Francis Bacon

Television: In his film about Francis Bacon, the U2 bassist convincingly argues that this great 'British' artist is a lot more Irish than we might think.

He has an argument to present, too: that this great “British” artist is a lot more Irish than the art establishment – or Bacon himself – would allow. These, Clayton says, spoke to his Irish heritage – and of the Grand Guignol Catholicism that would have been all around Bacon through his childhood (even if he was raised Church of Ireland). Clayton, presumably aided by a vast team of researchers, chronicles the holiday a young Bacon took to Dublin and Connemara at the age of 19 in the company of Eric Allden, a former intelligence officer who was 23 years his senior. He and Bacon are, loosely speaking and to varying degrees, of Anglo-Irish heritage, and then there is the work itself, which is full of terror and hopelessness. And this is where Clayton’s detective work suggests Bacon began painting seriously for the first time. “It connected very much with me as a teenager and the beginnings of punk rock.”