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N°I 2025 MuseoMag
MODERN ART
must first consider his trajectory as an artist and the
sociopolitical context in which he lived and worked,
after which we can move on to explore how he res-
ponded to this world in his art, specifically in a num-
ber of works ostensibly depicting a pair of wrestlers.
BEING QUEER IN BRITAIN
Born in Ireland in 1909, Bacon had a complicated re-
lationship with his family due to his emerging homo-
sexuality and was thrown out of the family home
at the age of 16, allegedly for wearing his mother’s
underwear. After a brief stint in London, Berlin and
France, where his interest in fine art was sparked,
he moved back to London in 1929 to pursue a career
as a designer. He quickly gave up on this career
path and focused on painting instead. Bacon’s early
successes came in the 1930s with his inclusion in
several group shows, but 1948 marked a turning point
in his career, when his Painting 1946 was acquired by
the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In the 1950s, Bacon established himself as one of
Britain’s leading post-war painters, exhibiting inter-
nationally at important venues. The 1960s was the
most important decade in Bacon’s career, with his
first major museum retrospective at the Tate Gallery
in London in 1962. By the time he exhibited there
again, in 1985, the then-director of the Tate, Sir Alan
Bowness, hailed him as “the greatest of living pain-
ters”. Seven years later, he passed away in Madrid at
the age of 82.
Over the course of Francis Bacon’s lifetime, rights
for queer people in Britain changed dramatically. In
the year of his birth in 1909, male homosexual acts
were illegal and punishable by imprisonment, and
Oscar Wilde’s famous 1895 trials for “gross indecen-
cy” were still in living memory. When Bacon started
to gain critical acclaim in London in the early 1950s,
there was a particularly harsh crack-down on sexual
behaviour between men by the police. In 1952 alone,
there were 670 prosecutions for sodomy, 3087 for
attempted sodomy and indecent assault and 1686
prosecutions for gross indecency.
One of the most high-profile cases involved Alan
Turing, a well-known mathematician and World War
II code breaker. Turing was convicted in 1952 and
forced to undergo chemical castration, a type of
hormone treatment designed to reduce the libido of
sex offenders. He took his own life two years later.
Another case splashed across the national press
was the arrest and fining of the recently knighted
actor Sir John Gielgud in 1953, followed by the scan-
dalous trial of Lord Montagu, Michael Pitt-Rivers and
Peter Wildeblood the year after. This was the context
in which Bacon was living and working; a dangerous
time to be queer, with the very real threat of being
convicted if caught.
1967, however, marked a turning point in the his-
tory of queer rights in Britain, when homosexual
acts were partially decriminalised in the Sexual
Offences Act. Though bans on buggery and inde-
cency between men were still in force, homosexual
acts were legal if they were consensual, took place
in private and both parties were over the age of 21.
This would have allowed Bacon to live more freely,
though queer relationships were still very much re-
legated to the private space. Significant change in
terms of queer rights would only come many years
later with the passing of the Equality Act 2010, which
offered protection from discrimination based on
sexual orientation.
WRESTLERS OR LOVERS?
Under the threat of strict laws surrounding his sexual
practices for most of his life, Bacon still managed to
be “the loudest, rudest, drunkest, most sought-after
British artist of the 20th century”, as the BBC docu-
mentary A Brush with Violence (2017) put it. Indeed,
Bacon lived decadently and excessively, frequenting
establishments ranging from grand hotels and fancy
restaurants to disreputable clubs and gambling
joints in London’s seedy underbelly – a lifestyle his
biographer Daniel Farson describes as a “gilded gut-
ter life”. How did Bacon reconcile being in the lime-
light with his love affairs that until 1967 were conside-
red illegal and even after that had to be conducted
behind closed doors?
This tension between the public and the private
is evident in Bacon’s portrayals of wrestlers from
the early 1950s. Two Figures (1953) depicts two
naked men grappling with each other, which could
either be read as wrestling or a sexual act. Here, the
artist draws on the compositions of Eadweard J.
Muybridge’s photographs of wrestlers from the late
19th century, a historical reference that in some sense
legitimises the scene by setting a precedent. Howe-
ver, while Muybridge portrays his wrestlers outside,
Bacon situates them in a closed, windowless room
on a disheveled bed. We as viewers are placed by
the door and take on the role of voyeurs witnessing
a private sexual act. Treading a fine line between ath-
letic portrayals and erotic imagery, this provocative
painting draws attention to the open secret of same-
