage is a skull [...] the action takes place in the mind
bank. From its single window he could see the downstream of one man”.19 Beckett creates a space of void, a world of
extremity of the Isle of Swans”. In Company (1979) “You are silence, out of sight and as tranquil as a tomb.
lying on the floor of a hemispherical chamber with generous
However the last quote I deployed from Worstward Ho
diameter with ear dead center.” and in Ill Seen Ill Said (1981)
gives the opportunity for another investigation: the
“The two zones form a roughly circular whole. As though
background in Bacon’s portraits. This particular text is an
outlined by a trembling hand. Diameter. Careful. Say one
investigation of form and abstraction at its very limits. The
furlong. On an average. Beyond the unknown. Mercifully.
space could be the void of a skull itself, the story moves
The feeling at times of being below sea level. At night when
back and forth, gets exhausted, deformed and finds ways
the skies are clear. Invisible nearby sea. Inaudible. The entire
to proceed. In Bacon’s portraiture and in spatial terms,
surface under grass.“ and finally in Worstward Ho (1983)
background and head interlock, interweave, melt into
“That shade. Once lying. Now standing. That a body? Yes.
each other. The background becomes the shadow that
Say that a body. Somehow standing. In the dim void. [...] A
covers the face; the face escapes the head and dissolves
place. Where none. A time when try see. Try say. How small.
in the background. Boundless bounded in the dim void.
How vast. How if not boundless bounded. Whence the dim.”.

Having examined already the spatial elements of Francis

Triptych
Bacon, one can make the correspondence of Beckett’s inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem
Sweeney Agonistes
words with more than one paintings. And if Bacon’s round (1967)
territories could be interpreted as his own palette, in the
perspective of the artist himself, then Beckett’s round
spaces can possibly be the womb itself, and his characters
the fetus, which is neither standing nor sitting nor lying, but
rather floating head between knees in the dim dark.16 Or
it could be a head, the roundness of the inner side of the
skull. A cavity, a hollow sphere like the universe, containing
a universe, as in the case of Murphy.17 Beckett’s characters
are looking inside their heads.18 He says that in the Endgame

16 Deleuze 1996, 58. Deleuze proposes that the

inexhaustible amount of different postures that Beckett devises
is one of a kind since Dante (in Hell of the the Divine Comedy).
17 Calder 2001, 19, 44.
18 Deleuze 2004, 59. 19 McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1998, 175.
44 45
 If the examination of particular examples may seem arbitrary,
I will now attempt to concretise the common space of the
two artists in their structural essence. What Bacon attempts
with his devision of structure-contour-figure applies also
to Beckett’s writing. In The Unnamable, for example, the
narrator is lying immobile in a room that he does not own
and surrenders in a recollection of moments past, on the
edge between possible reality and fiction, in an existential
musing and con-fusion. Here the structure of Bacon, a
room, a door, a single window, a wooden floor, can be
read as the physical room of Beckett’s unnamed characters,
who constitute the Figure. The contortion, the sinuosity of
Bacon’s athletic bodies is the drifting in thoughts of Beckett:
Some autobiographical memories from his Irish childhood,
some dreamlike states of mind and mindlessness, some
elaborate reflections on his current state. Beckett’s figure,
the narrator turns his face around, trying to understand what
happened to him, where is he, how he got there. “Where
now? Who now? When now?” are the opening words of the
Unnamable.
Having made this suggestion, one would then need to
grasp how the third part of the triplet, the pictorial contour
of Bacon, is translated in Beckett’s terms. And there I dare to
suggest that the contour is language itself. Language is what
shapes the figure and what restrains it too. The language
constructs the narrator and the narrator constructs himself
through language. The double movement is the tension
between what can be expressed through words and what
exactly words describe: Beckett works right in the middle
of the void of language.20 The tension of Bacon’s figure
that try to transcend their contour and escape to the vast
20 Katz 2013, 361-369.
46
fields of colour is comparable to the tension of Beckett’s
characters to go beyond words and reunite with the vast
field of thought, of mind and mindlessness. He writes:
“more and more my own language appears to me like a
veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things
(or the nothingness) behind it. [...] To bore one hole after
another in it, until what lurks behind it -be it something
or nothing- begins to seep through. I cannot imagine
a higher goal for a writer today.”21 He suggests that it is
inherently impossible to express the entirety of things.
Something is always left out, beyond words, and at the
same time, what language describes is not precisely what
it intended to describe, it is rather foisted. Ones sees
the same double tension of Bacon towards precision
and chance. Words are burdened with calculations and
significations, with intentions and personal memories,
with old habits. Words limit the experience down to what
can be expressed. The materiality of the word surface
cannot be dissolved, exactly like Bacon’s contours whose
materiality, whose shape is equally inescapable.22 “It all
boils down to a question of words, I must not forget this,
I have not forgotten it. But I must have said this before,
since I say it now. I have to speak in a certain way, with
warmth perhaps, all is possible, first of the creature I am
not, as if I were he, and then, as if I were he, of the creature
I am. Before I can, etc. [...] the words are everywhere,
inside me, outside me, well well, a minute ago I had no
thickness, I hear them, no need to hear them, no need of
a head, impossible to stop them, impossible to stop, I’m
in words, made of words, others’ words, what others, the
place too, the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words,
21 Calder 2001, 17, 94.
22 Deleuze 1996, 98.
47
 the whole world is here with me. Ι am words amongst
words [...] you must say words, as long as there are any,
until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange
sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps
they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me
to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens
on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I,
it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know.”23
Beckett’s characters and Bacon’s Figures share a common
setting, the same Ireland: the round area, the isolator,
the Depopulator;24 the presence of the attendant, who
still feels, sees, and speaks; the way the body escapes
from itself.25 The space occupied by Bacon’s work stands
to bequeath to us not an archeology of imagery, but a
painterly model that speaks eloquently to Beckett’s
sarcoid figures.
Study for Crouching Nude
(1952)
23 Beckett 1955, 407.
24 The depopulator refers to the prose of Beckett “Le
dépeupler” in french, in english “The Lost Ones”.
25 Deleuze 2004, 43.
48
THE SERIES
Beckett’s words and Bacon’s cages are their very constrain
and liberation at the same time. They use words to go
beyond words, they use figuration to surpass figuration.
Beckett aspires a literature of the un-word, the non-word, and
Bacon aspires a painting without figuration. Their research
is for an art that “gets beyond words to the silence between
them”.26 Bacon was obsessed in working and reworking the
same recurring theme in multiple versions: the popes27, the
crucifixions,28 the cattle, Van Gogh29, George Dyer, to name
a few.30 Beckett simultaneously devises the meta-character,
the motif of a narrator in most of his stories: a crippled,
apathetic, aphasic, old (?) mind that tries to reconstruct
its past. Their exploration is personal, exhausting, but not
futile. Which leads the research of space in a new direction,
a meta-space that the artists are sharing. This is the space,
the inter-web created by the series in their work.
Bacon works in triptychs, Beckett in trilogies. This succession
testifies that both were haunted by their research, they
worked and saw their leitmotiv developing in front of their
own eyes, they used different forms only to light it from
26 Knowlson, Pilling 1979, 247.
27 Hammer 2013, 31, 58-61.
28 Hammer 2013, 96-102.
29 Hammer 2013, 63-64, 68-69.
30 Deleuze 2004, 73-74. Retrospectively Bacon renounces
previous works of his, he feels that they were not enough or
too much in his research. He passes judgement: the series of
the Crucifixions? Too sensational to be felt. Even the Bullfights,
too dramatic. The series of Popes? “I have tried very, very
unsuccessfully to do certain records -distorted records” of
Vélazquez’s Pope, and “I regret them, because I think they are
very silly... because I think that this thing was an absolute thing.”
49
 different angles, to discover it better, to discover it again. need to frame, in order to trespass. Their need for utmost
The triptychs do not imply a progression of the story, precision, for detail, to express something universal. Their
there is no story, the parts do not relate to one another obsession, their inexhaustibility of themes, their haunting
through narrative or even illustration.31 The triptychs and questions. What one draws is a dynamic spiral going deeper
the trilogies testify on a whole different movement. Bacon in their subjects, their art, their disquiet.
says “The will to make oneself completely free. Will is the
wrong word, because in the end you could call it despair.
Because it really comes out of an absolute feeling of it’s
impossible to do this things, so I might as well do anything.
And out of this anything, one sees what happens.”32 How
can one not be reminded of Beckett’s infamous quote in
Worstward Ho33 “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Fail
again. Fail better. [...] Better again. Or better worse. Fail
worse again. Still worse again.”? Bacon himself attributes
the use of triptych to his need to capture consecutive
moments of movement.34 But this movement is not the
successive and thus linear moving in time of Muybridge’s
models, but the movement of Bacon himself, and Beckett
correspondingly, a movement towards and within Pope with Owls
(1958)
themselves. As Edmund Husserl (who will reappear in our
discourse in matters of phenomenology) explained, the
importance of variations is searching out the essence of a
phenomenon. I will say it in my simpler way: same, same,
but different. The variations differ one from the other, but
yet retain some thing common to them all; namely, the
sought-for essence of their themes. What can one draw
from the spatial research on the work of both? Their

31 Deleuze 2004, 58.

32 Sylvester 1987, 13.
33 In my eyes, Worstward Ho is the epitome of Beckett’s
sketch of failure in terms of language, expression and
representation.
Pope I
34 Sütter 1999, 37-40. Sylvester 1987, 21. (1951)
50 51
W H O NOW ?
CHAPTER 3 THE BODY

After examining the matter of space in the art of Francis

Bacon and Samuel Beckett, one cannot but remark how
both are distancing themselves from the modern tradition,
but also from the trend of post-modern abstraction. Now
it’s time to investigate how they deal with the matter of
the body, the Figure, as the juxtaposing element of space,
as the main character that inhabits the space. Their body-
centered art distances itself both from the burden of
figuration, from narration, but also from mere dissolution
and deconstruction of the figure. Francis Bacon and
Samuel Beckett accentuate the three-dimensionality, the
palpability of the bodies not by extruding them, but by
containing, restraining and framing them in space.

It is a notably organic plasticity that fleshes out of the

volumetric figures of Bacon’s painting and Beckett’s
writing. Rather than using the cerebral geometric
fragmentation of analytical cubism, Bacon (and Beckett)
give the human figure forth through emphasis and
exaggeration of the curved, the swollen, the bulbous,
the amputated. Their aesthetics are aesthetics of
fleshy roundedness. Of chopped-off members, of
incompleteness, of fragmentation, of twisting and twirling
torsos, of deformation, of descent. They document pain,
the protagonist’s pain and the artist’s pain, they document
the state beyond pain, how one goes forth, how one
52 53
 proceeds, after the injury, after the accident. And most battlefield of inner and outer forces. Bacon uses particular
eminently, the accident of life itself.
35
elements in that premise: A mirror duplicates the figure,
it plays with the heterotopia of here and there, at once, it
Francis Bacon’s bodies are massive, heavily muscled,
captures inside itself all that there is.40 A washbasin, a toilet,
athletic, full-fleshed. Every muscle is tense, ready: inside
36
a bed, they are not just the stage of events, but also dictate
the body something is happening, an event is taking
how the events will take place, how the figure will spasm.
place, the body is the source of movement from within
An umbrella suppresses the figures beneath it. And most
itself towards the vast area of its contour. The body exerts
importantly the shadow: an ominous field of colour, a figure
itself. It is not I who attempts to escape the body, but the
in itself. “Sometimes a man’s shadow is more in the room
body that escapes itself. But this movement is not abstract,
than he is” Bacon says.41 In Bacon, the shadow has presence,
is not a generality to attempt to describe the dynamics
is the body that has escaped itself, it is the vanishing point,
of the form, this movement in Bacon is precise, palpable,
the trace of the spasm, and simultaneously the juxtaposing
forceful: It is the body in an instantané of spasm.37 This
doppelgänger of the figure, an element of the contour
is a crucial term in our discourse on Bacon: spasm. His
already, a material as structural as a door frame.
work could be seen under the perspective of a series
of spasms: scenes of love making, of wrestling, of lying
down as if pinned, of vomiting, of excreting.38 The body
attempts, awaits to escape the body, through the body.
The Figure is the body that once has been.

And the Figure is simultaneously a membrane, a filter.39

It is subject to forces not only from within, but also from
the contour, the motionless field of colour, that surrounds,
envelops and imprisons the Figure. The contour reveals its
function, it is not just a hollow volume that can relieve the
figure from its tension, but also the vessel that gives form
to the fluid figure in the first place. The body becomes a

35 “You are on Earth. There is no cure for that”, quote by Figure Writing Reflected in a Mirror
Samuel Beckett. (1977)

36 Sylvester 1998, 32-33.

37 Deleuze 2004, 15. 40 Sylvester 1987, 37.
38 Sylvester 1987, 78. 41 Quote from the film Love is the Devil: Study for a portrait
39 Sylvester 1987, 199. of Francis Bacon.
54 55
 Beckett as already mentioned, uses similar mechanisms
of containing and constraining, in order to reach the core
of his characters, both as bodies and as intellects. In The
Unnamable (1953) for example, Beckett treats the body of
the narrator as a put-together of features that have to be
by all means removed in order to reach the absolutely,
the fundamentally necessary. “For of the great traveller I
had been, on my hands and knees at the later stages, then
crawling on my belly or rolling on the ground, only the trunk
remains (in sorry trim), surmounted by the head, with which
we are already familiar”.42 One cannot avoid to think that this
may be a metaphor for life, and how while drifting in it, one
leaves back parts of themself. I regard it more as Beckett’s
pure need for reduction to the absolute minimum. He
removes all that appears excessive, redundant or incidental.
He sticks to the core, the core of the body as a mere trunk.
Bacon and Beckett both dig towards a profound direction
of becoming-imperceptible, of entering a deeper field
where the figure disappears, dissolves from within.43 The
unnamable narrator of Beckett embodies Bacon’s once-has-
been-a-body figure.

Triptych
(May June 1973)

42 Beckett 1955, 321.

43 Deleuze 2004, 25.
56 57
 Simultaneously Beckett gives voice to Bacon’s figures the scars, the traces of these forces in action. The body is not
and their position in the space. He speaks of bodies transformed, it is deformed.47 The body is pushed towards
in fetal position, with their heads between their legs, unidentifiability.
reaching for their crotch. Beckett speaks of postures
that are impossible to define as whether standing, or
sitting, or lying, or stretching, which Bacon paints as
floating bodies in vast surfaces of colour, as for example
in Lying Figure No.1 (1959). In Company (1979) Beckett
writes “Simultaneously the various parts set out. The
arms unclasp the knees. The head lifts. The legs start to
straighten. The trunk tilts backward. And together these
and countless others continue on their respective ways till
they can go no further and together come to rest. Supine
now you resume your fable where the act of lying cut it
short. [...] You now on your back in the dark shall not rise
to your arse again to clasp your legs in your arms and
bow down your head till it can bow down no further.”44 It
is interesting to remark that in two very different and apart
in time works as The Unnamable and Company, Beckett
insists to refer to what is left of the body as a trunk. A dry,
lifeless piece of wood.

Beckett and Bacon they do not erase the body. Although

knowing they cannot put it aside, or escape it, they try
nontheless. Bacon in a state of semi-drunkness admits
“I cannot break down the barrier of the skin”.45 Their
characters are immobile in their own capsules, subject to
inner forces of pressure, dilation, contradiction, flattening
and elongation.46 The wiped and swept away parts are
Lying Figure No.1

(1959)

44 Beckett 2016, 116.

45 Quote from the film Love is the Devil: Study for a
portrait of Francis Bacon. 47 Sylvester 1987, 43. Bacon says “Maybe I kill my
46 Deleuze 2004, 50. darlings”.
58 59
 THE PORTRAIT
When one refers to identity, to identifiability, one cannot
escape the face. The face is the identity, the face is the primary
point of recognition. The portraiture of Francis Bacon is a
significant part of his work that cannot remain unmentioned
in relation to the exploration of the body. Dealing with these
painting forces is even more evident on the portraits and
the self-portraits of his, either sole canvases or triptychs. The
way he tries to erase the identity, to dismantle the face, to
take away what makes a person a person. He destroys. He
distorts the subject as in the humble examples of George
Dyer, Michel Leiris or Isabel Rawsthorne. Beckett does too.
He does not write of the face and its characteristics, but of
the head, of what is left when all recognisable, excessive,
incidental elements are removed. In The Unnamable he
writes “No, no beard, no hair at all, it is a great smooth ball I
carry on my shoulders, featureless, but for the eyes, of which
only the sockets remain [...] I do not feel a mouth in me, nor
a head, do I feel an ear, frankly now, do I feel an ear, well
frankly now I don’t”.48 And they raise the question: To what
degree of distortion does the subject stops being itself?
When the body confronts the nonsonorous and invisible
forces, it gives them no other visibility but of its own:49 The
body becomes the force that is transforming it, and the
force obtains a face, becomes vidible. The paint is smeared
across the features of the face and the head is now revealed
‘beneath the skin’.50 The face becomes meat. It is deformed
in a way, that the head will emerge from beneath the face.
48 Beckett 1955, 299, 376.
49 Deleuze 2004, 52.
50 Sylvester 1998, 25.
60
Bacon rediscovers the head, as the minimum of the face,
and this exact effort brings him so close to Beckett.
A distinction of flesh and bones, which is appears so
often and naturally when it comes to the body, is a fruitful
parameter to our discourse. The bones are the material,
the spatial structure of the body, and the flesh is revealed
only when the bones stop to support the body. Meat is
the state of the body in which flesh and bone confront
each other. In meat, the flesh descents from the bone,
and the bone rises up from the flesh.51 How can one not
recall the quote of Bacon at the slaughterhouse? “Well
of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go
into a butcher’s shop I always think it’s surprising that I
wasn’t there instead of the animal.”.52 Bacon paints of
the flesh, Beckett writes of the bone, the skull. In Malon
Dies (1951), the predecessor of The Unnamable in the
trilogy, he writes “You may say it is all in my head, and
indeed sometimes it seems to me I am in a head and that
these eight, no, six, these six planes that enclose me are
of solid bone. But thence to conclude the head is mine,
no, never.”53 And again, in The Unnamable, one cannot
find better and more consequent words to summarise the
matters of the body: “In spite of these handicaps, I shall
begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out
to be the same place as always, the same which seems
made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want
and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or
swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely
the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now
51 Deleuze 2004, 19-24.
52 Sylvester 1987, 46.
53 Beckett 1955, 215.
61
 am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with
my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring
my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.”54

Their premise, their starting point is the same. Bacon and

Beckett they both work on this state of meat55, but from the
opposite sides: Bacon enhances the flesh, the descent, and
Beckett focuses on the bone, the structure. Bacon renders
all recognisable elements to pure flesh. Beckett sticks to the
core, to the most fundamental, what is left even when flesh
has descended. But they are both in this dynamic state of
meat, because meat has this great ability of retaining all the
suffering, all the memory of pain, all the colours of the living Self - Portrait
flesh. Meat as a state of body manifests its vulnerability. (1973)

Meat as a field of action is where the artist identifies with

the objects of his horror and of his compassion, all at once.
Meat is the food of the worms, the zone of indiscernibility
between life and death.

Studies of
Isabel Rawsthorne
(1966)

54 Beckett 1955
55 Bacon says “Flesh and meat are life! If I paint red meat
as I paint bodies it is just because I find it very beautiful.”
62 63
 Carcass of Meat and Bird of Prey Francis Bacon by John Deakin
(1980) (1952)

64 65
 THE COUPLE
In the research of the matters of body, one could not
exclude the matters of bodies, the couplings of figures,
which is a recurring theme both in Francis Bacon and in
Samuel Beckett. If the sensations produced by the single,
the isolated figure can be interpreted as vibration, when the
sensations communicate with one another, confront and
feed one another, then unavoidably a space of resonance
is created.56 What interests me in this premise, is the fact
that the couples of Bacon and Beckett manage to escape
the danger of introducing a ‘story’, they are not related in
illustrative or narrative terms,57 but form a complex of two
figures, one coupled Figure, whose two bodies are most
usually doppelgängers, like the two sides of the same coin.
Without the one, the other is impossible to be conceived
alone. It is not two figures that emerge from one complex,
but rather, more precisely one indivisible Figure that
emerges from out the coupling of the two, one Figure in
two bodies. It is delicate.
In theater the idea of the combat of sensations, of energies,
of frequencies is the very core of the art itself: it is the
conflict, the collision, that leads to actions. But Beckett
transcends dramaturgy, he does not employ his characters
in order to create tensions (as the entire pantheon of theater
tradition), but in order to relieve from the tension, to relieve
from narration, to create a space of non-action. Even when
Beckett’s characters may be in physical, or mental, contrast
to each other. In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir is tall and thin,
Estragon is short and fat, one has got a stinking mouth, the
other has got stinking feet, one has got a problem with the
shoes, the other appears to have a problem with the hat
and so on and so forth. In Endgame, Hamm cannot stand
while Clov cannot sit. In The Happy Days Winnie cannot
be silent, and Willie cannot not be. These asymmetries
enhance the absurd of their condition: despite their
contrast, their existence is dependent on each other.
The one cannot be seen without the other. The one
gives presence to the other. They are flesh and they are
bone. They represent an impossible state of attendance,
complementation, integration, merging. Meat.
In Bacon the combat receives a literal sense. Two bodies
struggling, in an indefinite complex between wrestling
and sex, as in Two Figures (1953) or the Sweeney
Agonists (1967) or the Three Studies of Figures on Beds
(1972). Or the body and its shadow as in the central part
of the Triptych (1972) or the other Triptych (May-June
1973). Or the body and its duplication in the mirror as
in Figure Writing Reflected in a mirror (1976) and the
Three studies of male back (1970). I consciously use
the term duplication rather than reflection, because it is
more active and serves better our discourse: the mirror-
duplication of Bacon, the restraining of the one body
through the presence of another, blurring the limits of
each, is exactly the dramaturgical mechanism of Beckett,
too. Ohio Impromptu, where the narrator is being visited
at night by another character who looks identically like
him, who sits down and reads to him the book of his own
life, and with whom they grow to be as one, without a
word exchanged, is only one example to testify on this
proximity, but which embodies all of the aspects above.

56 Deleuze 2004, 55-58.

57 Sylvester 1987, 63.
66 67
 Two Figures
(1953)

Three Studies of Figures

in Beds
(1967)

68 69
 Triptych
(August 1972)

Three Studies for

the Male Back
(1970)

70 71
 THE MOUTH
Bones and flesh are meat, as much as teeth and lips are.
The open mouth is a recurring theme in both Bacon’s and
Beckett’s art. The scream, the hollow cavity, crystalised in time.
Beckett says “The head and its anus, the mouth”. Deprived
of the bodily movement, the facial expression or the sound,
Bacon’s open mouth becomes highly ambiguous.58 Is it a
cry? A scream? A laughter? A yawn? A roar? A vomit? All of
the above in a hysterical outburst of energy?
The screaming mouth, the crying mouth is not uncommon
in the history of art: Laocoön and his sons, fighters, nymphs
and satyrs in Roman art, martyrs in Christian art, the
Caravaggian Holofernes (1598) and Poussin’s Massacre of
the Innocents (c.1625), which Bacon encountered in Musée
Condé in Chantilly in 1927 and made a great impression on
him.59 In modern painting one cannot exclude The Scream
(1893) by Edward Munch60 or multiple crying figures of
Picasso61, notably in the Guernica (1937). In photography,
the Mouth from Documents (1929) by Jacques-André
Boiffard is a radically visceral and violent attempt to capture
the mouth, isolated from the face, and beyond context,
exactly like Bacon’s mouths. In the same Documents Bacon
reads a quote by George Bataille, the maitre of instinct
and of the zone where the limits between man and animal
diffuse: “One great occasions human life is concentrated
bestially in the mouth, anger makes one clench one’s teeth,
terror and atrocious suffering make the mouth the organ of
58 Sylvester 1987, 48-50.
59 Fifield 2009, 65-66. Sylvester 1987, 34-35.
60 Zweite, Müller 2007, 76.
61 Sylvester 1987, 8. Zweite, Müller 2007, 30-31.
72
tearing cries”.62 In film, it is widely known that the Nurse
from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) has
haunted Bacon’s work.63
And here is where Beckett gets involved, who admired
and even approached Eisenstein to work as his assistant.
Beckett and Bacon were drinking water from the same
tank. And Beckett wrote the short play Not I in 1972,
where the stage is pitch black and illuminated only by
one beam of light, that reveals a mouth, eight feet above
where the ground should be. A mouth emerges as the
unique figure of the play, the absolute, the sovereign
element of the piece. The words emerge amidst dark and
silence. In the television adaptation of the piece in 1975
for BBC, starring Billie Whitelaw and Beckett himself as
director, the piece enters a new field.64 Now the speaking
mouth with the teeth and the saliva obtains a whole new
proportion, it fills oppressively the screen, it bloats and
dilates, it becomes a face in itself, a devil’s eye, ominous
and full of sexual connotations. Exactly like Bacon’s
mouths, welcoming and blocking any penetration.
The mouth in both Bacon and Beckett is isolated from
other facial features, it becomes an object in itself, a fact,
is distanced (and protected) from any narrative context. It
suggests an existential agony. It testifies on the crisis, the
pathos, the human vulnerability.65 In my native language
there is an idiom which would be translated as “with the
62 Brighton 2013, 42.
63 Hammer 2013, 54-57. Sylvester 1987, 34. Sylvester
1998, 17. And let's not forget the painting Study for the
Nurse in the Film Battleship Potemkin (1957).
64 Fifield 2009, 63-64.
65 Sylvester 1987, 80.
73
 soul on the mouth”, one acting, behaving, being “with the Not I
(1975)
soul on the mouth”. It implies a state of the utmost agony,
compression and breathlessness. The mouth is the exit
point of breath, of inner tensions and sensations. It is the
emergency exit, the escape, the excretion of the body itself,
from itself, through the mouth.66 The captivation of the force
that kicks from the inside, rendering the body bulbous,
Documents
wanting to break free, through the mouth, in a painless/ Jaques - André Boiffard
(1929)
painful, but definitely soundless exhale. Beckett’s and
Bacon’s mouths remind me of Eliot’s lines “This is how the Battleship Potempkin
world ends, not with a bang but a whimper”.67 Sergei Eisenstein
(1925)

66 Deleuze 2004, 16.

67 T.S Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925.
74 75
 Judith
Beheading Holofernes
Caravaggio
(1598)

Le Massacre des Innocents

Nicolas Poussin
(ca. 1625)

Guernica
Pablo Picasso
(1937)

The Scream
Edward Munch
(1893)

Laocoön and His Sons

(ca. 200 BC)

76 77
WHEN NOW ?
CHAPTER 4 THE TIME

After the space, after the body, and keeping in mind the
thought that has been developed so far, the research on
the art of Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett will now focus
on the matter of time. How do they perceive time? How
do they render time? How can time be rendered visible,
sensible? What position can one take towards something
that flows and flees? How do Bacon and Beckett stand still
in time? Despite the different nature of their mediums, the
instantaneity of painting as a sole fragment of time that a
painting is, versus the duration-based art of theater where
the text unfolds in the passing of time, Bacon and Beckett
both work on the same space in time. Many researchers
are naming it ‘an endless time’, but I am asking myself
what time is not endless. Thus I decide to name this space
in time as always already. And let me explain why.

Beckett preoccupies himself with the matter of time as

early as his essay Proust (1930) on the In Search of Lost
Time (1913). He proposes that matters of memory are
basically irrelevant, in the sense that it is impossible
to reconstruct the past tense. He writes “The laws of
memory are subject to the most general laws of habit”68
and proposes that ‘memory’ can only happen in the

68 Calder 2001, 65.

78 79
 present. It is not a representation of something that has
already happened, but rather a devision, a re-construction
(re- as ‘every time anew’) of a narration in the present. He
reminds of Schopenhauer ideas, such as “Memory is not
a receptacle, but a mere faculty, acquired by practice, of
bringing forth any representations at random, so that these
have always to be kept in practice by repetition, otherwise
they are gradually lost.”69 For Beckett memory happens
in the present. Memory, what has happened is indivisible
from what is happening now. What has already happened
is what is happening now. And what is happening now, it
has already happened.70 This exactly is the space of always
already: Everything has already happened, and it has always
been so. It is as if all moments are present in the present, as
if there is no past, because there is no memory. Everything is
happening now and has always been happening now. And
therefore there is no future, because present is inescapable:
one cannot move on, cannot hope to leave the present,
to put it in the past. All moments pile up and co-exist in a
simultaneous space, a haze. In The Unnamable: “Was there
a time when I too revolved thus? No, I have always been
sitting here, at this selfsame spot...”.71
Beckett is in a sense obsessed with memory. He is never
nostalgic though, he does not regard the past as golden in
comparison to the present, he does not beautify or sanctify
the past. He uses the memory to unfold the present. In his
piece Krapp’s Last Tape, Krapp is playing back tapes of his
69 Schopenhauer 1966, 140.
70 Hale 1993, 95. Beckett says in Proust that “the work of
art is neither created, nor chosen, but discovered, uncovered,
excavated, pre-existing within the artist, it is a law of his nature”.
71 Beckett 1955, 287.
80
voice, speaking to him of his past, as if he rediscovers
himself through the narration of the tape. In Rockaby a
prematurely old woman, the female alter ego of Krapp,
is pinned on a rocking chair and listens to her pre-
recorded voice. In Ohio Impromptu, the Reader, sent by
the dear face, comes to the Narrator to read him his own
past. In That Time three voices from different directions
reach a male head, the Listener, they speak of his life, his
self-induced isolation, his solitude, his time-cancer and
he only listens attentively and reacts to the words that
balance between fact and fiction. In Company the voice
is coming to the one in the dark and speaks of his past,
but since he is in the dark, he questions if the voice is
indeed speaking to him, of his past, or to someone else
of their past. Company is a state of enhanced exhaustion.
It is exemplary of how one can be detached from his own
memories, to the degree that one cannot be sure if it is
indeed their life, their reality that is being told. As if there
is no other reality than the one conceived and conveyed
by words.72 And in a way, there is not. Because if memory
is in the present, it can belong to anyone that is in the
present. Memory constructs reality, rather than being
constructed by it. Memory is not “owned”, memory is not
personal. As long as it is dark.
The Unnamable lives exclusively out of his narrations,
his stories. They are the vehicle for him to be going on.
By the end of his adventures, he says “It’s the last words,
the true last? Or it’s the murmurs? (The murmurs are
coming, I know that well.) No, not even that. You talk of
murmurs, distant cries, as long as you can talk. You talk
of them before and you talk of them after. More lies: it
72 Deleuze 1996, 62-63.
81
 will be the silence (the one that doesn’t last) spent listening, that the words that construct the memory are not enough,
spent waiting (for it to be broken, for the voice to break it). not elaborate enough, not precise enough, not capable
Perhaps there’s no other, I don’t know. [...] You must go on. I enough to give form to the story that is to be told. And
can’t go on. You must go on. I’ll go on. You must say words, finally at Worstward Ho, he exhausts the words until they
as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say reach their meaninglessness. He uses repetition to the
me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s point of not further, and then devises a way to actually
done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps go beyond the uselessness that he created. He re-invents
they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before new phrasal schemes only to exhaust them too. Only
the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if to keep having words on his mouth. Only to keep the
it opens.) It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t present going. Until nothing is left to tell. Until no means
know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know.”73 What are left. He must move forth, he must move on. Somehow
Beckett proposes here is that in fact memory, the story is the on. Nohow on. This are the two last words of his work and
only precondition of one’s being, the proviso of existence. also the later title of the trilogy.
Without memory, in the present, there is no present. When
the story is over, when silence is achieved, then all is done.
All is over. Considering the very medium of Beckett this is
absolutely natural, in the sense that it is inscribed to the
nature of his medium. A book is over when there are no
more words in it. A performance is over when all is said
and there is nothing left to be said. For Beckett words are
the only way that one can proceed, go forth, move on. For
Beckett words construct the present, thus words construct
the time and silence is the equivalent of the end of time.

So he keeps using words, being aware of their limitations

in expression, until he exhausts them, until he renders them
useless. This is evident in his late trilogy, which I read as his
most consistent research on the matter of time. In Company,
the first of the trilogy, as already mentioned, he proposes
that no memory is absolute, and it’s non-belonging, it does
not pertain to one person in particular, it belongs to present.
In Ill seen, Ill said, the second part of the trilogy he proves
Triptych
(1970)

73 Beckett 1955, 407.

82 83
 The role of words as far as Beckett’s art is concerned, is
taken over by the skin in the art of Bacon. Beckett cannot
escape his words, Bacon cannot escape his skin, his flesh.
No matter how fault, no matter how not enough, this is
their means, their tool, their companion, their partner and
catalyst of their art. Bacon renders the time, the passing of
time on the form of his flesh. In the chapter about the body,
it has been a thorough examination of the painting forces,
the inner forces that deform the appearance of the subject.
If I were to use terms of photography, that played such an
important part in Bacon’s influences, then I would describe
the aesthetic technique of Bacon as someone leaving the
shutter open for long enough that all this inner movement is
captured within the same frame. The photographic studies
of movement by Muybridge are well-known influences
of Bacon, who kept reproductions of them in his studio.74
But he works exactly on the opposite direction: instead of
decomposing the movement in steps, phases in a time-
based medium as film, he rather creates a flow of movement
in a timeless immobile frame. “In a second you may blink
your eyes or turn your head slightly, and you look again
and the appearance has changed. I mean, appearance is a
continuously floating thing.”75 In this premise he approaches
Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase (1912)76, but
he again, does not describe the movement in successive
snapshots that coexist and are to be synthesised cerebrally,
but enhances the continuity of the movement, the flow and
the violence of it. He catches the deformation at work, he
catches the painting forces red-handed.
74 Sylvester 1987, 30-33, 114-116.
75 Sylvester 1987, 118.
76 Deleuze 2004, 35.
84
If his favourite Picasso and cubism were putting together
one subject as seen from different angles, then Bacon’s
subjects are rather an assemblage of different moments
in time. Bacon stretches the present. His paintings are not
an instantané as the medium of painting requires, but
are rather a superposition of instantanés. The moment,
the present moment is a palimpsest, a sequence of
sensations. An extended presence. Bacon’s brush passes
through areas, through levels and depths, wipes off parts
and fields of colour, Bacon flows through emotions and
feelings, he creates dynamics, he creates rhythm. It is
each painting, each Figure that is a shifting, the Figure
becomes a moving-forward sequence itself, rather than
simply a step in a series.77 There is no series. There are
not different sensations, but different ‘captures’ of the
one and same sensation: the deformation of the subject
in time. Therefore, time as rendered visible through the
rhythm of deformation, becomes a character itself.78
The rhythm organises and decides on the form and the
aesthetics of the figure from within it. There is a delicate
connection between activity and passivity here: the figure
is transformed by the rhythm, but not in a philological
sense that time alters its objects, of course not, but rather
the rhythm is present and at work on the figure from
within itself, because the figure has shallowed time.
Bacon’s triptychs testify wildly on this premise of, what
I will name, extended presence, as the other side of
the coin of Beckett’s always already. It is clear that the
relation between the images of the three canvases is not
chronological, is not linear, is not hierarchical. What takes
77 Deleuze 2004, 33.
78 Delueze 2004, 63.
85
 place, is taking place now, at once. There is no causal or
other relation, there is no order, because there is no narrative
connection. In the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of
a Crucifixion (1944) the central part, which traditionally in
crucifixions is the part of the figure of Christ on the Cross,
sided by saints, has in Bacon’s case no more value, no more
significance than the two side parts. The eye, the camera,
focuses on three simultaneous incidents and captures their
simultaneous deploying in time.

The concepts of always already of Beckett and of the

extended presence of Bacon are a useful key to decipher
their request for non-narrative. They both inhabit a space
in time, where time doesn’t matter. Because all moments
are equally present, and alive, and happening now. The
moments lose their chronological sequence and thus their
narrational connotations. No narrative connection can
spring out of the immediate now, the now without hierarchy,
without order, without con-sequence. And for the chapter
of time to close its circle, I will quote a passage by Deleuze,
because there are not more precise or more dense or more
by chance relevant words to our discourse: “Presence.
Interminable presence. The insistence of the smile beyond
the face and beneath the face. The insistence of a scream
that survives the mouth, the insistence of the body that
survives the organism, the insistence of transitory organs
that survive the qualified organs. And in this excessive
presence, the identity of an already-there and an always-
delayed. Everywhere there is a presence acting directly on
the nervous system, which makes representation, whether
in place, or at a distance, impossible.”79
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944)

79 Deleuze 2004, 44.

86 87
 C H A P T E R 5 T H E FAC T

The previous chapters were dedicated to the research

of the formal aspects of Samuel Beckett’s and Francis
Bacon’s art. Elements as space, body and, to an extent,
time are tangible, references and commonalities are
more or less detectable and thus the proximity of the
two artists emerges from the juxtaposition of examples
as something natural, something effortless, something
already there. The following chapters will focus however
on the thought, the discourse, initiated, proposed and
supported by their texts and paintings. The following
chapters aspire to connect the two artists through but
also beyond their specific work, in the world of ideas.

A leading figure in this premise is Gilles Deleuze (1925-

1995), the french philosopher who was contemporary
to Beckett and Bacon and who in 1981 published the
book Logique de la sensation (later translated as Logic
of sensation), entirely on the art of Francis Bacon. In
the book there are various points where Deleuze (not
quite surprisingly) makes analogies between Beckett
and Bacon.80 Later, in 1992, he would occupy himself
exclusively with Beckett in the essay L’épuisé (tr. The
exhausted). Deleuze had spoken of Beckett as early as Portrait of
Isabel Rawsthorne
1972 in Anti-Oedipus, along with Félix Guattari, and (1966)

80 Deleuze 2004, 15, 36, 43, 47, 53, 59,

88 89
 underlined how Beckett’s work is compatible with their own. of figures which is not narrative, but rather it is a matter
of fact, as opposed to intelligible relations (of objects or
A crucial term in Deleuze’s discourse in the Logic of Sensation
ideas). The two figures are not two facts, but they are both
is the fact. His point of departure is that the relation of the
included in a single fact. And finally, the triptych that does
Figure to its contour, its isolating place defines a “fact”: the
not imply a progression, that does not tell a story, it must
figure takes place, a fact takes place, thus the figure is a fact.81
unavoidably incarnate, for the figures, another order of
Deleuze, of course, does not only employ a wordplay and
fact. The triptych is a union that separates the figures and
a logical equation, but actually gives name to what could
establishes for them a common fact.84
be termed a deeper need of Bacon’s painting: to create
relations that are far from figuration, far from illustration,
and simultaneously far from abstraction. The fact is the tool
to decipher the functioning of Bacon’s painting, to locate
the space he inhabits that is not figuration and that is not
abstraction either, but somewhere in between and far from
both. It is the space of an ultimate figuration, an ultimate
formation of the figure that does not entail narrative. The
fact is happening, the fact is ultimate, it cannot be denied or
interpreted. The fact is not subject to subjectivity. The fact is
what it is.

The forces of isolation, deformation and dissipation,

subjugating and dismembering the figure are a fact. The
relation of the figure with its space in Bacon’s paintings is
interchangeable: the figure tries to escape and enter the
field of colour, and at the same time, the contour isolates the
figure. The fact is precisely this two-way tension,82 rendered
visible through the state of meat. Meat as the exaggeration,
the put-forward of the figure’s flesh, which also includes
violence towards the figure itself. Meat as a fact.83 A next
order of fact is the relation between figures, the coupling
Three Figures
and Portrait
(1975)
81 Deleuze 2004, 6.
82 Deleuze 2004, 7.
83 Deleuze 2004, 21. 84 Deleuze 2004, 58, 70.
90 91
 It is no coincidence that the renowned interviews of Bacon
by David Sylvester go under the title The Brutality of Fact
(1987). The series does not only provide a direct insight
into his way of thinking and way of approaching things, but
more than that, it offers an elaborate reading of Bacon’s art
from his friend and firm believer, Sylvester. The interviews
undertake an examination of Bacon’s attitude towards his
art in the most honest way, since it is widely known that
Bacon usually lied in interviews, possibly because he was
provocative and controversial by nature.85 So how can a fact
be established when the very agent of facts blurs the borders
of their truth? Sylvester in the Preface writes: “Like the
camera, the tape recorder, roughly speaking, cannot lie and
cannot discriminate. Faithfully, it registers every false start,
every crossing of purposes, every malformation of syntax
and thought, every digression, every unthinking answer or
question, every unwitting distortion of fact that results from
not having time to remember clearly.” According to Deleuze,
this is exactly what Bacon aspires to do with his painting: to
register his very truth, which is a universal truth, rather than
a subjective perspective of truth; to record something real,
undeniable, unquestionable, undistortable in its distortion;
to render visible a fact, common to him and to all, rather
than to him alone. To capture all in all the essence of things.
“How are you going to make this thing look real, how are
you going to make it real to the way you feel about the thing
or real to the instinct?”, he would be cited saying in one of
the interviews.86
85 Sylvester 1987, 97, 100. Francis Bacon defends himself
against any interviewer or critic, saying that he paints his instincts
and that if he could explain his instincts, his subconscious, he
would not need to paint anymore. He says that a discussion
about art reaches unavoidably a dead-end.
86 Sylvester 1987, 164.
92
What is this fact though that Bacon is trying to record?
What is the common fact to Bacon, and to Beckett, and
to all artists, to all people? Bacon himself suggests “We
only have our nervous system to paint [...] I’m just trying
to make images as accurately as possible off my nervous
system as I can”.87 Here one needs to address to the
phenomenological tradition, through Edmund Husserl,
Erwin Straus, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty amongst many. The nervous system is the locus
of sensations. And the body is the stage of sensations.
The sensation takes place in, for and to the body. The
sensation is the fact of the body. The body is the field
where it unfolds. The body is all ends of the sensation, at
once producing and receiving it. In Deleuze’s words, it is
the subject and the object of sensation.88
As such, the body appears as the juxtaposition of objects.
An object has certain properties, it is narrative, it does
not sense. An object, a Gegenstand, stands opposite to
the subject. To reach out to an object, to represent an
object, it does not but convey a story. Bacon (and already
Cézanne, the first to connect the phenomenology of
perception to painting)89 ask the same question: how can
an object obtain a body? What does it mean to become
an object? What does it feel like to be an object? What is it
like to be a thing-in-itself? What Bacon puts on the canvas,
is not the represented object, but the object insofar that
it is experienced as the sensation of the body, it is the
body of the object, it is the Figure.90 The figure becomes
87 Sylvester 1987, 82.
88 Deleuze 2004, 31.
89 Deleuze 2004, 31.
90 Deleuze 2004, 32.
93
 the sensation and at once conveys a certain sensation. A
sensation that is transmitted directly, a sensation that speaks
to the nervous system.
Therefore, the “most right” sensation, the most truthful and
honest at a certain moment is the sensation that is determined
by the instinct. Eventually isn’t instinct the passage from
one sensation to another?91 The instinct will choose one
sensation over another, will pick the most accurate, the one
that will fill the flesh, that will record the fact. All in all, the
sensation becomes a fact through the instinct. Bacon says:
“It is a very, very difficult problem to put into words. [...] It is
a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint
comes across directly onto the nervous system and the other
paint tells you a story in a long diatribe through the brain.”92
I find it particularly interesting that the matters of instinct,
the matters of sensation cannot simply be expressed with
words, as Deleuze himself also points out.93 One needs to
use their hands, to make more tangible, more substantial
what is sensed, which is more than what words convey. One
needs to paint. One needs to say, to write and come face to
face with the limitation of the words. Bacon and Beckett both
know what they want to do, they want to document the fact,
to transmit the sensation, but how to do it is something that
cannot be guided but by the impulse, the mere instinct. It is
knowing what to do, but not quite knowing how94, because
there is this unspoken parameter which is so forceful that
it cannot but be obeyed and simply does not comply with
logic or argumentation or anything cerebral for that matter.
91 Deleuze 2004, 40
92 Sylvester 1987, 18.
93 Deleuze 2004, 34, 38, 39.
94 Deleuze 2004, 78.
94
Because the sensation does not speak to the brain, but to
the body, the sensation is an intensity, a vibration.
Which is, then, the sensation that Bacon gives forth through
his paintings? For Sylvester, it is brutality. Why does he
suggest that Bacon’s fact is brutal? Bacon himself gives
the answer: “[this way of painting far from illustration] has
a life completely of its own. It lives on its own, like the
image one’s trying to trap. It lives on its own and therefore
transfers the essence of the image more poignantly. So
that the artist may be able to open up or rather, should
I say, unlock the values of feeling and therefore return
the onlooker to life more violently”.95 Brutality appears
to be intrinsic in the fact, it is the unavoidable, the
unquestionable sensation, and according to Bacon, one’s
sole mission is to unveil it through the painting. “Anything
in art seems cruel, because reality is cruel.”96
Bacon’s figures bend and dissolve under the burden of
violence, as he erases their identity, decomposes their
features, their self, their I. He does so with violence.
And this violence has some grace it in. It is glorious, it is
a manifestation of life, of the bestial part of the human
condition, it is in the end beautiful.
However, this is not a violence towards the figure itself, it
is not an injury to the subject as a person,97 but towards the
representational of art. He says “So what I’m disrupting all
95 Sylvester 1987, 17.
96 Sylvester 1987, 200. One here cannot see Bacon’s life
separately from his fact, since Bacon has experienced daily
violence by his lovers, sometimes intentionally submissively
and other times in devastating wiping-everything-out fights.
97 Sylvester 1987, 41.
95
 the time it is this literalness, because I find it uninteresting”.98
Violence is the factor that distances Bacon from abstraction,
too, since “you can’t be cruel in abstraction, that’s why so
many people like abstraction in art”.99
The fact is equally common to Samuel Beckett. Deleuze,
in his essay L’épuisé, examines four of Beckett’s pieces
for television and attempts to grasp the undeniable, the
unquestionable, the unsubjective core of his writing. The
sensation which Beckett conveys is not violence though,
as in Bacon’s case, but what Deleuze names exhaustion.
One should be careful not to underestimate exhaustion
for tiredness. Tiredness is a reversible state, one can lie
down, take some rest and continue. But the exhausted, the
épuisé, finds no cure for their exhaustion, the exhausted
has exhausted the possibility of rest, has renounced all
need, preference or signification, is beyond tiredness,
is beyond all possibility.100 For Beckett exhaustion is the
ultimate sensation.

How does one go forth when all is exhausted? When

all is done? When there are no means of going further?
I have already suggested in the chapter on space, that
Beckett’s contour, Beckett’s limit is his words. Just now,
Bacon also faced the inability of words to capture the
sensation. So, Beckett responds to exhaustion with
exhaustion. Instead of resorting to instinct, he devises a
mechanism of exhaustion-progression to go beyond the
initial limitation of words and to put forth his very fact.
Beckett pursuits the formless and the unformulated (or
even the unformable) with the precision and purity of
mathematical formulations.101

He escapes his words with words: he creates a Three Studies

for a Crucifixion
metalanguage, a special language in which the relations (1962)
of objects are replaced by the relations of words. This

98 Sylvester 1987, 121. 100 Deleuze 1996, 51-55.

99 Sylvester 1987, 200. 101 Deleuze 1996, 56.
96 97
 metalanguage no longer offers a depiction of reality (relation
of objects), but itself becomes its own reality (relations of
words).102 If language I is the language of objects, of the
world as it is, of the possible, of what (as subject) is exhausted
always already, then language II is a metalanguage of
echoes: voices as vibrations, flows, waves. In order for one
to proceed beyond their exhausted words (because at some
point describing the world as an object, as a Gegenstand
is exhaustible), one must relate new words to the Other, to
another who will pronounce them. The subject duplicates
itself, it duplicates its perception and its sensations in order
to become the body of things, to become one with the
things, to become a thing-in-itself. Another voice is devised
so as for the speech to proceed. Thus Beckett’s characters,
like Molloy, Malon, the Unnamable, Watt, Murphy, Mercier,
escape themselves, escape their exhaustion by devising
new voices to speak for themselves. Μolloy resorts to Moran,
the Unnamable resorts to Mahood, Mercier to Camier etc. In
other words, if language I may speak of exhaustion, then
language II becomes the exhaustion.103 This language II
appears specifically in Beckett’s prose, in the novels, the
poems and the pieces for radio and television, since in
theater the dramatic dialogue cannot escape its colloquial
nature.104 This metalanguage is not a spoken language, it
bares within its very form the limits of representation.
The new voice, the Other becomes the new owner of the
words, and thus of the objects that they possess by speaking
102 Deleuze 1996, 59-60.
103 Calder 2001, 105. Beckett on an early essay for Joyce
writes: “His great work is not about something; it is that
something itself.” With the devision of his metalanguage
approaches and achieves precisely this frequency.
104 Calder 2001, 16.
98
of them. The Other becomes the world, because the Other
is now the one to give voice to the world.105 In the chapter
of time, I have already examined the case of Company
and how memory is not possessed by anyone in particular,
but by everyone who is present in the present, the tense
of memory. The characters that belong to language I, and
their shades, their holograms that belong to language II
are all present in the present. This unavoidably leads to
haze and indeterminacy, to the decomposition of the self,
of the I, which exhausted as it is, explodes in versions of
it, all in all in echoes of it. In Lessness (1970), the spiral
reaches the maximum of six simultaneous voices, which
may separate or even oppose one another. They may
merge again eventually, but their merging does no longer
resemble the initial subject of language I, since it belongs
to the enhanced state of exhaustion of language II. The
Unnamable cries “How many of us are there altogether,
finally? And who is holding forth at the moment? And to
whom? And about what?”106
Can one put an end to these voices, to their stories?
Can one be whole again? How can one go beyond this
new level of exhaustion? Through exhaustion, of course.
Language I exhausts the objects, the world, with words;
language II exhausts the words themselves, and leads
to language III, neither a language of objects, nor a
language of words. Language III does not represent the
world, nor invents stories and inventories of memories.
Language III is the language of silence. “Blanks for when
words gone. When nohow on. Then all seen as only then.
Undimmed. All undimmed that words dim. All so seen
105 Deleuze 1996, 60-64.
106 Beckett 1955, 362.
99
 unsaid.”107 It is obvious that language III has far disclaimed any truth it is to reveal by itself.111 And they manage it
its representational function, undressed its rationality, even by using the same principle, staying faithful to what they
more than language II. It is no longer definite, nor personal, have: their body, their sensory system. They capture the
it no longer operates with words, nor with punctuation, absolute minimum of what it means to be a body, to have
but unfolds in the rhythm between blanks, gaps, holes a body: to be the subject and the object of sensations.
and silences.108 Its field is a vast space of indefinite, it is Their sensations are facts, they are truths-in-themselves,
the breath between the words, it is the space between the they have an inescapability, an unquestionability, an
letters of each word, it is the contrast between black letters unavoidability, and therefore distance themselves from
and white background. Language III is an Image. the world of ambiguity, interpretation and relativity.
The fact of the painting and the image of the writing
The Image does not define itself through content, as
constitute the answer to Bacon’s demand for “an order
language I, nor through its form, as language II, but through
in chaos”112 and Beckett’s accordingly “to find a form that
its internal tension, the force it gathers to put forth the void,
accommodates the mess”113.
to drill holes, to loosen the grip of words, to dry up the flow
of voices. The Image is a pure, mere, unsullied form. The
Image is a sensation. It is driven from the forceful need
to go beyond itself through itself: to disengage from the
burden of the memory, of the predetermination of notions,
of the rational and the definite. The Image is a process. It is
a movement towards silence, a pure intensity, a breath just
before the absolute freedom, and dissolution.109 Beyond
Image, there is nothingness.110

How can one here not see the common basis of Bacon and
Beckett in the world of ideas? What Bacon does to his figures
with his brush, Beckett does it with his words. They both
aspire to escape figuration, illustration, narrative and fiction, Krapp’s Last Tape
Bob Wilson
which overshadow a piece and prevent it from revealing (2014)

107 Beckett 2016, 248.

108 Deleuze 1996, 64. 111 Sylvester 1987, 22-23.
109 Deleuze 1996, 92-93. 112 Sylvester 1987, 191.
110 Calder 2001, 87. “Towards a condition of silence”. 113 Graver, Federman 1979, 243.
100 101
 CHAPTER 6 THE SELF

Apart from the phenomenological discourse, and the

discourse of Gilles Deleuze, one could additionally
employ the ideas of the existentialists in order to
decipher the paradoxical equation of Samuel Beckett
and Francis Bacon. The existential philosophy that was
contemporary with the two artists, actively shaped their
artistic practice. Beckett knew Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert
Camus personally in the literary circles of Paris. He knew
Alberto Giacometti, one of the most existential artists, if
you ask me. And Bacon was introduced to the existential
ideas when he spent time outside Paris in 1927.

Bacon and Beckett aspire to record the invariable fact,

the sensation of the world, were it violence or exhaustion.
They are armed solely with the truth of their body and
are deprived from any overarching narratives. They
experience and express all in all what is fundamentally
human, they live their human condition in its very core,
in its purity, in its intensity. Their world is devoid of
metaphysical consolations, there is no God. Beckett Beckett and
Alberto Giacometti
writes in The Unnamable: “there is no one but me, there in Giacometti’s Studio
was never anyone but me, here I mean, elsewhere is Archives of the Giacometti
Foundation
another matter, I was never elsewhere, here is my only (1961)

elsewhere”.114

114 Beckett 1955, 395.

102 103
 The absence of God comes hand-to-hand with the realisation
that life is random, accidental, arbitrary. Beckett says “the
only sin is the sin of being born”115 and Bacon accordingly
“Also I think that man now realizes that he is an accident, that
he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the
game without reason [...] and the greatest art always returns
you to the vulnerability of the human situation.”116
Self-Portrait on Mirror
(1970s)
115 Calder 2001, 25
116 Sylvester 1987, 28, 199.
104
The absence of God is also accompanied by the
consciousness of mortality. Because if life is random,
death is too. Bacon says that “we are potential carcasses.
If l go into a butcher’s shop, l always think it is surprising
that l wasn’t there instead of the animal.”117 I would not go
far and speak of ‘fear of death’, because neither Beckett
nor Bacon seem to me as afraid of death. If anything,
they look at death straight in the eyes.118 “l have a feeling
of mortality all the time. Because, if life excites you, its
opposite, like a shadow, death, must excite you. Perhaps
not excite you, but you are aware of it in the same way
as you are aware of life you’re aware of it like the turn of
a coin between life and death.”119 Beckett incorporates
death in life straight away: his characters embody a
corporeality of pathology, failure, impotence, or even
grotesque handicap, they embody a corporeality of
abjection.120 Death dwells in the living body.121 The body
is not wholesome, it is weak and suffering as a reminder
of the state that it will eventually reach.
There is no doubt that the discourse of the existentialists
influenced both. The meaninglessness of life, the futility
of all efforts, the hopelessness and the despair, the
feeling of homelessness and groundlessness, are deeply
embedded in Beckett’s characters and Bacon’s figures.
117 Sylvester 1987, 46.
118 Calder 2001, 74.
119 Sylvester 1987, 78.
120 Osborne 2002, 76.
121 This is why Deleuze sees in Beckett a symptomatologist,
as quoted in Dowd 2007, 46. “[Samuel Beckett’s work] is
an extraordinary portrait of symptoms: it’s not just about
identifying an illness, but about the world as symptom, and
the artist as symptomatologist.”
105
 How can one not think of The Fall or The Rebel or The
Stranger in relation to Bacon’s violence? How can one not
think of Sisyphus next to Vladimir’s and Estragon’s patience?
They are all living in a constant state of waiting, the greatest
manifestation of incompleteness.122 Every character, every
figure is living in their own private hell: a room, a restlessly
probing mind, boring holes into the appearance of reality,
in a breathless attempt for meaning, unable to reach any
conclusion, unable to believe in any creed, finding nothing
but darkness and blankness.123
Being aware of one’s vulnerability, being aware of one’s
futility, how does one proceed? Interestingly, neither Beckett
nor Bacon’s answers result in nihilism. How does one find
within themself the power to move on, to move beyond the
absurdity of this awareness? How does one overcome their
fault by default? The art of both Bacon and Beckett involves
an affirmation, what I will call, a transcendental smile. “Ah
well, you can be optimistic and totally without hope. One’s
basic nature is totally without hope, and yet one’s nervous
system is made out of optimistic stuff.”124 Somehow for
Bacon, the world of sensations, the body, the nervous
system is the one to awaken, to open one’s eyes to face the
absurd and simultaneously the one to provide consolation.
Bacon defies the pointlessness of life with living. He lives
like Camus’ Meursault, who finds pleasure in a good meal,
a cup of coffee, a good swim, the sun on his face and on
his lover’s body. He drinks and parties and gambles and
paints and likes to be abused, to feel corporeal pain next
122 Calder 2001, 22, 69. The state of waiting is a purgatory
comparable to Dante’s Divine Comedy.
123 Calder 2001, 41.
124 Sylvester 1987, 80.
106
to his existential one. His revolt is not a murder though as
Meursault. His revolt is the constant exhaling of violence
in his paintings. “I think of life as meaningless; but we give
it meaning during our own existence. We create certain
attitudes which give it a meaning while we exist, though
they in themselves are meaningless, really. [...] Α way of
existing from day to day. [...] Α purpose for nothing.”125
Beckett walks more in the direction of Camus’ Sisyphus,
when he repeats that all he ever wanted to do was to
put his head against the cliff-rock and push until he had
moved it a fraction of a millimeter further away.126 He
resorts to an hermetic living where the revolt against
the absurd of life is discipline, is order amidst the chaos.
And one should consider Sisyphus happy. Beckett as
well. Is it the powerful image of the rock, the stone (that
had such a strong allure to Camus, and Beckett), is it
the pointlessness of the action, or is it the firm, almost
religious belief in something so obviously unattainable,
so outrageously impossible? I cannot know, but I regard
this need of Beckett as the most excruciating and most
honorable fight one has to fight.
Indeed. Beckett with his writing and Bacon with his
painting push their heads against a rock. They do fight
their impossible fight. A fight with and against their own
art. Their art is their personal exercise on futility. Their
gamble. Their indebtedness to capture what cannot be
captured, to paint the invisible, to speak the unspeakable,
to create a form for the unformulable. They render vivid,
accurate portraits of (contemporary) humanity. Beckett
125 Sylvester 1987, 133.
126 Calder 2001, 76.
107
 speaks of “the expression that there is nothing to express,
nothing with which to express, no power to express, together
with the obligation to express.”127 The struggle to express a
nonexistent content, to create order where none is possible,
to know this precise fact and yet to never cease. This is the
triumph and the failure of the artist. It is the awareness of a
Three Studies for
a Self-Portrait
delicate self-perception that does not cease to express the
(1976) inexpressibility of things.

127 Calder 2001, 79.

108 109
 Concluding and summarising, Bacon’s and Beckett’s works
can be regarded as expressions of immediate perceptions,
of sensations, valid in and for themselves, sensations that
testify to the one undeniable fact: the fact of their existence.
As long as they are, they will express their being, because
they are obliged to express, obliged by their inner need,
their instinct, the voice on the root of the back neck. They
are expressing themselves, because they cannot not do it.
And even when they cannot anymore, they will still. As long
as there are sensations, they must be painted, they must
be said and written. Their art, their craft is their response
to life. Their friend and their foe on the everyday. Ironically
Beckett’s last written word, in his last poem What is the Word,
shortly before he dies, is ‘word’. He writes in the end of The
Unnamable: “Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in
the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I
will go on. --END ”.128 Because in the end, there is silence.
In the end there is the quietness of the studio, among the
paints and the brushes. It is not a blank canvas, it is not a
tabula rasa. It is a silence achieved amongst the figures, it is
a silence amongst the words.

Self - Portrait
(1971) 128 Beckett 1955, 407.
110 111
 folly - and where -
folly for to - folly for to need to seem to glimpse
for to - what where -
what is the word - where -
folly from this - what is the word -
all this - there -
folly from all this - over there -
given - away over there -
folly given all this - afar -
seeing - afar away over there -
folly seeing all this - afaint -
this - afaint afar away over there what -
what is the word - what -
this this - what is the word -
this this here - seeing all this -
all this this here - all this this -
folly given all this - all this this here -
seeing - folly for to see what -
folly seeing all this this here - glimpse -
for to - seem to glimpse -
what is the word - need to seem to glimpse -
see - afaint afar away over there what -
glimpse - folly for to need to seem to glimpse
seem to glimpse - afaint afar away over there what -
need to seem to glimpse - what -
folly for to need to seem to glimpse
- what is the word -
what -
what is the word -

Samuel Beckett’s Last Poem (1989)

112 113
 CHAPTER 7 THE END

Little is left to tell.

I would like to close the circle with a text by Milan Kundera,

as I read it at the series of essays Encounter (2009). He
speaks of Bacon and Beckett, and he says:

Both of them are located at just about the same place

in the respective histories of their art. That is, in the very last
period of dramatic art, in the very last period of the history of
painting. For Bacon is one of the last painters whose language is
still oil and brush. And Beckett still wrote for the theatre that was
based on the author’s text. After him, the theatre still exists, true,
perhaps it is even evolving; but it is no longer the play writes’
texts that inspire, renew, and guarantee that evolution.

In the history of modern art, Bacon and Beckett are not

the ones opening the way; they close it again. When Archimbaud
asks Bacon which contemporary are important to him, he says:
‘After Picasso, I do not know’. [...] He talks like an orphan. And
he is one. He is one even in the very concrete sense of the life
he lived: the people who opened the way were surrendered by
colleagues, by commentators, by worshipers, by sympathizers,
by fellow travelers, by an entire gang. But Bacon is alone. As
Beckett is. In one of the Sylvester interviews: ‘I think it would
be more exciting to be one of a number of artists working
together…I think it would be terribly nice to have some one to Three Studies for
George Dyer
talk to. Today there is absolutely none to talk to’. (1971)

114 115
 Because their modernism, the modernism that closes
the way again, no longer matches the ‘modernity’ around them,
modernity of fashions propelled by the marketing of art. [...] Being
modern at the moment when the greater modernism is closing the
way is an entirely different thing from being modern in Picasso’s
time. Bacon is isolated (‘There is absolutely none to talk to’);
isolated from both the past and future.
Like Bacon, Beckett had no illusions about the future either
of the world or of art. And that moment in the last days of illusions,
both men show the same immensely interesting and significant
reaction: wars, revolutions and their set backs, massacres,
imposture we call democracy -all these subjects are absent from
their works. In this Rhinoceros, Ionesco is still interested in the
great political questions. Nothing like that in Beckett. Picasso
paints Massacre in Korea. Inconceivable subjects for Bacon. Living
through the end of a civilization (as Beckett and Bacon were or
thought they were), the ultimate brutal confrontation is not with
a society, with a state, with a politics, but with the physiological
materiality of man.
[...] It is neither pessimism no despair, it is only obvious fact, but a
fact that is veiled by our membership in a collectivity that blinds
us with its dreams, its excitements, its projects, its illusions, its
struggles, its causes, its religions, its ideologies, its passions. And
then one day the veil falls and we are left stranded with the body, at
the body’s mercy. [...] the body as a simple ‘accident’, an accident
that could easily have been fashioned some other way, for instance
-I don’t know- with three hands, or with the eyes set in the knees.
These are the only pictures of his that fill me with horror. But is
‘horror’ the right word? No. For the sensation that these pictures
arouse , there is no right word.
116
Milan Kundera summarizes my entire dialectic on Bacon and
Beckett. He speaks of the body, the fact, the fact of existence,
he speaks of the sensation conveyed by the paintings, he
speaks of a language unable to express or to represent.
He speaks of a truth experienced outside and beyond
language. Kundera knows from his personal experience, he
is a writer himself, a worker like Sisyphus.
What particularly intrigues me in this passage is that Kundera
introduces Bacon and Beckett as the last men standing. He
speaks of their essential loneliness. He points out the essence
of their being, which is nothing but the asymmetry that no
matter how honestly, no matter how honorably, no matter
how graciously one will live their life and share moments
with others, in the end one is intrinsically, irreparably, utterly
alone. And when in the end one dies, no one is dying
with them, despite the best of intentions. Bacon admits to
Sylvester: “I ‘ve done a lot of self-portraits, really because
people have been dying around me like flies and I ‘ve had
nobody else left to paint but myself. I loathe my own face,
and I ‘ve done self-portraits because I ‘ve had nobody else
to do. [...] There wasn’t anyone else around to paint.”129
No matter how many times I come across these words by
Bacon, I always find them strikingly truthful. Speaking out a
reality, and a fear in the most human way. This is the word,
human. Because there is a tender humanity that blooms out
of Beckett’s and Bacon’s work:
In my end is my beginning and In my beginning is my end,
writes T.S. Eliot. Because the fact of aloneness is present
in the present, the past and the future. To stand still, and
alone, within this inexplicable, ungraspable, unframable
129 Sylvester 1987, 129, 142.
117
 mess of life. It is the timeless, the unquestionable, the
unarguable, the inevitable, the absolute. And in a sense, it
is liberating. When one realises this sole invariable of the
human condition. When one looks at the eyes of the absurd.
With open hands. Then in a way, one feels then less alone.
Because the awareness of aloneness is common to all
people, and thus there emerges a feeling of connectedness,
of belonging, to nothing else but the human condition itself.
It is an awareness of co-existence through the awareness of
aloneness.
One understands that life implies death, and death implies
life, that self implies other. One gets synchronised with their
deep-deep down, their far-far in, whatever it is to be found
there, and opens up to the world. One sees themself not a
stranger to the world, not as something here on probation,
not as something that arrived here by chance, not as an
accident. One begins to feel their own existence with its
futility, with its inevitable suffering, with its aloneness, and
uniqueness, as absolutely fundamental.
There is indeed a sense of compassion, a smile, an
affirmation as the last and ultimate shelter of this existence
devoid of meaning. Life is fatal, and the answer to its fatality,
to its futility, is creation.
It is a very lonely process to be an artist, it takes place
behind closed doors, it demands a lot of courage and
strength and tolerance to a rather violent art world. It
demands this transcendental smile, that does not derive but
from the practice itself. This is why I believe that an artist,
especially on their first baby steps towards what they can
potentially become, needs to delve into art history as well
as be constantly informed about what is taking place in
their field right here and now. It creates within them a sense
118
of connectedness, of belonging. When one studies the
process of another artist, one can be inspired, motivated,
one can borrow tools and apply them in their respective
process.
It is the same reason why an artist today cannot not visit the
Biennale of Venice, or even the Frieze Art Fair, cannot not
look into this year’s Hugo Boss Prize nominees and cannot not
attend artists’ talks. Because there is an ongoing discourse
that embodies and expands all the past discourses and one
needs to be synchronised with their contemporaneity in
order to find their own space, their own contribution to this
discourse.
I am not suggesting that a painter should look into Yves
Klein and end up using his blue in their own canvases, nor
that a musician should copy-paste Arvo Pärt’s scales. It is
rather a question on the attitude towards one’s art: an artist
can find their way, the why of their art, by examining and
paying close attention to other artists’ why or how. I am
indeed suggesting that one cannot be a performance artist
and not watch Jackson Pollock painting in his studio, or not
be aware of Beyoncé’s show at Coachella. One cannot be
a writer without spending time in front of a Jean-Michel
Basquiat or Cy Twombly painting.
Are these examples arbitrary? Maybe they are, but first one
has to start from somewhere, and second, I tend to think
that the more distant this start is from the medium itself,
the more randomly and intuitively this research begins,
the more it can reveal about one’s practice. Yes, maybe an
architect can identify and learn more from Christo’s or Robert
Wilson’s work rather than from Le Corbusier or Tadao Ando,
who may be in his turn an inspiration for a cinematographer
along with James Turrell.
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 I also tend to think in pairs. It is maybe an interesting mind Because I cannot do otherwise.
game, when one picks two processes, that are seemingly
irrelevant to each other, and aspires to connect the dots, to
dive into the ‘Zwischenraum’ amongst instances of culture.
Yoko Ono and Bruce Naumann, Bernardo Bertolucci and
Georges Bataille, Bill Viola and Claude Monet, Jannis
Kounelis and Ibrahim Mahama, Marcel Duchamp and Allan
Kaprow, Pina Bausch and Louise Bourgeois. The pairs are
endless and hopefully someone will get in the trouble once
to look them up.

I picked Samuel Beckett, I picked Francis Bacon. I attempted

to steal their secret and make it mine, and as soon as I did,
I realised that this was precisely what drew me to these
two mates in the first place: To discover, with words, with
awareness, with groundedness, that my meaning as a
human, my personal response to life, is to be an artist. It is
not easy to make this choice, to put yourself and your guts
out there, it is not pleasant. It is a rather insane decision
to make, which ensures that the absurdity of living will be
perpetual. It is a birth, a constant birth, bearing the memory Nothing is left to tell.
of pain, of the daily exhaustion, of the constant struggle
with your material and yourself, of the failure, the haze,
the doubt, the pointlessness. It demands inner order and
discipline to keep fighting towards something that one
does not really know what it is, and to keep believing with
an inexplicable strength that it will lead somewhere. It takes
the discipline of Sisyphos. And precisely through discipline,
through the artistic practice, one can eventually generate
joy, one can become happy, one can find meaning within
creation, within expression, only by continuing to express
and to create. In the end, one can only hope to serve their
art with all their power, with all their means, with all their
stamina and devotion. At least that’s all I can hope for.

120 121
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archimbaud 1993: Michel Archimbaud, Francis Bacon:

In conversation with Michel Archimbaud, Phaidon Press,
London, 1993.

Beckett 1955: Samuel Beckett, Three Novels, Molloy,

Malon Dies, The Unnamable, Grove Press, New York,
1955.

Beckett 1955: Samuel Beckett, Three Novels, Molloy,

Malon Dies, The Unnamable, Grove Press, New York,
1955.
Beckett 2016: Samuel Beckett, Η τελευταία τριλογία (The
late trilogy, bilingual edition, trans. Thomas Symeonidis),
Gavriilidis Editions, Athens, 2016.
Brighton 2013: Andrew Brighton, Francis Bacon, Tate
Publishing, London, 2001, hardback 2013.

Calder 2001: John Calder, The philosophy of Samuel

Beckett, Calder Publications, London, 2001.
Deleuze 1996: Gilles Deleuze, Erschöpft, in Stücke für
das Fernsehen mit einem Essay von Gilles Deleuze,
Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1996.
Deleuze 2004: Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation,
University of Minessote Press, Minessota, 2004.

Fifield 2009: Peter Fifield, Gaping Mouths and Bulging

Bodies: Beckett and Francis Bacon, from Journal of
122 123
 Beckett Studies, issue 18, 57-71. Retrieved from https://
www.jstor.org/stable/26469638.
Graver, Federman 1979: Lawrence Graver and Raymond
Federman, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage,
Routledge, London and New York, 1979.
Hale 1993: Jane Hale, FRAMING THE UNFRAMABLE:
Samuel Beckett and Francis Bacon. Samuel Beckett Today /
Aujourd’hui 2, 95-102. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/
stable/25781155.
Hammer 2013: Martin Hammer, Francis Bacon, Phaidon,
London, 2013.
Harmon 1998: Maurice Harmon, No Author Better
Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan
Schneider, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998.
Katz 2013: Daniel Katz, Language and Representation,
from Samuel Beckett in Context, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2013.
Knowlson, Haynes 2003: James Knowlson and John
Haynes, Images of Beckett, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2003.
Knowlson, Pilling 1979: James Knowlson and John Pilling,
A Poetics of Indigence, from Frescoes of the Skull: The
Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett , John Calder
Publications, London, 1979.
Knowlson 2001 : James Knowlson, Samuel Beckett Eine
Biographie, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2001.
McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988: Douglas McMillan and
Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, Riverrun Press,
New York, 1988.
Osborne 2002: Thomas Osborne, Becoming Organic:
Samuel Beckett’s Literary Anthropology in Journal of
Beckett Studies, vol. 11, no.2, p. 74-89, 2002. Retrieved
124
from www.jstor.org/stable/26468936
Peppiatt 2000: Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon:
Anatomie eines Rätscels, Verlag DuMont, Köln, 2000.
Schopenhauer 1966: Arthur Schopenhauer, The World
as Will and Representation, vol. II, transl. E.F.J. Payne,
Dover Publications, New York, 1966.
Sylvester 1987: David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact:
Interviews with Francis Bacon, 3rd ed., Thames and
Hudson, New York, 1987.
Sylvester 1998: David Sylvester, Francis Bacon: The
human Body, Hayward Gallery, London 1998.
Sütter 1999: Heike Sütter, Bewegung und Raum im Werk
von Francis Bacon, VDG, Weimar, 1999.
Zweite, Müller 2007: Armin Zweite, Maria Müller, Die
Gewalt des Faktischen, Hirmer Verlag, Nordheim-
Westhafen, 2007.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
Love is the Devil, 1998.
Francis Bacon, Form und Exzess, 2013.
Francis Bacon : A Brush with Violence, 2017.
Film, 1965.
Samuel Beckett, Silence to Silence, 1991.
Bruce Nauman : Make me think, 1997.
The Radiant Child, 2010.
Giacometti, 1967.
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