Interviews with Francis Bacon, by David Sylvester, 1957, Thames and Hudson, London.

Francis Bacon: I believe that realism has to be re-invented. It has to be continually re-invented. In one of his letters Van Gogh speaks of the need to make changes in reality, which become lies that are truer than the literal truth. This is the only possible way the painter can bring back the intensity of the reality which he is trying to capture. I believe that reality in art is something profoundly artificial and that it has to be re-created. Otherwise it will just be an illustration of something – which will be very second-hand.

David Sylvester: ….Is our response to it not a response to its inherent qualities, which obviously connect with our experience – very much so – but not in a way that amounts to our making a comparison of it with something else? If you say that a thing is like something in reality, you have to compare it with reality to confirm that. But isn’t it the case, when we look at a great work of art and are moved by it, that we don’t make such comparisons, that the work has a kind of power of its own that speaks to us?

FB: Yes, certainly, of course it has. It has its own power. Because it has re-invented its own realism. And Van Gogh is one of my great heroes because I think that he was able to be almost literal and yet by the way he put on the paint give you a marvellous vision of the reality of things….the way he put on the paint he was able to give it such an amazing living quality….The living quality is what you have to get….Most people go to the most academic painters when they want to have their portraits made because for some reason they prefer a sort of colour photograph of themselves instead of thinking of having themselves really trapped and caught. The sitter is someone of flesh and blood and what has to caught is their emanation. I’m not talking in a spiritual way or anything like that – that is the last thing I believe in. but there are always emanations from people whoever they are, though some people’s are stronger than others.

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DS: If you don’t like the word emanation, could you talk about the kind of energy given off by someone?

FB: Energy is better. There is the appearance and there is the energy within the appearance. And that is an extremely difficult thing to trap. Of course, a persons appearance is closely linked with their energy. So that, when you are in the street and in the distance you see somebody you know, you can tell who they are just by the way they walk and the way they move. But I don’t know whether it would be possible to do a portrait of somebody just by making a gesture of them. So far it seems that if you are doing a portrait you have to record the face. But with their face you have to try and trap the energy that emanates from them.

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DS: So what explains the forms on your canvas is above all the attempt to capture the energy and the appearance together?

FB: Yes, but with all the mechanical means of rendering appearance, it means that a painter, if he is going to attempt to record life, has to do it in a much more intense and curtailed way…..You have to abbreviate into intensity.

DS: But you don’t just abbreviate; you also impose a certain rhythm – a distortion, some might say….

FB: Well, I feel that that is a misreading of it. What I do with the forms is done for aesthetic reasons, is done because I think that it gives across the image in a more acute and accurate way.

FB:….the very great Degas are the pastels, and don’t forget that in his pastels he always stiates the form with these lines which are drawn through the image and in a certain sense both intensify and diversify its reality….As the techniques of the cinema and all the forms of recording became better and better, so the painter has to be more and more inventive. He has to wash the realism back onto the nervous system by his invention, because there isn’t such a thing in painting any longer as natural realism. But does one know why very often, or nearly always, the accidental images are the most real? Perhaps they’ve not been tampered with by the conscious brain and therefore come across in a mush more raw and real sense than something which had been tampered with by consciousness?

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FB:….we’re so saturated with all the arts, through all the means of reproducing them and everything, that the saturation point has come so strongly that one just longs for new images and new ways by which reality can be created…..You want something new. Not an illustrative realism but a realism that comes about through a real invention of a new way to lock reality into something completely arbitrary. – Mirror Masks ‘trap’ the viewer within them.

DS: Completely arbitrary or completely artificial?

FB: Well, I said arbitrary, but I think artificial would have been better.