The Baroque and Bacon's Popes (original) (raw)

In July 2007, Study from Innocent X (1962) sold at Sotheby's to an anonymous bidder for over $52 million. The painting, held in a private collection for over thirty years, had never appeared as auction before. It was a record sale for the artist, Francis Bacon, who dies thirty years after completing the work.1 The painting was thought to be valuable because, of all the popes Bacon painted, it most resembled the inspiration for the long series of paintings Bacon executed on this theme, Diego Velázquez's haunting Painting of Innocent X (1650). Bacon would not have thought the success of his Study should depend on its resembling the Velázquez. In fact, he counted all of his paintings of popes failures, and not only or obviously because they failed to resemble their inspiration.2 Bacon painted at least forty-five popes (there is no exact count of how many he destroyed), mostly modeled on the Velázquez portrait, beginning with Head VI (1949) and culminating in Study for Red Pope (1971), a painting said to follow closely the Study from 1962. What was Bacon trying to accomplish in all of these images? What problem or question or challenge did Portrait of Innocent X pose for him? Was it, in fact, a problem he never expected to solve, a question he hoped never to answer, a challenge set not by Velázquez's painting but by painting itself, a problem he transferred to other subjects, continuing to produce solutions that would never completely satisfy him? It is not controversial to say painting poses a problem, for the artist and the viewer. It is the exact nature of the problem for Bacon that we want to explore here, the way these images of popes pose the problem for Bacon but also fix it in a fast and ready form. We are especially interested to know how Innocent X, the portrait and its subject, figure in the setting of this challenge. To this end, we will look carefully at the series of popes, seventeen paintings in all, that Bacon painted between 1950 and 1953 of which Study After Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), the so-called Des Moines Pope, in the most well-known.3 We will delineate, in this most concentrated series of paintings on this theme, the elements brought together in them and Bacon's manner of plying these elements onto one another to make a complete work. With the details in front of us, we will work out or unfold the problem Bacon set for himself and the significance of this problem for him and for painting in general. We will find that a uniquely Baroque strategy was used by this distinctly bohemian artist to remake an image of Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X for purposes that were, to his satisfaction, never realized. We will not the special role photography plays in anchoring the image for Bacon and setting the conditions for the possibility of a distinctly Baroque remaking of an image of Velázquez's portrait. " This is the obsession, " Bacon says: " how like can I make this thing in the most irrational way? " 4 We will find in a special conception of the