Stories
Obsessions: Francis Bacon
Kick-starting our new series on personal obsessions, Claire Miccio details her habit of seeing Francis Bacon everywhere she goes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- Better Baby Names Bureau (The Non-Expert)
- This Is Not a Eulogy (Profiles)
- The Vanishing Date (Spoofs & Satire)
Also by Claire Miccio
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- How Everything Turned Out (June 27, 2007)
- What's the Frequency, Musad? (June 15, 2004)
- The Education of Elisabeth Eckleman: Back to School (June 6, 2005)
Also in Stories
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State College, Pennsylvania
Jerusha introduces me to Francis Bacon. She is my manager at The Nittany Quill, the stationery and fountain pen store where I work. It’s easy to adore her. She knows just about everything but claims to know absolutely nothing. Art, philosophy, and literature are what she loves and what she talks about incessantly. She dresses like Jackson Pollock, wears glasses thicker than War and Peace, and purposely swigs Coca-Cola Classic until she can’t tell the difference between a $1,200 gold-nibbed Waterman and a mechanical pencil. I love being around her and I love it when she jokes about choking customers to death with curling ribbon.
She’s talking about Francis Bacon, and I assume she’s talking about Sir Francis Bacon, the philosopher, right up until the phrase ‘drunk, gay cross-dresser’ exits her mouth.
‘Oh no, a different Francis Bacon. I’ll bring in his biography. You’ll love it—boy, was he a nutcase. I mean like, real twisted.’
Northampton, Massachusetts
Francis—the artist, not the philosopher—and I are better acquainted once I go to college. Libraries are not foreign places to me—but libraries solely devoted to art are. Big, beautiful, pricey books about kooky, homely, piss-poor people are sorta kinda mine all for the arduous completion of a financial-aid application. Standing at the circulation desk with a good 20 Bacon books cupped to my chest I think to myself: ‘It shouldn’t be this good.’
His paintings are hideous, but in a pleasing way. The broken strokes, bloody colors, and brutish subjects that make them so repugnant, make them so beautiful in the same breath. I am astonished at how grotesque his faces and figures are, how his portraits are a series of abstract contortions that appear so real you could step inside them, how no one would consider him painterly but how he really is. His pieces are breathtaking—and sick and fascinating and revolting—and I ache to see them in person.
I think the gaping mouths and obscured cages startle me most. I think I ought to close the book and start looking at some pretty impressionism, some vases, some landscapes, some fruit, but, no, I’d rather stare into the grainy black chasm of a pope’s screaming mouth.
Manhattan, New York
The first time I greet Francis is at the MoMA. Alone, I brave chaotic Port Authority and unfamiliar New York streets to meet up with one of my greatest obsessions: Alberto Giacometti. I have no idea I’m gonna run into my first Francis, but I do and there it is—Study of a Baboon. It’s a baboon shrieking upward into a pitch-black night. I can see teeth and I’m feeling a bit queasy.
Francis, um yes, you scare me. I’d like to see more.
Rome, Italy
I’m backpacking in Italy for a month with my friend Nick. He has a full-fledged BACKPACK; I have a Jansport. A sizeable chunk of my life savings, three pairs of underwear, two shirts, one pair of pants, zero everything else—yes, it’s totally worth it.
Avoiding the mob in front of the Sistine Chapel, we are wandering aimlessly around the Modern Religious Art wing of the Vatican Museums. And I spot it immediately. This makes Francis #2, screaming pope #1. Nick’s wishing he were deaf right now. Velasquez! See the cage! Oh god the mouth! How strange this is here! I give it a rest once I realize Nick is looking at me like I’m making him sit through a Police Academy Movie Marathon.
I’m searching up and around the Sistine Chapel and trying so hard to really see it but I can’t because most of my mind is still standing in front of the pope in purple downstairs.
Venice, Italy
I am being a bitch to Nick and I know it. I love him dearly but he deserves half of it because we are at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and he’s camping out on a sofa to make a list of the movies he wants to rent. The undeserved half comes from me not eating: Worried that I wouldn’t be able to come up with rent when I return, I decide to eliminate food from my budget—the museum entrance fee, without question, stays.
I’ve grown roots in front of Francis #3, Study of a Chimpanzee. This one isn’t so great—except for the magenta background. Magenta, but a magenta so intense you wonder if it isn’t slowly eating at your eyesight. Mark Rothko has a celebratory, spiritual sense of color, but Francis: Francis’s colors are scare tactics.
Nick wants to know how much longer I plan to stay. Normally I would answer this honestly but today, like the day before, I am a bitch.
‘Until I’m done.’
‘Okay. You like this one? It’s weird.’
‘I can’t decide. I like the colors, though.’
‘The pink?’
‘That’s so not pink. Pink is a cooey color; you can fall asleep on it. This color hurts me.’
‘It hurts you?’
‘Yeah. It hurts a lot but I like it.’
‘You’ve seen Miller’s Crossing, right?’
State College, Pennsylvania
Jerusha wants to hear about Italy, all of it.
‘Well, let’s see. Venice was my favorite. Nick and I got locked in a homeless shelter in Rome. I witnessed a tua-madre fight in a subway station in Milan. I saw some more of Francis Bacon.’
‘Did you? Aren’t they terrifying? What a wonderful feeling.’
Francis, oh yes, you scare me. I’ve got to see more.
Jerusha introduces me to Francis Bacon. She is my manager at The Nittany Quill, the stationery and fountain pen store where I work. It’s easy to adore her. She knows just about everything but claims to know absolutely nothing. Art, philosophy, and literature are what she loves and what she talks about incessantly. She dresses like Jackson Pollock, wears glasses thicker than War and Peace, and purposely swigs Coca-Cola Classic until she can’t tell the difference between a $1,200 gold-nibbed Waterman and a mechanical pencil. I love being around her and I love it when she jokes about choking customers to death with curling ribbon.
She’s talking about Francis Bacon, and I assume she’s talking about Sir Francis Bacon, the philosopher, right up until the phrase ‘drunk, gay cross-dresser’ exits her mouth.
‘Oh no, a different Francis Bacon. I’ll bring in his biography. You’ll love it—boy, was he a nutcase. I mean like, real twisted.’
Northampton, Massachusetts
Francis—the artist, not the philosopher—and I are better acquainted once I go to college. Libraries are not foreign places to me—but libraries solely devoted to art are. Big, beautiful, pricey books about kooky, homely, piss-poor people are sorta kinda mine all for the arduous completion of a financial-aid application. Standing at the circulation desk with a good 20 Bacon books cupped to my chest I think to myself: ‘It shouldn’t be this good.’
His paintings are hideous, but in a pleasing way. The broken strokes, bloody colors, and brutish subjects that make them so repugnant, make them so beautiful in the same breath. I am astonished at how grotesque his faces and figures are, how his portraits are a series of abstract contortions that appear so real you could step inside them, how no one would consider him painterly but how he really is. His pieces are breathtaking—and sick and fascinating and revolting—and I ache to see them in person.
I think the gaping mouths and obscured cages startle me most. I think I ought to close the book and start looking at some pretty impressionism, some vases, some landscapes, some fruit, but, no, I’d rather stare into the grainy black chasm of a pope’s screaming mouth.
Manhattan, New York
The first time I greet Francis is at the MoMA. Alone, I brave chaotic Port Authority and unfamiliar New York streets to meet up with one of my greatest obsessions: Alberto Giacometti. I have no idea I’m gonna run into my first Francis, but I do and there it is—Study of a Baboon. It’s a baboon shrieking upward into a pitch-black night. I can see teeth and I’m feeling a bit queasy.
Francis, um yes, you scare me. I’d like to see more.
Rome, Italy
I’m backpacking in Italy for a month with my friend Nick. He has a full-fledged BACKPACK; I have a Jansport. A sizeable chunk of my life savings, three pairs of underwear, two shirts, one pair of pants, zero everything else—yes, it’s totally worth it.
Avoiding the mob in front of the Sistine Chapel, we are wandering aimlessly around the Modern Religious Art wing of the Vatican Museums. And I spot it immediately. This makes Francis #2, screaming pope #1. Nick’s wishing he were deaf right now. Velasquez! See the cage! Oh god the mouth! How strange this is here! I give it a rest once I realize Nick is looking at me like I’m making him sit through a Police Academy Movie Marathon.
I’m searching up and around the Sistine Chapel and trying so hard to really see it but I can’t because most of my mind is still standing in front of the pope in purple downstairs.
Venice, Italy
I am being a bitch to Nick and I know it. I love him dearly but he deserves half of it because we are at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and he’s camping out on a sofa to make a list of the movies he wants to rent. The undeserved half comes from me not eating: Worried that I wouldn’t be able to come up with rent when I return, I decide to eliminate food from my budget—the museum entrance fee, without question, stays.
I’ve grown roots in front of Francis #3, Study of a Chimpanzee. This one isn’t so great—except for the magenta background. Magenta, but a magenta so intense you wonder if it isn’t slowly eating at your eyesight. Mark Rothko has a celebratory, spiritual sense of color, but Francis: Francis’s colors are scare tactics.
Nick wants to know how much longer I plan to stay. Normally I would answer this honestly but today, like the day before, I am a bitch.
‘Until I’m done.’
‘Okay. You like this one? It’s weird.’
‘I can’t decide. I like the colors, though.’
‘The pink?’
‘That’s so not pink. Pink is a cooey color; you can fall asleep on it. This color hurts me.’
‘It hurts you?’
‘Yeah. It hurts a lot but I like it.’
‘You’ve seen Miller’s Crossing, right?’
State College, Pennsylvania
Jerusha wants to hear about Italy, all of it.
‘Well, let’s see. Venice was my favorite. Nick and I got locked in a homeless shelter in Rome. I witnessed a tua-madre fight in a subway station in Milan. I saw some more of Francis Bacon.’
‘Did you? Aren’t they terrifying? What a wonderful feeling.’
Francis, oh yes, you scare me. I’ve got to see more.
—Published November 18, 2002
