The Brilliance in Francis Bacon’s Early Failures

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For a painter whose fascination with the grisly would eventually result in depictions of figures hacked to bits on a bed, shrieking into the void, or nailed to a mattress by a hypodermic syringe, Bacon excelled in a design style that was exceptionally sleek and clean. Born in 1909, he was in his teens and early 20s by the time postwar aesthetics took hold. The Bauhaus movement, for one, made quick work of disassembling the leafy tendrils and sweeping arabesques of the past Art Nouveau era. Organic, foliate forms were replaced with a crisper geometry. Circles, squares, and triangles found expression in cradles and tea infusers. A jointless steel chair was a triumph both material and existential—indeed, with its emphasis on seamlessness, Bauhaus took on universal and even democratic aspirations.

In addition to Bauhausian simplicity, Bacon enjoyed other modern, cubistic forms of design, as well as Art Deco trends, which used geometry a bit more ornately. These included the work of the designer Eileen Gray, whose showroom Bacon had apparently come across in 1928 while living in Paris (around the same time he studied in design workshops). Like most visitors, he was galvanized by what he saw. “Suddenly,” Swan and Stevens write of Gray’s studio, “the known world of rooms looked undone and emptied out, replaced by light, a few simple forms, and exhilarating open spaces.” This sight was one of the major aesthetic shocks Bacon experienced in Paris. Another was his first encounter with Picasso’s work, which sent Bacon reeling. “At that moment,” Bacon explained in an interview with the British art critic David Sylvester, “I thought, Well, I will try and paint too.” But paint like a master he could not. Not yet. Design like one, well—he could try. Or he could imitate.

By the next year, Bacon had opened his own design studio at 17 Queensberry Mews, London. He had sleek business cards made: “Francis Bacon,” they announced, “Modern Decoration, Furniture in Metal, Glass and Wood/Rugs and Lights.” A sign outside the studio read FRANCIS BACON, DESIGNER. According to Revelations, the space itself, a former automobile garage with lofted ceilings, offered “a beguiling mix of radiant white, gleaming steel, mirrored glass, boxy chairs, animal skins, and mysterious geometries.”

If Bacon’s glass-topped tables looked suspiciously like Gray’s (they did), his wooden bench “was an almost exact copy” of an earlier Gray design. Still, in London—considered less artistically adventurous than the booming Berlin and Paris—Bacon’s studio made a splash. The influential British critic Madge Garland (whom Bacon had befriended) glowingly covered it, praising the studio’s windows—“curtained with white rubber sheeting, that hangs in sculptural folds”—and its rugs, which she admired as “purely thought forms.” The article generated attention and brought Bacon a few commissions, one of which inspired a subsequent review, likely also written, Swan and Stevens surmise, by Garland: “It is not often that you find painters turning into decorators, but … Francis Bacon has done this with marked success.”