frame 35 April 2023
Getting Glassy Eyed with Francis Bacon
by Travis Elborough
Francis Bacon first saw Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet agitprop movie about the failed first Russian revolution, in 1935 and ‘almost’ as he later maintained to David Sylvester, ‘before’ he’d ‘started to paint.’ The ‘almost’ is a typically Baconite fudging of at least five years’ worth of painting at that point, nearly all of which he later destroyed, erasing practically everything he produced prior to about 1944. But the importance of the film to his subsequent output can hardly be underestimated. From the late 40s until late into his life, he was to reference, almost obsessively, a particular photo still from a key scene at the picture’s finale in which a screaming grandmotherly nurse in a pair of pince-nez spectacles is shot in the eyes by counter-revolutionary Tsarist forces conducting a massacre on the Odessa Steps.
The style of glasses Eisenstein chose for this unfortunate victim was far from arbitrary. Named from the French for ‘nose-pincher’, this type of eyewear, a kind of steampunk spectacle cantilevered as majestically as any airship, dispensed with side-pieces in favour of spring-loaded wire bridges that kept them in place. They emerged in the 1840s and rapidly became one of the most popular designs across Europe and in America, and were thought quite smart, in all senses of the word, by middle and upper class men and women. Bendy enough in some ingeniously manufactured iterations to be folded up, their lenses could slide neatly over one another, allowing them to be tucked discreetly into a waistcoat pocket. When next needed they could be fished out, sprung back into shape and easily restored to the face. Women, lacking such pockets, often kept them close to hand on a decorative chain or a fancy ribbon. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was to place a gold pair at the heart of one of Sherlock Holmes’ cases; the cold fish sleuth deducing after just a few minutes inspecting them that their owner must be ‘a woman of good address, attired like a lady.’
Still from Battleship Potemkin (dir. Sergei Eistenstein), 1925.
For Eisenstein, as for Conan Doyle (and the public at large), the pince-nez then was an optical aid readily associated with the better sort and the professional bourgeoisie. Accordingly and none too subtly, the old girl in Battleship Potemkin is killed precisely because she’d failed to see how evil the ancient aristocratic regime truly was. Strikingly, pairs of pince-nez appear at the beginning and the end of the film. The first ones belong to the eponymous boat’s doctor, Smirnov, and in an early scene that might easily have held equal fascination for Francis Bacon, he uses his to inspect the ship’s ration of maggot-ridden meat. This grisly fare is shown in all its festering glory by Eisenstein in a close-up through the spectacles’ lenses, the doctor goes on to blithely declare it safe for consumption by the already ill-nourished, if curiously still gym-buff, working class sailors. Mariners of a physical cut and jib that we could well imagine Bacon himself propping up the bar with in Charlie Brown’s Thames side boozer in the West India Docks. Rotting meat and meaty men were hardly unknown qualities in the painter’s art or indeed life.
Francis Bacon, Study for the Nurse in the film Battleship Potemkin, 1957 (Catalogue Raisonné no. 57-08)
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2023. Photo: Hugo Maertens)
But it was the woman’s mouth, gaping open in a howl of terror and pain, rather than her eyewear in Battleship Potemkin that largely preoccupied Bacon. Not too long after seeing the film he also acquired a secondhand medical textbook in a bookshop in Paris that contained ‘beautiful colour plates of diseases of the mouth’ and a yawning maw, after Eisenstein and the examples in this volume, was to become an archetypal element of his mature paintings, appearing constantly as existential emblems of pain, suffering, greed and despair.
Yet those spectacles do crop up from time to time. Shattered pince-nez-like glasses appear to frame the eyes of the papal figure in 'Study for a Head’ - one of the six pictures after Velázquez’s famous 1650 Portrait of Pope Innocent X that he completed in 1952. While the eyes of the figure in the four picture sequence, Portrait of a Man with Glasses from 1963, look more like open mouths than anything. (Equally, were there four portraits rather than, say, a triptych because his sitter effectively had four eyes?)
Bacon lived to the comparatively ripe old age of 82, and continued to paint until just a few months before his death in 1992. But to this day he remains famed for his prodigious consumption of stuff served up in highballs and flutes in drinking dens such as the Colony Room in Soho. If fond of a glass of champagne (or a bottle or two), it’s not clear if he ever wore glasses. It is a subject that biographers appear oddly silent about. Newspaper paparazzi-style photographs of the painter in his autumn years, and caught returning home with bundles of shopping - a bottle of Evian, a loaf of Sunblest Medium sliced white bread and a copy of the Daily Telegraph under his arm - fail to catch him off duty and goggled-up. The hair, of course, remains a suspiciously dark shade for an octogenarian. Why then go out in public with face furniture that continues, and for good historical and biological reasons, to denote the onset of old age either, if you can avoid it?
In a piece entitled ‘Bacon’s Eyes’, his friend and biographer Michael Peppiatt recalled the ‘pale blue depths’ of the artist’s ‘unwavering stares’ and that if something caught his attention Francis’s ‘normally genial gaze took on a cold, piercing, intensity like a bird suddenly spotting its prey.’ Nothing about glasses here either, obviously. But Peppiatt also mentions a moment where he once saw a look of genuine terror in ‘Bacon’s eyes’. This incident occurred ‘in Marseilles in 1976, just after his exhibition had opened at the Musée Cantini’ when ‘he came abruptly face to face with a blind man with dark glasses and a white cane tapping his way down a dark street behind the old port’. A potential diagnosis for glaucoma and facing perhaps the eventual loss of my own vision spurred me to write my book, Through the Looking Glasses, a history of spectacles; I can well understand his terror of sightlessness. For Bacon, though, it was surely there all along, and hiding in plain sight, in that inspirational image from Eisenstein.