ABSTRACT
Though some of Francis Bacon’s early work was shown alongside the Surrealists in London in the 1930s, he emerged in the 1940s as a shady figure at the edge of a bohemian circle consisting of Graham Sutherland, John Minton, John Craxton, John Melville, Keith Vaughan, Lucian Freud, and others. One of the perceived tendencies of professionalised modernism was pedagogic. It seemed that its ideological and technical metiers could be taught. By contrast, resistance to socialization or to the distribution of power through teaching was a marked aspect of the bohemian authenticism of the 1940s and 1950s. Tradesmen’s sons and daughters, unless suitably marked and transfigured by an appropriate authenticity, must not be allowed to pollute the rare mountain air. Such sentiments are significant among the enabling ideological conditions of Bacon’s eminence.
