Dynamics in the Paralytic Child

In his chapter on Dynamics, Arnheim mentions the Muybridge photographs of the galloping horse, noting that none of the photographer’s stills captures the full intensity of the horse’s speed and exertion as the impossible image of a horse fully spreading his forehand and backhand. One of my favorite and heartbreaking Francis Bacon paintings is a interpretation of another series of Muybridge stills, images of a paralytic child in motion. As Arnheim would anticipate, almost none of Muybridge’s stills adequately capture the distorting that the child’s body must undergo in order to move forward within itself. It is no surprise, then, that Bacon chooses to paint the final image in the series (bottom right still): it is the image in which the body is the most fully distorted, the rear highest in the air, torso most compressed, front right shoulder dropping to accommodate the tilted head and neck. The final Muybridge still not only captures the extent of the child’s contorting, but it also is the most balanced: the bend of the right knee and the resultant weight paced on the left leg is compensated by the weight which the child shifts onto the right arm as he tilts his head towards the camera. Because of the balance within this still, it is the image which most adequately captures a dynamic sense of “movement:” as Arnheim might also have predicted, this image is perhaps the one in which the child looks the least uncomfortably static and frozen. In his adaptation of this final image, Bacon emphasizes this sense of balance with the addition of a door frame which is balanced in a manner similar to the child (with the weight of the foreground, or the closer arm, placed visually on the right-hand side and the weight of the background, or the far leg, resting on the left), with its weight resting in the foreground in the righthand side of the painting and presumably meeting the wall in the background slightly to the left. In his image, Bacon captures the movement and dynamism of this child in a way that the Muybridge stills can only reproduce when shown as a continuous film (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80gjYWEbZlA). 

It is also worth noting that while each of the Muybridge stills contains at lease the horizontal line separating the floor if not horizontal and vertical lines within the body of the boy, only oblique lines (including the one separating floor from wall) comprise Bacon’s image, a device which adds to the dynamic effect of the painting. The Muybridge stills look rather like Hans Thoma’s illustration mentioned in Arnheim, for the child looks stiff because the abnormal curves and oblique angles of his body do not conform to the total, quite grid-like schema of the whole image. Perhaps it is for this reason that the Muybridge photographs look quite scientific and less like “art” than the Bacon painting which situates its dynamic boy within a setting composed of complex and irregular angles. Bacon’s child can stand on his own and no further images are needed to lend the work a dynamic quality, but much of the dynamism within the Muybridge comes from the grouping of the various photographs: the slight changes in the child’s position from one image to the next lends the work the movement Bacon accomplishes in one image. For a painter who so often relies on the theme of being “trapped” or “confined,” it makes sense that Bacon relies so fully on abnormal distortions that convey such dynamism to prevent his images from seeming frozen or lifeless.