Between Emotion and the Emetic: Francis Bacon and the Tragic Body at the Margins of the Oresteia*

Abstract

As for my latest triptych and a few other canvases painted after I reread Aeschylus, I tried to create images of sensations that some of the episodes created inside me. I could not paint Agamemnon, Clytemnestra or Cassandra, as that would have been merely another kind of historical painting when all is said and done. Therefore, I tried to create an image of the effect that was produced inside me.—Francis Bacon1 The recent exhibition “Bacon en Toutes Lettres,” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, featured the paintings of Francis Bacon most directly and strikingly influenced by works of literature and philosophy (by Bataille, Conrad, T. S. Eliot, and others).2 Among these paintings, the enigmatic triptych that presents Bacon’s take on Aeschylus's Oresteia has quasi-programmatic value (fig. 1), capturing in a form that is at once representational and anti-representational both the hallucinations of Orestes after the matricide and the hallucinatory effects of literary images on Bacon’s creative imagination—the way they come and go, never fully abandoning him, blending one into the other in a kind of synesthetic fusion, subjecting his genius to an exhausting yet productive fort and da.3